I wouldn’t in her shoes. Not after what I’d done to her.
Brooklyn would be so pissed if she were alive. Nothing irritated her more than fuckboy behavior—which I’d always found hilarious because her favorite genre of televisionwasfuckboy behavior (and also false eyelashes and the occasional Essex accent)—and there was no question that telling your roommate-formerly-with-bennies that she made you forget your soul mate was maestro-level fuckboy energy. It was more than fuckboy behavior, it was just... hurtful. Mean. Something to be ashamed of.
It wasn’t Sunny’s fault that I’d forgotten the anniversary of Brooklyn’s death. And it wasn’t Sunny’s fault that the last weeks with her had been a fantasy, a drug, like stepping through a wardrobe to find sunshine instead of snow and finding music when I’d forgotten what music inside my head could sound like. That was just Sunny being Sunny and being hot and hilarious and pouty and wise.Iwas the one who’d forgotten the whole point of coming here, which was to write a stupid album so that I could spend the rest of my life doing what I did best: being alone and remembering the one time that I hadn’t been.
It was all my fault, and fuck, it shouldn’t have been hard,oneday out of the year, and what was I even doing these days? Everything had gone wrong since I bought this mansion—had been going wrong since the weekend Brooklyn had come home exhausted from a tour stop and I’d noticed that the whites of her eyes were yellow—and I just needed to delete myself from the real world. Tell my label that they could have all my money, sell everything I owned, and then move to a cabin in the woods where I wasn’t able to hurt perfectly innocent roommates anymore.
Yeah. Yeah, that sounded like a solid plan.
My eyelashes scraping against the rug agreed, and eventually I could match the sound to my heartbeat, and it’s too bad no onewanted a song made up just of eyelash sounds from me, because it could have been my magnum opus.
I’d been down on the floor long enough that the light had changed and I’d had to pee twice, but each time, I came right back to my floor spot and resumed blinking. Until my door was kicked right the fuck open, swinging into the wall with a thud and revealing a Kallum-size silhouette in the doorway.
I blinked.
“I’ve always wanted to do that,” said Kallum to someone wearing a beanie behind him.
“Pretty sure it was unlocked,” said the beanie person. Nolan. And then, “Oh no. We’re at the floor stage.”
A third person crowded into the doorway, and with the only light coming in all cloudy and silver-dark from the window, I could only trace the suggestion of a mustache and a hand holding a doughnut. “I think he’s dead. Son, are you dead?”
“Yes,” I mumbled into the floor. “Now go away.”
“Okay, come on, big boy,” said Kallum, and before I knew it, Kallum and Teddy Ray Fletcher were lifting me bodily from the floor while Nolan found a lamp and turned it on.
I was propped into an armchair and then loomed over by two former pop stars and a pornographer.
“Why,” I said.
Kallum folded his arms, looking abruptly like a dad, which I guessed he was now. “You, sir, have been worrying people. You’ve been off-grid.”
“I went to a charcuterie restaurant with Jack Hart. I watched Teddy shop for rings yesterday.”
“That was two days ago,” Teddy said.
Two days ago? No. That couldn’t be right. That would mean that I’d been lying on the floor for over twenty-four hours. That would mean it was—
“It’s Christmas Eve,” said Kallum. “In case you’re wondering.”
I shook off his words like a wet dog. “Whatever. It doesn’t matter. My point is that I couldn’t be moreonthe grid lately.”
“Debatable,” said Nolan. “Is there anything to drink in here?”
I flung a hand at the armoire near the doorway to the en suite. Nolan opened it to find several boxes of Capri-Sun and a bottle of coconut liqueur.
“Okay,” Nolan said, staring at the boxes of shelf-stable fruit drink. “So we’re in a dark place.”
“I did tell them that you were alive as of two days ago,” said Teddy, settling on the love seat across from me. “But that wasn’t good enough for the cat women.”
“Cat . . . women?” I asked, genuinely confused.
“Beer me one of those Capri-Suns,” called Kallum to Nolan, who decided to kick a Capri-Sun like a hacky sack over to Kallum. Kallum caught it one-handed and then plonked himself down onto the love seat next to Teddy. He poked the straw into the pouch and then said, “You know, the old ladies you talk to? They’ve been helping you with Sunny’s cat?”
“Judy, Betty, and Dee?” I asked, confused. “Howon earthdo you know about them?”
“They found us,” Nolan said. He’d gone straight for the bottle of liqueur and then sunk against the wall next to the love seat, sitting on the floor in a lanky sprawl that hadn’t changed a bit over the last twenty years. “Something about you not answering their messages lately. With Brook’s... thing... coming up, they were worried. So they called Kallum and me to come check on you, and since you’re too busy with the whole Miss Havisham bit to lock your doors, apparently, we let ourselves in.”
I was still stuck on the Cat Advisory Text Thread. “How did they know to call you? They don’t even know whoIam.”
