“Aubrey! So good to see you.”
Maya hears them in the hall. Aubrey must have been on her way to the bathroom, probably hoping to sneak back to sleep afterward, but now she’s been caught awake. “Hi, Brenda.” Aubrey’s voice is sleepy but warm. She’s spent a lot of time here over the years, including a whole month last year after her mom kicked her out of the house for sneaking a boy into her room.
Brenda makes them all French toast and serves it with local maple syrup, a splurge. The French toast is crispy on the outside and soft in the middle. The house smells like fried batter and the coffee that Maya has recently begun to join her mom in drinking with breakfast. She started largely because she wasn’t allowed to drink it when she was younger, but she liked the way it made her feel and quickly learned to love its bitter taste.
She washes dishes afterward, and Aubrey dries. They talk over running water, the smell of Palmolive. “So about Frank . . .”
“Finally!” Aubrey says. “Thought you were never going to tell me.”
Maya hadn’t wanted to dwell on it last night, but now she needs to know how afraid she should be. “You were right. Total creep.”
Aubrey would never say I told you so. She pouts sympathetically. “What’d he do?”
Maya lathers a fork as she tells Aubrey about the three times she seemed to black out around Frank. The first time, at Balance Rock, she assumed it was his dad’s medical marijuana; that stuff is known to be strong. The second time, the night she kissed Frank, she’d been so giddy that she hadn’t given the missing hours much thought.
“Hours?”
Maya, embarrassed, keeps her eyes on her soapy hands.
“But how . . . ?”
“I have no idea . . .” She waits for Aubrey to dismiss her, and when she doesn’t, Maya tells her about last night. The cabin in the woods. The missing minutes as she arrived and left. Walking in the rain with no idea how she got there. The phone calls. The fucking with her head.
“I’m going for a run,” her mom says, suddenly behind them, dressed in shorts and a shirt that reads pumpkin fever triathlon.
Aubrey nearly drops the plate she’s been drying for the past two minutes.
“Geez, you two are jumpy.” Her mom leaves the kitchen door open at her back.
Maya wouldn’t have blamed Aubrey for being skeptical. But when she manages to look at her, there’s not a shred of doubt on Aubrey’s face. No judgment. She believes Maya, and it shows; she looks afraid. More afraid than Maya herself had felt up until this moment, until she saw the fear in her brave friend’s eyes and the way she stands frozen at the sink.
“I knew it,” Aubrey says quietly. “I think he did the same to me.”
Maya stares at her.
“At Dunkin’ Donuts, right before you ran into us. I felt like something weird happened that day, but then I thought . . .” She shakes her head. “I thought I was imagining it.”
“Oh my god! Me too!”
Now they both look scared.
“It was after he set that book aside for me . . .” Aubrey seems to turn something over in her mind. “A biography about this doctor who lived in Victorian London. A mesmerist . . .”
“A what?”
“Mesmerism—it was a medical practice in the 1800s. Basically mimosas. This doctor became famous for performing it onstage. He had this patient, a servant, and he would treat her while people watched. Sort of like a magic show only instead of magic tricks, people paid to watch him minimize the poor girl, who was probably unconscious the whole time.”
Maya furrows her brow, stuck on mimosas. “I’m sorry—what?”
“Which part?”
“Mimosas?”
“Mimosas,” Aubrey says. “You know, like hippo sizzling.”
Maya almost laughs. She turns off the water, and the room is silent. “Did you say . . .”
Aubrey’s starting to look annoyed. “Seriously?”
Maya doesn’t ask her to repeat herself. It doesn’t matter anyway what book Frank lent Aubrey—she just needs to know what he did to her, what he did to them both. She shakes her head as if to clear it. “What happened at Dunkin’ Donuts?”
“We talked about magic,” Aubrey says. “He told me he practiced a little himself, sleight of hand, coin tricks, that kind of thing. As if he thought that would impress me.”
Maya’s face burns. She herself was easy to impress.
“He asked,” Aubrey says, “if I wanted to see a trick. And he really sold it to me, you know?”
Maya knew.
“He told me the trick was really old and that very few people will ever see it. Well, of course I wanted to see it. I said yes and he took this key out of his pocket and set it on the table.”
“Was the key weird? Like, did it look sharp?”
“Has he shown you the trick?”
Maya shook her head. “What did he do with it?”
“He said he was going to make it levitate. Told me to focus all my attention on it. He said I’d see the key rise off the table.”
“Did you?”
“He never got to that part. He told me all about the trick first, like how it’s never been written down and magicians have been passing it down by word of mouth for generations. Blah blah blah. I knew none of it was true. Magic tricks usually start off with a story of some kind. But his just went on and on and on . . .” A strange look comes over her face. “I kept listening, thinking something was going to happen. But it never did. The key stayed where it was, and I . . . stared at it . . . and then you walked in.”
Maya stops washing dishes. She turns off the water.
“I walked home after that,” Aubrey says, “and when I got there, I saw that I’d been at Dunkin’ Donuts for more than an hour.”
“Knock, knock,” Frank says at the screen door.
They turn, eyes wide with fear.
There’s no telling how long he’s been there. How much he’s heard.
Maya instinctively picks up a knife that had been lying by the sink. “What are you doing here?”
Frank eyes the sharp paring knife. She’s not sure why she picked it up, and it feels like overkill, but she tries to hold it with confidence.
He raises his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I only want to talk.”
“I told you I don’t want to see you.”
“I just want to clear the air about the other night.”
Aubrey, standing closer to the door, faces him through the screen. She’s an inch or two taller than he is and, unlike Maya, doesn’t seem scared. “You need to leave, Frank. Now.”
“This has nothing to do with you, Aubrey. Stay out of it.”
“Or else what?” Aubrey stares him down. “I know,” she says.
A look of fear on his face, followed quickly by fury. His voice remains calm. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I know what you did to us.”
Maya can’t tell if she’s bluffing.
Frank lurches at her. Stops an inch from her face. “Like I said, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The words are edged with warning.
Alarm bells sound in Maya’s chest. She wonders if Aubrey is telling the truth.