“Done for the day?” Penn asks me at quitting time, both her kids trailing her down the staff hallway toward the exit that leads to the side parking lot. Fabian takes karate twice during the week and once on Saturday afternoons, and is skipping across the linoleum in his immaculate whitegi. Desi follows silently, her tiny hand tucked into her mom’s.
“All done,” I tell her, spinning the combination on my locker—the ones lining the hallway are small, like the kind at gyms and skating rinks, big enough to hold my canvas purse and emergency cache of Red Vines and not much else.
“Any luck with the TVs?”
“Not yet.” I shake my head. “But I’m working on it. Oh, also, remember you’ve got that meeting tomorrow with the guy from—” I break off suddenly, staring at the contents of my locker. Big enough for my purse and not much else, right—thenot much else, at this particular moment, being a long strip of a dozen foil-wrapped condoms that I definitely didn’t put there myself.
Penn stops a few feet away and turns to look at me, quizzical. “Meeting with the guy from . . .?” she prompts.
“Oh! Uh,” I say, shoving the condoms into the bottom of my purse before I take it out, praying that Penn—or, God forbid, the kids—don’t get a glimpse of them. I blink at the vents on my locker door, just wide enough for somebody to slide the foil strip inside. “With the glass guy, about the cracked windows on the second floor. I called to confirm yesterday afternoon.”
“Good girl,” Penn says, still looking at me a little uncertainly. Then: “You coming?”
“Yup,” I manage. Fabian flings his tiny body against the PUSH bar on the door, sunlight leaking into the hallway. “Let’s go.”
I wave good-bye to Penn and the kids, and cross the blacktop to my car—it’s sitting right under a pine tree where I left it this morning, exactly the same save a long, jagged scratch along the side.
Someone’s keyed my driver’s door good, leaving a deep white scar clear across the body.
Not someone.
This is all Julia.
“Damnit,” I say out loud, slamming my palm down hard against the window, loud enough that Penn and the kids, climbing into their spaceship-like minivan, look up in alarm.
“You swore,” Fabian calls out cheerfully from the backseat, sneakered legs kicking. Penn clicks the remote and shuts both kids inside.
“You lose your keys?” she calls, crossing the lot in my direction. “Molly?”
“No, it’s—” I shake my head, ashamed and embarrassed, not wanting her to come any closer. I hate the idea of Penn seeing, like she’ll be able to figure the whole sordid story just from a fistful of condoms and one stupid scratch on my car.
In the end, I’m pretty sure it’s my face that gives me away more than the damage to the Passat. “Yikes,” Penn says, looking from me to the gouge and back again. “Molly. You know who did that?”
I think of Julia’s hands all of a sudden, her knobby knuckles that she hates and how she always has a neon manicure, hot pink or electric yellow. She used to like to paint mine, too. I remember the chemical smell of the nail polish hanging low and heavy in her room—back when the rule in the Donnelly house was that I could still sleep over as long as I crashed with Julia, the two of us piled head-to-toe in her twin bed, her chilly ankles brushing my arm. “Oh myGod, this mattress is not big enough for the both of us,” she complained one night, rolling onto her side and whacking her elbow on the nightstand. The tiny bottles of polish rattled in protest. Julia swore.
“I said I’d go get the sleeping bag!” I protested.
Julia sighed theatrically. “No, it’s fine,” she said, then made a goofy face so I knew she wasn’t actually irritated. “Just hurry up and marry my brother so you can crowd him instead, will you?”
My eyebrows arced, surprised to hear her say the words out loud. Not even Patrick and I talked like that,forevers andwhens. Possibly we were both too afraid. “Oh, is that the plan?” I asked teasingly.
“That is the plan,” Julia confirmed, stretching her arms up over her head so her fingertips brushed the headboard. “You guys are going to give me a million nieces and nephews, and gross everyone out with the story of how you met when you were fetuses, and it’s going to be totally vomitous but also nice. The end.”
I snorted.
“What?” Julia propped herself up on the pillows and peered at me in the dark, her voice gone oddly serious. “You don’t think it’ll happen?”
Julia was funny that way, one-half full of kerosene and one-half hopeless romantic, but I hadn’t really thought she was serious before now. OfcourseI thought about Patrick and me long term. We were already long term, the two of us. “No, I’m not saying that at all, I just—”
“Relax, you big weirdo.” Julia grinned then, flopping back onto the pillows and pulling the quilt up around her shoulders. Her hair fanned out across the mattress, a blue-black storm. “I don’t have, like, a creepy binder full of cutouts from wedding magazines for you guys. I’m just glad Patrick has you, is all I’m saying. I’m glad you guys have each other.”
I thought of the good-night kiss Patrick had pressed behind my ear a few minutes earlier. I thought of him breathing on the other side of the wall. This was maybe a year after Chuck died, everything barely scabbed over, that feeling of needing to keep everything close. “I’m glad we have each other, too,” I said.
“Good.” She patted me on the shin through the blankets, cartoonish. “Just try not to wake me up when you sneak out of my room to go bone.”
“Oh,gross!” But I was giggling, I remember, and Julia was giggling, too, the sound of her laughter the last thing I remembered hearing before I fell asleep.
“Molly?” Penn’s still watching me curiously, like she’s pretty sure there’s more to the story here. “Hey. You okay?”
