Chapter Five

Wil put her arm along the back of the Bronco's bench seat and scooted closer to Katie, who smelled like Diana Price's house, some kind of holiday potpourri that had baked into Katie's sweatshirt and was releasing now in the blast of the Bronco's overenthusiastic heater.

Cinnamon and nutmeg and oranges.

Wil had known this outing would be a trip down memory lane, but she had failed to understand what a trip down memory lane would feel like, which was like her throat had shrunk to half its size, and her middle wouldn't stop flipping like the times on a train station arrivals and departures board.

Time kept crumpling and buckling in a way that was fucking her up.

Katie had pressed her shoulder against Wil's chest, the side of her head so close that Wil could smell Katie's skin instead of Christmas potpourri. Soapy and herbal and warm. She was moving restlessly, and if Wil's body hadn't perfectly recalled the sensation of Katie constantly adjusting and readjusting herself, then Wil would have thought Katie wanted her to give her some room. But Wil also knew that if she moved away, Katie would complain, hook a leg over hers, and pretend to pout that they weren't going to cuddle.

Wil enjoyed this about Katie. She liked people who were a bit of a show. She liked physical contact of all different kinds, obviously.

So she knew perfectly well that the hand that was currently on her knee, drawing an idle pattern, wasn't meant to make the skin on her chest hot. Even though it did.

"So you do want to watch it with me," she said, mostly curious what kind of reaction it would elicit from Katie.

Katie let out a laugh that sounded fully and utterly like a woman's laugh that Wil didn't know yet. When she turned her head to Wil, there was hectic color on her cheeks. "I don't want to, no. Then you'll know much too much. Except there is the part of me that wants you to know everything no matter what happens. I'd say that I can't decide what to do, but I would be lying. Should I pretend I'm watching it like I do at home?"

"How do you watch it at home?"

"Oh, don't ask me that." Katie put the whole side of her body against Wil's, and Wil had to tell herself to relax, to stay cool. Like a fan hoping not to be like all the other fans.

"I did ask," she said. "It happened. Can't take it back."

"Wow. All right. If you're going to be that way, then I will tell you it depends. I'm only allowed to watch your movies one time. I try to pick the right time. Sometimes I watch at breakfast, especially Saturdays, but only if I have something good to eat, which is usually a burrito, and time to myself, and I can really savor it."

"Do you eat the burrito or watch the video first?"

"First the burrito, then the video."

"Other times?"

"Other times, I wait until it's dark out and I'm in bed." Katie put a bit of a rough edge to her voice when she said this and then laughed another one of her grown-up laughs.

"I can't with you," Wil said. "Is this how people are in Los Angeles, just casually devastating each other with sex conversation all the time? Because I have to tell you, here in Green Bay, everything has rolled along as you must remember it. A lot of repression and occasional meaningful glances."

"But who is in the video with you today?" Katie was grinning. It was a version of her smile Wil had only seen in person, never on a screen—big and a little lopsided, sinking a deep dimple into one cheek. "They are from Green Bay, I assume, this person who you propositioned to kiss you. On camera. For an audience of millions." Katie tapped the screen of Wil's phone. "How many videos do you have now, Wil? Are there a hundred yet? Did you find a hundred repressed Green Bay people to exhibitionist-kiss you?"

Wil closed her eyes. There weren't quite a hundred videos on there, because there had been more than a few times Wil had let a particularly viral video roll for a couple of weeks, but knowing there were so many and that Katie had watched them alone in her room—just one time each, because that was all she allowed herself—made Wil's phone feel like a bomb in her hand.

Katie pressed her face into Wil's shoulder again. "To answer your question, which I will since you are blushing, it is not Los Angeles. It's me. I just like you. Play it now, before I self-immolate."

Wil pushed play. Cleared her throat. "She's my hairdresser."

"That's going to make things interesting next time you go in for a trim."

