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Neena murmured much the same in response. Shira turned to Danica. “Bye,” she said flatly, because it felt weird to walk away without saying anything, and then turned her back. She didn’t exactly flee, but she walked away fast enough that she was quickly swallowed up by the crowd and couldn’t hear if Danica said anything back.

Outside, the cold hit her like a slap in the face. It took a second to shrug on her coat. She’d done it. She’d faced down Danica and survived. She was done.

Why didn’t she feel good about it? She felt vaguely dirty, like she’d stepped in something gross and wiped it off on her coat. For the first time in a million years, she felt the urge to go to synagogue. She suddenly missed the sense of peace it used to give her, the way it calmed her and made her feel like she’d taken a shower on the inside.

She had the Hanukkah party, at least.

But what was that other than one more performance?

She shook the thought away. “Thanks for the last-minute save,” she said to Leo, though her cheeks burned a little bit that he’d seen her lose control like that. She wasn’t sure what she would’ve done if he hadn’t been there at her side—probably cried. “What is a book party, anyway?”

“No idea,” Leo said. He was frowning down at his phone. “It sounded good while not being close enough to what we were doing that they might ask about it. Hey, how expensive do you think it would be to take an Uber home?”

“Absurdly expensive,” Shira said. “The next train is in a half hour. We should make it in time.” He was still frowning down at his phone. “Is everything okay?”

“Yeah. I think so. I don’t know.” He tucked his phone in his pocket, stepping to the curb and raising his arm to hail a cab. “My aunt just texted me that I should get home as soon as possible. My aunt never texts me. I messaged my dad to ask what was going on, and he hasn’t answered. I don’t know, it’s all very weird.”

A cab with its lights on whizzed by without stopping. Shira took a step farther into the road, narrowly missing getting knocked over by an e-bike, and flung her arm out into the street. The next taxi skidded to a stop in time for them to clamber in the back. “Penn Station, please. The NJ Transit entrance.” The cab peeled away, and Shira shifted to the far window seat, leaving Leo on the other side of the sticky leather. Advertisements for dental work and Shake Shack blared from the little screen before them; she stabbed at the mute button, but it didn’t work. “Should I call my parents to have them check in?”

Lights flashed over Leo’s face. “No, don’t worry about it. I can’t do anything until I get home, right?”

He’d given her so much strength before and during the party. Now it was her turn. His hand was resting palm up on the middle seat. She grabbed it and squeezed. He squeezed back, and for one moment, the two of them were all there was in the world.

12

Leo’s mind wouldn’t stop whirling as he and Shira made their way through the city to the train. He kind of wished she’d start talking about something stupid, anything trivial, but she seemed too focused on getting them where they needed to go, which was fair, as Leo’s head was useless with all the whirling.

First the taxi driver dropped them off in the wrong spot, and they had to go around asking people to figure out where they were, and then they had to wait in line to buy paper tickets at the glitchy machine because the even glitchier app was malfunctioning, and then she was pulling him along in a run for the train, which they hopped aboard just as the warning bells were clanging. Leo’s heart was racing as they finally sank into their cracked brown leather seats. That was one blessing, at least: The train wasn’t crowded, so they got a whole three-person bench to spread out on. Small luxuries.

Leo held his breath as he checked his phone again. No service, but he’d received a few notifications while they were running for the train. He swiped past a couple of work email alerts—the video game world never slept—and a suggestive text from a girl he’d dated briefly a month ago who he’d been positive had ghosted him. Nothing from his aunt or his dad. He lowered the phone into his lap and stared out the window, which was blurry with the smears of a thousand fingerprints, into the dark tunnel beneath the river.

“Hey, I don’t want to forget to thank you for coming tonight,” Shira said, her tone so light it was obvious how hard she was trying to distract him. “You did a bang-up job as my fake boyfriend.”

“Bang-up job?” he said, amused enough that he was actually distracted from his phone, just for a moment, and then the train rattled out of the tunnel, and the signal bars came back, and he refreshed. Nothing. “Are you British and forgot to tell me?”

“Righty-o I am,” she said in the worst British accent he had ever heard. “Seriously, though, thank you. I don’t know how I would’ve made it through the night alone.”

She could’ve just left it there. He would’ve felt all warm inside, knowing that whatever was going on with his dad, at least he’d always have his old friend.

But she had to continue. “You made yourself look so good for everyone. It was great how you spun that whole story about your game.”

He could feel his whole face go blank. A “story”? That’s what she thought it was? Because, what, it couldn’t possibly have been true? The idea she’d thrown at him last year had made everything click, and it had gone really fast after that: He’d submitted it for a grant, where it had gathered a lot of attention, and everything had snowballed from there. He was getting offers from studios both to acquire the game and to offer him jobs, but he wasn’t sure if he was going to take any of them. The whole thing was a little overwhelming, to be honest.

But it probably made her feel better, considering all that was going on in her life, like she wasn’t the only person with everything falling apart. Maybe he should just be a good friend and let her believe whatever she wanted to believe.

She continued before he had to decide whether to speak up. “It was especially good that you told it all to Ellery, because she’s the gossip of the group. She’ll definitely tell Danica everything.”

Here, something that could distract him from jumping every time his phone vibrated, only to find an email from L.L.Bean or REI. “Are you going to tell me what happened between you and Danica? There was so much tension between the two of you I don’t know if I could’ve cut it with a machete.”

She pursed her lips, letting out a long, slow stream of breath. “I have integrity. I would never steal someone’s work.”

“I know,” Leo said. She might care way too much about what people thought of her, and she might have a habit for blurting out the worst thing at the worst moment, and she was also at least a little elitist, and—no, he was not going to sit here and mentally list out her flaws; that wasn’t what a good friend did. The point was, she might have a whole list of flaws, but dishonesty wasn’t one of them.

“It was wild.” Her lips were barely moving now, like her whole body was resisting the topic of discussion. Despite the stress of the situation, his eyes couldn’t help but linger on the little indents in her bottom lip where she’d chewed off her lipstick. “Danica didn’t like talking about her work and the paintings she was working on, which, okay. Plenty of people are worried talking about it will jinx it or ruin their creative energy or whatever. But finally she got to the point a year and a half ago where she wanted to share some of her sketches and early work for feedback, so I went through them and gave her my thoughts. It was really good! She’d also based it on her family history and had incorporated some creatures from Slavic mythology.”

“Your work is also based on your family history and has creatures from Jewish mythology.” It wasn’t like he was an expert, but he’d loved Shira’s paintings. Loved the way he could see her and her voice and her soul in the way lines arced on the canvas, in the smirky expressions the supernatural creatures held.

“It does! I told her about it, and told Ellery and Nora about it, and I kept rambling about how we could do shows together and do talks together and blah blah blah, and I didn’t realize until after how her face would go blank whenever I talked about it.”