Страница 51 из 64
“You don’t need to be spending any extra time around Sunshine Club members,” I said. “The last thing we need is for people to figure out that you’re a filthy traitor.”
Kasey’s mouth fell open.
“Joking,” I said.
“Not fu
“I’ll think of something fu
* * *
I pounded on the door. Adrie
“Alexis? What’s wrong?”
“Are you going somewhere?”
“What do you mean?”
And then I realized that this was just how she dressed now. How we all dressed now.
“Never mind. I was hoping we could talk,” I said. “About Aralt.”
Every Sunshine Club girl’s favorite topic. Her eyes lit up, and she led me over to the di
“Where did you get the book?” I asked.
The lights turned off. The glow faded. She mashed her lips together and looked away.
“Adrie
She fixed her eyes on the ceiling. “Here’s the thing, Alexis. I’m really not supposed to say.”
For all I knew, she really wasn’t. Maybe that was one of Aralt’s rules.
“Can I see it?”
She shook her head furiously. “No,” she said. “I’m sorry. You can’t.”
“I won’t touch it,” I said. “I just think it’s so pretty.”
She gave me an apologetic frown. “I know,” she said. “It totally is. Except…it’s not here.”
“Where is it?”
For a moment there was a flash of distrust across her features. But then she folded her hands and looked directly at me. “It’s at Lydia’s house.”
“But why?”
“Lydia thought it would be safer there.”
“Safer from what?” I asked.
Adrie
“I’m sorry, wait,” I said. “Did you say it’s Lydia’s book? Kasey told me it was yours.”
Her eyes went wide and she clapped both hands over her mouth.
“No, it’s fine,” I said. “I won’t tell her you said anything.”
“But I promised!” Adrie
“What’s there to be embarrassed about?”
“I don’t know. I think because it’s about, like, being popular and pretty, and Lydia never wanted people to think she cared about those things. But we wouldn’t judge her.…” She gave me a questioning glance.
That was my cue. “No, never!”
“I tried to tell her that, but she seriously didn’t want people to know it was her book. She asked me to say it was mine. And what did I care, you know? I knew I was a loser. Everybody knew.”
“So she brought it to your house and asked you to lie?” I asked.
“No, not to lie,” Adrie
“But she didn’t think it would be safe here?” I took a chance. “Didn’t Tashi have it for a while? And she was a total stranger.”
“Tashi wasn’t a stranger to Lydia,” Adrie
“I want to know as much about Aralt as possible,” I said. “I don’t care how Lydia and Tashi met. I care about making sure the book is safe.”
“Of course,” Adrie
I dialed it back and spent a few more minutes making polite small talk. But my body practically quivered with impatience to leave. Adrie
I had bigger fish to fry.
The Smalls’ house wasn’t just a little house in a shabby neighborhood. It was sloppy. There was something distasteful about the little signs of neglect—junk mail scattered on the porch. A trash bag leaning against the steps, waiting for who-knows-how-long to be taken all the way out.
I rang the doorbell, and a man answered it—Mr. Small. He wore a pair of jeans and a wrinkled plaid button-down shirt that looked like it had been caught in a dust storm.
“Hello,” he said, polite but baffled.
“Is Lydia home?” I asked.
He turned and stared at the empty room behind him. “She ran out.…Was she expecting you?”
“No,” I said. “I guess not.”
“Well, come on in. She just went to the store. She should be back soon.” He glanced at the clock. “I told her I’d need the car at nine thirty, so it shouldn’t be more than fifteen minutes.”
He pointed me toward the tiny living room, where a huge, modern sofa was stuffed awkwardly against the wall. I recognized it from back when Lydia and I would watch TV and talk about how much we hated everyone. It was totally out of place in the new house.
“Can I get you a glass of water?” Mr. Small asked.
“No, thank you.” Noticing the way he kept glancing at the stairs, I said, “Don’t let me keep you. I’ll be fine waiting here.”
He hovered in the doorway. “Oh, well…if you don’t mind…”
“Please,” I said.
He smiled and went around a corner, and I heard thumping footfalls on the staircase.
All of a sudden, the silence was broken by a shock of loud music—a weird smooth jazzy sound, mixed with awkward melodic riffs—coming from a keyboard, by the sound of it.
The song went on and on. I couldn’t help but compare it to Tashi’s playing, so heartfelt, so passionate, with so much subtlety and emotion behind it. Mr. Small seemed to be banging the keys randomly with boxing gloves.
A few minutes later, the front door opened with a creak, and a disheveled Lydia came in, arms loaded up with bulging grocery bags. She stopped just inside the door and looked up at the ceiling, taking in the music.
“Oh, come on,” she muttered.
Then she noticed me.
Her face turned bright pink, like I’d been digging through her underwear drawer. She dropped her bags and raced out of the room. The keyboard playing stopped abruptly, and the sound of Lydia’s outraged voice blasted down from upstairs.
A minute later, she returned, trying incredibly hard to stay in control.
“So sorry about that.…Give me one sec to put this stuff away.” The whites of her eyes showed over the tops of her irises, making her look completely rabid-chipmunk insane. She half-carried, half-dragged the bags out of sight, and after a fair amount of clanking and thumping, she came back and sat, her hands folded in her lap. “Now. How can I help you?”
I noticed a thick layer of concealer under her eyes. And her lipstick leached away from her mouth in tiny red rivers. She was tired.
“Something’s going on, Lyd,” I said. “This whole Tashi thing is messed up.”
“What are we supposed to do about it?” she asked. “Honestly, Alexis. Face reality. I don’t like it either, but she’s gone.”
“Yes, but where did she go? Didn’t she say anything to you?”
“When would she have done that?”
“When she told you she was leaving. When she gave you the book.”
She looked at me blankly.
“I know it’s here, okay?”
She sighed and leaned back. “Tashi wasn’t who she claimed to be. She was totally using us. She walked up to me at the mall one day, all talky-talky-let’s-be-friends. We were hanging out, and she mentioned this book she had. She acted like it was something she’d picked up at a garage sale. She was lying, obviously.”
“But you brought her to the party,” I said. “You gave the book to Adrie
“I told you before,” she said, glaring, “I did it as a joke, okay? I was going to make fun of them for being naive. How was I supposed to know Aralt was so amazing?”
“Why did you tell Adrie
“I never said that,” she said, shaking her head. “I asked her to say it was hers, not that it wasn’t mine. It’s not mine. It never was. It’s Tashi’s.”
“But now she’s gone, and she just left it here?”
There were footsteps on the stairs, and Mr. Small appeared. Over his clothes, he wore a black apron with SCHNELKER’S HARDWARE embroidered on the front.