The screen went from black to full color. Wil + Mandi appeared in the caption box, auto-read by the TikTok bot. She and Mandi sat opposite each other on the stools Wil kept on hand because some people felt uncomfortable about standing or couldn't stand.

"Mandi is incredibly hot," Katie said.

On the phone screen, Mandi smiled at Wil. She had a huge smile, teeth that had never been messed with by an orthodontist, which was Wil's favorite thing to look at about Mandi, although Mandi offered a lot to look at. Hydrant-red and pink hair in soft waves to her waist, teased up on top into a half beehive. Winged eyeliner. Tattoos bright against the pale canvas of her skin, all across her generous chest, up her neck, covering her bare shoulders and arms.

Pretty eyes. Wil hadn't noticed until she leaned close and put her hand at Mandi's waist, the smell of her perfume everywhere, as sweet and pink as her hair. She wore black leggings, like Katie, but she filled them out differently, her body lush and big and such an inviting combination of hard and soft, her calves rounded, her belly rounded in a different way, her breasts, her waist, the strong arms she cut hair with, the flare of her hips.

That was what Wil had been thinking about when she caught Mandi's face in her hand and put her mouth on her. Her body, and the way she smelled, and her glossy lipstick.

Katie sucked in a breath.

Wil let her arm come down around Katie before she'd even thought about it, holding her against her side. When they were girls they would often hold hands, put their arms around each other, give each other piggyback rides across the street while cars honked at them for being obnoxious. But she almost regretted the familiar impulse once her hand curled around Katie's shoulder.

Eighteen-year-old Wil must have been much cooler than the Wil she was now.

The kiss was interesting, but not in a way Wil would've been able to talk about, something about how she could feel Mandi's nervousness and her bravado fighting, how she knew Mandi had never kissed a woman before, how she tasted like the gum she'd been chewing when she came through the door.

It was the kind of kiss that made Wil want to take some time. Sit her down for a meal or watch a movie next to her, stroke her thigh or put her hand there and see if it led to more or didn't. But one minute was the constraint.

One minute meant Wil didn't always find out everything she wanted to know.

She found out that Mandi liked her long hair touched, fingers on her neck but not her face, that she didn't want Wil's hands on her body, that she liked Wil's tongue in her mouth and wanted Wil to run the show. And that Mandi was relieved when it was over, not because she hadn't liked it, more because she didn't know what that meant, which made her nervous in a way that became palpable to Wil.

Wil knew things about people in every part of her life that she never would've known if she hadn't kissed them.

After the screen went dark, Wil eased her arm from around Katie, realizing that she'd been holding her pretty tight. "Did you like that?"

Katie turned to Wil, flushed with color up the sides of her nose and blooming between her pretty eyebrows. She breathed in, and she must have been holding her breath, because when she took that breath, the hollow at the base of throat collapsed.

She brought a hand to the side of Wil's face. Wil told herself the cool hand against her hot skin was just more of Katie, not the consummation of all of those times Wil had let Katie make her up—soft brushes packed with eyeshadow swirling on her skin, soft puffs of Katie's breath as she blew away excess powder.

Confused longing and mascara.

"I liked that," Katie said, pulling her hand away. "Did you?"

"Which part?" Wil's voice had broken and husked out so completely, it embarrassed her. It sounded like the voice she used after a screaming orgasm.

Katie pushed herself away from Wil enough to tuck a knee underneath her, which brought her up closer, and her huge blue eyes were looking right inside Wil. Seeing everything. "Which part?" Katie whispered. "Wil Greene. Which part." She shook her head. "No, I don't think so. Don't deflect. Tell me what it felt like to kiss Mandi." Katie put both her hands to the sides of her own face, then slid them back to gather her hair at her nape.

Wil reached over and turned the heater completely off, even though it wasn't why they were both burning up.

Probably.

She cleared her throat and closed her eyes. Her voice came out in a rush. "It felt like she wanted me to be in charge, and like she wanted me but was surprised she did. Or confused that she did."

"God," Katie breathed. "Did anything else happen?"

"After the kiss?"

