“That’s crazy—” she tried.
“Take it off,” Casey said.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”But her mouth didn’t quite close again, and she was almost panting.“Do you know how long it took me to get this right—”
“Take it off.”
The next moment stretched out and out.Then, slowly, she raised her hands to the wig.“This is so silly—” she began.
And she launched herself at Casey.
I threw myself to the side out of instinct, more than anything else.Bodies collided above me.The gun barked.Casey bellowed in pain, and the woman let out a scream, and something thudded against the floor.
The gun.
Right in front of me.
I grabbed it and scrambled to my feet.
Casey was a short, sallow-faced man in a bloody tee and boxer shorts; he was hunched over, holding his side.The woman stood over him, one fist raised like she meant to clobber him again.The wig hung halfway off her head—to judge by her scream, it had been ripped free.
And underneath the wig, pinning the lace cap to her hair, platinum and diamonds sparkled.
5
“I call it Chekhov’s wig,” I said.“It’s a basic principle of storytelling.”
“We heard you the first three times,” Fox said before taking a long—and pointed—sip of their cocktail.My “friend” (notice the scare quotes) was dressed tonight in what they had informed us was Victorian matchstick girl meetsThe Ring.All I know is that there was a smock and a lot of waifish eye shadow.
“We were trying to ignore you,” Keme said.He was looking enviously at Millie’s beer, clearly hoping she would take pity on him and share (with a seventeen-year-old’s undue optimism).Millie—blond and beautiful and of legal drinking age—was oblivious to both the look and, even more amusingly, Keme’s massive crush.
“How’s your Coke?”I asked.“Oh God, my shin!”
For a boy perpetually in flip-flops, Keme can land some devastating kicks.
We were in the Otter Slide, which was the closest thing Hastings Rock had to a gay bar.On the jukebox, Cher competed with the ding-ding-ding of the pinball machines in the back, the roil of a dozen conversations, the clink of glasses and bottles, chairs scraping across the floor.The usual weekend crowd clustered around the bar where Seely was behind the stick, and scattered around the room, little stuffed animals perched on tables and chairs and shelves: an otter, of course, and a bear with rainbow-colored fur, and one extremely gay narwhal.
“I’m just glad you didn’t get hurt,” Bobby said—also for the third time.He had been super sweet about not saying things likeYou could have gotten killedandWhy did you do something so stupid?andI told you so.Some of that was because he was Bobby, and he understood me.And some of that was because he was dead on his feet from working a double dealing with the landslide, but he’d refused to go home and go to sleep.His thigh was pressed against mine.His shoulder to my shoulder.If he wasn’t careful, he was going to fall asleep on me, and I honestly might die from how cute that would be.
“The Chekhov’s wig principle states that—”
“We don’t care,” Keme said before giving Millie puppy eyes again.
“—in any story involving a wig—”
“Nobody cares,” Fox informed me before taking another sip of their cocktail.
“—the wig in question—”
Fox and Keme booed me until I stopped talking.
“You know what?”I said.“I’m not going to tell you.I’m not going to tell either of you.You’ll never know.”
“Is it like Chekhov’s gun?”Millie said.“Only with a wig?”
I actually felt my jaw go slack.But somehow I managed to say, “That’s a gross oversimplification—”
“If there’s a wig,” Keme said, “somebody has to have it ripped off by the end of the story like two drag queens fighting in an episode ofDrag Race?”
