“You think so?” I questioned.
“Well . . .” I watched her shift in her seat, pulling both legs to her chest and resting her chin on them as she looked at me. “It’s not really my place to know, you know what I mean?”
Frowning, I thought about it. “No,” I answered honestly. “You have four people, five including me, telling you that these people are bad shit, and you think it isn’t your place to know?”
“But it’s Quinn that they want, isn’t it?”
I knew my face didn’t hide my shock, and I blinked before I screwed my eyes shut. “Did you say that out loud?” I asked as I opened one eye to look at her.
Her face was beet red, and she buried her face in her knees. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“You’re so fucking lucky Gray didn’t hear that.”
“He’s kinda scary.” She reached out to take a drink of her Diet Coke. “I meant that . . . you know, I’m . . . well, no one. It’s Quinn they know, maybe you guys. But Ava? Me? We’re okay. You should all be looking out for Quinn.”
“We don’t know that they don’t know you. If they’ve been watching Queeny because we’ve been, you know, making waves, then they will have seen her with Ava, and that means they will also have seen you.”
“If? You don’t think they have been?”
“No. Well, I’m not sure. I think they weren’t before, and because of us, they are now.”
She watched me as I finished my drink, the truth hanging heavy between us. “Why do you do Mayhem?”
I gave her my attention again as she studied me. “That’s completely random and not related to what we’re talking about,” I said as I looked past her and around the small apartment. For two girls living here, it was surprisingly not girly. In fact, there were hardly any personal effects at all. “You sure you two are best friends?”
“Huh?” Red lifted her head and looked around. “Of course, why?”
“There’s no personality in this place.”
“Rude.” She stood fluidly and walked over to the small table that had been pushed to the side when the couch was delivered. “This is a joint project that we made the summer we decided woodwork was our thing.” Her smile was wide as she picked it up and showed me the underside of it, the heart with “Mia and Ava” inscribed onto it. “We kept it, obviously, but we know not to actually put anything on it, it won’t hold, and this leg . . .” She wiggled it, and it fell off. “Falls off. Woodwork was not our thing.” Putting it back, she looked over her shoulder at me. “These drapes? These were in Ava’s front room, but weaccidentally set them on fire one day playing with matches, so before Ava’s mom came home, we tried to cut the damage off and sew them up again.” Proudly, she held up the bottom of the drape, and I laughed at the crazy run off. “We failed horribly, so instead, before Jill came home, we replaced them with Ava’s ones from her bedroom and told her mom we were redecorating Ava’s room.”
I laughed at her impish grin. “Did she believe you?”
“Nope, not one word. Ava got grounded, and then I got grounded for helping her lie.”
Laughing, I sat up straighter. “What else?” I encouraged her.
Moving to the ugly picture on the wall, she pointed at it with pride. It was random splatters of different colors of paint, and it hurt my eyes to look at it. “This is art.” At my look of disbelief, she giggled. “Under all the different paint blobs is a list of all the people we disliked in high school and all the things we wanted to say to them but weren’t brave enough. Then because we were scared someone would find it, we wanted to throw it away, but we were afraid someone might find it in the trash. Plus, Ava had been watching some crime documentary where the forensic scientists could piece together shredded paper and make the note or letter again, so we covered it with paint to hide it instead.” Red looked slightly embarrassed. “You know, so the CSI crew couldn’t find out who we said bad things to in our head.”
I liked the story, and from what I had seen of them, it fit the two of them perfectly. “Why do you still have it?” I asked curiously.
Chewing the side of her lip, she looked at me and then it. “Because in my list, I wrote a cuss word, and Ava insisted we keep it to commemorate the day, even though no one would see it.”
“You swore?” I asked in amazement as I stood and moved over to the painting.
“I did.” She giggled as she looked up at me as I studied it. “You won’t see it, but it’s right about . . .” Reaching up, she pointed to a clump of blue, yellow, and red paint splatters. “Here.”
“What word did you use and in what context?” I asked her as I looked down and saw her hazel eyes looking back up at me. Shit, she was a looker all right.
Her tongue darted out to wet her lip. “TheCword.”
“Fuck off!” I threw my head back and laughed loudly. “For real?”
She nodded and went back to the sofa, taking a seat again, her legs automatically pulled up to her chest.
“Which boyfriend or crush deserved such a sentence?” I asked as I looked closer at the painting. Now that she mentioned it, I could make out faint script, but it was illegible and nowhere near where she had pointed. “Red?”
“My dad.”
