Next to me, Friday clears her throat. “I called him after I heard, child, same as I called you. You was thick as thieves growing up. He was your first love. Ain’t no way I wasn’t gonna give him the chance to get his ass down here and support you.”
“Oh my god, Friday, I can’t believe—” I stop myself there. I’m dangerously close to losing my temper and chewing out the old woman, and I’m sure she only thought she was helping. Damn it, though. Callan being here is the last thing I need. I need calm, and quiet, and peace, and the only thing Callan Cross can provide right now is confusion. I take a deep breath and then start over. “Callan and I aren’t friends anymore, Friday. We haven’t been for a very long time. And now he’s come back here, thinking I need him or something, and it’s going to be so awkward. I can’t…I can’t even look at him.”
Friday listens to me speak, but I can tell she has something to say from the look on her face. Her lips are pressing tighter and tighter together, turning them white, and her eyebrows are practically fused in the middle. “Just ‘cause you can’t look at him, doesn’t mean he can’t look at you. You know what he did when I told him your daddy was dead?”
“Laughed?”
“No, he did not laugh. What’s wrong with you? Lord have mercy.” I stare down at my sweet tea, not saying anything, but Friday prods me with the toe of her slipper. “That boy done broke down in tears, young lady. He may have denied it, but I could hear it in his voice sure as eggs is eggs. Now.” She points her finger at me, shaking it in my face. “When you see him, you make sure you don’t claw his eyes out too quickly, you hear? He might have something he’d like to say to you first.”
I shake my head slowly, feeling a strange, hollow kind of numbness working its way through my insides. “It’s been twelve years, Friday. If either of us had anything to say to one another, it was said a long time ago.”
CHAPTER THREE
CALLAN
Ghosts
NOW
The house smells like mothballs. I haven’t been here in over ten years, not since my mother passed, and while I’ve had a cleaner come in once a month to dust and make sure nothing is deteriorating too badly, you can tell as soon as you walk through the door that no one lives here. It’s a shell. A ghost-filled mausoleum. I wanted to sell a while back, but it only sat on the market for three weeks before I freaked out and had the real estate agent pull it from their listings. It felt like…like a betrayal somehow. I knew that as long as Malcolm Taylor was alive, Coralie was never going to come home, but I don’t know. My head would play out these scenes where she came back one day and knocked on the door, finally wanting to see me, and she was faced with a stranger. That wasn’t something I could tolerate. Even from within the vast embrace of a city like New York, it played on my mind that she was out there somewhere, and she may need to use the spare key again to run away and hide in my old bedroom, the same way she did for years when we were teenagers.
There’s a cold, snake-like thing that lives inside me now. It never used to be there. Not back then, when I was with her. No, the frigid, cold, empty thing that lives inside me showed up the day after my mother died. It told me it was pointless to care about people. It told me it was useless to consider what they think or feel or desire out of life. It insisted that other people’s feelings were nothing more than an inconvenience that would hinder my own happiness. It told me to forget all about Coralie. I railed against it for the longest time, but slowly, gradually, I resigned myself to the fact that it was right. Right about everything. I stopped caring about other people’s feelings. I shut myself off from the world and gave them the persona of the great Callan Cross instead. I did everything it wanted me to. Everything bar the last thing. I could never forget about Coralie, the girl next door, no matter how hard I tried. Moreover, I didn’t want to. She is still the one part of my past that I haven’t jettisoned from my life. She’s either a shard of glass under my skin or the only thing that’s keeping me from losing my shit altogether, depending on the day and the time and the place.
Right now, she’s the glass.