“Yeah, we do.” She grimaced. “I’m not much of an actor.”
I clenched my teeth, sucking in air. “Yeah. Me, neither.”
She checked her phone and sighed. “Okay, I gotta go. You fill Frankie in. I’m free all day tomorrow to, you know, nail down the details.”
“Okay.” My skin was buzzing, ready to take action. I was ready right now. I wanted Cassie to be, too. I gestured for her to hand me her phone and punched in my number. She hesitated again before she got in the car.
“Hey, what’s your last name?” she asked, putting up a hand to shade her eyes.
“Morrow,” I said, glancing at her, my eyes traveling down the tattoos on her arms to the CD cases on her dashboard to the granola bar wrappers at her feet. “You?”
“Salazar,” she said, smiling against the sun.
The quiet was surreal. A breeze licked one of the swings in the playground behind her. My heart was full of something like gratitude, something big and scared and shaking, but my mind kept getting slammed into Johnno’s Bronco. Jake, slammed into Johnno’s Bronco. JJ watching.
No, Cassie was going to help me. She was annoying as hell but she was fierce, and she was going to help me protect them. I wanted to shake her hand or hold her. It seemed absurd that we would just go off in our separate directions, like we had talked about the weather.
But that’s what we did. I glanced back over my shoulder when she reached the road. Though I couldn’t be sure through the afternoon glare, I thought our eyes met, and I waved. She lifted her hand and waved back.
Cassie
Someone was knocking on my door. I looked up from my keyboard, the remains of three joints on a saucer next to me, the shells of pistachios scattered under my feet. Pistachios were an expensive but type 2–friendly cure for the munchies, I’d found. I had been pacing, crunching, going back and forth between contacting Luke and telling him we had to call it off and playing piano to calm my nerves.
I checked the peephole. It was Rita, my landlady.
Uh oh.
I opened the door a crack. “Yeah?”
Rita was holding her dog, Dante, who was panting, cross-eyed. Rita sniffed, her eyes as pink and puffy as her robe. “I noticed your lights were on all night. Just wanted to check if you were all right.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m good.”
She sniffed again. “Were you smoking weed in here?”
My pulse quickened. “No.”
“Yes, you were.” I prepared an excuse, something about buying the wrong incense. Then she said, “You have any left?”
Phew. “Of course.”
It was an unspoken agreement that I could get away with a lot in Rita’s attic if I wasn’t stupid about it. There were a lot of unspoken agreements. I didn’t say anything about her loud weeping, for example, or her occasional parties where it sounded like people were making animal noises at one another, and she didn’t say anything if my rent was a few days late, or about the fact that my subwoofer shook the entire house.
“Nothing like a good wake-and-bake,” Rita said, settling herself on the couch.
Wake-and-bake? I looked at my phone. Six. Shit. I hadn’t realized it was so late. Er, early. I was supposed to meet Luke and Frankie in an hour before we went to city hall. And I was supposed to have written a “biography” of sorts for Luke, a collection of facts about my life that he could have reasonably retained in the week or so we’d “known each other and fallen in love.” It was a good idea—he’d suggested it on the phone last night. He was writing one for me to read, too.
Instead, I’d started writing a song. When I feel something I can’t quite understand, like when I felt smothered by Tyler, or when I found out I had diabetes, or now, for instance, I’d look for the feeling in notes.
Writing a song is like walking through a forest, foraging for food. You start at the edge, at the organ sound in C major, or E, then you see color somewhere through the trees, maybe a more synthy F-sharp, and you pick it up but it’s not quite right. Not quite the right berry to eat, so you venture further, touching E minor in a vibraphone like you would a familiar leaf, feeling its texture, playing it fast or slow, and there it is. You take it and you start picking more notes nearby. Nutty G chords and back to F, now that it’s ripe.
I never quite found the right notes for I’m getting legally bound to a person I don’t know. The feeling went in too many directions. Disbelief. Fear. Skepticism. But I found the notes for hope, a bright shapeless thing far off in the woods. I focused on this feeling in particular. Hope, though I didn’t know what it looked like, was leading me forward.