Van’s eyes clear, softening again in that way they always do when she looks at Alice, like she never wants to look at anything else. “Really?”
“Yes,” Alice says, for once able to tell the absolute truth. Spending her days with Van and patients, with a complex workload, getting to set up the office and the systems, doingeverything from scheduling to ordering to billing, always someone to talk to or a task to accomplish—it would be like the dentist job but without all the wailing toddlers. And hopefully significantly less spit. “I’d love that.”
“Okay,” Van says, a grin growing on her face despite what looks like her best efforts to keep it under control. It’s like she doesn’t want to be so joyful in the middle of a business proposition but she can’t help it, and god. Alice likes her so much. Van clears her throat, trying to pull down the corners of her lips and failing spectacularly. “I’ll, um, circle back with details when we have them?”
“Great,” Alice says, not bothering to be cool about it. Alice Rue may be many things, but cool is not one of them.
“Psst,” Marie hisses to them from the living room. She’s as far from the kitchen as she can get, after having been chastised twice for setting the table wrong. “C’mere.”
They walk over, Alice belatedly trying to make her face less lovestruck and quickly checking to make sure Babs and Aunt Sheila are distracted by whatever it is they’re doing with the stand mixer.
“Happy Chanukah,” Marie says, pulling three cans of beer out of the pocket of her hoodie, and a stack of cookies out from under her sleeve.
Alice decides that little sisters are very underrated.
They all crack open their cans, and Marie holds hers up. “L’chaim,” she says, and Van says it back. Alice tries to decide if it’s more offensive to gabble the sounds back at them or stay quiet. She settles on staying quiet, partly out of polite religious confusion and partly because she’s still trying to get her libido under control. She’s literally sneaking a beer with her comatose fake-boyfriend’s baby sister—Alice needs to pick a more appropriate time and place to be randy. Jesus.
“Oh my god,” Marie says, her mouth full of cookie. She seems to like the cookies more than the beer, which makes Alice want to squeeze her and tell her a bedtime story. She’s both so adult and still such a kid, and Alice’s affection for her throbs inside her chest, a feeling that’s entirely different from what she feels for Van but slots up next to it perfectly, like Alice has always been meant to feel it. “Van, have you showed her the costume closet yet?”
“No,” Alice says, looking between the two of them. “Which seems absolutely unacceptable.”
“Come on,” Marie says, her eyes wide with excitement. She ditches her beer and grabs Alice’s wrist, pulling her down the hallway and up the stairs. Alice blows a kiss to little cheerleader Van, which makes the real-life Van behind her grumble in an absolutely adorable way.
Upstairs is carpeted, with two bedrooms connected by an adjoining bathroom. The ceilings are sloped and low like Alice suspected, but it’s not cramped. The room on the right must be Babs and her husband’s room; Marie leads them into the room on the left, what was probably one of the kids’ bedrooms but is now something of a random storage room with a small futon shoved into the corner. Marie walks over to the closet, opens the door, and…wow.
For the second time tonight, Alice stops dead in her tracks. “That’s…a lot of glitter.”
“Girl, that’s not even the half of it,” Marie says with a grin, flicking on the light. “Step inside.”
Alice does as she’s told, and holy shiitake. It’s a walk-in closet, not square like Nolan’s but long and narrow. She can take probably ten steps in, and it’s positively bursting with costumes. A full-length purple ballgown scratches at her as she walks past, a creepy mask looms down from the top shelf, thereseems to be a wholeWizard of Ozsection, and way too many sequined jumpsuits.
It smells musty and like that cheap polyester that most bargain costumes are made out of, mixed with rubber and face paint.
“Holy god,” Alice breathes, her brain honestly refusing to process the input from her eyes. “What the fuck is this?”
“This,” Van says, from the doorway, “is Babs’s happy place.”
“She’s obsessed with Halloween,” Marie says unnecessarily. That’s quite clear, yes. “And she’s kept every costume any of us have ever worn. Plus everyone in the neighborhood knows to give them to her or come get one. All of October is, like, a costume swap meet in here.” Marie squeezes past Alice to get to the very back of the closet. “Let me try to find my favorite.”
Alice runs her fingers over a hippie outfit (long wig, tie-dye shirt, round purple sunglasses), a child’s bear costume, and a glow-in-the-dark skeleton onesie.
“I used to sneak up here and try on the suits from theMen in Blackera,” Van says softly, only for Alice. “When I was in high school, before I knew any queer people. They were all enormous and old and, like, awful, but I still loved it.”
Alice turns to look at her and tries very hard not to kiss her. “I wish I’d known you then,” she settles for saying. “I bet you were a total stud.”
Van scoffs, but she’s still standing so close, looking at Alice so intensely. “In a cheap suit that some old guy probably died in before Mom found it at Goodwill, yeah. Absolute chick magnet.”
Alice shrugs one shoulder, feeling her lips curl up. “Would’ve worked on me, I bet.”
“Guys! Check it out!” Alice turns, and almost screams atthe enormous shark head that has taken Marie’s place. “My great white costume!”
Alice jumps backward, her heart rate so high that it takes her almost a full minute to realize that she bounced back into Van, and now Van’s hands are on her hips, warm and steady and solid.
Marie runs out of the closet to scare her mother—Alice hopes no one else ends up in the hospital—leaving Alice and Van alone in the dark, claustrophobic costume emporium, Alice’s heart still galloping in her chest.
Van touches the sleeve of a poofy white shirt, cinched at the wrists, like a rich old-timey man might wear. “This was my costume last year,” Van says. “My ex, Sarah, wanted to be Ariel so I was Prince Eric. And Frank was Sebastian; he has a little crab costume.” Alice thinks that’s adorable—except for the whole Van ever having kissed or slept with or shared canine custody with anyone else part—but Van is frowning.
“That sounds cute?” Alice offers, making it a question even though it’s not. “I bet Frank looked amazing. And you do have that swoopy Prince Eric hair thing happening.”
