Chapter 12
“It kind of looks like she’s dead.”
“It’s not that bad.” Jo tilted her head and squinted her eyes, letting the vaguely-mermaid-shaped piles of sand go blurry. It didn’t so much look like a dead mermaid as it looked like someone had dropped the sand sculpture from a great height and then tried to mash it back together.
Annie planted her hands on her hips and sighed. “It is that bad. We’re bad at this.”
Jo dropped her focus from the smooshed mermaid and turned to Annie, taking her by the shoulders and giving her a little shake. “That just means mermaid sand sculpting isn’t our true calling.”
“Then what is?”
“I don’t know, kid.”
“I don’t think I even know what a true calling is,” Anniesaid, deflated.
“It’s about what you’re meant to do with your life.”
“I think my true calling is eating ice cream. And ghost hunting. Obviously.”
“Obviously.”
“Is taking pictures your true calling?” Annie asked.
“I don’t think so. It is for my friend Kyla, though. She takes amazing pictures. I’m not a real photographer.”
Not a real photographer, not a real social media manager, not a real model or nanny or—shit. Not a real anything.
“Then what is your true calling?” Annie asked.
“I don’t know if I have a true calling.”
“Everyone has a true calling. The Phoenix Princess says so. But she calls it destiny.” Annie shaded her eyes from the sun, squinting at Jo. “Maybe yours is modeling? Kat says you’re a model.”
Jo blinked back her surprise. “I was a model.”
“Not anymore?”
She was not prepared for conversations about her life’s purpose and the subsequent existential dread. Couldn’t she have one day to dwell in the giddy aftermath of a hot guy edging her into oblivion?
“Now I’m your nanny.”
“But what about when we leave? What are you then?”
Geez, kid, cut right to the heart of it, why don’t you?
But Annie didn’t give her a chance to answer. “I wish you could still be my nanny even when we go home.”
“You won’t need a nanny when you go home. You’ll haveyour parents.”
“I think everyone needs a nanny. Daddy definitely does.”
Jo nearly choked on her own saliva. “Why’s that?”
“Sometimes he gets so busy at work he forgets to eat. You would never let me forget to eat.”
She ruffled Annie’s hair. “We have to make sure you have enough energy to keep playing.”
“And sometimes when I’m with Mama and Daddy’s at his house alone, I worry that he’s lonely. If he had a nanny, he wouldn’t be lonely, even when I’m not there.”