Katie nodded. In this moment, she didn't resemble the serene, polished, charming Katie Price who'd been on that stage in Chicago, her necklaces softly clacking. Even in her leggings at the Christmas party, with no makeup, she'd maintained some of that polish.

It was a performance. Katie performed herself, performed her celebrity, for the people around her. But this Katie, Wil suspected, was only hers.

What a gratifying thought.

"She asked me for one more kiss before she left."

"Did you?"

"Yes." Wil had asked Mandi to initiate it, though. Wil had leaned against the cased opening in the living room low enough that she was nose to nose with Mandi, and they'd looked at each other for a long time before Mandi gave in. That kiss had felt like Mandi was… feeling herself. Letting the kiss find something for her. A lot of tongue. They both made a noise at the same time before it eased up and Mandi left.

"What was it like?" Katie pressed her finger into the top of Wil's thigh, hard. She knew that spot was tender and that Wil didn't like it. Pressing her finger there was how Katie used to boss-torture Wil into confessing things.

It hit a little different now.

"It was more," Wil said.

"Does that happen a lot?" Katie was whispering, and the windows were fogging now that the heat was off, so the Bronco really did feel like a confessional.

"A lot more than I thought it would, but I wouldn't say a lot."

"Did you like watching it with me?" Katie raised both her eyebrows and pulled her legs into a crossed position. Her posture, her voice, seemed to defuse the tension, and it was a relief.

Wil, despite Katie teasing her about it, needed to think.

Katie laughed. "Tell me later. I will tell you that I realized I had been imagining you watching me, or at least imagining that you knew, somehow, I was watching these videos, the whole time."

Wil could've told her that she had been wondering if Katie had noticed her videos for the last year, but she didn't, because she was only just now realizing this was true. "I think I would've noticed if Katie Price had left a heart on one of my kissing videos."

Wil was glad for the cold air that was seeping in through the deteriorating seals of the Bronco's doors. It reminded Wil it was December. Katie was here for Christmas, and then she'd go back to LA. This felt good, and could encourage them to keep in better touch, but Wil couldn't let herself get confused.

"I didn't use my Katie Price account. I have a secret handle. Can you guess it?" Katie bit her thumb and smiled around it. The vulnerable gesture made Wil understand that what she meant wasn't so much that she hoped Wil had identified her from among all the comments on her videos as that she hoped Wil could still see her. The person she'd been when they knew each other. The person she still was.

It made Wil's skin go tight everywhere on her body, her inner thighs aching all the way up. She thought about opening a window to get more cold air. "Give me a hint."

"I took the handle from a social media name generator. One of the random letters and numbers ones."

It should have been impossible for Wil to guess. There were thousands of accounts like that. Burner accounts. Ad accounts. Spam accounts. Bot accounts.

But Wil knew it.

She'd seen it, a string of six letters and numbers that always liked the videos, always. Sometimes the account left a one-word comment like forearms. Or clutch. A few times it left an emoji, like the fire emoji or, once, the drops of water emoji.

"Htx345." Wil watched Katie's face the same way she did when she was getting ready to kiss someone.

Katie's mouth came open just a little. Wil could see her tongue behind her teeth. "Yes." Katie shivered and then laughed, but she was breathing hard. So was Wil.

Katie eased back, unfolding her legs and scooting onto her side of the bench seat. But it didn't feel like she was pulling away. Wil thought that maybe Katie was giving herself the same reminder Wil had. The one about Christmas, and LA, and reunions.

"I brought red Twizzlers and pretzels," Wil said.

"Do you know how satisfying it is that you can barely handle me?"

Wil laughed, reaching down to grab the tote where she had put Katie's requested supplies. "Is it?"

"Of course it is. You're Wil-You-or-Won't-You Wil, no last name, wildly popular on TikTok, but also, also, you're Wilifred Greene, hottest girl at East High School. Valedictorian of our class. Softball player, fucking cheerleader after you quit softball. Student council. Orchestra. You"—Katie put her finger on Wil's nose—"dated the quarterback, Wil. That is a real YA novel situation you got yourself into there, and the rest of us noticed. We had thoughts."

