“Did you come here on purpose?” I demanded.
Now Parker dropped her voice a little. “Do you think I’m hunting you down or something?”
“What else could possibly be happening?”
“Wait,” she said then, her voice starting to ooze with delight. “Am I sensing that you still haven’t moved on from high school?”
Were we talking about this? I guess we were talking about this.
“That’s a hell of a question from you,” I said. When she didn’t stop me, I kept going. “A hell of a question from the person who framed me for stealing Madame Stein’s French exam. The person who started the rumor that I slept with Kacy’s boyfriend. The person who started a fire out by the field house and then put a can of lighter fluid in my locker. And let’s not forget the person who bullied Augusta Ross to the brink of suicide and then pinned it all on me.”
She wrinkled her nose in faux sympathy. “Not over it, then.”
“Of course not,” I said. “You methodically and viciously dismantled my life. Augusta Ross had been my best friend since second grade, but six months after you showed up, her parents were hauling her off to Seattle, never to return. You got me kicked out of school. You turned my own father against me. And all for what—so you could have our bedroom to yourself?”
I thought maybe holding her actions up to her in the mirror might evoke … something. Remorse, maybe. Regret?
Instead, Parker just said, “You forgot ‘stole your boyfriend.’ Which was why I needed the bedroom to myself.”
Whoa. She was worse than I remembered.
Parker was loving this, though. She leaned in. “Is it all still haunting you this much? I mean, I knew I won. But I didn’t know I won this epically. Sweetie, in two years, we’ll be thirty! Let it go.”
“Don’t call me sweetie” was all I could think of to say.
Remember when Dr. Nicole thought it was so perplexing that I would think that people would want to use your weaknesses against you? That there was some compelling reason to endlessly hide your vulnerabilities from the world?
Well, meet the entire reason I believed that—right here, in the flesh. Holding a cat in a coffee shop.
Hazel One called my name again.
I ignored it. Screw the latte.
“You can’t live here,” I said.
“I’m no landlord,” Parker said, “but I don’t think you can stop me.”
“Why?” I asked then.
She pretended the question made no sense. “Why what?”
I tried to bend her to my will with a don’t-mess-with-me tone of voice. “Why are you doing this, Parker?”
She gave a big shrug, and then she didn’t fight me—and I suddenly realized she’d wanted me to ask this question all along. “I heard about you and my mom hanging out,” she said, and then her voice got theatrically pouty, “and I thought, Are they having fun without me?”
“We were not having fun,” I said. “I don’t ‘have fun’ with Lucinda.”
“She paid you a visit, though,” Parker said. “At your roof-hovel.”
Hey. Only I got to call my hovel a hovel.
“Now we can all have fun together,” Parker went on—her voice shifting to menacingly perky.
“I don’t want you here,” I said, starting to feel a panic of helplessness.
“Aww, I know,” she said now—lacing her voice with fake sympathy. “This is kind of your worst nightmare, isn’t it?”
She waited, like I might confirm it.
I held still.
“But don’t worry,” Parker added then, raising her hand for another high-five attempt. “Given your whole brain-damage situation … you will literally never know I’m here.”
Eleven
PERFECT. BETWEEN JOE the Weasel and Parker, I pretty much had to dread every single elevator ride.
Another reason to never leave the rooftop.
And yet Parker wasn’t wrong. I really didn’t notice she was there. Other than that our top-floor hallway suddenly started smelling like cat pee, which had to be that creepy Sphynx cat’s fault. Maybe she worked all the time—what kind of terrible job would a person like Parker even have?
Or maybe she was moving around me all the time, unseen, like a ghost.
Either way, she was surprisingly forgettable.
The Weasel, however, was the opposite.
That red-and-white bowling jacket was as hard to miss as a stop sign. And he wore it all the time. Other people changed their clothes, their shoes, their hair. Sometimes they wore workout gear. Sometimes a suit for work. Sometimes jeans. It was normal human behavior to wear different clothes for different occasions and I applauded it. Of course, it made it almost impossible for me to know who was who, but at least the world was still lumbering along much as it always had.