Fade Out

“I’m considering it.” Some of the aggression faded out of him, replaced by curiosity. “Why are you challenging me, Eve?”

“Why shouldn’t I? We’re not exactly besties,” Eve said. “And besides, you’re a jerk.”

He smiled, but it wasn’t a nice sort of smile. “And how have I offended you recently?”

“You were totally going to screw us over last night, weren’t you?”

Oliver’s smile faded. “I came when Amelie called. As I always do.”

“Until you don’t, right? Sooner or later, she’s going to ring the little bell and faithful servant Ollie isn’t going to show up to save her ass. That’s the plan. Death by slacking, and you don’t even get your hands dirty.”

“And how is that any business of yours, in any case?” Oliver’s eyes were dark, very dark, and full of secrets that Claire wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

“It’s not. I just don’t like you.” Eve tapped her talons again. “Mocha?”

He glanced at Claire’s blistered face and said, without too much sympathy, “That’s quite disfiguring.”

“I know.”

“A week should see it right.” Which was, weirdly, kind of comforting in its dismissal of her problems. “Very well, mocha.” But he didn’t leave. Eve widened her eyes and looked irritated.

“What?”

“It’s customary to pay for things you buy.”

“Oh, come on. . . .”

“Four fifty.”

Claire dug a five-dollar bill from the pocket of her jeans and handed it over. Oliver left.

“Why are you doing that?” she asked Eve, a little anxiously. Because hey, it was cool and everything, to get in Oliver’s face, but it was also not exactly safe.

“Because they cast him as Mitch, which means I have to pretend to actually like the dude. Ugh.”

“Oh, the play. Right. I, uh, looked it up. Looks interesting.” Claire said that kind of halfheartedly, because it didn’t, at least to her. It sounded like a lot of middle-aged people having melodrama.

“It is interesting,” Eve said, and brightened up immediately. “Blanche is sort of really the symbol of the way women oppress themselves; she just can’t live without a man. Come to think of it, based on that, I guess Oliver’s casting was genius.”

“So . . . you’re playing a woman who can’t live without a man?”

“It’s a stretch, but the director wanted to do this post-modern kind of take on it, so he went with Goth girls for Blanche and Stella.”

“Goth girls, plural,” Claire repeated. “I kind of thought you were the only one in town.”

“Not quite.”

“Eve? You 911ed me?”

“Oh—uh, yeah, I did. I wanted you to meet—oh, there she is! Kim!”

Claire looked around. A girl had just come in the door of the coffee shop, not quite as Goth as Eve, but quite a bit farther down the curve than anybody else in the room. She had long black hair, dyed jet-black, with bubble-gum pink stripes. Her makeup was mostly eyeliner. She wore less-outrageous stuff, but what she did wear seemed kind of grim—black cargo pants, plain black shirt,black leather wristband, which had (of course) a vampire symbol on it.

Kim had signed up with a vampire named Valerie, apparently. Claire didn’t know much about her, but she supposed that was a good thing. If nobody was talking about her, Valerie was probably playing by the rules. Mostly.

“Hey, Eve,” Kim said, and slid into the third chair at the small table. “Who’s the burn victim?”

Claire felt herself stiffen, she just couldn’t stop herself. “I’m Claire,” she said, and forced a smile. “Hi.”

“Hey,” Kim said, and dropped Claire like a bad boyfriend to focus on Eve. “Oh my God, did you hear they cast Stanley?”

“No! Who?” Eve leaned forward, wide-eyed. “God, tell me it’s not that kid from high school.”

“No. Guess again.”

“Um . . . no clue.”

“Radovic.”

“Get out!” Eve jiggled in her chair, grabbed Kim’s hands, and then they both let out a wild, high-pitched scream of excitement.

Claire blinked as a mocha was thumped down in front of her. She looked up at Oliver, who was studying her with cool, distant eyes. He raised his eyebrows, didn’t speak, and went back to his job.

“Who’s Radovic?” Claire asked, since he seemed to be the most exciting thing since indoor plumbing. She couldn’t remember which character Stanley was, but she thought he was the wife-beating rapist—not somebody she felt inclined to squeal over.

“He runs the motorcycle shop,” Eve said. “Big biker dude, shaved head, muscles TDF.”

“TDF?” Claire cocked her head. “Oh. To die for.” She lowered her voice. “So, is he . . . you know?” She mimed fangs. Both of the Goth girls laughed.

“Hell no,” Kim said. “Rad? He’s just cool, that’s all. In that dangerous kind of way. I think he’s way more scary than any of them I ever met.” By which she meant vampires.

“I guess we don’t meet the same ones,” Claire said.

“Because mine? Plenty scary.” And . . . she knew that all of a sudden, she was trying to one-up Kim, and she didn’t like that about herself. She also didn’t like Eve and Kim being besties all of a sudden while she was sitting like a poor, pathetic lump on the sidelines with her disfigured face, with Oliver bringing her sympathy mocha.

That was just sad.

Kim barely glanced at her. “Yeah?” She sounded totally uninterested. “Hey, E, can I catch a ride to rehearsal tonight? Would you mind?”

“Nope. Hey, can I come in and see what you’re working on?” Eve threw Claire a quick smile. “Kim’s kind of an avant-garde artist. She’s really cool; I love her stuff.” There was a real glow in Eve’s eyes, an excitement that made Claire feel cold and a little pissed off.

I’m your friend, she wanted to say. I’m cool, too, right?

So she wasn’t some weird artist type who made art out of used toilet paper rolls and chicken bones—so what? What made that cool, anyway?

Eve didn’t hear all the mental arguments. Kim said something about the script, and they both got out their copies and flipped pages, talking about theme and motif and things Claire honestly couldn’t care less about, because she was now officially in a miserable mood.

She gulped the mocha as fast as humanly possible, given that Oliver had heated it up to the surface temperature of lava. She felt truly betrayed, not just because Eve had dragged her into the middle of Common Grounds with her face looking like undercooked hamburger, but because she was sitting there chattering away with Kim, ignoring Claire’s presence entirely now.

As Claire got up, though, Eve blinked and looked at her. “You’re leaving?”

“Yeah.” Claire couldn’t bring herself to sound too apologetic. “I need to get home.”

“Oh. I’m sorry, I just thought—I thought you’d like to meet Kim, that’s all. Because she’s cool.”

“It’s nice to meet you,” Kim said. She didn’t sound all that sincere about it, but more like she wished Claire would hurry up and hit the bricks so she could get back to her BFF-fest with Eve. “Hey, you guys live in that house with Michael Glass and Shane Collins, right? What a couple of hotties!”

Claire didn’t like that Kim had even noticed Shane, much less knew his last name. Eve didn’t seem to mind at all. She just nodded, eyes wide. “They are, right? Man candy. We know!”

Claire grabbed her backpack. “I really have to go.”

“Claire—you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she said. Kim was kind of smirking at her behind her drink, and Claire had a wild impulse to dump that coffee all over her.

But she didn’t.

“Bye?” Eve said, and made it a kind of pathetic question. Claire didn’t answer. She just pushed past Kim’s chair, not being too careful about it, and headed for the door.

Behind her, she heard Kim’s clear, carrying voice say, “Wow, what crawled up her ass and didn’t die?”

Claire threw a venomous look back over her shoulder, and saw Oliver watching her with a very slight frown grooving his forehead. Eve looked stricken, clearly surprised at Claire’s departure. Kim . . . Kim wasn’t even watching her. She just lifted one shoulder in an I-can’t-be-bothered shrug.