“About the date?”
“What do you mean?”
“We talked,” I say. “Last night. On the stall?”
I was so sure. I didn’t doubt for a second.
“The stall?” she asks.
“Are you messing with me?”
She leans back, puts a hand over her heart. “No, darling. I’m sorry. I don’t know what you mean.”
“Oh,” I say. “I guess I had too much to drink or something. I could have sworn . . .”
“Tell me,” she says. “Come. Let’s sit.”
We sit on the stairs and drink our coffee as I give her a play-by-play of the night. I tell her about handsome, terrible, bland Pascal. I tell her about Dan and his repulsiveness. She scoffs.
“Some men are so foul you wouldn’t even bother to save their blood,” she says.
“Sorry?”
“Never mind,” she says. “Continue.”
I tell her about how the restaurant was tacky and the food was gross, about how I drank straight whiskey and escaped to the bathroom. I tell her about how I saw the graffiti, the message that I assumed was from her. The red ink.
She keeps shrugging and shaking her head like she had nothing to do with it, like she has no idea what I’m talking about. I’m not sure I believe her. Part of me hopes she’s lying, because the alternative is scary. Did I hallucinate? See what I wanted to see? Was I drunker than I realized?
I tell her about how I started to get sassy, but then realized it was futile.
And then I tell her about the bones.
She’s silent as I recount the story. She doesn’t sip. She doesn’t move. I don’t think she breathes.
“I laughed. I started laughing. It took me over. I thought it was the funniest thing I’d ever seen, the funniest thing to ever happen. He was bleeding from his mouth, spitting out bones, and I was laughing. I laughed. The whole restaurant was staring.”
Last night, the laughter made me feel immortal, but in the yellow light of day, I feel ashamed of it. It was crazy to laugh. Why did I laugh? What was so funny?
“I thought maybe it was you,” I say. “Like the spider. I thought it was a curse.”
“It wasn’t me, pet,” she says, stroking my hand. “It was you.”
I have a flash of memory. Me spinning around and around, a swirl of trees, the house. The moon hovering above me. My feet numb. A mist like a silver aura delicate as lace. My voice. A strange song.
I remember how it felt. How I felt.
I conjure it. The feeling. The feeling of watching Dan spit bones from his wretched mouth. The feeling of dancing on the grass, in the moonlight. Of being seen by Lynn and not caring. Not caring at all.
I wasn’t myself. I’m not myself.
Or maybe . . . maybe I’m more myself than I’ve ever been.
“But how?” I ask. “How?”
Sophie puts a finger to her lips, a thought haunting her face.
“What?” I ask.
She smiles widely. “Nothing at all, my dear,” she says. “Let’s go out for breakfast. We can talk over pancakes.”
“You’re obsessed with pancakes.”
She shrugs. “What can I say? They are cake disguised as breakfast. I’ll go get dressed. How’d the dress work out, by the way?”
“It was perfect. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, my pet,” she says, walking upstairs.
I’m left sitting on the steps drinking cold coffee and questioning everything.
I let my eyes wander around the foyer. They distinguish each detail. The shape of the crystals dripping from the chandelier, not quite teardrops. They’re too sharp, and in this exact light, at this particular time of day, they look dangerous, like the kind of icicles that kill people.
The colorful silhouettes the crystals project onto the walls, they’re in constant movement. They make me dizzy.
I put my face in my hands and rub my temples with my thumbs. It smells like incense in here, a scent so rich it’s almost rotten. I’m finding it hard to breathe.
There’s a pain in my chest. A gnawing.
Once Sam and I were watching some show on the History Channel about medieval torture, and there was one type where the torturers would adhere a bucket of rats to your chest and then heat the bucket so the rats would panic and chew through you.
“That’s actually happened to someone,” I said to him, “to multiple people.”
“I don’t want these anymore,” he said, setting the bowl of Cheetos we’d been snacking on down on the coffee table. Then he used his foot to push them farther away.