Bea’s my age, but she left college the spring of her freshman year to finish raising her three younger brothers when their parents died in a tragic house fire, so she often seems much, much older.
I’m practically on the border of North Carolina and Tennessee, according to the GPS. “I don’t know, but I’m safe, I had Cod Pieces yesterdayandtoday, and things are going…erm…well.”
Silence lingers on the other end of the phone.
Not hard to picture my best friend squeezing her green eyes tightly shut and breathing slowly while she grabs a fistful of her curly brown hair.
“Shall I call Butch’s friend?” I hear Simon say in the background in his British accent. “I’m certain we can locate her without much trouble.”
“No! No.” I shake my head, even though they can’t see it. “I have everything under control. No issues. No worries. I’m safe. I’m here on purpose. Bea, tell him I’m here on purpose. And that I’m having fun. And then tell me about you. I want to know absolutely everything Simon did to deserve you again. Spare no detail. I think I have five hundred minutes to talk on the burner phone, so we have time.”
“Remind me again why you’re calling from a different phone?” Bea says.
“Mine fell out of my dress because it didn’t have pockets so I was storing it in my bra except I forgot I wasn’t wearing a braand it got busted and I don’t have my ID or credit cards on me so even if we could stop at a store to get a new one, I can’t,” I lie.
Bea breathes on the other end of the phone.
I’ve heard that breathing before.
It’s the same breathing she did when her youngest brother would lie about why he was out too late or when her middle brother would lie about how badly he was injured—he’s a professional baseball player now—or when her oldest brother would—actually, when Ryker would do nearly anything because he’s a grumpy-grump monster, as she says, and it’s often annoying that he can’t findanythingto be happy about.
Huh.
I wonder if Oliver’s taking us past any of the cities Griff might be playing in.
We could catch a?—
No.
No, we couldn’t, because if Oliver was recognized in the stands, or if I was—unlikely as that is, since I’m pretty much irrelevant to the gossip world now—Oliver’s wholeI’m running away in secretthing would be blown.
“You were wearing a dressagain?” Bea says.
“It was another costume party.” We did one together a week before I left for the Hamptons.
“Who are you with again?”
“You wouldn’t know them.”
“Them? You saidheyesterday. Are you with multiple people, or is this someone finding themselves who wants to use they/them pronouns now, or are you hiding something from me?”
“You remember that time before my parents kicked me out of the family when I tried to talk you into going to a frat party with me to get signatures on a petition to save that old tree down Haysmith Road, and you told me you were too old for frat parties, so I went without you and then I realized someoneslipped something into my drink and I called you and you came and got me and everything was fine?”
Honestly, I don’t fully remember it, but I remember the story.
It still makes me want to throw up, and it probably always will.
But I had enough training in my youth to know when something’s wrong, and I knew to call Bea, and she got there and shut the whole party down before anything worse happened.
She’s a badass mama bear, and she’d figure out how to teleport to get me out of here if she thought she needed to.
“Daphne.”
“There is absolutely zero chance anything bad will happen like that here.”
“Not feeling reassured.”
“It’s someone I’ve known most of my life. Someone very boring. Like, someone who’s so far the opposite of me that it’s weird to realize that the thing we have in common is that we didn’t fit into the world we grew up in.I’m safe, okay? Like extra mega super boring safe.Oh my god.Hudson went back to college, didn’t he?”
