“Oh.” I try not to squirm. “Haven’t sent them out yet.”
“Don’t you need to do that, though? To give people time to RSVP? Your caterer will want to know how many heads to expect.”
Leon saves me from answering. “She’s still got time. Anyway, what do you think the surprise is, Naomi?”
I open my mouth and can’t think of a single nice thing this surprise could be. Whatever it is, Nicholas has the edge on me. I’m racked with nerves.
“Dinner,” I say. “He’ll serve me to a mountain lion.” In a boiling cauldron of lettuce and carrots, like a Bugs Bunny bit.
Leon laughs. “I think that’s a little dramatic.”
Maybe so, but Nicholas has a dramatic streak as well. He got it watching daytime television in grade school, pretending to besick so he could stay home and avoid bullies who called him Four-Eyes and made fun of the ascot his mother made him wear. Nicholas knows precisely what he would say to his childhood bullies if he ever came across one of them now. He’s perfected his speech in the shower, which he must think is soundproof. Too muchOne Life to Livein his formative years turned him into a vindictive diva.
To be honest, I hope he gets the opportunity to deliver that speech someday. It’s incredible.
“I’m going to put off going home for as long as possible,” I tell them. Brandy nods sagely. “I might go see a movie. Then grab something to eat. Then see another movie. By the time I get home, the mountain lion will have gotten so impatient that it’ll have already eaten Nicholas. We’ll watch Netflix together on the couch. A wildlife documentary.”
I laugh at my own joke, but the noise lodges in my throat when the door opens and a version of Nicholas from the Upside Down strolls into the Junk Yard. He’s wearing hiking boots and a secondhand jacket the color of the woods. It’s so wrong on him that it takes me ten whole seconds to process that it’s camo. Nicholas Rose is wearing camo.
My jaw drops when my eyes reach the top of his head. His hair is stuffed under one of those old-fashioned winter caps that has fleece-lined earflaps. Its colors are ugly orange and brown plaid. It’s hideous. The whole ensemble has proved fatal to a handful of my brain cells and maybe my retinas.
“Oh my god,” I say in a hoarse whisper. “You’re going to drag me into the woods and shoot me, aren’t you?”
I’mnotbeing dramatic. He’s dressed like one of Morris’s many avid hunters.
Nicholas rolls his eyes, but I sense a shift in his mood. There’s a calmness about him that unsettles me. “I’m picking you up. Remember that surprise I told you about?”
Brandy clutches my arm, and I can almost hear her thinkingIt’s more oleander!
I don’t know why, but I lie. “No. What surprise?”
He frowns, which must be why I lied to him. My subconscious is cruel and wants him to think I don’t listen to anything he says, which is only true half the time. I feel bad about it until I remember that he completely checked out of wedding planning the second his mother stuck her interfering nose in, and he didn’t stop her from trampling my every piece of input. We’re all invited to Deborah’s wedding in January.
I have been taught not to get into cars with strangers, so I wisely say, “My car’s here. I’ll just drive home.”
“Nope.” He takes me by the arm and leads me outside before I can blinkSOSat Brandy and Leon in Morse code. I drag my feet on purpose, but he holds me against his side and lifts so that he can kind of glide me over the blacktop. I kick my dangling feet to leave scuff marks. This is how I’ll die: slightly unwilling but ultimately lazy.
I throw a pleading glance at my car across the way, but it doesn’t spur to life like Christine and avenge me. Soon enough I’m locked in the passenger seat of his Jeep, which he still hasn’t explained, and I’m split down the middle between curious and pissed.
“You’re pushy.”
He buckles me up and starts the engine. The Jeep smells like his Maserati’s crazy uncle. It drinks too much and plows over mailboxes. It had Taco Bell for lunch.
“What about my car?”
The question emerges as a whine, and he rewards my surrender of dignity with an indulgent smile that doesn’t make it to his eyes. “We’ll come back for it.”
“But why don’t I just...”
There’s no use finishing my sentence. He’s grit and steel now and won’t give me a straight answer. The weird outfit has toppled my grasp of him irrevocably. I don’t know this man. I’m at a severe disadvantage. If this bewilderment tactic is retaliation for my pancake makeup and Steelers hoodie, it’s working.
“Are you having a midlife crisis?” He’s a bit young for one, but then again he reads all the boring parts of the newspaper and there are usually Werther’s candies in his pockets. He mentions his 401(k) alot.
The corner of his mouth tilts. “Maybe.”
We pass the turn to the street we live on and keep going. I desperately hope Deborah drives by and gets an eyeful of what her son is wearing. Actually, she wouldn’t recognize him right now. She’d assume I’m having an affair, which, I’ve got to admit, is what this is starting to feel like. There’s no way this is Nicholas. A thousand-year-old witch has hijacked his body.
Nicholas’s placid body language is freakish next to the apprehension seeping from my pores. I don’t know this car at all. I knew where everything was located in the Maserati, napkins and sunglasses and a mini bottle of Advil. For whatever reason I’m hung up on a bottle of sweet tea in the cup holder closest to the dashboard rather than the one close to the center console. That’s backward for him. Such a tiny detail, but it fascinates me.Why?Also, he never drinks cold tea. Only hot.
