He was squinting in the sun, avoiding her eyes.
“It’s…obvious that I love you too, Leo,” Rosemarie said gently.
“Right.” He nodded, refusing to look at her. “Just don’t let her mistreat you or, like, break your heart or whatever.”
“I won’t.” She thought of how hot she felt confessing her feelings to Sparrow earlier in the afternoon compared to the coolness coming off her in the water now. She wanted to remember everything, even the things that hurt, so she could tell Kasey all of it like she promised. “What about Claire?” Rosemarie asked him. Claire was a girl from church whom Leo used to date, and Rosemarie didn’t realize she was jealous of Claire until Leo told her Claire wasn’t going on the mission trip and Rosemarie’s body flooded with relief.
It was selfish to want Leo all to herself this summer, but so what? He wanted her all to himself too. It was how their relationship worked even if it didn’t make sense to anyone else. It didn’t have to.
“You love Claire,” Rosemarie forced herself to say, scared of what Leo’s response would be. She flipped and went underwater, swam across the pool and back again. She popped up and sat next to Leo, nudging him playfully with her shoulder.
“I only love Claire a little. I love you a lot,” he said finally.
“I love you a lot, too,” Rosemarie said to him, touching his wet face.
*
Rosemarie was already in her pajamas when there was a knock at the door, and it was Sparrow. Rosemarie asked her if she wanted to go outside and talk on the trampoline, and Sparrow said yeah, sure.
“What’s up?” Rosemarie asked once they were out there lying down. The sky was full of stars. She couldn’t stop looking up at them; Sparrow was looking up at them too.
“I was thinking maybe this should be it for us. Like, whatever this weird thing is we’ve been doing, I think I’m done with it. When you go to Costa Rica and when I go away to school, maybe we should leave it here in Goldie and not talk about it anymore again, like ever. Because I’m not gay, Rosemarie; I’m not. Like, I had sex with Frankie today. I have sex with Frankie, like, every day.” Sparrow said the last part softly, and when Rosemarie looked at her, by the light of the kitchen-window glow, she saw a tear smooth down into Sparrow’s ear.
“Okay,” Rosemarie said. She said it again. It was all she could say. She didn’t want to ask anything and she didn’t want to hear any more either. After a couple minutes of quiet, Sparrow got up. The fence lock opened and closed.
*
Rosemarie cried in her bedroom with the light off, but it wasn’t all because of Sparrow. It was because of Kasey and Kasey’s mom and high school ending, and her aunt too. Her mom had told her earlier that her aunt’s cancer was back, and she imagined her aunt dying and Rosemarie wanted everyone to stop fucking dying.
She cried because she knew she was hurting Leo and she didn’t want to hurt Leo. She got her phone off the nightstand and called him. She didn’t try to hide that she was crying when she told him she was sorry.
“For what, Ro? Did you think we were in a fight earlier? I didn’t. It felt like we were just talking,” Leo’s sleepy voice said. There was a blankety muffle on his end of the line.
Rosemarie told him about her aunt and she told him about Sparrow too. When she was finished, she heard a bit of rustling and then quiet guitar strums. Leo was playing “Pink Moon” for her. She cried some more because it was so soft and pretty and she loved that song so much and it was Just So Leo for him to play it for her in the dark when she’d called him crying about the weight of being human.
“Do you want to stay on the phone together until we fall asleep? Let’s stay on the phone together until we fall asleep,” Rosemarie heard him say when she was nearly knee-deep in a dream.
2019
31
Ada
Thursday morning, Ada called Grandma Mimi first thing and asked her to please text or call them when Trey was up at the hospital. Mimi promised she’d do it.
Rosemarie brought the mushrooms in a little cloth bag. They were on the counter next to the sink alongside wedges of Gruyère and Parmesan cheese, a bag of mozzarella and fresh herbs. A cold bottle of white wine and a box of noodles. Butter, olive oil, a lemon, eight cloves of garlic. Laced or not, Ada wasn’t skimping on taste.
“Psilocybe ovoideocystidiata,” Rosemarie said, pointing. “This is our answer. These mixed with the LSD bourbon will make him so out of it that it’ll be easy to convince him to go down by the water and get him in. The drugs will have him thinking he can swim.”
“Explain this to me like I barely got a C in biology, because I barely got a C in biology,” Ada said.
“They’re psychedelic magic mushrooms. Eating them won’t be what kills him; they’ll make him high on shrooms. Like being stoned on weed, except more intense and totally different, and the odds of them turning up in an autopsy report or anything is pretty low. They’re magic,” Rosemarie said. She explained that cooking the mushrooms made them less potent, so they’d be sure to use a lot. “And lysergic acid diethylamide: LSD. For our Foxberry Bourbon–Tripping Balls Cocktail.” Rosemarie held up a small glass vial of clear liquid. “Kase, you’ll have a knife on you in case he tries to fight back?” she asked.
“Right. I’ll flirt with him, though. I’m going to do and say everything he wants,” Kasey said confidently.
“So, I’ll put some in there and sprinkle some on top too. I’ll use all of them with some extra sauce,” Ada said about the mushrooms. “Extra sugar in the pie, just in case.” She’d get the lasagna in the oven and start on the pie filling. This plan wasn’t like the old plan. This was going to work. It had to work. Every time anxiety crept in, Ada visualized squashing it with a pink four-inch heel that said this has to work on it in a fancy script.
“I know it may be wild, but I don’t have any weirdness about doing this whatsoever, do y’all? People get sick and die all the time; actual good people are murdered all the time. Trey doesn’t get to live when other people have to die. He tried his best to kill Caroline and he said he’d do it. I don’t have any weirdness about doing this at all,” Rosemarie repeated, shaking her head. “I thought about it a lot last night. I barely slept.”
“I didn’t sleep a lot either,” Ada said. Grayson, like most men, could sleep through anything. She didn’t have to worry about disturbing him as she sat up for hours the night before with the lamp on, mindlessly scrolling through her phone. He’d only mumbled nonsense and rolled over when she got up and cleaned the coffeepot at 3 a.m., just for something to do.
“Me neither,” Kasey said. “And I don’t have any weirdness about it, no. We don’t have a choice anymore—we don’t. Fuck him.”
“We can’t wait around for something to happen,” Ada said. “Fuck him. This will work. It will. It’ll be fine.” Ada had weighed everything, holding on to the belief that Rosemarie was right. The Plum family had money and good lawyers, and no one would suspect her. She was a mother, a major figure in the community. Her reputation spoke for itself. Her privilege was a shield. This has to work.