"Here." Wil handed Katie the package of Twizzlers. "You're saying these things to me, but also, you have an Oscar. Golden Globes. Emmys. SAGs. The Grammy from when you played the Appalachian blues singer. Oh! And the Tony! My mom went with Diana to New York to see you on Broadway and had to take two days off work after. You did that to Beanie Greene. A photographer followed you to the Maldives and took a drone picture of you on a yacht sunbathing topless with your cat Trois curled around your head."

"How good was that picture?" Katie asked, separating Twizzler strands and wrapping them around her finger.

"I mean, it was so fucking good, I and the rest of America deep-dive Google-searched for the highest-res image possible. That is my point. Somehow, you ended up owning the paparazzi so hard by looking that good, and also that you're…" Wil searched for the right word, but she couldn't find it, and when she met Katie's eyes, she wasn't sure what to make of what she saw there.

It wasn't pride in being flawless, perfect, accomplished Katie Price. It was something a lot closer to the way Katie had looked the day Wil picked her up off the side of the road with red-rimmed eyes and tangled hair, and they'd sat in the parking lot of the high school for the first time because Katie didn't want to go home yet, the wind gusting against the Bronco.

Do you ever feel like you're not real?Katie had asked.

Wil knew exactly what she meant.

Now, Katie was watching Wil the same way she used to watch and rewatch her Criterion Collection movies in Craig and Diana's den—as though there were things she wanted to know, and the only way to figure them out was to keep her attention completely and utterly on the screen. "Give me your phone," she said.

Wil handed it over. Katie tapped for a few minutes and handed it back.

"What did you do?"

"I logged into my Dropbox so I could grab the hi-res file of the picture and save it to your camera roll."

Wil blew out a breath. "We have really got ourselves into a thing here."

"You're not worried, are you?" Katie pressed her phone to her chest and smiled a new smile at Wil that made her forget this was an extremely temporary diversion made of nostalgia and two confident women trying to out-flirt each other.

"Yes, I am incredibly worried, actually. But I have no defenses against"—Wil put her hand over the phone in the middle of Katie's chest—"you. Wait. Don't lean into me. Jesus." Wil laughed, gently pushing Katie back into her own space.

"Good. I'm glad you don't. Are we going to go drive past Mr. Cook's place or what?"

"I brought us here so we could make a plan. That's how we do this. We sit in the parking lot, we make a plan, we eat junk food. We usually didn't get any further than the plan part."

"We never really did, did we?" Katie put the Twizzlers down and opened the bag of pretzels. "We were terrible stalkers. Or detectives. But now there is a bet. Or at least, there are stakes, and we no longer have a curfew. So what's the plan?"

"I don't know where he lives," Wil admitted. "Like I said, the directory doesn't have anything to run with. He didn't pop up with an address on a quick Google search. We could internet stalk him, but that didn't seem correct."

Katie ate a handful of pretzels one by one, licking the salt off them before she crunched them, which she had also done in high school, but it hadn't murdered Wil's impulse control like it was doing now. If she didn't stop, Wil was going to take off all of her clothes and just exist in the deep end.

"Oh! I know what we can do!" Katie said.

"What is it? Please stop fellating those pretzels."

Katie grinned and licked another one, very slow. "Hmm. What about those things on the internet that save the things on the internet after someone has taken them off? A fan did that to find my deleted LiveJournal from when I was fourteen, which meant I had to talk about my Grey's Anatomy fanfic to reporters at Cannes."

"Like a cache? A Wayback Machine?"

Katie shrugged and crunched her denuded pretzel stick. "I'm not internety."

"I'll see what I can do. When is this happening? Once I get the address?" Wil took some pretzels.

"When do you get off work?"

"Tomorrow? Four."

