“You look really familiar,” she says before she looks over at me. I can’t say what my face is doing, but she doesn’t press. “Connie, can you help me find my phone charger?”
We retreat to the bus and close the door behind us.
“What the fuck?” I say.
“Oh my God.”
“How?” I sit on the couch and put my head in my hands.
“What are the odds,” she muses. “What if… hmm.”
“Uh oh, what dots are you connecting into a line over there?” Lilli gives me a sly smile. “Actually, I don’t want to know.”
“I think you do.” I wave a hand in front of me, an invitation to get it over with. “I think this is your second chance!”
“No.”
“Hear me out,” she pleads.
I snort. “I don’t have to hear you out when whatever you’re about to say is certifiably insane.”
“You literally wrote a song about how you wished you could have another shot together. ‘Picture It’ is a great song.”
I shake my head. “Just because it’s a great song and I wrote it doesn’t mean I still feel that way. If that were true, we never would’ve written any other song.” I don’t know why I’m arguing with her; she’s right about this maybe being a secondchance. Thinking something to myself is different from sharing it with my best friend when we’re all about to be in a tour bus together for the next three weeks.
It feels like summer camp all over again, hoping we could sit next to our crushes at the campfire and gushing about them in the cabins after lights out.
“So you’re okay with him being here and being yourpersonalbodyguard?” she asks.
“Sure, why wouldn’t I be?”
She looks at me like I’m suffering from a concussion. “Do you really need me to answer that?”
“No.” I pull my legs up and cross them on the couch. “It’s fine. We weren’t even dating.”
“Okay, sure, but are you sure you’re not just doing that thing where you minimize the seriousness of something to be more accommodating?”
I snort my derision again. “I don’t do that.”
“Your appendix literally had burst, and you were in so much pain that you couldn’t drive, but you would’ve gone to work if I didn’t take you to urgent care instead.”
“Yes, you saved my life, I’m aware.” I roll my eyes. “How was I supposed to know it wasn’t just my ovaries or something?”
“Connie.”
“I’m not minimizing this, Lilli. It’s going to be fine. We can talk about it more later, but right now I need a break from human interaction.”
She narrows her eyes, her bullshit detector measuring me. I’m not lying, though—I feel exhausted and I need to recharge. She seems satisfied and shrugs, putting her headphones on to listen to a podcast. She’s such a podcast junkie. I used to be too, but Lilli started describing everything she learned to me, so I stopped listening to podcasts to spare myself from hearing the information twice. I turned insteadtoward audiobooks—mostly fantasy and nonfiction. Eric was the one who put me on to fantasy, actually. I restart the audiobook forThe Hobbit.
A little while later, Eric and Ash have joined us on the bus. “We’re going to take off, ladies,” Ash says. “Buckle up.”
There are seatbelts at the table and on the couch, but Lilli opts for the table, so I join her there. Ash is driving, Eric in the front passenger seat, and I sit with my back to him.
I close my eyes and pray these travel days go by quickly. I can’t help but look back over my shoulder at him. He’s talking with Ash and laughing, but I can’t hear what they’re saying over the audiobook. I look ahead again and see Lilli’s gleeful face as I roll my eyes at her.
“Okay sure,” she mouths.
What kind of cosmic joke is this?
