Unbuckling, I push the door open. Charlie moves out of the way, all grace and indifference.
“Where were you today?” I ask. My feet scrape across the grit of the asphalt and I wince.
Charlie frowns down at my feet. “Where the hell are your shoes?”
“Gee, I guess I left them at home,” I spit back, pushing forward. “Where were you? Were you with her? That girl? Who is she? Where did you meet her?”
Charlie tilts her head, her expression part curiosity and part sadness. “Is that really what you want to talk about right now?”
“Yes.” I slam the car door shut. “Yes. That’s what friends do, right? We talk about our dates and what it felt like to kiss them and how so-and-so made us feel all giddy and how you didn’t even need a drink at that party because Girl was enough of a high for you and oh, isn’t she hot? Wow, so hot. I can’t believe how hot she is. Damn, Charlotte, you’re so lucky—”
Cold sears through my back as Charlie presses me gently against the metal of the car, her hand on my stomach and her eyes glaring into mine. “Stop.”
“Just tell me.”
“I’m going to let this go, because I know you’re upset right now. But just so we’re clear, I don’t owe you an explanation or a story or even one juicy detail. You put this in motion, Mara. I’m only doing what you said we should.”
Her hand drops away and all my cells feel too loose, as though they’re seconds from drifting off in different directions.
“And don’t call me Charlotte,” she adds, taking my hand and pulling me toward her front door.
I let her lead me and I focus on the familiar feel of her hand in mine, all of my molecules slowly coming back together.
Inside Charlie’s house, more familiarity calms my breaths. The faint smell of her dad’s after-shave, the modern furniture, about a million pictures of Charlie as a baby, as a toddler, as a kid, as a tween, and so on. She’s everywhere, her parents’ miracle child after years of fertility treatments.
She drops my hand as we head upstairs. Once in her room, she immediately clicks on some gloomy music via her laptop. She knows I can’t stand the stark silence. I sit on her bed, careful not to disturb her guitar resting on the pillow. A notebook lies open on the plain navy blue comforter, her slanted half-cursive, half-print handwriting spilling over the page.
“Are you writing a new song?” I ask, resisting the urge to pull the notebook closer and devour her words. Charlie’s an incredible songwriter. An incredible singer. An incredible guitar player.
“Yeah.” She flips the notebook closed and places her guitar on the stand in the corner. The rest of her room is pretty messy. Clothes everywhere and posters taped to the wall, showing off singers I know about only because of Charlie. Her knitting supplies are piled into a laundry basket in the corner, needles and half-finished scarves and beanie hats overflowing and dripping onto the floor, yarn hued in mostly blues and silvers, golds and reds—?her and my Hogwarts house colors. Her room is a type A personality’s nightmare.
“Have your parents heard it?” I ask.
“Heard what?”
“The song.”
She just stares at me, that crinkle between her eyes that makes me want to smooth my thumb over it. Charlie’s parents send her to the Nicholson County Center at Pebblebrook because she’s been singing—?and singing well—?since she was five years old. They think she adores arias and big choral pieces meant for giant concert halls. And it’s not that she doesn’t like all that. It’s just that she loves the guitar, a tiny stage, soft lighting on a single stool, a whole lot more.
“I’m sorry,” I say, running my finger over an almost-hole in my jeans.
Charlie lifts her dark eyebrows. “Why?”
“For calling you Charlotte.”
A sigh escapes her throat, and the bed depresses as she sits down next to me. I wait for her hand to reach out and start playing with my hair or to gently squeeze the back of my neck like she’ll sometimes do when she can tell I’m getting worked up. I’d even take a playful shoulder shove. Anything to connect me to her, to feel like us.
But nothing comes. She just sits there, picking at a peeling callus on her middle fingertip.
“Where were you today?” I ask again, and she lifts her dark eyes to mine. “Are you sick? You don’t seem sick.”
“I’m not sick.”
“So you skipped?” Charlie never skips, calls skipping a wasted lie. Her parents are administrators at two different middle schools in the next county over and are nearly impossible to bullshit about school stuff. They wrangle hormonal seventh-graders all day for a reason. Still, Charlie works hard to craft this certain picture of herself when she’s around them, full of half-truths and half smiles. “I lie with loving care,” Charlie joked once when I asked her why she doesn’t tell her parents how much she hates it when they call her Charlotte. Which they always, always do.
“I didn’t skip,” she says. “I was—”
“You weren’t in school. You aren’t sick, so you skipped. Why didn’t—”
