“I’m sorry,” Evie says.
“Never apologize,” Mom tells her. “Women do that too much for things that aren’t our fault. And this is definitely not your fault.”
Mom tried to argue with the rest of the shop owners. Tried to tell them what Adrian said to me and Lucky. That he was in the blue car with the other boys, drinking and speeding down the street. The car that the old woman from Regal Cosmetics spied from her window.
“Even Kat Karras backed me up,” Mom says, “if you can believe that.”
We had our hands all over each other.
I laugh nervously.
“You okay, shutterbug?”
“I’mso good,” I tell her, and immediately regret saying it that way, ugh.
She makes a weird face at me and then shakes her head, as if to say,Whatever, kid.
“Anyway,” she says, “Kat and I were shot down. Mob rules, and the mob supports the Summers family. No one saw Adrian do it, and everyone loves Adrian. Therefore, it must have been some tourist hooligans that broke the boatyard window. Unrelated to the department store window. One person suggested Lucky might have done it himself—that maybe he’s got a thing about breaking windows now. Some kind of gang initiation.”
“What?” Evie and I both say in unison.
“That’s ridiculous,” I add.
Mom cleans her cat-eye glasses on the front of her shirt, then squints in the light to check the lens. “Yep. That’s when Kat and Nick stormed out of the meeting,” Mom says. “Hard to blame them. This town is what happens when puritans and greedy rich people breed.”
“What happened to all our revolutionary resistance fighters who fought for freedom and justice?” I ask. “Beauty wasn’t always bad … right?”
“Our revolutionary spirit got stamped out of the town when people like the Summers family figured out they could use it to make a profit out of tourism,” Mom says.
“Well, what do we do now?”
Mom shrugs. “I don’t know, babe. I’m hoping Adrian will stay away and let this thing die down now. But Evie, maybe you shouldn’t engage with him anymore if he texts?”
“Trying,” she says.
Seeing as how Lucky and I are pretty much the epicenter of the event that sparked the neighborhood meeting—broken windows, all that—you’d think he’d be interested in discussing what happened at that meeting, kiss or no kiss. I expect he’ll have a sarcastic opinion about it, and it will come via text any second now.
Any second.
I mean, maybe he’s busy.
He’s still trying to balance working at Summers & Co and the boatyard. And I don’t see his Superhawk parked outside, so he could be doing something with his family. I don’t know what he does every single minute of his day.
I’m sure he’ll text when he gets a chance.
But I don’t hear from Lucky that night … or the next day.
Or the next.
Two days …
Okay. Two days is definitely a long time, and that’s when I’m suddenly filled with a strange kind of panic that feels like thin iceforming over my skin, cracking, and re-forming … over and over again.
I go over everything in my head again—the entire conversation we had in the darkroom before everything happened. I worry I said something wrong, or I didn’t say enough. I worry about his state of mind regarding what he went through in the fire at the lake house, and that maybe we should have talked about that more.
God. I hope I didn’t pressure him into kissing me. I mean, I blocked the door. He asked me to move. Was all of it one-sided? Did I read the signals wrong? I don’t think so.… At least, I didn’t at the time.
Or maybe it was none of that. Maybe he just changed his mind and decided that kissing his best friend was too weird and squicky.Please, please, please don’t let that be it.
