Margie pops her head back in. “Maybe he has better snacks. I’m gonna snoop.” She extends one long leg through the hole. The rest of her follows before I can do more than gawk.
“Margie!”I scramble after her and dangle a leg through The Hole, mimicking her move. But my legs aren’t long enough to reach the sofa on the other side, and I end up falling through in a heap, sending plaster all over Jack’s sofa in my wake. “Margie!”
She opens his fridge, and the massive laminated Poison Control card anchored to the door by a magnet gives me pause. Margie’s already on the move, closing the fridge and then opening and closing all his cabinets willy-nilly. I catch a glimpse of a fire extinguisher under his sink before she shuts the cabinet. She finds chips in a cupboard and smiles, reaching in to grab a handful and then handing the bag to me.
I toss the bag back into his cupboard and run after her. She’s now in his bathroom.
“Margie, I’m going to kill you. This is breaking and entering.”
“Technically this is just entering. Gence did the breaking.” She polishes off her chips and dusts off her hands before inspecting the contents of Jack’s medicine cabinet. It is shockingly well stocked. Is that…a pulse oximeter? And a blood pressure cuff?
“You said you wanted snacks! What are you looking for?”
“The right pills can be snacks, Penelope,” Margie drawls. “But mostly I’m looking for evidence of STIs. Incontinence. Erectile dysfunction. Anything interesting. Maybe Viagra?”
“Why? You’re not going to—” I don’t finish the thought. The image of Jack smiling affectionately at Margie, her pulling off his snug tee, running a hand up his chest, him cupping her face tenderly… I swallow a grimace.
“Not me, girl. He’syoursnack. All that passion and anger? And now you two hot tamales have no wall to contain your libidos? It’s my job as your best friend to make sure your ticket to Bonetown ensures a safe ride.”
She clicks her tongue. “He must get migraines. My mom takes these.” Margie rattles a bottle of pills. Then she pulls out her phone to look up the label for one of the tubes of cream. “This one is for an allergic reaction. Thought maybe he had a fungus. Okay, I think he’s clean. You’re clear to do the no-pants dance.”
“I need a new best friend.”
“You love me too much.”
Margie leaves me to close the mirror, and I catch my expression. My hair is honey at sunset, tousled from my couch dive. My blue eyes are extra vivid. My cheeks are pink, flushed with…fear? Excitement? I’m not going to lie, the adrenaline makes me look pretty damn good. Maybe marketing isn’t for me… Cat burglar. That’ll make Mom proud. I pluck a piece of plaster off my head and toss it into Jack’s wastebasket. Then I hear a crash.
I rush to the bedroom in time to see Margie on her hands and knees, picking up coins. “Knocked over that little bowl of quarters.”
“Margie! What the fuck?” I’m on my hands and knees next to her, gathering them up as quickly as I can. When we’ve collected what I hope is all of them, I look around. His room is neat: white walls, bed made. Masculine, but not in a spartan, bachelor way. There’s some character here. Beige curtains streaked with razor-thin vertical blue lines. A surrealist painting of… Is that Citi Field? Pictures on the walls of people who look to be his parents, another of a dog, one of Jack shaking hands with an older man while they both hold up an award. Another of him and a tall woman, side by side, captured mid-laugh. Margie looks at it over my shoulder.
“He has a girlfriend?”
My chest twinges. A memory leaps into the fray, desperate to be tagged in by my consciousness. “They broke up, I think. Right after he moved in.” I turn away, my dislike for Jack crowding out what little tolerance for him I’ve built up. I’m glad for the reminder.
“He’s pining,” Margie says. “That’s sad.” At my expression, she tilts her head, curious. “Why don’t you like him, anyway? There had to be something that kicked all of this off. You don’t just instantly hate someone.”
“I told you why.” I reach under his bed for a renegade quarter.
“Nope.”
I sigh and sit back on my haunches. “When he moved in, I ran into him in the hall. He was carrying a sofa in, helping the movers. I— I mean objectively, if you overlook his awful personality, his shitty tree-candle smell… I mean, he could be considered okay-looking in some circles.”
“Young Harrison Ford,” Margie says. “Continue.”
“Yeah. Fine. If you squint and then take some shrooms. Whatever. He made a comment—something funny. Funny-adjacent. I don’t know. I laughed. We didn’t even exchange names, but it felt like… Anyway, I had to run because I was meeting you downtown for that thing? The day Chris got food poisoning and you had the extra ticket?”
“Ugh, Chris.” Margie is briefly distracted by the mention of her ex.
I haul in a breath and release it, trying to control the disdain and anger that course through me at the memory. “When I got home, I was coming up the stairs and this woman…thatwoman,” I say, gesturing to the photo, “came running out of his apartment in hysterics. I stopped her and asked if everything was okay and she… She said, ‘No. I’m not okay. Cheating asshole. I thought he loved me,’ or something along those lines. And then she bolted.”
“Oh, Pen.” Margie is well aware of the nerve that episode would have touched. She’s heard about my cheating father more than once, from meandmy mom. I’m sure some people can rebound from being cheated on, but not us. It was the cloud that hung over our house my entire life, the thing that tainted almost every memory from my childhood.
Why?Mom’s anguished face as she stared down at me drifts through my mind.Why did I say anything to him? Why didn’t I leave well enough alone?
“So, the next morning, when I ran into him in the hall, he was all smarmy, as if a woman he clearly cheated on hadn’t fled his apartment the night before. Like he didn’t hurt someone in that way. And he had the audacity toask me out.” I wrinkle my nose. “So I borrowed your line fromGeneva Convention.”
Margie covers her face with both hands, but I hear the laugh in her voice. “You told him you’d rather slather honey on your belly and hug a beehive than go out with him? That is, like, the worst line in the worst B-movie I’ve ever done.”