"Pick me up after you're done at work. I want to see what you wear to work and what you're like right after. But I need to focus tomorrow, so don't text me or call. If I think you might text, I'll be wondering if you're going to when I'm supposed to be writing."

"As it happens, I don't even have your number. Seeing as we have not spoken to each other in thirteen years."

"Right. Give me your phone."

Wil handed her phone over again, and Katie programmed herself into Wil's contacts.

Just like that.

Which told Wil it was never that Katie didn't want Wil to have her number. It was that Diana feared Katie didn't, or thought it might not be a good idea, or simply had never thought to give Wil access to the daughter she watched over and worried about.

"Fair warning, I used the yacht picture to come up if I contact you," Katie said. "So don't call or text me tomorrow, but I like that you do have my number, and then I can think about how much you're holding yourself back and if you will manage to. Like if you might just lose it and send me a nude."

Wil did not imagine herself sending Katie Price a nude—or rather she tried not to, but did a little bit, and had to squeeze her legs together. "Katie. I'm starting to think you're teasing me."

"I am not. At all." She touched her temple. "I'm just looping and looping and looping up here, all day long. Guess who I like to loop on lately?"

Wil breathed in, slowly. Breathed out. "Okay. What are you writing?"

"I'm trying to adapt a novel. A screenplay."

Then Wil saw something on Katie's face that she was able to identify, the same thing she'd seen a hint of earlier.

Katie felt uncertain.

Uncertain people, frightened people, walked into Wil's house twice a week. Wil had learned a lot about how to connect with, validate, and work through those kinds of ordinary human feelings. "Tell me about that."

"I'm struggling," Katie said. "I've never been like you. School was hard for me. I had to put all of my psychic energy into flattering and impressing Mr. Cook to get the grade I needed to keep my admission to Winston-Salem, and then I didn't go. It's a lot to try to stay positive about doing something I've never done before that no one even wants me to do, especially when it's not going well. And it's not going well. Which is why me and my babies are spending a month in Wisconsin."

Wil took a Twizzler out of the bag and peeled a strip off it. "I have so many thoughts on that, I don't know where to start."

"I mean, dig in. I already feel like a rabbit about to bolt, so this is probably a useful conversation for me to have."

"First off, ‘flattering Mr. Cook'? Do you think that? Because I have to tell you, nobody thought that."

Katie pushed off her Uggs, pulled her bare feet onto the bench seat, and wrapped her arms around her knees. "I spent that whole semester acting like he was the best teacher ever, when literally no one had ever liked him. I don't even think anyone had ever learned anything from him."

"Sure," Wil said. She thought about that class from Katie's perspective, which she hadn't before. How much Katie engaged with Mr. Cook. Asked questions. Made him feel like he was the caliber of teacher he had never bothered to be. "It wasn't fair. Now that I think about it, it was worse than not fair, like, aren't teachers supposed to be observed sometimes or something? To make sure their talents aren't coming from the efforts of one of their students? But more important, you were acting. We were all so fucking entertained by you. I've actually talked to other people from our class about this over a beer, how you razzle-dazzled Mr. Cook into not being a dick for the entire semester. There is lasting gratitude. Jen Diver, for one, who got her IEP accommodations so she could take her tests and quizzes in the library and didn't collapse into a puddle of sensory overwhelm."

"He didn't know I was acting." Katie said this in a voice Wil didn't recognize, as though she were speaking for someone else.

Or repeating what someone else had told her.

That gave Wil something to think about. She turned and wrapped her hand around Katie's bare foot. She could feel Katie's pulse throbbing under the soft skin of her instep.

Katie was looking out the windshield at the school building, and Wil looked, too, remembering.

She had put Mr. Cook in the category of a bad teacher, a bully, but she hadn't really interrogated his behavior from her perspective as an adult. Male teachers had so much power. It had been a dicey move for Katie to take up the work of appeasing this grown man who should have known better, who should never have put a student in the position of bolstering him in order to maintain his emotional regulation and ego.

