‘Yes. I’m sure.’
I wasn’t. Not even a little.
She could spin me a thousand different stories about becoming Lily Fireball. They might all even be true.
This was Lily, though, and Iknew– fundamentallyknew, deep in my bones – that there was something she wasn’t telling me.
We thought alike. That had been the basis of our friendship from the start: we were born schemers. We had different strengths – she had flawless dramatic instincts, I was good at big picture narrative – but it was the same skillset. We both had an innate understanding of cause and effect. I didn’t know if we were both missing the same checks and balances most people had, or whether it was some kind of extra abilitywe had that they didn’t, but we could see the strings that other people couldn’t – and we didn’t have any qualms about pulling them.
I understood her. She understood me.
So I knew there was no way that she would completely reinvent herself for reasons as thin as ‘I want to play pretend’ and ‘I want to have fun’, no matter how badly she was grieving. Not when there were an infinite number of other, better ways to play pretend and have fun. Lily Ong was better at scheming than that.
But I’d done the calculations, in my few seconds of hesitation. I could work with her, or I could work against her, but I couldn’t stop her.
Either way, the show had to go on.
So I made the only choice I could. A wrong choice – a bad choice – but a choice that might let me figure out what the fuck she was doing.
A choice that might let me get my best friend back.
I put my earpiece back in. ‘Open the door,’ I said into my headset mic.
‘Thank you.’ Lily squeezed my hand.
Just for a moment, things felt all right again.
Then the limo door opened, and she let go, and my best friend was gone. ‘Don’t let them close the door on my train,’ Lily Fireball said, patting me proprietarily on the knee. ‘I’ll murder someone if this dress gets torn.’
4LilyThirteen years ago
‘So,’ I asked, leaning back in my chair, ‘what are you doing here? Why reality TV?’
Murray looked contemplative as he took a sip of his coffee. I was drinking a cappuccino, featuring a love heart the barista had drawn in the foam; but he’d ordered his coffee black, in the largest size they had. Was he just hungover, or did he always drink it this way?
‘I care about stories,’ he replied.
‘Interesting,’ I said. ‘Tell me more about that.’
Tell me more about thatwas, far and away, the most successful flirting line I had in my arsenal. Boyslovedtalking about themselves, and the beauty oftell me more about thatwas that you didn’t even have to give them any parameters. You just pointed them in a direction, batted your eyelashes, and made it look like you were a) listening and b) fascinated – and boom, you had them eating out of the palm of your hand.
‘Do you care about things?’ he asked abruptly.
I blinked. ‘What do you mean, do I care about things? Are you trying to figure out if you’re about to spend three months stuck on an island with a sociopath?’
If he was, I probably shouldn’t mention that I was fairly sure I had some tendencies in that direction. Thuong was forever extolling the values of therapy and how useful she found it and howyou should totally go, Lily, you’ll find out so much about yourself, but I’d only ever been a couple of times, out of fear that a good therapist would have between one and five conversations with me and go,oh, no, you’re completely incapable of forming normal human relationships, your shithead high school boyfriend was right actually, you’re a lost cause.(Plus, all that therapy hadn’t made Thuong brave enough to fess up and tell me she was fucking my brother, so it couldn’t bethatuseful.)
Murray chuckled. ‘No.’
A curl was falling in his eye. He shook his head trying to dislodge it. ‘Do you have some big cause that you care about? Something that drives you? That you’re passionate about?’
Now there was a question I should file away for future flirting attempts.
I rested my head in one hand, toying with my coffee spoon in the other. ‘I didn’t take a job onDesert Island Castawaybecause I’m passionate about watching people do obstacle courses in the wilderness, if that’s what you’re asking.’
He regarded me over the top of his enormous mug. ‘You don’t answer questions straight, do you?’
I really hadn’t been imagining it, when I’d been watching him last night in the bar.
