The Hundred Lies of Lizzie Lovett(22)

“Yep.”

There was another pause. This one was longer. I was thinking Emily and I’d gotten disconnected, but she finally said, “Please think about what you’re doing.”

“Well, I’m not going to walk up and tell him Lizzie’s a werewolf.”

“I have no idea what you’re going to do, Hawthorn. That’s what worries me.”

Her response was too sad to bear. Emily and I used to have adventures. We used to talk about our lives and all the possibilities, and the future seemed so amazing. Emily didn’t lecture me back then.

“I have to go,” I said.

“Wait. I didn’t mean to upset you. Just… This guy is grieving. You know that. This is serious for him.”

“It’s serious for me too.” I hung up without waiting for her response.

? ? ?

“More coffee?”

Lorenzo barely glanced up. “Sure.”

I filled his mug, and my heart was pounding so hard that I was sure it would burst right out of my chest and cover half the restaurant in blood and gore. Which would remind Lorenzo of his potentially dismembered girlfriend, and he’d probably go home and commit suicide or something. Then all three of us would be dead, me and Lizzie and Lorenzo, and Emily would walk around telling people, “I told Hawthorn not to talk to him.”

But that didn’t happen. I finished pouring the coffee. He didn’t say thank you. I was about to walk away. But that didn’t happen either.

“Hey, you’re Lorenzo Calvetti, right?”

He looked up. “Yeah.”

“Your girlfriend is missing.”

“Yeah.”

“That really sucks.”

He didn’t say anything, just stared at me. His eyes were dark blue and bloodshot. He must not have been getting much sleep lately.

I was getting uncomfortable and wondered if I’d said something totally inappropriate, which I guess wouldn’t have been unusual.

“Look,” I said, “I didn’t mean to be weird or anything. I just thought I should say something, because it would be weirder to act all quiet around you so you’d wonder if I was, like, thinking you killed her, which I wasn’t. Well. Maybe a tiny bit. You didn’t kill her, did you?”

He stared at me like I was an escaped mental patient, like I was the only one who’d straight-out asked him if he was a murderer.

“No,” he said. “I didn’t kill my girlfriend.”

“Well. That’s good.”

We stared at each other for another second, and there were so many important things I wanted to say, but I didn’t know how. So instead, I said, “Let me know if you need more coffee.”

I started toward the kitchen.

“Hey, wait,” Lorenzo called.

I turned back to him.

“It’s Enzo. My parents are the only ones who use my full name.”

“Enzo. Got it.” I smiled and then scurried into the kitchen.

? ? ?

I paced back and forth in front of the stove, still carrying the coffee carafe. I didn’t know what I was doing. Emily was right. Everything about the situation was getting out of hand. Vinny, the cook, watched me with a bemused expression, which I didn’t really appreciate.

Enzo. People called him Enzo. His friends called him Enzo. Was I a friend? Of course not. I didn’t even know him. Could I be his friend? Maybe. Did he kill his girlfriend? Certainly not.

I peeked into the dining room. Enzo was hunched over his coffee mug again. He looked like the kind of guy who shopped at thrift stores and wrote poetry, which was considerably different from the kind of guy who dismembered beautiful young girls in the woods.

But how did I know that? I didn’t. I hadn’t even known he went by a nickname until five minutes before. I’d spent so much time thinking about Lizzie and Enzo but hardly knew anything real about them. It had started to feel as if they only existed in my head. As if I’d made them up or could make them into anything I wanted them to be.

Meeting Enzo changed everything.

It was Mark Twain getting on a bus and sitting down next to Huck Finn. Or F. Scott Fitzgerald running into Jay Gatsby at the grocery store. It was meeting someone I invented and realizing I hadn’t actually invented him at all.

For once, I wasn’t just pretending.

Something interesting was really happening.

Vinny pulled me out of my thoughts. “You got a crush or something?”

“No,” I said with as much scorn as I could muster. “I don’t have a crush.”

“What then? You’re blocking the grill.”

“Oh, because we have so many customers putting in orders?” I moved to the other side of the kitchen anyway, because there was no point in arguing.

Enzo. I’d met Enzo Calvetti, the guy with a missing girlfriend. But not a dead girlfriend. And for sure not a girlfriend he’d killed.

I thought about the full moon and Wolf Creek and the two of them in the tent that night. Something had happened to Lizzie; that was for sure. And maybe Enzo had been there, but her disappearance wasn’t his fault. No matter what people called him, he wasn’t a murderer.

Maybe he just had the bad luck of dating a werewolf.

I could see Lizzie so clearly, rushing into a clearing, not knowing what was happening to her and being afraid but at the same time feeling more alive than ever before. She would have understood that she was finally becoming what she was always meant to be.