An icy, prickly shiver ran down Wil's spine. Because, of course, just a few months after she left the high school building behind, Katie had met Ben Adelsward.

"I'm sorry we didn't understand," Wil said. "I'm sorry we sat in that class as the beneficiaries of something that should not have been happening." Wil stroked Katie's foot.

Katie tucked her foot more firmly into Wil's hand, an old gesture that meant massage my foot, you tease, and shook her head. "It's all why I had the fantasy about getting to the bottom of his secret affair with you. So I could tell both of those women about him. I wanted them to know what a gross insect he is."

"We don't have to bring all that stuff into our getting back in touch now, you know." Ben, she meant. But couldn't quite bring herself to say. "I don't need an excuse to want to talk to you." Wil pressed her thumb into the arch of Katie's foot. There was a blustery red mark right under the pinky toe that made Wil think about all the gravity-and physics-defying shoes Katie wore.

Because she was a world-famous actress.

Right.

Katie looked out the window again. Her eyes were too bright in the dim cab of the Bronco, her hand full of pretzels that she'd forgotten to eat. She drew in a shaky breath and exhaled slowly until her shoulders sank down to their usual position. "I want to talk to you about it. I don't think I can right now, but yes. Sometime. What I can say is that it got hard for me, after Mr. Cook, and after Ben, to tell the difference between imagining and pretending and acting and—and deception, I guess. Tricking people. Being someone who can do a trick to get what she wants. Not even an especially good trick, just a trick that I was born being able to do, like being double jointed."

Wil stopped herself from blurting out meaningless reassurances. She was holding onto Katie's ankle now, and Katie's ankle felt the same as it always had against the palm of her hand. It was so utterly clear to Wil that this was Katie. The Katie she'd known.

Which meant she'd never not been.

Which meant it was Wil's Katie who'd gone through all that. It was Wil's Katie who'd been drawn into a relationship with a much older, much more powerful man, who had probably treated her terribly, and who had never stopped using the media to harass her. It was Wil's Katie who was still going through the kind of thing Wil had seen for herself in Chicago when the press showed their fangs.

Katie had apologized for losing touch, for not being there when Wil's dad died, but Wil hadn't expected Katie to come to the funeral because she'd no longer thought of Katie as anything but a wonderful memory. Someone she sometimes felt angry she didn't know anymore, or wasn't allowed to know.

Do you ever feel like you're not real?

One of Katie's biggest fears. And Wil—along with the rest of the world—had done that to Katie Price. Done it and done it.

"I'm sorry," she started. "I'm sorry I didn't stay in touch and wasn't available to you, if you had wanted me to be, when you were going through something hard. I wasn't a good friend, and all the feelings I had about being mad that I somehow wasn't supposed to talk to you anymore were actually me feeling guilty and regretful and not getting it. I'm so, so sorry. You deserved better from me."

Katie sucked in a breath, and Wil felt her body get very still. Then Katie met Wil's gaze, tears streaming down her face. "Oh, fuck, Wil Greene! I didn't even know I needed to hear that!"

Wil brushed away a tear alongside her nose. "Then I'm extra glad I said it." Wil thought of something else she wanted to say. "You know that everything about you is real, right? You're fucking smart, you're a genius, actually. You have something, but it's not a trick, and you weren't born with everything you know how to do. Remember, I watched you learn it."

"Say more about that." Katie pushed her foot into Wil's hand, and Wil squeezed it.

"You worked so hard. You were always working. Remember when Beanie and me and Diana drove down to see you play Alice in Milwaukee?"

Katie shook her head and wiped away a last tear.

"Of course not, why wouldn't you? But I do. That was junior year, and I didn't want to go. I'd never minded seeing your stuff, but this was children's theater, and I thought that meant it would be three hours of checking my watch, wishing I was in the backseat of the quarterback's car investigating the contours of my sexuality, because who cares? Alice in Wonderland is a kids' story. But I guess there was a way I could love a kids' story. You made me love it. It was all Beanie and I could talk about on the drive back, wondering how you'd done it, how you pulled it off, and mostly what we talked about was how hard you'd always worked."

