Fear and Laundry Read Online Free

birthday last year, the windows open, Blank Fiction blasting from the speakers at full volume and our hair whipping around our heads.
    Lia switched off the music just as we reached her parents’ house, a brick single-story ranch with bright white trim that the Mlinarichs had moved into when Lia was just a baby, right when her dad’s grocery store business had begun to take off. With the later success of Paper or Plastic, they could easily have afforded someplace bigger and nicer, but by then the Mlinarichs liked the neighborhood too much to move.
    Lia’s parents normally parked their cars in the driveway, reserving the sound-proofed two-car garage as our rehearsal space. But just then neither John nor Elyse Mlinarich was home. Jake’s blue van, however, sat against the curb, the roughly 400 miles from Austin showing all over its bug-splattered windshield and dirty tires. Lia pulled in nose to nose with it.
    When she opened the front door, her cat, Clyde 2, tried to make a run for it. But before he could set a paw across the threshold, Lia scooped him up with a practiced move.
    “Where do you think you’re going?” She tucked the cat under her arm like a football and buried her nose against him, nuzzling the black fur at his neck. The bell on his studded collar jingled as he squirmed in her grip, furry legs cycling in vain.
    In the entryway just inside the door hung a memorial to every bad haircut and ugly outfit the Mlinarichs had ever donned. Lia called it the “Wall of Shame.” As we passed a Sears portrait featuring a three-year-old Lia dangling, red-faced and bawling, from her mother’s lap, we heard the television squawking from the living room. Lia poked her head in there, turned and yelled Jake’s name. There was no answer.
    Lia released the cat and stomped through a doorway behind her, down another corridor to what’d been her brother’s bedroom before he’d moved away. I followed, but stopped just inside the bathroom at the end of the hall, not eager to get caught up in their sibling rivalry crossfire just yet. Peeking out, I saw the door to Jake’s old room standing slightly ajar. Lia pushed it fully open and yelled at him again.
    “What?” I heard him call back. Music played in the background but I didn’t recognize it.
    “TV’s on,” she informed him.
    “Yeah, so?”
    “So, turn it off if you’re not gonna watch it.”
    He said something I couldn’t make out. The music died away and a minor crash sounded as something toppled over.
    “Just go turn it off.” Lia pointed in the direction of the living room, her other hand on her hip.
    “You turn it off,” he said. There was more crashing, followed by muffled cursing.
    “You’re the one who left it on. I’m not your mother.”
    “Could’ve fooled me.” Jake’s voice sounded closer, and in a moment he was in the hall. I took a step back as he swept by but he didn’t notice me, or even look up as he headed for the living room.
    I poked my head back out into the hall, where Lia stood waiting, gesturing at me to follow her into Jake’s room. “Come on.”
    I hesitated.
    “Just come on,” she insisted.
    In Jake’s old room, a flowered comforter and sheets had been ripped from the brass bed against the wall. The matching curtains had been pulled down, too, and sunlight streamed in the windows, illuminating an overwhelming mess. Boxes stood piled just about everywhere. A few cartons lay on their sides amid an avalanche of CDs in the middle of the floor, and I guessed these were the sources of the crashes I’d heard.
    “Jesus. Will you look at all this crap?” Lia climbed onto the bed, surveying more of the wreckage. I looked around, too, and saw the foot of the bare mattress lying buried beneath a tangle of t-shirts, a television and VCR with the cord wrapped around it sitting on a dresser, two beat-up guitar cases, one electric and one acoustic, leaning in a corner, and a little black dorm fridge covered over with band and bumper