Horror consumes Aubrey’s face, and Mallory says, “I’ve got it.”
Aubrey hesitates, shifting the box onto her hip. “I have to ask, do you actually have a plan? Because this...” She juts the box at the freezer. “This is starting to feel like scrambling.”
Mallory places her hand on Aubrey’s arm and chokes back the self-doubt that’s nearly strangling her. “I’ll figure it out, promise.”
Aubrey eyes the frozen cauliflower rice. “Maybe we could start with getting something to eat? This Aubrey’s apparently a vegan, and dairy-free cheese is disgusting.”
“Understood. I’ll meet you at the car. We can see if Gracie’s still exists?”
Their favorite sandwich place with the cocktail slushies. She really, really hopes Gracie’s exists.
Aubrey’s back to nodding, giving a tight head bob before carrying the box of frozen food up the stairs. Mallory stifles a grimace as she slides her hand into the freezer beside Grayson’s blanketed torso. She finds the keys, but they resist. She yanks and hears the slight tearing of fabric as the keys snag on the way out. She breathes deeply, shoves the key chain into her pocket, and gently sets the overnight bag at Grayson’s feet.
“I’m sorry,” she says, realizing she hasn’t done that yet. Apologized to Grayson for whatever she might have done.
Her hand lingers on the bag, her fingers grazing his ankle, covered by a sock of purple-and-gold argyle, and this unexpected splash of whimsy suddenly makes Mallory feel weighed down by a knight’s armor. She stares at her hand, the pop of blue veins slicing across her skin like a line of mold on some stinky French cheese. Even without her reading glasses on, she’s repulsed by it. How could her hands look like this? How could these be her hands? Hands that might have packed her emergency snack bag with the means to kill the man she’s not falling in love with because Mallory doesn’t fall in anything, let alone love?
The sprout of uncharacteristic tears in her eyes brings back her usual focus. She won’t give in to it. She gives a firm shake of her head. She can do this. For all of them.
Her hand disappears into the side of the overnight bag. She slides Grayson’s phone into her pocket. She doesn’t exactly have a plan, but she has the first piece of it: making Grayson disappear.
She closes the lid to the freezer, plugs a new combination into the padlock, and bounds up the stairs. A Moscow mule, no, a paloma slushie.Please, Gracie’s, please.But just in case, for Aubrey, she heads for the fridge, hoping for an actual cheese stick to tide them over.
The fridge at home was a matte black, clean and clear, not even a magnet. Here, the white fridge is a jigsaw puzzle of stickies reminding her mom to pick up half-and-half and cat food—Mom has acat?—and of business cards for plumbers and locksmiths and of photographs, lots of photographs. Mallory as a baby eating her own toes, as a toddler dancing with the incoming ocean tide, as an eye-rolling preteen in between her mom and an attractive man holding a World’s Best Dad mug.
Mallory stumbles back. That same man beams in half a dozen photographs. A man with the same color hair as Mallory. Aman with the same height Mallory has but her mother lacks. A man whose cheek her mother is kissing. A man holding Mallory’s hand outside the elementary school.
That very same man in a uniform. Mallory’s father is not absent here. And Mallory’s not-absent father is a police officer.
Interstitial
They were in shock.
It was shocking.
Death is shocking, but also a part of life, isn’t that what they say? But they wouldn’t—no one would—if they’d seen it up close. Like we had. We shared something no one else did. We were special.
Bound together, twisted like twine, with a strength that not even the sharpest blade could sever. It is a strange thing to achieve something you didn’t even know you were looking for. Yet it creates a hunger. To achieve everything else.
No matter who it hurts.
16
Aubrey
Saturday Morning
Two DaysAfterthe Outing
We’re still here.
Aubrey hits Send on the first text she’s written in more than a month because this Aubrey didn’t have to vow never to text again. The message zooms off to Ilena and Mallory, and Aubrey waits. But no little dots appear, no response comes. What if they’re not here? What if it’s only Aubrey?
She pushes herself out of the white couch she’d have never bought, because who buys a white couch? She begins folding the throw blanket that she hopes is from Target, because then there’s a chance they make it in her world too. A pattern of light green with wispy white fronds, soft cotton on the outside and faux fur underneath, it was like sleeping inside a cotton ball. She couldn’t bring herself to sleep in the bed, the sheets smelling of her eucalyptus shampoo but also something heavier, muskier. Kai’s deodorant, probably. His baby-smooth cheeks surely don’t require aftershave, and oh yeah—sex, smelling like sex.
She found birth control pills in the medicine cabinet last night and took the one marked for that day, and she’ll take the one marked for today. If there’s another Aubrey in her body at home, she’d like to think that Aubrey’s not flaking on taking care of her either.
Though Aubrey did flake, just a little, when she had that hot dog at Gracie’s but not Gracie’s, the name different but the place still serving the same cocktail slushies, thirty flavors of ice cream, and funky sandwich fillings like mushroom “steak” and pastrami burgers, and yes, hot dogs with buffalo sauce and blue cheese. But the vegan-fed intestinal system she’s now stuck with made her pay for it.
