“You have got to stop sneaking up on me,” I said before I even turned on my light. I knew Tommie would be in my room when I slammed the door behind me, Buddy—or should I call him Justin—still sitting on the swing saying, “What? I don’t know what I did,” and me saying, “Time’s up. I gotta go in now.”
Tommie seemed suspended in the air in the corner of the room.
“I am not sneaking. This is my room.”
I threw my clothes off and into a pile next to the rocker, then crawled into the bed in just my panties. I didn’t even brush my teeth. Or put on a shirt. So there!
Or wash my face, and Buddy’s smell was all over my skin. Was that cologne? My heart flipped around. I settled the sheet over my body. Thank goodness the AC was on. One thing about kissing is it raises one’s internal temperature. And one thing about JimDaddy is he is not a tightwad contractor. Nope. He just withholds important information about a star witness.
I flopped onto my side, away from where Tommie glowed in the corner.
“Gotta sleep,” I said.
When she spoke, she was right near my ear. He voice was sad as I expected a dead girl’s voice to be. Now that I knew she was dead, I mean. Really dead.
“I saw you with him.”
Could she strangle me, right here in bed, like in the movies?
Would she?
I touched my throat.
Tommie sniffed.
“Justin was my first and only boyfriend,” she said, and her words were brokenhearted.
Like that I remembered walking in on Momma when I was about six years old, and she was crying like she might never stop because my real daddy was gone and I wouldn’t ever remember him.
Did the dead feel as heartbroken as the leftover living? How fair was that?
“We were going to get married.”
Married? She’d only been twelve or thirteen. . . .
“He didn’t know. I’d made those secret plans in my heart. Even found a wedding dress and saved it online.”
I looked at nothing in the dark.
“You were kissing him, Evie.”
“Listen, Tommie,” I said, and sat up, keeping the sheet up around my neck.
But she was gone.