Lola didn’t know how to finish that. Come to think of it, neither did Scarlett.
“Spencer’s friend is very cute,” Lola said, carefully rubbing her toes clean with one of her special wipes. “I don’t think I’ll mind if he does this play if he keeps bringing home friends like that.”
As soon as she thought of Eric, Scarlett was nauseous again. She beat her heels into the dresser handles, then let herself down heavily. She opened up her computer. Several e-mails had come in from her friends. Chloe met a guy she liked. Tabitha had been bitten by a weird spider and her eye was all puffy. Josh sent a single, very drunken line: I KAN SING IN WELSH!
Scarlett didn’t have the energy to reply to anyone, so she tried to write for a bit. She ignored her disjointed notes from the night before and started with a clean page.
Write what comes into your head, she told herself.
What came into her head was a pair of eyes—that stunning marbled blue.
Eric. He was a subject she could get into. She described every part of him she could think of. The soft, low voice. The slight shadow of sandy stubble that framed an angled face. Thumbs casually hooked into pockets. A graceful shuffle from foot to foot as he spoke, his focus up and all around him…
She was absorbed in the task when there was a single knock, the door flew open, and Spencer strode in. Scarlett snapped the computer closed quickly.
“Well,” he said, “it’s done.”
“Done,” Scarlett said, “as in…”
“As in I told them, and they said they would think it over tonight and tell me tomorrow. So I have a whole night of it hanging over my head. Hooray!”
He collapsed to the floor in a dramatic heap. Lola leaned down and looked him in the face.
“What exactly did you say?” she asked.
“I may have said that it was an invitational audition for Juilliard,” he said. “That may have come out of my mouth at some point. I also may have made something up about a possible scholarship to NYU. It’s not that these things are true…but we don’t know that they’re not true, right?”
“If you say so,” Lola said mildly.
Something odd passed between Lola and Spencer, a long moment of silence and staring—Lola from her high ground on the bed, and Spencer from his fainting pose on the floor. His face had become very serious.
“If you have a problem with me, you should just come out and say it.”
“I still think you should consider the scholarship,” Lola said. “But whatever you decide…”
“Thank you.”
“Maybe you can let me make my own decisions, too,” Lola added.
“I always do.”
There was some unknown argument between Lola and Spencer that had hummed along in the background for as long as Scarlett could remember, some residual vibration from their own personal Big Bang. It was never clear what it was about, and it never came to any kind of a head. It simply surfaced now and again as static, unexplained and transient.
“I need to get out of here,” he said, bouncing up and breaking the tension. “It’s too hot to even breathe. I need to burn off some energy. Do you think I would definitely kill myself if I tried to do a fall down the Central Park steps, or just probably kill myself?”
“I’d go with the first one,” Lola said, picking up the nail polish brush again.
“That’s what I thought, too,” Spencer said, disappointedly. “Think I’ll just go curl into a ball.”
“What’s the problem with you two?” Scarlett said, when he was gone.
“There’s no problem,” Lola said. “We have different ways of looking at things. We always have.”
“It’s more than that,” Scarlett said.
Lola replaced the nail polish brush and looked up at Scarlett.
“I’m afraid for him sometimes,” she said.
Lola’s plainspoken sincerity struck a chord. If she was being very truthful with herself, Scarlett was a little afraid, too. She never questioned Spencer’s ability…just their general luck. She worried for them all. Every day something else seemed to chip off this quivering pile that was their lives. It could only be a matter of time before the whole structure came crumbling down. But unlike Lola, she could never say that out loud.
“Whatever the case,” Lola went on, “it’s his problem, Scarlett. It’s good that you care so much, but you have to lead your own life. I mean, you have your own problems. And you have a guest to take care of.”
Lola was right, but the reminder still wasn’t very welcome. She did have problems, like the weeks of nothing that spread out in front of her, the lack of money, of general life. At least Spencer had a goal, even if it was kind of a hard one to reach.
Come to think of it, maybe she did have an unreachable goal of her own.
She opened her computer again, where her imaginary Eric was waiting for her, looking at her again like he had at the table. Something had happened there, something that wasn’t imaginary. And if that had happened…well, anything could.