Her eyes narrowed. “Yeah, I get that. Eddie’s kind of making a fool out of himself around the lake right now, just FYI.”
I sighed. “He needs help. I told Fen that before I left.”
“Yeah. Fen…” She wrinkled her nose.
“What about Fen?”Breathe. Do not panic. Just pet the dog. Stay calm.
“I stopped by the record store on our way out of town. He asked about you.”
“Oh?”
She shook her head. “He’s just really messed up without you. Hurting. That’s all.”
My heart fell. I was messed up without him. And it killed me to know he was hurting.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “I shouldn’t have told you that.It’s not my business why you broke up. Though Eddie says it’s because you’re not over him.”
“Eddie probably needs to believe that,” I said.
“He’s very wounded. He pretends to be easygoing, but he’s definitely struggling.”
This surprised me. The entire conversation surprised me.
She turned toward me. “Hey. Come with me to Spain. I’m leaving in two weeks. Just me and my friends Angela and Hayden. Be my personal assistant again. You can take care of Frida and see Barcelona.”
“Spain?”
“I’m probably going to stay there for a couple of months, then maybe go to Greece. Who knows. But Angela can’t party because of her meds, and Hayden has been sober since her stomach surgery. So, you know. It won’t be like the lake. Just good vibes and healing. And you could just take care of all my clothes and the dog. Same as this summer.”
I stared at her, a little dumbfounded. “Why would you want me to come?”
“Because…” She moved her fingers through the sand. “Like you said, we’re going through the same crisis right now. And in a way, we’re sort of sisters, aren’t we?”
My pulse increased. She always threw variations of that word around lightly—manita—but she’d never quite said it like that. “Are we?”
She backed down from that, reconsidering, and said, “Well, spiritual ones, anyway. Come with me to Spain! Look how muchFrida needs you. I can’t even handle this dog anymore. She’s miserable without you, and she resents me. She actually bit me last night, can you believe it?”
I pulled Frida up to my chest and held her warmth against me. She felt so good, and I’d missed her so much. This was unexpected. A huge opportunity for me to travel the world—if Velvet really meant it. A chance for me to escape my life here in a way I hadn’t accounted for. To have a little bit of freedom and maybe find myself in a different way that I couldn’t at school.
A choice, but not the right one for me.
Because I imagined myself in Spain, chasing Velvet and her friends around. Even without drugs, I worried it would just be the lake moved to another country.
“I’m sorry,” I told Velvet. “I really appreciate you asking me. It’s so nice of you to come down here like this—to bring Frida to see me, and to ask me this. But I can’t go with you. It’s really tempting, and I love Frida more than anything, but I need to do something else right now.”
She blinked at me as if surprised and then nodded. “I think I get it. You want to put everything that happed at the lake behind you, right? You want to get past your brain injury and forget all about it. That’s why you had to leave? Because Fen reminded you of falling in the dam.”
“Not really.” I didn’t want to forget my brain injury. Or the dam. I absolutely didnotwant to forget Fen. Not sure if I even could.
Holding Frida, I glanced at Velvet, and an idea struck me.
“I sort of have plans for the future. Can I tell you what I wantto do?” I asked her. “Then maybe you can figure out a way to make it work. Because I’ve been trying to talk it out with my dad, and I’m kind of stuck. I need your help. Think of it like a party, but it’s my life. Use your magic planning skills.”
She leaned back in the sand. “Lay it on me,manita. Two heads are better than one.”
For the first time since I’d known her, it felt as though we were on the same level.
Maybe not sisters, but friends.
