But Bee was still standing there, stretching up on her tiptoes to look down the street. “Ryan said he was coming,” she explained, “and I told him to be here early.”
“Ryan’s ‘early’ is a little different from how the rest of us would define it,” I told her, trying to stamp down my impatience.
Last night, I had met Blythe back at the Waffle Hut, and we’d gone over where we were heading. She’d unfolded a map on the table, ignoring the sticky spots where syrup hadn’t been totally cleaned up, and pointed to a spot in north Mississippi. “Here first,” she said, tapping a place so tiny it didn’t even have a name.
I had taken a sip of Coke—the regular kind this time. Planning requires both sugar and caffeine. “What’s there?” I asked.
Blythe had wrinkled her nose at me and tapped the spot again. “Trust me, okay? We can talk about it when we get there.”
“Why not now?” I’d asked. “Because you feel like being mysterious, or because you know that I won’t want to go if you tell me?”
This time, I got an eye roll in addition to the nose wrinkle. “Can you just trust me?”
“No,” I’d replied immediately, and to my surprise, she’d smiled.
Sitting back in the booth, Blythe had watched me for a long moment. Her dark hair had been loose for once, and it made her look younger. I had to remind myself that I hardly knew anything about her. Maybe she was my age. Another teenage girl caught up in something she didn’t understand, but one who, I think we can all agree, had really run with it.
“Has it occurred to you,” she asked, leaning forward to rest her arms on the table, “that I’m putting a lot of trust in you, too? I mean, I’m getting into a car with a Paladin and her best friend, both of whom have more than enough reasons to want to hurt me. So can we just make a deal to trust each other the best we can, and stop thinking the other is looking for a backstabbing opportunity?”
“Literally,” I’d quipped, and while she hadn’t exactly offered her hand for us to shake on it, I felt like a deal had been made.
So I hadn’t pressed her any more. It was my car we were taking, after all, and while I wasn’t sure I believed that Blythe wanted to help out of the goodness of her heart, I believed that she wanted to undo what she’d done the night of Cotillion.
I was distracted from that line of thinking by the sound of a car turning down our street. It wasn’t Ryan’s SUV, though. It was Aunt Jewel’s massive Cadillac, and I grinned to see it. I’d hoped to get a chance to say good-bye to her, and when I saw that Ryan was in the passenger seat, I smiled even more. She must have gone by to pick him up on her way over.
The giant Cadillac careened to a stop at the end of the driveway, and I grimaced as Aunt Jewel’s bumper took out one of our trash cans.
The car parked, she got out, wearing yet another rhinestone-studded sweater, this one in a pale pink with matching slacks. She was holding a plastic Piggly Wiggly sack, and I went around to her side of the Cadillac, giving Bee and Ryan a little bit of privacy on the other side.
“I knew that boy would be late if left to his own devices, so I decided to swing by and get him myself,” Aunt Jewel said, taking my proffered hand and hefting herself out of the driver’s seat. “I can still do that, right? Even though y’all aren’t together anymore?”
She didn’t even wait for me to answer, instead thrusting the Piggly Wiggly bag at me.
“Here, baby.”
I took the shopping bag and glanced inside. A rainbow of Tupperware stared back at me, along with several plastic sandwich bags, all holding, as far as I could tell, different types of cookies.
Reaching in, I lifted one napkin-wrapped bundle and held it up to my aunt, my eyebrows raised. “Um. Cake?”
Aunt Jewel shrugged and fiddled with the appliqué hummingbird on her shirt. “You girls will get hungry, and Lord only knows what you’ll find to eat out there. I figured better safe than sorry. And your aunt May went ahead and put her best cooler in the trunk, so make sure you grab that, and if you’ll just stop and pick up some bags of ice—”
I threw my arms around her before she finished, squeezing tight.
“I love you, Harper Jane. And I want you to promise me you and these girls are going to be very careful. And call me every night.”
“Every night,” I vowed, grateful for about the hundredth time that I’d decided to tell Aunt Jewel my secret.
Ryan and Bee had apparently said their good-byes, because they crossed around to the front of the car, their arms around each other’s waists. Blythe stood off alone but didn’t seem all that self-conscious. That wasn’t a surprise, I guess, seeing as how being self-conscious probably required an amount of self-awareness I doubted Blythe possessed.
“So how long will y’all be gone?” Aunt Jewel asked, and I stood up a little straighter.
“Two weeks. We’ll be back by the end of the month.”