Katie nodded. "All right. Yes. That's all true, I mean, logically, I know this, and in fact I have a lot of, frankly, arrogance around the work I bring to the table. It's rough, though, when I can't get my screenplay I'm supposed to be writing to do what it's supposed to." Her hands flew up then, floated around in the air in a gesture that shouldn't have meant anything but somehow expressed the three-dimensionality and texture of how the world felt in her imagination. "I get the story, I know these characters as well as I know my family. And then I try to make it be on paper, in scenes, with action and dialogue that is right for these people to tell this story, and then I can't. I can't."

She held out her hand for a Twizzler. Wil gave her one. She ate it, looking somewhere into the space between them that was deep inside her head.

"Sometimes I end up petting cats all day," Katie said. "I count that as a good day."

"What kinds of things have you written? Other than your Grey's fanfic." Wil was interested in this. She was always interested in problems that she found easy to solve.

"Not a ton," Katie said with a shrug. "Mostly things for school, and my mom had to check everything. If it was worth a lot of points, I took it to one of my college student tutors."

"Do you have a disability?"

"No, I don't think so. My parents got me tested a couple times because I was an early reader and early talker, but school didn't work. I can memorize full scripts like it's nothing. I can focus. I love reading. I have no problem understanding complex contracts. I can learn things I have to do, like how to operate cameras and digital products. I like editing. But I struggle to make what I see and feel, even if it's simple, be writing that communicates what I see and feel to other people."

"See? That's such a very beautiful way to put that, and one hundred percent accurate in every way."

"It is?"

Wil slid forward. "Yes. It means that your only problem is the building blocks—mechanics, process, synthesis—and identifying the right way for you to approach them. This is something you can learn. If you want, I can teach you."

"Yes. I want you to. You know how to write?"

"I don't write creatively, but I'm a good writer. All that pre-law, remember? And three years at the academic center as a writing peer figuring out firsthand that there are a lot of people with a lot to say who just never got the basics from anyone. Ideas into words. I can do that."

"Tomorrow. You'll help me?"

"Sure." Wil wanted to help Katie. She wanted to keep seeing her. She wanted, if she was being honest with herself, to push this temporary connection further than was probably smart or self-preserving, and she wanted to do it in a way that meant it wasn't only Katie who got vulnerable.

Back then, it wasn't just Wil swooping in to rescue Katie and drive her around in the Bronco or introduce her to new friends. Katie had been Wil's friend, too. She'd been the only friend Wil could talk to about the future, because Katie knew that every dream Wil had, every goal she made, came with an asterisk. She'd known Wil was terrified of losing her dad, and Katie knew Wil's dad, so she could talk about it without getting weird or running away.

It made Katie probably the only candidate to try where Beanie had failed.

"I will help you if you make me do one thing on my ‘Just Fucking Do It Already' list," Wil said. "Which, I admit, isn't fair. As Beanie has already pointed out, making someone else make you do something so you can blame them if you don't do it is classic asshattery. But when it comes to this list, I am already an asshat."

"Wait, this is a real thing that exists? You made this list?" Katie stretched out her toes when Wil pressed her thumbs into the middle space beneath the ball of each foot.

"It is. Beanie helped me. She's recently started to get after me about my languishing."

Katie reached down for another Twizzler. She winked at Wil. "Text it to me when you get home."

"I'll text it to you now. I don't want to get in trouble for texting after I drop you off. It's already tomorrow." She was in so much trouble already. She could almost feel her brain cheerfully compartmentalizing all of her new Katie Price feelings into tidy boxes she wouldn't let herself ever open again after Katie left in a month.

But that was what she'd done last time.

Katie looked at her phone when it buzzed with Wil's list, went quiet, reading, and then looked up at Wil with a smile. "Oh, we're going to have so much fun."

For a little while,Wil thought. She had no doubt they would.

They always had.