Chapter 7

7

“Wake up! Wake up! Wake uuuuuuup !” Naomi climbs into my bed. She pushes me over to make room. “It’s birthday eve!”

I groan. “What time is it? Why are you doing this to me?”

“It’s almost eleven, sleepyhead.”

“No, it isn’t,” I say, opening a single heavy eyelid to check the nightstand clock. It’s ten forty-seven. “Shoot.”

“Golly gee, you slept in!”

We look at each other and take a quick, silent vote on whether we should acknowledge last night’s conversation, continue the discussion, or sweep it under the rug for as long as possible, linger in sweet denial. The latter wins.

There’s no point in telling her what I saw on the doorbell camera. I shouldn’t have even looked.

Why did I look?

“You’re still in dreamland,” she says, taming a flyaway, gently pressing it to my skull.

“Mm,” I say, rubbing my eyes and wracking my brain for a more pleasant thought. “Oh, I’ve been meaning to ask you, do you think I could get away with calling people hoss?”

“Hoss?”

“Yeah,” I say, and yawn into the pillow to spare her my breath.

“Let me think about it.”

“You need to think?”

“Yeah, I need time to think. I’m not just going to say yes and then have you out here trying to pull off something you can’t pull off. But I don’t want to say no and deprive you of an opportunity.”

“But your initial reaction is no?”

“I’ll have my answer to you by end of day,” she says. “Which is in, like, an hour. Come on. Up, up, up! I want to take you to brunch. I need coffee. And a cheeseburger. Not necessarily in that order.”

She hops up, taking the covers with her.

I whine.

“Birthday eve!” she says, grooving toward the stairs, my blanket draped over her head like a veil. She turns back toward me, curtsies, leaves the blankets, descends the stairs. “Another beautiful morning to caffeinate! Ah, caffeine. My favorite socially acceptable drug.”

She goes on chattering, but I stop listening. I roll out of bed and hobble over to my suitcase, contemplate what to wear, if it even matters. The days it’s most critical for me to feel good about myself are the days it seems most impossible.

It’s jeans and an unsexy sweater.

As I’m buttoning my fly, my gaze lifts to the window at the front of the cottage. No snow, yet. But there’s something else. A smear on the other side of the glass.

It’s…a handprint. It looks like a handprint.

My nightmare comes slithering back—the figure at my window—and with it an ambiguous whispering. Faraway voices I can but can’t hear. I step closer, closer to the glass. It’s exactly where the silhouette appeared. Residue from a bad dream.

An obliterating headache erupts between my eyes. I pinch the bridge of my nose. I’m hungover.

I dismiss the window smudge. It’s not a handprint, because it can’t be a handprint. It’s just muck.

I look down at my own hand. At the two slim bands on my ring finger.

“Sloane!” Naomi calls out. “I need sustenance!”

I fight the urge to climb back in bed and sleep all day. To sleep forever.

“Coming,” I say.

—

We’re too impatient to wait for the shuttle to take us into town, so we walk to the main mansion from our cottage. We arrive shivering and starving, our hair wind crazed, like a pair of wolves. We’re out of place in the dining room, which is formal, all decorative molding and heavy drapes. There’s a limited menu—a choice of yogurt with whipped honey and berries or eggs Benedict. Naomi throws a small fit at the lack of cheeseburgers on offer but is appeased once she gets her coffee, a butterscotch latte with a perfect heart in the foam.

“Aw,” she says, snapping a picture.

We each order the eggs Benedict, which come with a side of thin, crispy fries. Naomi asks for ketchup and the waiter seems offended, but he brings it. He’s another kid—maybe early twenties? I never noticed or cared how old people were until suddenly everyone was younger than me.

Naomi turns the bottle of ketchup upside down and spanks it with a flat palm, over and over, until a red mass finally bursts free of the bottle’s neck. It oozes onto her plate, saturating everything. Messy. She smiles, satisfied.

I shake my head.

“Gour-met,” she says, licking some ketchup off of her thumb, licking her lips.

I take a sip of my coffee. It isn’t strong enough.

Though we made an unspoken agreement not to revisit last night’s conversation topic, and though I resolved to keep the doorbell camera discovery to myself and try to put Joel and his cheating out of my mind, it’s still there, and it’s taking up space between us. I’m reluctant to admit it, but it’s been taking up space between us for years.

“I made us plans tonight,” she says, piercing a ketchup-coated French fry with her fork.

“Plans?”

“For your birthday. Something special.”

“You’re not going to tell me what?”

“If I told you, you’d have time to talk yourself out of it.”

I’ve suddenly lost my appetite. I look down at my plate, and the poached eggs are like alien eyes staring back at me. “You’re really selling this, whatever it is.”

“This is part of the present. Caution to the wind,” she says, setting down her fork and reaching across the table for my hand. She gives me a sweet, pleading puppy-dog look. “Have you no faith in me?”

“Okay, you win,” I say, sufficiently guilted. “Whatever you want to do tonight, I’ll go along for the ride.”

“I don’t want you along for the ride, though. I want you in the driver’s seat. Revving the engine like a motherfucker.”

“Not the engine-revving type, Nay. Never have been.”

“You could be, though. It’s not too late.”

I snort.

“Come on. I promise. It’s gonna be good.”

I pick at my fries. “Well, if you promise.”

She laughs. “No faith. Zero faith.”

“Can you blame me? Within a week of us being friends I got my first detention,” I say, diving into nostalgia to escape the present. “Trouble.”

“You’re so full of it!” she says, threatening me with her fork. “That was not my fault. I wasn’t even there that day!”

We argue about an incident with our honors English teacher, Dr.Hopkins, who rarely assigned books by women and, when he did, spoke about them in such an overtly misogynistic way that I finally blew a fuse and called him out on it, earning myself a detention.

And yes, it’s true that my frustrations with him had been long-standing, existed even before Naomi and I had started to hang out. But she was the one who confirmed my frustrations were valid, who, when I brought him up, said, “That guy hates women.” She corroborated everything I’d been silently seething about for months. And whether she’d meant to or not, she gave me the confidence to confront him about it.

Because when you’re fourteen and the coolest person you’ve ever met is in your corner, you feel invincible. You feel immortal.

Naomi is trouble, but more often than not, she’s the kind of trouble I need, that I’m not brave enough to stir up on my own. My nerves settle about tonight’s surprise plans. At the very least, I could use the distraction.

The waiter comes by to clear our plates.

“How was everything, ladies?” he asks, expressionless, his voice void of enthusiasm.

“Amazing,” Naomi says, looking up at him, batting her lashes, petting her long neck. She flirts with everyone. She’d come on to a scarecrow in a corn maze. It’s not about whoever she’s flirting with. It’s not about desire, or at least most of the time it isn’t. It’s about power.

The waiter smiles at her, showing signs of life. “Can I get you anything else? More coffee? Another latte?”

“Just the check. Thanks, hoss.”

She turns to me, grinning.