I want to reach out to, she writes. Start at your throat. Feel your pulse. Then reach down and…
…
…
What is this supposed to be? Is that a threat or a flirt? It’s hard to tell the difference.
Tell me more, I finally reply.
No, she says simply. I'll tell you more later.
After waiting for several minutes, the screen is still blank. She said I would have to wait, and I guess she was telling the truth.
Chapter 30
Dahlia
I have excellent coping skills, I'm told. When my mother passed away, I was a rock. It's my nature. I wasn’t in denial or anything, I just felt like a literal rock, letting everything flow over me. It could subtly modify my surface, but not move me from where I was. Pain washed through me. I tried to stay still and silent and accept it all.
My dad is more or less the same way. I probably get it from him. We try to accept things the way they are. If things got really rough we could focus on one another instead of focusing on ourselves. That helped a lot.
Even though my mom's cancer came on quickly we didn’t fool ourselves. We knew right away that pancreatic cancer wasn't something that people usually recover from. Usually they are taken away fairly quickly. It's an aggressive cancer, the sort that many times they don't even bother to treat, because the discomfort of treatment is not worth the remaining days of the victim.
Bunny relies on me for this quality. She's resourceful in her own way, too. She's a problem solver. She likes to get in the middle of things. Where I might be stoic, she's active and reaching out and creating strategies, sometimes causing as many problems as she solves.
Which brings me to this morning.
I'm sick. I am paralyzed with worry. Bunny told me she had a plan… but that plan is a dumpster fire. I haven't even been able to look at my phone again. It just sits next to me on my desk, face down, jiggling slightly every once in awhile to let me know that something is happening.
But I can't look.
When I saw what she had done, I was appalled. Appalled may not even be the right word for it. Outraged? Astonished? All of that and more. Horrified, even. Mortified.
When we were in her kitchen and her mother called, I thought that she was just going to step a little bit out of line. Set up a meeting with Kirkman. Handle the awkward moments of trying to convince August that he should allow me to meet with Kirkman to snap a selfie. I thought that was the plan.
But instead, she went completely off the rails. She started sending these messages to August that sound like… porn. I mean, who talks like that? I don't talk like that. And then she handed back the phone to me and told me I was supposed to continue the charade this morning.
With what? More pictures of my cleavage? I don't know how to do this. And even if I did know how to do this, does it make any sense anyway?
I really need to reconsider my friendship with Bunny. She is out of control.
Her excuse was that he came onto her. In some ways, I suppose that's true. He did seem perfectly willing to talk. Okay, maybe he even liked it a little bit when she suggested that she wanted to touch him…
Just thinking about it makes my stomach twist up like the top of a bread wrapper.
“Hey, are you okay?”
I startle, looking up from my computer like a deer in headlights. Lori leans on the side of my cubicle, running her tongue over her front teeth as she scans the rest of the room over my head suspiciously. She's always doing that, looking around as though she's on some kind of reconnaissance mission.
“Yeah, I'm okay… why do you ask?” I mutter, then remember to smile professionally at her. Hopefully, she's just using my desk as a lookout post, not here to actually talk to me.
“I was wondering if you had a chance to set up that meeting with Kirkman?”
My stomach sinks. Looks like she's here to talk to me, after all.
“Well, not just yet,” I dodge. “I can't even get confirmation that he's actually here, to be honest. But I did hear that Penn and Teller are coming to the Arcada Theatre? Do you want me to look into that? I hear lots of people hate them.”
She scowls and glances down at me, almost looks through me like she doesn't even see me for a second.