“That’s the plan,” she mumbles back, only a second later it buzzes again, and then again a moment after that, until finally it’s just one long frantic drone like a swarm of bees. “Okay,” Lilly says finally, pushing him gently off her. “Let me just—” She sits up and reaches for it, the morning sun golden along the planes of her back. Will reaches out to trace the knobs of her spine with one finger, and he can feel the moment when her entire body tenses.
“What?” he asks.
“I need to call my sister.”
Will frowns. “What’s wrong?” he asks again, but Lilly is already hitting the screen to dial, waving him off.
“Olivia and who?” she asks whoever answers—jamming the receiver between her neck and shoulder as she pulls on her underwear, digging around under the bed until she comes up with her bra. “Junie. Olivia and who?” Then she’s shutting herself in the bathroom where her voice is low and muffled, the door clicking tidily behind her.
She’s in there for a long time. Will stays in bed for a while, then finally gets dressed because he doesn’t know what else to do—he doesn’t know what’s happening in there, but he has a feeling that whatever it is he’s not going to want to confront it with his dick hanging out. He’s just scooping his T-shirt off the floor when the door to the bathroom opens and Lilly comes out, the expression on her face sincerely rattled for the very first time since he’s known her. All at once Will thinks of the night the police showed up atthe house to tell Georgia and him about their parents: he remembers focusing on the raindrops on the younger officer’s uniformed shoulders, counting them to avoid doing anything else. “What?” he asks again, and it sounds a lot more like pleading than he means for it to.
Lilly sits down on the edge of the bed. “There’s a video,” she says slowly, “of Olivia at Moon Landing. With Nick Harlow.”
The sound in Will’s head is the rushing of water. The feeling in his chest is pure dread. “Olivia with Nick Harlow doing what, exactly?”
Lilly shrugs, but barely. “All the things you might expect.”
“And she... she released it?”
“What?” Right away she’s on her feet again, whirling on him like a boxer. “Of course not. Nick sold it to the Sinclair.”
“I—right.” Will nods. It’s like he’s trying to hear her from the other side of the freeway. “I—of course. Right.”
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Lilly demands, pacing like a lioness across the carpet. She’s still in her bra and underwear, wrenching open a dresser drawer and pulling out a pair of jeans. “You think she would sell a video of herself—”
“I don’t,” he backpedals quickly. “Of course I don’t.” He twists the T-shirt into a rope with both hands, guilt and dread blooming inside him like the algae on the pond back in Pemberly Grove. “Lilly,” he says, and oh, already he knows he is going to regret this. Already he knows this is going to be bad. “About what happened between me and Nick.”
***
She’s still as the desert at night the whole time he’s telling it, Georgia and the Polaroids andOrpheus Descending. Then all at once she’snothing but motion. “Are you kidding me?” she demands, sitting down hard and then immediately jumping up again, wrenching open the closet door. “I mean—how can you possibly have—are you kidding me?”
Will flinches. “Lilly—”
“I asked you,” she interrupts, her eyes glowing coal-dark with fury as she flings her empty suitcase onto the bed, nearly hitting him square in the chest. “I fully asked you what the deal was with that guy and you called me cheap for wanting to know. You let me send my baby sister off to that stupid fucking festival with a literal sex predator—”
“You never told me he was taking her to a festival—”
“I didn’t know!” Lilly explodes. “I didn’t know, because I didn’t think to ask, because I didn’t know he was someone I needed to protect her from. Because you didn’t tell me.”
“I explicitly said he wasn’t a good guy!” Will protests. “I’m sorry I didn’t provide you with the salacious detail you so obviously require—”
“Oh, right,” Lilly says, stalking over to the dresser and yanking open the middle drawer. “When it was your family he was messing with he deserved a beatdown in an alley, but when it’s my family it’s just, ‘Eh, I don’t like him, can’t tell you why, but odds are good it’s just because I’m a giant fucking snob who hates everybody—’”
“It had nothing to do with me being a snob!”
“How the fuck was I supposed to know that?” Lilly demands. She flings an armful of clothes into the suitcase, then bangs into the bathroom, returning a moment later with an armful of expensive-looking cosmetics. “You let me be a target, Will. You let my sister be a target.”
“Wait a second.” Will blinks. “Are you saying this is my fault?”
“I mean.” She dumps the makeup into her bag with a noisy clatter. “It’s notnotyour fault, that’s for sure.”
“That’s insane,” Will counters, his mouth falling open at the unfairness of it. “That’s insane! I warned you, Lilly. I warned you, and I’m not about to take responsibility for your shitty taste in guys, and I’m definitely not about to take responsibility for your sister’s shitty taste in guys. Like, not to put too fine a point on it, but this kind of thing is, like, pretty on-brand for her, isn’t it?”
All at once, Lilly stops moving, her sudden stillness taking his breath away. “I’m sorry,” she says, and her voice is dangerously quiet. “What?”
Right away, he realizes that was exactly the wrong thing to say. “I didn’t mean—” he starts, then completely fails to follow it up in any meaningful way. “I’m only making the point that—”
“It’s on-brand for my sister to have an incredibly personal, private, vulnerable moment broadcast all over the internet without her consent?”
