Back to Vanilla by Jennifer Maschek

up or
was simply fated to drown in a sea of eternal fretfulness.
    With no time left for
pleasantries, Megan dashed off to fetch her three-year-old son,
who, praise be, was ready for her, waiting in his navy duffel coat.
She placed him into his hand-me-down buggy, once owned by his
sister, who was now a strapping ten-year-old tugging at the shirt
tails of adolescence.
    She unwrapped the
cling film from a soggy cheese sandwich made by her husband, Rich,
that morning, crusts carefully trimmed off and bread cut into
right-angled triangles. She placed it in Sam’s left hand, the right
one being occupied with the small blue Jess the Cat water bottle
that seemed glued to his mouth, and without a word, the two steamed
double time up the hill that led almost directly from Waterfield’s
Primary School to the main street where the dental surgery
waited.
    On arrival, mother and
son popped into the small toilet cubicle with a private sink, and
she made sure to scrub from his tiny teeth all traces of the
cheese, bread and cereal bar he had eaten while she pushed. Playing
the good boy, he barely protested, knowing this was a
non-negotiable.
    And, for the third
time that year, he sat in the adjustable swivel chair in a surgery
filled with friendly-faced fluffy toys, stickers and even a few
primary coloured posters on the ceiling for younger patients to
gaze up at as they lay flat on their backs, and refused to open his
mouth. Bribery, coercion, threats… nothing worked. Lips firmly
pursed, he sat shaking his head for 15 long minutes, before, once
again, with Megan feeling like the world’s most ineffectual mother,
he was strapped into the buggy and off they went.
    The walk back down
towards home was substantially less unpleasant in the way that
downhill tends to be. They passed the school during the 25-minute
return walk, but now Megan was neither red-faced nor panting nor
stressed, and Sam was fast asleep. As if on cue, though, he woke up
as they walked in through the front door, with just over an hour
until Becky would arrive, fresh from the newly permitted freedom of
her five-minute walk from school. Grace, at 15 the oldest of the
three children, had play rehearsals and was unlikely to appear
before 6pm.
    Resisting the appeal
of a surreptitious hour spent in front of some mindless telly,
Megan wandered into the cramped kitchen of their early Edwardian
terraced house. Rich couldn’t have been gone for long – the kettle
was still warm – and she grabbed the bowl of celery sticks and
cucumber cubes he’d kindly pre-chopped from the fridge, and settled
down with their son and a selection of Dr Seuss on the couch for
half an hour before going online.
    It was her turn to
make a move; if she was quick, there’d be just enough time. Using
two of the letters already there, she keyed in the word
“influence”: that was one plus one plus four plus one plus one plus
one plus three plus one… 13 points!
    With three kids and a
part-time job to shuffle, the handfuls of free time Megan managed
to scoop out for herself these days had been increasingly spent
scouring through profiles and suggested reads on Facebook, and on
trying out various game apps on her phone. When the chance came to
combine the two, which it occasionally did, she took it.
    Which was how Megan,
through an opportunist link suggested to her on the all-pervasive
social network, found herself wandering head first into what was,
implausible as she had initially found it, gradually revealing
itself as the racy world of online Scrabble.
    That was
two-and-a-half months ago and by now she’d played more than 237
hours of the game, under the name WordGirl. She was well versed in
the rules and becoming a fixture in the online scene, so was
constantly in demand as a contestant. She played twosomes,
foursomes and as part of a larger team, as well as dabbling a
little, as her skill and confidence in her abilities as a
sesquipedalian bloomed, in the world of challenges and clan
Scrabble