The week rolls by like molasses. Billie doesn’t come to the diner even though LD and I wait for him every day, ordering chili cheese fries. We hope he does, but apparently Golden Boy has found greener pastures. I can’t say I blame him.
I rub the sleep out of my eyes and order a refill of coffee. It’s my third on my lunch break.
“You better stop or you’ll be bouncing off the walls,” LD warns, eating another chili cheese fry.
“I just haven’t been sleeping well,” I reply.
Ever since Grams went missing, my mind’s rattled me awake every night. I’ve tried everything—Led Zeppelin, ocean ambience, counting the popcorn on the ceiling (and that just made me hungry . . .)—but my brain just keeps racing with the same questions, over and over, like a NASCAR track, in circles.
What if Micah hadn’t found her? What if she’d wandered somewhere else? What if it happens again? She doesn’t remember wandering off in the first place. When I asked her what she was thinking, she said she didn’t know.
“But, oh dear, I’m forgetting something. Sloane, what day is it?” she asked this morning, grabbing onto my forearm.
Sloane. Mom.
“June twenty-second, Grams.”
“That isn’t your birthday, is it? No, it’s—Ingrid! Goodness, Ingrid why didn’t you tell me!” She chastised me, and sent me to the store at two in the morning to get cake mix. I didn’t go. I just sat outside until she got up from the couch and shuffled to her room, having already forgotten that she’d sent me.
I can handle this. I have to handle it. I made peace with that in March, when the doctors first told us about her Alzheimer’s. He gave us pamphlets, brochures, websites, informational videos to watch. He told us what to expect, what medicines to try, what to do to ease her pain.
Her pain.
That always worries me. Is losing your memory painful? Or is it something that happens slowly, like sand slipping through your fingers, so slight you barely notice you’re leaving bits of yourself behind?
Stop thinking. Stop thinking. I squeeze my eyes tightly closed—
LD slaps me on the hand. “You get this crease in your brow when you’re thinking something bad. So stop it! It’ll make wrinkles.”
The waitress refills my coffee and I thank her, pouring three packets of sugar into the black cup. “I’m fine.”
“I didn’t ask if you were. Is this about what happened last week? At the festival?”
“I don’t want to talk about it—”
“Well I do.”
I fish in my purse for cash to pay.
“Iggy,” she tries to reason.
“Why don’t we talk about you, Lorelei,” I hiss. “Did you really choke on your audition? Or was it something else?”
“Well I—”
I slam a twenty down on the table and leave the diner before I can hear whatever she has to say. I swung a low blow, I know I did, but it’s not fair how she thinks talking things out is the best medicine when she won’t ever talk about herself. How come I have to bare my soul when everyone else keeps theirs encased in armor?
When I get back to the store, I pull a stool up to the counter and rest my head in the nook in my arms, hoping I can get some shut-eye. Maybe if I’m asleep I won’t think. I don’t want to think.
I must doze off, because the next thing I know the bell above the door rings. It’s a group of people, their footsteps loud, voices annoying. Blearily, I think I recognize them, but I can't tell. As I wipe the sleep from my eyes, I sit up to greet them.
And go still.
“What, can’t get any sleep in the pasture?” Mike sneers. Beside him, Heather rolls her eyes, clutching Micah’s arm like he’s a new Louis Vuitton.
“You have five minutes until my lunch’s over,” Heather says, ignoring him. “So hurry up and pick something out. Baby, want anything?”
Micah kisses her chastely on the lips. “Nothing’s sweeter than you.”
Mike groans. “Gag me.”
The three of them walk past me into the candy store, down the Twizzlers aisle. Micah doesn’t even give me a glance. They follow Heather to the discount shelves, talking about the drive-in movie they’re planning on seeing this weekend. A double feature. Mike complains that they always go to the drive-in whenever he doesn’t have a date.
“Not my fault you’ve exhausted every girl in Steadfast,” Heather replies sharply. The problem with working in a small candy store is that everything echoes. Voices bounce off the silver shelving and ricochet back to me. Heather knows this, even if Micah and Mike don’t.
