“What?” I ask her.
“You don’t trust me,” she says.
“What? No. Of course I do. I trust you.”
“I understand,” she says. “I’m not an easy person to trust. Maybe it’s the way I look.”
“No, Sophie. Why would you say that?”
“You hesitated. Just now when I gave you the apple. Like you were afraid to eat it.”
“No,” I say. But I was, wasn’t I? Why? Why do I feel like something’s off?
“I . . . ,” she says. She doesn’t finish her thought. She stares out the kitchen window.
I can’t let my weird paranoid bullshit ruin this potential friendship. I won’t.
“It’s not you, Sophie. I’m just preoccupied. I had a bad conversation with Sam. He said something that really bothered me. And then I started drinking. I’ve been drinking a lot,” I say. “I keep thinking, what if I can’t do this? What if I can’t be alone?”
Her demeanor changes. She softens, returns to cutting fruit.
“I understand why you’re asking the question,” she says. “But we’ve talked about this. You will be fine. Who initiated the contact? Him or you?”
I falter. Technically he called me, but he was calling me back. “Um . . .”
“So you?”
I nod.
“We’ll have to fix that,” she says. “And what prompted the call?”
“I don’t remember. General loneliness?”
“Here,” she says. She sets a glass down on the table in front of me. “Only if you want.”
“Is it just rum in there?”
“Does it matter?” she asks.
I take a sip. It’s straight rum. I guess we’ve abandoned the punch idea. That’s fine.
“What did he say that hurt you?”
“He said . . . he said something about how he used to have to be home for dinner. Like, there was an insinuation that I kept him on a short leash, something like that.”
Sophie gasps. “What a hideous thing to say!”
“I don’t think I had, like, unreasonable expectations when we were together. But I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe I did.”
“Annie,” she says. She pours herself a glass of rum. I notice her hand is shaking. Badly. Something’s wrong. Something is very wrong.
The nag of fear is back. The flapping bird of panic.
“Sophie,” I say.
She lets the glass fall from her hand. It smashes when it hits the floor. Completely shatters. Glass everywhere.
She steps on the glass without caution. It crunches under her boots. It’s a horrible sound.
Outside, the sun bows beneath the trees, a sudden descent that chokes the light from the room. For a moment, in the chaos of the newborn dark, I can’t see her at all. She’s nowhere. But then she appears beside me, sitting next to me at the table. The only source of light in the room is the candle, the manic dance of an orange flame.
In the candlelight, shadows traverse her face. They climb up her neck, claw at her cheeks. The subtle warmth about her that I’ve grown accustomed to, the slight upward turn at the corners of her mouth, the fullness in her cheeks, eyelids relaxed to conceal the full whites of her eyes—all of that is gone.
Her mouth is flat, cheeks gaunt, eyeballs bulging out of their sockets.
“Annie,” she says, her voice low, hoarse, “are we friends?”
How else am I supposed to answer?
“Yes,” I say. “Of course.”
“Do you want to be my friend?”
“I already am,” I say. “We’re friends. I’ve slept over at your house.”
There’s a sting on my arm. She’s grabbing me. Her hand clutches my wrist. Her nails dig into my skin.
“I need to tell you something,” she says. “Something about me. Something I believe you may already suspect.”
“Okay,” I say. I wriggle my hand and she loosens her grasp, though not enough for me to escape it. She has me.
“I’ve told you before, I feel real affection for you. A kinship. And I . . . I can sense you pulling away from me. Perhaps I’m imagining it, manifesting my fear. You see, it’s very tempting for me to be my whole, true self around people I care for. But whenever I am, I take the chance of scaring them away.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Sophie,” I say. “It’s fine. We’re good.”
“I’m so afraid, Annie. I’m afraid if I tell you, it’ll ruin everything. It’s been so long since I’ve had a friend. And I could be a good friend to you. I could help you!”