When the Sky Fell on Splendor(47)

He dropped the shell and mussed my hair. “Also, I just got pizza grease in your hair.”



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I awoke to a message I’d been waiting for, but it wasn’t the one from Bill.

Ungrounded, Remy wrote. Meet at WH for breakfast? I have updates.

Sofía was softly snoring in the bed beside me, but judging from the voices and clinking of dishes rising through the sun-washed floorboards, I could tell the boys were already awake.

I slid out of bed and retrieved the rubber gloves from my backpack. I’d sneaked down to the kitchen for them last night before I went to empty my wildly unsettled stomach, and then wrote my e-mails to Bill from the bathroom, praying Sofía wouldn’t have another spontaneous visitation into my eye sockets.

As it turned out, she hadn’t heard the conversation with Remy. Her little visitations were limited to sight only, which was great until you were trying to send a discreet e-mail in between puke sessions.

When I got back to the bedroom, though, she wasn’t there, and I figured she’d decided to go sleep on the couch. Apparently sharing a bed with someone she couldn’t even look at didn’t appeal to her.

But here she was, back in bed this morning (our couch was famously uncomfortable), and things were looking better in the light of day. Whatever had upset my stomach—the crushing weight of this situation, perhaps!—had passed too.

So do we, I typed back to Remy.

We? he replied.

Sofía sat up groggily in bed, shoving a fistful of dark hair out of her eyes and squinting through the buttery morning light. “Updates?” she said through a yawn. “What updates?”

I stared at her for a minute, then typed back, Sofía’s psychic and Nick’s obsessed with pianos. We’ll explain everything at breakfast in half an hour.

“Technically, I think I’m telepathic,” she said, reading the message from the far side of the room. “Or something.”

She offered a tentative smile, an olive branch, and the relief flooding through me was immediate.

“Get out of my head!” I teased, flinging my rubber glove across the room at her.

“Get out of my head!” she squealed back, dodging the glove.

This was how our last fight had gone too; one weird day and then 360-plus more wherein we agreed not to acknowledge the parts of our friendship that could never fit quite right.

“It’s bad enough I had to see you poltergeist a house,” she deadpanned. “I shouldn’t also have to take a front-row seat to your and Handsome Remy’s unrequited love!”

“How do you get unrequited love out of that text message?” I took my other glove off and flung it at her too.

“It’s there between the lines,” she yelped, lurching onto her knees and hurling the first glove back at me. “The part about Waffle House! Splendor’s premier dining establishment! And the puppy dog eyes he gave you during your secret midnight rendezvous!”

“It wasn’t a rendezvous!”

It was exactly a rendezvous, but not in the way she was thinking.

Still, she’d touched a nerve, made me feel anxious and seen in a way far more uncomfortable than knowing she was able to look through my eyes, and all the pressure points in our relationship gave tiny warning throbs.

But at the same time, we hadn’t laughed like this, just the two of us, much in the last year, and there was a pining feeling low in my stomach, like I got when Remy said I love you, like I was already missing this moment even as it was happening.

“Are you still mad?” I blurted before I could change my mind.

Sofía’s smile faded. “I would’ve told you,” she said. “If it had been me, I would’ve told you.”

“I know,” I admitted. But if Sofía suspected about herself what I knew about myself from Remy, she would’ve turned herself in to be quarantined and dissected for the greater good.

She was too good, too selfless, to understand someone like me. Meanwhile I’d driven my own mother away by demanding her attention when she was so torn up she could barely get out of bed.

Sofía shook her head. “What did I do to make you not trust me?”

A pit opened into my stomach. I hadn’t meant to hurt her. That was the whole point. I’d wanted to be the kind of person who didn’t cause the people she loved pain, but somehow, I still managed to poison things.

Sofía had left behind the private school where she could have prepared for her future as a lawyer, she’d left behind her favorite city in the world, her enviable lacrosse team, and a whole host of friends, and she’d been stuck with me: someone who couldn’t be the friend she deserved and couldn’t really explain why. “You didn’t do anything,” I said.

Outside, footsteps thundered down the hall, and my bedroom door was flung open.

“Is everything okay?” Arthur asked as he, Nick, and Levi swarmed in. “We heard screams.”

“I knew it!” Nick pointed at Sofía, whose hand was still poised to throw the second rubber glove my way. “Girl sleepovers really are freakier than boy sleepovers!”

Sofía cleared her throat and pitched the glove at his head. “Put pants on, Grandpa. Remy’s ungrounded, and he has ‘updates’ for us.”