“You can start trying North Platte up the road,” Micah adds jokingly. My body goes rigid—but then Mike laughs. If Micah wasn’t dating Heather, that would’ve started a fight. Mike’s started fights over less.
“Ha! But you two are wrong,” Mike replies triumphantly. “I haven't gone through every girl.”
“Mike.” Heather’s voice is even. A warning.
I hear his footsteps—they're easy to catch. Loud, clomping. Like he’s a giant come down from a bean stalk. I sit up straighter on my stool as he picks up a pack of Japanese panda cookies (the ones with the chocolate insides) and tosses them onto the counter in front of me. I begin to ring it up when he stops me.
“I’m trying to decide what goes with those. Got any ideas?” he asks, nudging his chin toward the cookies. I bite the inside of my cheek, staying quiet. “Soda? Coffee? You?”
“What?”
He swirls his pointer finger in a circle. “I’ll buy whatever you want. You can eat whatever you want. I’ll pick you up at four. Don’t thank me—”
“No, thanks,” I interrupt as he turns away.
He pauses, and turns back. “You’re not doing anything.”
“What if I am?”
He snorts. “Come on, Ingrid. Don’t lie. Look, you can hang out with your boy again, too. Two birds with one stone. I’ll make sure you have a good night.”
“No,” I repeat, and slide the box of cookies back. “Sorry, I’m busy.” Saturday nights I usually am busy. I usually go to the radio station. Although this last weekend I didn’t. I couldn’t bring myself to leave the house.
I don’t know if I will this weekend, either.
“Busy?” he echoes, and then an idea dawns on him. He laughs. “It’s Bleaker, isn’t it? I saw you with him at the festival—”
“Billie’d never like me that way,” I quickly denounce before he even begins going down that road. I don’t think I can hear it. I don’t think I want to. That sort of possibility is one I can’t imagine even in a perfect world.
A golden boy and an abandoned girl—there’s a reason there are no love songs about people like us.
Mike grins. “You’re right, you’re right. How stupid of me. Then if not him . . . oh. Oh.” He playfully gasps and leans forward. “It’s Perez, isn’t it?”
My mouth goes dry. “Shut up.”
“No, no; I think I’m onto something. Because I’m finding out there’s an actual person under all those ugly cardigans.”
I stare down at the counter. My insides are squirming. I want to be anywhere else besides here.
“To think, Steadfast’s little Ingrid North has the hots for her best friend—and he’s dating Heather.”
“Shut up,” I croak, begging.
But he keeps going, his words like a dagger in my heart. Twisting, twisting. “You didn’t actually think you had a chance, did you?”
“Please shut up.”
“I mean, compared to you, he had the pick of the litter.”
I fist my hands so tightly my nails indent into my palms.
He leans in closer, and he smells like boy-sweat and Calvin Klein cologne. I hate the smell, the same that’s invaded my nightmares for years, the scent I turned away from in the hallways—like the stench off a corpse. “What’s it like, Ingrid? To realize that even your best friend couldn’t stomach dating you—”
Somehow, with his smell and the way his voice dips into false earnest, it snaps me. I grab the cookies from the counter and throw them. “I SAID SHUT UP!” I cry, as the panda cookies miss him.
They hit Micah’s shoulder and burst open, scattering across the ground.
I stare at him through my blurry tear-filled eyes. His face is open, surprised. No, shocked—horribly shocked. The last thread keeping us together. The last thing—the final straw.
Micah and I stare at each other for a moment, raw and irrational. Nothing hidden anymore, the truth laid bare as though Mike’s words split my rib cage open and bore my bloody, beating heart.
“Igs,” Micah finally asks, hesitant. “Is that . . . do you really . . .”
I swallow the bile climbing in my throat and remember the night LD and I sent my love for him to the stars. I sent it to the moon and it came right back. Is that what the saying really means? That love is a boomerang you can’t escape?
“Yes,” I reply. My voice is calmer than it has any right to be. “Excuse me.” I leave from behind the counter to the workroom, grabbing my backpack. Heather tries to stop me on the way out, but I wrench out of her grip and shove open the door, and leave.