“You need a new way in,” Ringo continues. “If this search for the Holy Grail that your boyfriend has laid out for you is the only way you feel you can make a decision, then you have to get to the end of it. Just think—what’s going to lead you there?”
I twist my fingers in my lap. “Yeah, you’re right. I guess. I don’t know.” Matt said he wanted something in return that wasn’t my resurrection, but I don’t know what it is that he’s asking for. Ringo seems to be telling me to open Pandora’s box and find out, but I’m not sure I want to. I sigh. “There’s another thing. I found this anonymous post on our school’s ChatterJaw account. It said something I didn’t understand about how I wasn’t going to resurrect Will because there was trouble in paradise.”
“Were you in a fight?”
I’m quickly discovering that Ringo is the easiest person to talk to that I’ve ever met and I try to weigh how much I should watch my tongue before saying, “No. Of course not.” Will and I did bicker with each other plenty, usually about stupid things, like when he talked too loud in movie theaters or how he always had to make small talk with strangers. Penny was always our tiebreaker. In a few quiet Penny sentences, she could tell us which one of us was right without making either of us feel wrong. “But…it’s bothering me. Like why does someone think that they know Will’s and my relationship better than I do?”
“So ask the person who posted it,” Ringo says.
“It’s anonymous.”
The clack-clack from Margaret’s keyboard pauses. “I’m offended,” she says. “You are sitting in front of the wizard.”
“Gandalf, Dumbledore…” Ringo lists them.
“Merlin,” she says.
“You can find out who posted it?” I ask. “Anyone?”
She twists her mouth and pinches one shoulder to her ear. “Almost anyone. It has to be tied to a traceable e-mail address that the user has logged in with. So, like, there are limitations. If someone didn’t use their normal account, used an alternate IP address, maybe if they went private, but otherwise, yeah. Show me the post.”
And so I do.
“Need another one while we wait?” Ringo points to my empty mug.
I give him a thumbs-up, then lean over to him and say softly, “I like your friends.” I scan the crowded corner. I’m not even sure what half of them are doing, but I’ve never been someone with a large group of friends. Obviously, since my entire social crowd has been wiped out in a single car wreck. It’s lively and the relationships seem more fluid and less intense than I’m used to.
Ringo winks and it wrinkles the uneven skin around his eye. “Be right back.” He raps the table twice with his knuckles and disappears toward the front counter.
Despite what I had just said, my chest instantly tightens as I look around at the group of faces with whom I know I don’t fit in. The swell of being on the outside, of not belonging, grows inside me, like yeast rising up my throat and closing off my airways. The terrible part of it is that I had thought I was past this. I believed that Penny and Will would always be around to insulate me from this very feeling. That it was okay for me to never have to start a conversation with anyone new because Penny didn’t feel awkward anywhere she went, because Penny would be there all day every day. Penny and Will were my miracle when I had no one else, and here I am alone again and I am starting to wonder if anyone will notice if I get up and run.
But then Kai, who is straddling the back of his wheeled chair, plants his feet on the concrete floor and pushes toward me. He comes zooming over in one athletic arc and catches himself on the side of the table.
He grins, flashing blindingly white but crooked teeth. “What kind of girl are you?” he asks, rubbing his chin into the hand that’s resting on the seatback. He stares up at me with dark eyes. His black hair is buzzed into a high-top fade with not an inch of fuzz at the line where it reaches his ears.
I reach for the mug of coffee and take a sip, realizing too late that it’s empty. “That’s, um, a loaded question.”
He narrows his eyes and looks me over like he’s trying to guess my measurements. “Liz Phair, I bet,” he says. “No, no.” He holds a finger up like an exclamation point. “Wait, something with a little more gumption. And girl power!” He claps. “Letters to Cleo?”
He waits and it dawns on me that I’m supposed to have a response. “Are those…bands?” I venture, biting my lip. He widens his eyes and gives me a perfunctory nod as in, Hello, of course they are. “I don’t know, I guess I’m more of a Top Forty girl?” I wince, knowing full well that this is the wrong answer.
Kai clutches his neckline and stretches out an open-palmed hand dramatically. “Jesus take the wheel!” he cries out in a theater voice. “Please, please, please, tell me you have not told our Ringo that. That boy is fragile as my mama’s wedding china and that may break him.”
“My…musical taste?”
The confusion and concern must be obvious on my face—Ringo, fragile? And would he really care what I listen to on the radio?—because Vance drags his chair over to us. Vance is just as thin, long-limbed, and bony as Kai, but he has the complexion of a vampire. His dark hair is tucked into a knit cap, and black-rimmed glasses frame an angular face.
“Excuse him.” Vance nods at Kai. “His mother sent him to theater camp at a tender age and now we have this.”
Kai makes a show of being offended. “Excuse you. The camp circuit is still buzzing over my debut as the Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist.”
Vance’s eyebrows lift above the frame of his glasses.
Simone glances over from behind her thick crop of bangs. “Are these two harassing you?” she asks.
“I don’t think so,” I say quickly, but Simone gives them each a stern look anyway.
“A makeover!” Kai bounces on his seat. “That’s what we’ll do.” He must see that I look skeptical because he says, “Oh god no, you’re gorgeous. A musical one. And Christ, just because I’m gay does not mean I can do hair.”
Vance puts his hand on Kai’s knee, a gesture that seems loving and as though he’s trying to quiet his excitable boyfriend all at once. “He’s trying to indoctrinate you,” Vance says. “You know, we accept her, one of us, gooble-gobble, gooble-gobble, that kind of thing.”
Kai squinches up his face and then rolls his eyes. “It’s a quote,” Kai explains with a dismissive wave. “He likes old movies too. Not one of his finer qualities.”
“Not when you fall asleep by seven o’clock during the opening credits,” Vance snaps back.
“Please, when I’m thirty and have a face like a baby’s bottom, we’ll see who’s complaining.”
“Still me,” Vance replies. I bounce between them like I’m watching a tennis match. Neither Duke Ellington nor Simone seems to take notice at all, so this kind of back-and-forth must be a regular occurrence.
I’ve almost forgotten what I am doing here and what I’m waiting for when Kai looks past my shoulder and says, “Give us the song for today,” and I turn back to see Ringo handing me a fresh cup of coffee.