Mila leaned in over the table. “Well, I’m glad you’re free now because Emma Easton and her cheer crew are doing a back to school mixer, and moi and you are going.” She held her hand up when I opened my mouth to interrupt her. “I know you and Emma aren’t BFFs, but the entire senior class is invited.”
“Emma Easton slashed my tires last year, and she calls me Nerdy Nora,” I said, arching my brows. “And let’s not forget the other names she has for me: bee girl, geek girl, blonde bitch, and my favorite . . . Amazon girl,” I said, ticking them off on my fingers.
“You forgot brownnoser. And she started the rumor about you and the janitor.”
“Exactly! She’s hated me since I beat her out of class president. Why would I go to her party?” I asked.
Mila seemed surprised at my declaration. “When she started the rumor about you and Mr. Bronski, you just laughed it off. Everyone thought you didn’t care. I thought you didn’t care.”
True, her repertoire of insults had never hurt me. After all, I’d had other more important things to worry about, like my essay on the merits of Walt Whitman’s nature poetry or whether Finn would be coming home for a visit that weekend.
“You should go and break out of this serious funk you’ve been in since Drew. You haven’t even been out on a date all summer. You need some male meat, chica,” she said seriously.
I bit back a grin because Mila had never had any male meat. She was still a virgin, and if she knew what I’d done with my body, she’d never speak to me again.
I nodded. “You know what, I do want to go. There’s something I want to tell Emma about her quarterback boyfriend. I figured it out last year, and she deserves to know,” I said, tapping my fingers on the table, remembering what I’d seen.
Yeah, a bad girl wouldn’t let Emma Easton run over her.
“Don’t have a clue what you’re talking about, but if it gets you to go, then I’ll take it,” she said with a triumphant grin. “But you gotta tell me the scoop. You’ve got this evil gleam in your eye which means you know something on somebody.” Her gray eyes focused in on me. “Yep, you’ve been people watching again. Tell me what you know, chica.”
I laughed for the first time in over a week. “I’ll tell you this much: it involves her best friend April Novak,” I said, rummaging through my backpack. I pulled out dad’s silver flask. If I wanted to get to rehab, I better get started. I had some catching up to do.
I unscrewed the metal top and sniffed it gingerly. Mother had let me have glasses of wine and champagne on special occasions, but I’d never tried vodka. I poured a healthy shot into the glass of Sprite I had.
Mila’s eyes widened as she took in the flask. “Are you insane? What is that?” she whispered, furtively looking back over her shoulder for Aunt Portia.
“Grey Goose vodka,” I said, taking a test sip and shuddering at the harsh aftertaste. “I stole a bottle from dad’s liquor cabinet, and according to the Internet, this particular brand is expensive and made in France.” I raised my glass to her. “Therefore, it must be awesome, right?” I tossed back another big gulp, trying not to grimace.
She shook her head, and her mouth gaped open. With her Emily Post-type personality, it wasn’t surprising that she’d never taken a drink of alcohol.
“Since when do you drink?” she said heatedly, in a quiet way, sniffing my cup and making a gagging face. I laughed because vodka really didn’t have a scent.
“Today is officially my first day of becoming an alcoholic. And this drink is making my soda very good—actually, no, I take that back. It tastes like shit, but I’m going to drink it anyway. Want some?”
Before she could answer, my attention was caught by a black Escalade pulling up at the warehouse directly across from the shop. When two guys got out of the vehicle, a memory tugged at me, and I focused harder on them, but they were too far away and it had gotten dark outside.
Mila let out a long sigh, pulling my attention back to her. “Anyway, you wanna hit downtown tomorrow? Maybe do some shopping at the Galleria?” she said, choosing to ignore the alcohol.
“Is there a good tattoo place around there? If not, I wanna try this new shop that just opened around the block.”
Her hands went nuts, fluttering up and down, like the girly girl she was. “I’ll never see you again because your mother will kill you! God, Nora, do you want to be incarcerated again?”
Seeing her dramatic tirade triggered something in me, and I burst out laughing as she chuckled along with me. I laughed and laughed so hard my chest burned and tears streamed down my face. Embarrassed by the emotion, I tried to suck it in and stop, but I couldn’t. I gripped my waist with my hands, but it didn’t help. She eyed me, and you know that awkward moment when everyone else has stopped laughing at something, but you still are, so they start staring at you? It was like that, only worse, because she could see my hilarity had turned into something strange and dark. I pressed my hands over my mouth and stopped the awful laughter, but then the panic set in. A cold sweat rippled over me and my heart hammered, making me feel like I was going to pass out. I bent over, my body aching as if I’d just run a hundred yard sprint. I squeezed my eyes shut, took a deep breath, held it for five seconds, exhaled, and then repeated it until my heart finally slowed.
I sat up with care, and Mila was standing and staring at me, her face washed out.
“What was that?” she asked, blinking.
“I think . . . I think it was my version of a panic attack,” I gasped out, wiping my face with some napkins from the table.
“Damn. Has it happened before?” she asked in a scared voice. “Should I go get Portia?”
I shook my head. “At the open house I had some dizziness, but nothing this dramatic,” I said, shuddering at the horrible laughter that had come out of me. Had I lost my mind completely? Had just the mention of Mother and being locked in my room sent me off the deep end?
“You okay now?”
I bit my lip and nodded, but I was lying.
“Hey, maybe I’m just that funny. You think I could do stand-up?” she said.
I shook my head at her. “I’m screwed up, Mila.”
“No, you’re not,” she said firmly, settling back down in her seat. “Maybe a little weird sometimes, but that’s just because you read dictionaries in your sleep.”
My eyes were drawn back to the warehouse across the street when the door opened and the taller of the guys came out. He strolled over to the SUV and popped open the back. He wasn’t facing me, but I could see he was wearing jeans and a black wife beater. I squinted, trying to make out the shadows on his muscled arms, recognizing them as some sort of tattoo. I wished he’d step into the street light so I could see him better, but he didn’t. He picked up a couple of guitars from the car, slammed the door shut, and walked back to the warehouse. My eyes followed him until he’d disappeared inside.
Something about him pricked at me and made my stomach flutter, almost like I knew who he was but couldn’t place him. I needed to get a good look at his face.
I called out for Aunt Portia to come over. “Who’s the guy next door?” I asked her, gesturing out the window.
“Where?”
“Some guy just went inside the warehouse across the street. He was driving the black SUV there,” I said.
She nodded. “Leo Tate. He’s been renovating the old gym all summer and turning it into a health club. Supposedly, it’s going to be brand new with a pool, tennis courts, yoga classes, the works.”
“Huh,” I said with a dismissive laugh, remembering that exercise and I did not get along, not since Mother had hired a personal trainer for me when I was fifteen, forcing me to take a 5:00 a.m. boot camp class three mornings a week. Her goal was to squeeze me into a size double zero. Ha. True, I was slimmer now, but only because I’d grown five inches, not because I could run a mile in six minutes.