Mira looked down at his knees. There was a grease stain on his jeans where he’d rested the burger between bites. She realized, then, that the scent that wafted around him in the hallways, the one she’d taken for some kind of masculine emission of heat, was the smell of this car, and Baconators. She resisted an urge to put her hand on the knee and pat it. It was not a sexual urge, and Mira felt certain that he would not have misconstrued it as a sexual gesture—but at that moment he did not have his hands on the steering wheel, and he seemed so excitable that Mira was a little worried they’d end up in the median if she made even the gentlest of sudden movements.
59
“Hi, Perry.”
“Josie.”
“Haven’t seen you around for a while.”
Perry couldn’t walk around her. She was standing directly in front of him and in front of Karess, who was standing beside him. The only place to go without knocking over one of the two of them was to crawl over a table at which two guys who looked like graduate students sat, passing a page full of calculations angrily back and forth between them, and he couldn’t do that.
“Yeah,” he said to Josie, and looked around her showily in the direction of the Starbucks counter, trying to make it clear that he was on his way past her, that he didn’t plan to linger here with her. But Josie had never been one to take her cues from other people. “Are you living with Craig?” she asked him. “Because that’s the rumor.” She glanced at Karess, head to toe, and seemed to dismiss her before turning back to Craig again.
“Why do you want to know?” Perry asked.
“Because I want to know,” Josie said.
“Look. Josie, I’ve—”
“Excuse me,” Karess said, sounding meekly polite as she squeezed between Perry and Josie. When she reached the counter she turned and gestured for Perry to follow, but he couldn’t, because Josie was still standing in front of him.
“Who’s that?” Josie asked, jerking her head in Karess’s direction. “You’re dating a hippie chick?”
“Josie—”
“Look,” Josie said. “I want you to tell Craig something for me.”
Perry looked at the ceiling. He waited.
“I want you to tell Craig ‘fuck you’ for me.”
Perry continued to stare at the ceiling—although, out of the corner of his eye he could see that Karess was still waving her pale hand at him, a bit more frantically now. Her bracelets seemed to catch the light, which danced around on the ceiling. He tried to concentrate on that even as he saw (as if, suddenly, he had panoramic vision and could take in all of Starbucks without taking his eyes off the ceiling) Josie’s equally pale hand rise up and rush toward him, colliding with his face.
The smacking sound was oddly muffled to him because, along with his cheek, Josie had struck him in the ear, but it was clear to him, even in his shocked state, that everyone else in Starbucks had heard it, because they all turned to stare at him at once as Josie’s little black shoes snapped away, back to the corner she’d come from, sounding like claws or talons tapping across the linoleum as she went.
“Oh, my God!” Karess cried out, and rushed toward him as if she thought he’d been shot. She grabbed his arm and body-slammed him toward the door, pushed him out into the street. “Oh, my God!” she screamed again. “That girl slapped you!”
60
Shelly turned at the sound of a slap to see Josie red-cheeked and openmouthed, heading back toward their table, the boy she’d apparently slapped and his girlfriend careening back out the door into what now seemed to be an actual blizzard.
The same feeling of surrender, defeat, with which she’d sat back down when Josie told her to came over Shelly when she realized she was going to have to walk home in that blizzard wearing only a dress and a thin sweater. Maybe Josie would slap her, too, before she had to go back out there.
Josie tossed herself down in the chair across from Shelly, and the whole room erupted in cheers and laughter, as if the home team had just scored a touchdown. Two scholarly-looking guys at a table near the door high-fived each other. There were a few whistles, and a girl alone at a table in the corner looked up from her laptop, pumped her fist in the air. “You go, girl!” the cashier behind the counter shouted. The guy who was making cappuccinos and lattes stabbed a thumbs-up into the air, and even the mother with the toddler in the stroller who’d followed Shelly in from the cold and spoken to her so kindly was smiling.
Had something been said that Shelly hadn’t heard—something for which the boy deserved to be slapped? And if he had said something, could so many have heard it? Shelly herself hadn’t heard a thing until she’d heard the sound of the slap, and the girlfriend’s alarmed exclamations, and some of those hooting with approval had been sitting even farther from the scene than she was.
Of course, had that boy slapped Josie he would have been tackled by the very guys who were high-fiving one another now. The police would have been called. The boy would have been taken out of Starbucks in handcuffs.
Josie was pink-cheeked, her lips parted. She wasn’t smiling, but neither did she look particularly upset.
“What happened?” Shelly asked, trying to sound more concerned than she felt, more alarmed. What she wanted was to get out of there.
“Fucking asshole,” Josie said. “He lives with somebody I hate.”
“Who?” Shelly asked, and Josie muttered a name. Shelly leaned forward and asked again. “Who?”
“Craig Clements-Rabbitt,” Josie said, exasperated, as if Shelly had been badgering her about it for days. “He’s this jerk who—”
“The boy who was in the car crash,” Shelly said—and as she said it, her own voice sounded to her like someone else’s. A narrator’s voice. The distant voice of a storyteller. An omniscient narrator. A narrator who’d known all the facts all along but had chosen to reveal them slowly. “Craig Clements-Rabbitt,” she repeated, not to Josie, but to herself. “You knew him.”
Josie snorted, and rolled her eyes. “Yeah. I knew him,” she said. “He’s a liar and a womanizer and he deserves everything that’s coming to him—and, believe me, it will be bad, what’s coming to him.”
“You think he killed your roommate,” Shelly said. “Nicole. Your friend.”
Josie didn’t deny it, although she’d yet to tell Shelly that she’d been the dead girl’s roommate. And in all that had passed between them since, Shelly had never asked.
But now, if there’d ever been a reason to deny it, there was no longer any reason, and no more denying it. Josie shrugged, and said, “Yeah. That’s part of it.”
It was a dismissal.
Yes, he might have killed her friend, but there was something even worse he’d done.
“What did he do, Josie?”
Josie waved her question away, and said, “It doesn’t matter now. He’s going to pay.”
“He’s already paid,” Shelly said, trying to keep her voice from trembling. “I was at the scene of the accident. I saw what happened. And what didn’t happen.”