“Not with me. I need a person in the room for something like this. Let’s watch something else instead. My turn to pick.”
“I’m not watching another goddamn Divergent movie, Bronwyn.” I wait a beat before adding, “You should come over and watch Ringu with me. Climb out your window and drive here.” I say it like it’s a joke, and it mostly is. Unless she says yes.
Bronwyn pauses, and I can tell she’s thinking about it as a not-joke. “My window’s a fifteen-foot drop to the ground,” she says. Joke.
“So use a door. You’ve got, like, ten of them in that house.” Joke.
“My parents would kill me if they found out.” Not-joke. Which means she’s considering it. I picture her sitting next to me in those little shorts she had on when I was at her house, her leg pressed against mine, and my breathing gets shallow.
“Why would they?” I ask. “You said they can sleep through anything.” Not-joke. “Come on, just for an hour till we finish the movie. You can meet my lizard.” It takes a few seconds of silence for me to realize how that might be interpreted. “That’s not a line. I have an actual lizard. A bearded dragon named Stan.”
Bronwyn laughs so hard she almost chokes. “Oh my God. That would have been completely out of character and yet … for a second I really did think you meant something else.”
I can’t help laughing too. “Hey, girl. You were into that smooth talk. Admit it.”
“At least it’s not an anaconda,” Bronwyn sputters. I laugh harder, but I’m still kind of turned on. Weird combination.
“Come over,” I say. Not-joke.
I listen to her breathe for a while, until she says, “I can’t.”
“Okay.” I’m not disappointed. I never really thought she would. “But you need to pick a different movie.”
We agree on the last Bourne movie and I’m watching it with my eyes half-closed, listening to increasingly frequent texts from Amber chime in the background. She might be starting to think we’re something we’re not. I reach for that phone to shut it down when Bronwyn says, “Nate. Your phone.”
“What?”
“Someone keeps texting you.”
“So?”
“So it’s really late.”
“And?” I ask, annoyed. I hadn’t pegged Bronwyn as the possessive type, especially when all we ever do is talk on the phone and she just turned down my joke-not-joke invitation.
“It’s not … customers, is it?”
I exhale and shut the other phone off. “No. I told you, I’m not doing that anymore. I’m not stupid.”
“All right.” She sounds relieved, but tired. Her voice is starting to drag. “I might go to sleep now.”
“Okay. Do you want to hang up?”
“No.” She laughs thickly, already half-asleep. “I’m running out of minutes, though. I just got a warning. I have half an hour left.”
Those prepaid phones have hundreds of minutes on them, and she’s had it less than a week. I didn’t realize we’d been talking that much. “I’ll give you another phone tomorrow,” I tell her, before I remember tomorrow’s Saturday and we don’t have school. “Bronwyn, wait. You need to hang up.”
I think she’s already asleep until she mutters, “What?”
“Hang up, okay? So your minutes don’t run out and I can call you tomorrow about getting you another phone.”
“Oh. Right. Okay. Good night, Nate.”
“Good night.” I hang up and place the two phones side by side, pick up the remote, and shut off the TV. Might as well go to sleep.
Chapter Fourteen
Addy
Saturday, October 6, 9:30 a.m.
I’m at home with Ashton and we’re trying to figure out something to do. But we keep getting stuck on the fact that nothing interests me.
“Come on, Addy.” I’m lying across an armchair, and Ashton nudges me with her foot from the couch. “What would you normally do on a weekend? And don’t say hang out with Jake,” she adds quickly.
“But that is what I’d do,” I whine. Pathetic, but I can’t help it. I’ve had this awful sickening lurch in my stomach all week, as though I’d been walking along a sturdy bridge and it vanished under my feet.
“Can you honestly not come up with a single, non-Jake-related thing you like?”
I shift in my seat and consider the question. What did I do before Jake? I was fourteen when we started dating, still partly a kid. My best friend was Rowan Flaherty, a girl I’d grown up with who moved to Texas later that year. We’d drifted apart in ninth grade when she had zero interest in boys, but the summer before high school we’d still ridden our bikes all over town together. “I like riding my bike,” I say uncertainly, even though I haven’t been on one in years.
Ashton claps her hands as if I’m a reluctant toddler she’s trying to get excited about a new activity. “Let’s do that! Ride bikes somewhere.”
Ugh, no. I don’t want to move. I don’t have the energy. “I gave mine away years ago. It was half-rusted under the porch. And you don’t have one anyway.”
“We’ll use those rental bikes—what are they called? Hub Bikes or something? They’re all over town. Let’s find some.”
I sigh. “Ash, you can’t babysit me forever. I appreciate you keeping me from falling apart all week, but you’ve got a life. You should get back to Charlie.”
Ashton doesn’t answer right away. She goes into the kitchen, and I hear the refrigerator door opening and the faint clink of bottles. When she returns she’s holding a Corona and a San Pellegrino, which she hands to me. She ignores my raised eyebrows—it’s not even ten o’clock in the morning—and takes a long sip of beer as she sits down, crossing her legs beneath her. “Charlie’s happy as can be. I’m guessing he’s moved his girlfriend in by now.”
“What?” I forget how tired I am and sit up straight.
“I caught them when I went home to get more clothes last weekend. It was all so horribly clichéd. I even threw a vase at his head.”
“Did you hit him?” I ask hopefully. And hypocritically, I guess. After all, I’m the Charlie in my and Jake’s relationship. She shakes her head and takes another gulp of her beer.
“Ash.” I move from my armchair and sit next to her on the couch. She’s not crying, but her eyes are shiny, and when I put my hand on her arm she swallows hard. “I’m so sorry. Why didn’t you say something?”
“You had enough to worry about.”
“But it’s your marriage!” I can’t help looking at Ashton and Charlie’s wedding photo from two years ago, which sits next to my junior prom picture on our mantel. They were such a perfect couple, people used to joke that they looked as though they came with the frame. Ashton had been so happy that day, gorgeous and glowing and giddy.
And relieved. I’d tried to squash the idea because I knew it was catty, but I couldn’t help thinking Ashton had feared losing Charlie right up till the day she married him. He was tremendous on paper—handsome, good family, headed to Stanford Law—and our mother had been thrilled. It wasn’t until they’d been married a year that I noticed Ashton almost never laughed when Charlie was around.
“It’s been over for a while, Addy. I should have left six months ago, but I was too much of a coward. I didn’t want to be alone, I guess. Or admit I’d failed. I’ll find my own place eventually, but I’ll be here for a while.” She shoots me a wry look. “All right. I’ve made my true confession. Now you tell me something. Why did you lie when Officer Budapest asked about being in the nurse’s office the day Simon died?”
I let go of her arm. “I didn’t—”
“Addy. Come on. You started playing with your hair as soon as he brought it up. You always do that when you’re nervous.” Her tone’s matter-of-fact, not accusing. “I don’t believe for one second you took those EpiPens, so what are you hiding?”
Tears prick my eyes. I’m so tired, suddenly, of all the half-truths I’ve piled up over the past days and weeks. Months. Years. “It’s so stupid, Ash.”
“Tell me.”
“I didn’t go for myself. I went to get Tylenol for Jake, because he had a headache. And I didn’t want to say so in front of you because I knew you’d give me that look.”
“What look?”