Sign Here(40)
Lily shrugged. “He’s Silas’s brother; I can ride it whenever I want. I’m surprised you’re not up there, though.”
Sarah stretched out next to her and threw her hair, damaged but still enviable in its volume, over the edge of the float into the lake. “I live dangerously enough on my own two feet.”
Lily snorted. “Did you practice that line in the mirror?”
“How else would I have nailed it so flawlessly?”
That time, Lily laughed for real.
“So, Silas Harrison, huh? How’s that going?”
Whatever fragile camaraderie there was between them was lost the minute Lily heard Sarah say his name. Like it was at home in her mouth.
“That’s definitely none of your business.”
“I think it’s cute,” she said. “You two make sense, you know? Like Happy Days. I’m sure it’s really nice.”
“It’s a whole lot more than nice.”
“I’m sure. You seem . . . wild.” Sarah grinned and closed her eyes against the sun.
“What about you and Dan? Or was it Kevin? Or wait . . . no. I think it was the whole baseball team,” Lily said as she sat up, using her perfect twenty-five-inch waist to block Sarah’s sun.
“Basketball, actually.”
“Why are you even here?”
“I was invited.”
“By Phil? Don’t get too big a head from his little crush; he would stick it in anyone who would have him. You’re just his best bet.”
“Well, aren’t I lucky!” Sarah said, but Lily could hear a little crack in her witty armor, and it was enough.
“You didn’t know he wants to fuck you? That’s why he’s here this weekend; usually he’d stay home. But he wants . . . whatever this is,” Lily said, sliding one finger under the string tie of Sarah’s bikini bottom and letting it snap, like she was emptying a rattrap.
“Phil and I are just friends.”
“That’s not what he tells the boys,” Lily said, leaning back on her hands. “Apparently, you get real frisky with just a little tequila . . . Is that true?” She went sweet on the upward inflection, in that poison way teenage girls do.
Sarah’s eyes fluttered, but she kept them closed. “Phil wouldn’t say that.”
“I guess we’ll see when they get back from the liquor store.”
Lily stood and stretched, showing the whole length of her body. She was long from start to finish, a ray of light straight from the sky.
“Later,” she said, and she dove into the water with barely a splash.
* * *
—
WHEN LILY REACHED THE clearing that afternoon, she stood at the lake’s edge and plucked the petals off all of the poppies but one, throwing each into the water. No matter how far she tried to throw them, they gathered back at her feet.
“I’m sorry, Sarah.”
Gavin said he talked to Sarah out loud all the time. He said it helped. But to Lily, it felt showy and self-indulgent. What good was a conversation if the other person couldn’t push back? The presumption that the dead are happy just to listen was a selfish, desperate side effect of loss.
“I don’t have any excuses, and I’m sure you wouldn’t even care. But for whatever it’s worth, I’m sorry. If I had gotten up earlier, or if I had done something—”
Lily wished beyond anything else that she hadn’t gotten up that night. She wished she hadn’t stumbled out onto that lawn littered with plastic cups and moonlight, shuffling one foot in front of the other over roots and leaves down the path to the clearing, her head thrumming with heavy vodka Sprites. She wished she had just stayed in bed where Silas put her, next to a trash can and a glass of water. If she had just rolled over and gone back to sleep, everything could’ve been different. Not for Sarah—Lily couldn’t do anything about that. But for her, and Silas. And, of course, for Philip.
Lily laid the last flower whole on the spit of shore, the bright red garish against the murky silt, as if showing off. Bragging about being alive.
As if it didn’t yet know that it was not.
PEYOTE
“WHY WOULD YOU AGREE to that? It doesn’t matter how many souls he offers us; we can’t go traipsing around the globe looking for—who are we even looking for?” I said when we landed back in the office.
“Not here,” Cal hissed, unsnapping her tablet and putting it back in its cubby. “Meet me at my place after work.”
I lifted my eyebrows.
“Just do it,” she said before she turned down the hall between the cubicles, raising her hand to greet someone on the other side of the divide.
* * *
—
CAL DIDN’T KNOW I had her file. I held that card the way one holds an autograph, preciously and proudly. I can admit that I fantasized plenty about the moment I could tell her and wipe that smug we-can-pretend-you’re-in-charge-but-we-all-know-I-am smile straight off her face. Not the way we used to Downstairs, of course, with Agent Orange and a scrap of steel wool. I knew I would have to catch her off guard. But it was becoming clear that Calamity Ganon didn’t get caught off guard. She’d never even tried it—loosening into the capable hands of another. Cal knew nothing but guard her whole life, both in the blip of regular and the forever of after.