“Hey, I can flirt.”
“I’m not saying you can’t. I’m saying you don’t. At least I’ve never seen it.”
“Well, I did. And so did she. Just, like, fun. Nothing major.” Usingher toes, she pushed her chair around in a circle. “And then yesterday, I ran into her at the Barkathon.”
“Just, like, randomly ran into her?”
“Yes.It wasso weird. I went into the main building—which I never do, you know that.”
“’Cause you want to take all the animals home.”
“Exactly. I’d taken all the shots I’d planned on, and I don’t know what it was that pushed me in that direction, but I walked in before I could stop myself. And there she was. Right there at the front desk. I saw her immediately. She was the first thing I laid eyes on.”
Shea gave a little squeal. “This is the best story! And, honey, I hate to tell you this, but the Universe is talking to you. In a big way.”
She didn’t share Shea’s beliefs about the Universe and fate and destiny and all that, but she did have to wonder. “She was there to adopt a cat.” The rest of the story came tumbling out, from visiting with Nugget to Ellis asking her out to eat, the way the invitation just kind of fell from her mouth, surprising them both. “We went to The Flip and had a late lunch and ate off each other’s plates and just talked and talked.”
“You had, like, a day right out of a rom-com. I’m so jelly right now.” Shea kicked her feet in mock frustration. “Are you seeing her again?”
“We exchanged numbers.”
“Have you texted her?”
Cherry nodded. “I did last night, told her I had a great time. She said she did, too.”
“This is amazing. You so deserve to date somebodyreal.” Cherry was clear on Shea’s stance around the whole fake online relationship thing. It was the same one Andi had.
“I didn’t tell her anything about my social media brand.”
“Really? Well. I’m not surprised.” She’d expected Shea to criticize her. Scold her. At least roll her eyes at her. She did none of those things. “I mean, you can’t really. Your social stuff says you have a girlfriend.” Then she groaned. Loudly. “When are you gonna take care of that, by the way?”
“There it is,” Cherry said, and it wasn’t snarky, but her tone held a definite edge of being tired of this conversation. Because she was.
Shea flipped her body around so she sat up again and held out herhands in surrender. “Look, I’m not gonna give you shit about it today. You’re very aware that you’re lying, and you’re very aware that you shouldn’t be. I’m hoping maybe meeting a nice girl will give you the kick in the ass you need to fix things. I don’t understand why you can’t just be real online.”
“Because people don’t want real,” Cherry said. Well, shesnappedreally, given they’d had this conversation what felt like a million kajillion times. “They don’t want to see struggle. They want to see beauty and happiness and love, and they want to think they can have it, too.”
Shea shook her head and stood, and Cherry could almost hear her argument, how people might appreciate her more if she was honest. And then Cherry would say they had no idea that she wasn’t being totally honest and that’s fine because nobody online is a hundred percent honest, and around and around they’d go like they had so many times before. Shea must’ve felt the same way because they just held each other’s gazes silently. Finally, Shea threw up her hands and turned toward the door.
“Look, you do you. Okay? You do you. But mark my words—it’s gonna bite you in the ass sooner or later.” She mimed taking a huge, toothy bite out of the air. “Right in your cute little ass.”
* * *
I didn’t start worrying about Mikey right away. That didn’t start until she was seventeen and I was twenty-two and I noticed how painfully thin she’d become. I remember how our dad called her Pudge when she was little because she had this adorable tummy that stuck out a little bit. You know, like any little kid might have. The tummy didn’t stick, but the nickname did, even as I watched her get thinner and thinner.
Rainy days were good for writing. The gray, overcast sky always put Ellis in exactly the right mood to let herself drift back in time. Back to before things went sideways. Back to before Michaela’s life had gone off the rails, taking her father’s and sister’s with her. The book idea had been rolling around in Ellis’s head for over a year before she sat down and actually mapped it out, made an outline for it, wrotea few sentences for each chapter from beginning to end. It wasn’t a memoir because it wasn’t really about her. Well, it was, but it was more Michaela’s story. Ellis was just a secondary character. She had no idea what she’d do with it when she finished it. Most of her wanted to shop it around, look for an agent, get it published. But there was a small part of her heart that wanted to keep it. It was Michaela’s story, after all, and it was Ellis’s job to look out for her.
Yeah, ’cause you’ve done such a bang-up job already.
Her fingers stopped typing when that thought zipped through her head.
It wasn’t new.
Her guilty conscience taunted her often with lines like that. Lines? No. Facts. They were facts. Ellis was the big sister. Fact. Big sisters are supposed to look out for their little sisters. Fact. Michaela had driven her car full-speed into a tree, and Ellis had had no idea whatsoever that suicide was something she’d ever even thought about. Sad, sad fact.
Yeah, it was time to stop now. She knew this. She knew when the blame began in her head, it was time to stop. She saved her work, closed the laptop quietly, and pushed her chair away from the table where she’d chosen to work that morning. Time to stop now.
“Okay, El, shake it off.” She stood up, shook out her arms like a boxer, bounced up and down on the balls of her feet.
