“Maybe she really is just worried about you,” I tell him.
He dumps the noodles back into the pot. “Why should she be worried about me?”
I stare at him.
“It was three and a half months ago,” he points out. “What does she need me to do to prove I’m okay? Get a tattoo that says HAPPILY SINGLE on my forehead?”
“That would scream ‘I’m okay,’ ” I say.
“You know what I mean.” He dumps the pesto in with the noodles and swirls the pot around. “I’m thirteen years older than her. I’ve been on my own since she was a kid. I don’t need my barely grown sister worrying about me. Especially when worrying about me mostly just consists of leaving her dirty clothes on the hallway floor, and setting her phone alarm to top volume, then snoozing it five hundred times.”
I get down a couple of bowls and some forks, and pass them to him to start dishing it up. “Do you want me to kick her out?”
He eyes me briefly, then goes back to scooping pasta into the bowls. “I can’t,” he says. “Not when I don’t know what’s going on.”
He adds a couple whole basil leaves to each bowl and passes me one.
I set mine aside and touch his shoulders, ease them down. “If you ever need to vent,” I say, “text me. You know I love complaining, and it’s no fun to be the only one.”
His jaw softens. He sets his pasta aside too and pulls me into a hug that makes my bones liquefy, his breath warm against my neck. I close my eyes and breathe him in, and it’s not complicated: I want him, I like him, and I care about him enough to push those first two thoughts aside.
The front door flings open, Ashleigh’s and Julia’s laughs competing for Most Likely to Piss Off Mr. Dorner, and we peel apart as they bound inside, loaded with Target totes.
“Smells like heaven,” Ashleigh says, whizzing past. Miles and I exchange a look, both apparently sensing some kind of mischief afoot.
We pick up our bowls and follow them to the living room, where they empty their totes onto the rug. An air mattress, a pump, a couple of vacuum-sealed pillows, a blue blazer, a gold chenille blanket, and two mini desktop fans fall out, followed by some toiletries and a belt.
“Are you planning a very specific heist?” I ask.
“I thought about buying a pullout to replace this garbage sofa,” Julia says, “but I didn’t want to be presumptuous.”
“Oh, yeah. You wouldn’t want to be presumptuous,” Miles deadpans.
“Hey, be nice,” Julia says. “It’s temporary. As soon as I get a job, I’ll start apartment hunting.”
He rubs his brow. “I have to get to work. We’ll talk later.”
“You know where to find me,” she says, leaning over the couch to gather her laundry.
Miles turns, shaking his head and still forking pesto into his mouth as he heads toward the front door.
I set my own bowl down on the coffee table. “Do you need help with that?”
“Nope,” Julia says. “Just looking for somewhere else to put this stuff. The living room’s getting a bit unwieldy.”
Ashleigh snorts. “A bit.”
Julia’s moving toward the closet. The closet. Where I keep the dress.
My heart rattles against my rib cage like one of those New Year’s Eve clappers. She reaches for the pocket doors, seemingly in slow motion.
“No, wait—” I lunge for her.
I don’t make it in time.
Not even close.
For the first time since the day Miles helped me haul my stuff over here, the closet door slides all the way open—from the wrong side. The side packed so Tetris-tight that the absence of the door triggers an avalanche of white, cream, ivory, blush.
Gift bags. Boxes of taper candles. Tea lights. A crate of biodegradable cutlery. Palm leaf plates. Organza, an ungodly amount of organza. The amount you’d need to film a monster movie where the town predator was a sentient wedding dress, hell-bent on swallowing women whole.
Me. I am the woman who was supposed to be swallowed by that dress, and now it’s cascading directly into Julia’s face, a raging waterfall of my mistakes.
It takes several seconds, during which she’s utterly frozen, for everything to come tumbling out. It’s like something out of I Love Lucy, or The Dick Van Dyke show.
When it’s finally over, we’re all left staring.
“Oh, honey,” Ashleigh says. “Tell me you didn’t keep the dress.”
OceanofPDF.com
21
“I just haven’t had time to figure out what to do with it!” I cry, brushing past Julia to start stacking things back up.
“No!” Julia yelps, yanking a box of thrifted-and-laundered ivory cloth napkins out of my hand. “You can’t just put this stuff back in there. Pandora’s box has been opened, Daphne.”
“And Pandora’s contents aren’t going to fit in this living room with your big-ass life raft,” I say.
“You’re going to have to get rid of it before you move anyway,” Ashleigh points out.
Julia’s eyes snap to me. “You’re moving?”
“Possibly,” I say. “But not until after the summer, at the earliest. I’ve got time to deal with this stuff.”
Ashleigh faces Julia. “Maybe you could move into her room.”
For Miles’s sake, I’m relieved to see Julia scrunch her nose in dismay. “No way. Staying here is a short-term solution only.”
Now that I have an in, I ask, “Why the sudden interest in moving here, anyway?”
Julia sucks her teeth for a second. “Can I tell you something without it getting back to Miles?”
“Ooh, gossip!” Ashleigh pantomimes zipping her lips.
“Fine,” I say. “But if you can tell me, I’m sure you can tell him.”
Julia snorts. “I love my brother more than anyone on the planet, but there are things it’s better for him not to know.”
“Such as?” Ashleigh presses.
“I’ve been almost moving here for years.”
“Weren’t you in college, in Wisconsin?” I ask.
“I was miserable,” she says. “And I couldn’t tell Miles—he’d cosigned my loans.”
“He would’ve understood,” I insist.
“I know,” she says. “He babies me. And frankly, I’m not a huge fan of cleaning up my own messes. But the thing is, when I make one and Miles rushes in with a mop, he’s always leaving something behind.”
I shake my head. “I don’t understand.”
“When he graduated from high school,” she says, “he was supposed to move to Colorado with a couple of his friends. Last minute, he decided not to go. And I know it was because of me. Because I would’ve been stuck with my parents.
“He waited until I left for college to even leave the state. He moved out here and he loved it. So when school started sucking, I was going to come too. But then he started dating Petra.”
“Didn’t you two get along?” I ask, surprised.
“Petra gets along with everyone,” Julia retorts. “But she’s also so fucking flighty. And I say that as a flighty person. I get sick of jobs. I get sick of roommates. I get sick of having bangs, four days after getting them.”
Ashleigh says, “Well, that’s everyone.”
“But Petra—she’s next level. Once she and Miles took a trip to Iceland and decided just to stay indefinitely. For like two months. I’m not even sure if it was legal. And then last winter, their two-week trip to Uruguay lasted five.
