“I don’t like it,” Scarlett said, shaking her head at the note. “I think there’s something wrong with her.”
“Look,” Spencer said, “everyone rebels. Lola’s way overdue. Going to Boston is nothing. I did way stupider things than that. One time, I went to Jersey to see a girl I’d never even met in person.”
“Jersey is a lot closer,” Scarlett said.
“Not when you go by bike. I didn’t have the twenty bucks for the train and it looked a lot closer on the map. FYI, it’s not close. Can you trust me on this one? She’ll be back in a few days to obsess about the towels and yell at me for whatever. This is actually a good thing. It shows she’s normal.”
“You’re sure?” Scarlett asked.
He flipped over on his side, toward the wall.
“Have I ever been wrong?” he replied.
Demo version limitation
STRANGE GAMES
The next day, Scarlett got superpowers. Her brain bounced quickly along, remembering details of articles read long before in International Politics, and an obscure verb she didn’t even remember learning in French. It allowed her to make a comment so intelligent in English that it concluded a fifteen-minute discussion. For a few hours, she wondered if she just might be a genius.
That there was a possibility that she might be seeing Eric, that he might call at any point, well, perhaps that had something to do with the pulse and the charge. It didn’t slow as the day went on, and by Biology, with no call or message, it was so high and frantic that she couldn’t even listen or concentrate enough to be annoyed by Max or take any notes. Her brain was burning.
When she emerged at the end of the day, the air was sticky and the sky had a greenish tint. There was an inescapable promise of a storm, something ugly and massive that would wash out the streets and flood the subways. She hurried in the direction of Mrs. Amberson’s to walk Murray, her brain giving her the vague warning that this was not something she wanted to be caught in. Dakota, however, was positively glowing. She had done her job so well the night before that Scarlett was left waiting at the theater for almost a half hour. She accompanied Scarlett on her walk across Central Park to Mrs. Amberson’s, detailing everything she and Spencer had talked about. She wasn’t even making her usual effort to sound unexcited.
“Didn’t he…didn’t you say there was some girl he liked all summer, someone from the show?”
“Stephanie,” Scarlett said absently. She was clotheslined at ankle level by a dog leash because she was busy looking at her phone. And she could only get away with this behavior because Dakota was so consumed in her awkward questions about Spencer. They were mutually guilty.
“Oh right, yeah. Whatever happened with her?”
“Nothing,” Scarlett replied.
“Stop looking at that phone,” Dakota said. “Stop looking at that phone or I’ll eat it.”
Scarlett sighed, and shoved it in her pocket.
“He thinks I’m pressuring him,” she heard herself say. “I shouldn’t have given him the ticket. But he looked like he wanted to go. He was laughing.”
Dakota stepped ahead and stretched out her arm to prevent Scarlett from going any farther.
“I say this as someone who loves you. It’s going to keep happening. So either you stop dealing with him, or you stop talking about it. But this has to be done. You’re making me crazy.”
“I just felt like something was going to happen today,” Scarlett said. “Something huge. I can’t explain it.”
“It’s been two months now,” Dakota replied. “I need the old you to come back. I need to have a different conversation. I have to…I have to go meet Andy.”
“Who’s Andy?” Scarlett asked.
“Some grad student my parents found for me to work on French conversation with. I have to meet him up on One Hundred Eleventh Street in a half an hour.”
“Oh,” Scarlett said. Had Dakota told her this before? Had she just tuned it out? It seemed like something she should have heard about. “I’m going to try harder, I promise.”
“Yeah,” Dakota said sadly. “I know you are.”
When she got home, the door to the Jazz Suite was shut tightly, and she could hear low voices from inside.
“In here,” Marlene called.
Scarlett cautiously peered around the doorway into Marlene’s room.
“Do you want to sit down?” she asked, somewhat formally.