Triage, Nora.
So, dinner. She’s got chicken marinating in buttermilk brine, ready to be roasted with fresh herbs. The basil she’d planted too late in the season had wilted and blackened on the first chilly night, but the other tender plants are still doing fine.
At least they were.
Parting the surrounding foliage, she sees that the rosemary, parsley, and thyme continue to thrive, but the sage plant has been reduced to a clump of hacked-off stems.
Stacey
“Girls! Time to eat!”
Hearing her mother call from the foot of the stairs, Stacey hits Save and closes her laptop with a sigh of relief.
It isn’t that she’s hungry, but she’s more than ready to take a break from the college application essay she’s been rewriting for the past few hours.
She stretches her burning shoulders, then picks up her phone. She’d set it on Do Not Disturb while she was working, as she often does now that Lennon is in her life. He texts frequently, sometimes just a smiley face emoji with hearts for eyes, or a few letters, like IMY—his shorthand for “I miss you.”
The first time, she’d deciphered it and written back, IMY2.
He’d responded, You mean IMYT. He doesn’t approve of abbreviating 2 as too any more than he does U as you. Just one of his little quirks she initially finds endearing, though it occasionally gets on her nerves, as does Lennon.
But that’s normal, right? Her parents and Piper get on her nerves, too, and she loves them.
“What about me? Do you love me?” Lennon asks in her head.
He hasn’t come out and asked her that in real life. He has, however, told her that he loves her. Every night now, it’s the last thing he texts: Love you. He’s said it in person a few times, too, in parting. Love you.
Not “I love you,” in which case failing to say it in return would be a blatant omission. But without the I, it’s much more casual. Not quite as casual as “Luv U,” but still . . .
She shouldn’t feel uncomfortable for not responding, “Love you, too” . . . right?
Right. No one should ever feel obligated to say they love someone else. The words should be spontaneous, from the heart.
And she shouldn’t spend so much time analyzing her relationship with Lennon, but he’s . . . a lot. He’s just a lot.
There are no new messages from him on her phone, but she finds a bunch on the group text with the girls from her lunch table. They’re planning to see a movie together at Regal Essex on Friday night.
Who’s in? Rebecca asks.
Looks like everyone is. Scrolling through the enthusiastic responses, Stacey is wistful. A movie with a group of girls sounds fun, but she’s not sure they meant to invite her.
When Rebecca added her to the group text yesterday, one of the others, Kaitlyn, had questioned the unfamiliar number. When she found out it was Stacey, she’d sent a thumbs-up and smiley face.
Now, though, spotting her own name in a comment from Kaitlyn, Stacey believes for a sickening second that the girls don’t realize she’s on the thread. What if she’s about to read a cruel comment unintended for her own eyes? The electronic equivalent of mean girls talking behind her back.
But no, that’s not going to happen to her anymore. Not here, anyway. Not with this group.
Kaitlyn has written, Stacey? Are you in?
She heaves a sigh of relief.
Definitely! Thanks!
As soon as she hits Send, she wonders if she should have checked with Lennon first. But they haven’t made any weekend plans yet. Not like last week, when he told her in advance about the open mic event—a real date night, and it had been fun.
Until he got up to sing, anyway. She wasn’t expecting that. He hadn’t even brought his guitar, but he’d borrowed one from another performer.
It wasn’t that he wasn’t good, because he was. He was fantastic.
But when he took the stage, he said, “This goes out to my girlfriend. It’s the song that was playing the night we met, as I was looking out the window literally watching her walk into my life, and it pretty much describes us. Well, me. Here’s Radiohead’s 1993 hit, ‘Creep,’” he added, with a self-deprecating smile that got a laugh.
Stacey didn’t know the song by title. But as soon as he started strumming, she recognized that it had, indeed, been on in the background when she and her family arrived for dinner that first evening.
And the crazy thing is, she’d actually sensed someone’s scrutiny as she walked down the street to his house. She’d been concerned about a man on a neighboring stoop, hidden behind a newspaper. She’d thought she sensed his eyes following her, even wondered if he was the same person she thought she’d seen on the shed roof the night they moved in.
Now Lennon was confessing to a roomful of strangers something he’d never mentioned to her.
He’d spied on her as she walked up to his house?
It wasn’t the only time. When he’d materialized in the Edgemont Grind on the first day of school, he’d mentioned that he’d seen her walking Kato in the park before they even met. And what about that first chance meeting in the Grind? Was he there because he’d followed her?
Those were the thoughts racing through her mind at open mic night. She felt trapped, hands clenched in her lap as he fixed her with a penetrating gaze and sang disturbing lyrics about dark, obsessive passion for a girl to whom he felt inferior.
I don’t want you getting hurt by some little creep who’s not good enough for you, her mother had said the day they’d had their first fight.
When the song was over, the audience went crazy.
Lennon wore a pleased grin when he rejoined her at the table and put his arm around her. “What’d you think?”
“You were amazing,” she said, reminding herself that it was just a song. He hadn’t written it, and maybe she’d misunderstood the meaning behind it.
Still, the incident bothers her whenever it pokes into her consciousness, so she tries to keep it out, along with disquieting thoughts about the murders, the watcher, the man who’d called her Anna.
This has been a good week so far, with new friends. One of the best weeks she’s ever had. No reason to go looking for trouble.
Wondering why Lennon hasn’t texted her in the last couple of hours, she opens the Stealth Soldier app to see where he is. The blue heart icon is positioned in Lower Manhattan. Soho. Ah, that’s right. A close artist friend of Heather’s has a big gallery opening tonight. Lennon is there with his moms and sister.
Stacey pockets the phone, opens her door, and inhales the savory aroma wafting from below. Yeah, maybe she is hungry. It’s late, past eight o’clock, their new dinner hour. Dad decided last week that he wants them to eat as a family on weeknights. That means waiting until he gets home from work. By the time they’re finished, it’s too late for Stacey to go for a walk with Lennon.
“What, you turn into a pumpkin if you leave the house after nine o’clock?” he said when she broke that news.
“I told you, my parents don’t want me out at that hour.”
“Let me talk to them.”