“If you say so.”
“Go ahead,” I told her. “You want to rage at me. I’m listening.”
“Fine. Okay.” Rachel stopped walking and planted herself squarely but gawkily, as if she’d been given a stage direction she wasn’t sure how to implement. “Here’s the deal. When you first came back from Addington, I know you were unsteady, but I swear, I felt like I finally recognized you. You’d been so distant, so out of touch those weeks before your accident. Right in the beginning, we were back. We were real, true friends again.”
“Of course we’re real, true friends, Smarty—this is, like, a blip.”
“It’s not.” Color stained all the way across Rachel’s cheeks. “For you to take off from the party last night. For you to keep me in the dark while you make me cover for you. For you to not be in touch, to totally drop out of our plans together—how’s that supposed to make me feel? And it’s not just about last night. What about Halloween? What about your wonderful idea to jump in a cab with some stranger and leave me to deal with that?”
“You had Jake,” I said faintly.
“Whatever, Ember. I’d just started hanging out with him that night. You didn’t know if or how that was working out. But since we’re speaking of Jake, sometimes when I tell you I’m doing stuff with Jake, you look relieved. As if you’d way rather be by yourself. I guess the point I’m trying to make is that I feel like you’re disappearing from me again.” She gulped, braving it. “Why?”
I had to tell her; there was no real reason not to. “Smarty, I’ve met someone,” I answered. “The guy from Halloween.”
“That same one, Kai, who was in the cab that took off?”
I nodded. “And I don’t know exactly what’s going on between us. But I do know he’s been on my mind a lot, I guess. More than our plans, more than school. More than anything else. It’s hard to explain.”
Rachel crossed her arms and stepped back. To anyone else walking down the hall, she’d have seemed casual, in control. But I knew the agitation of my best friend’s gaze on me. I’d seen it since she was little, when she used to worry that I’d use up all her yellow paint, since that was her favorite color. “So this person, Kai, is someone you don’t ever want to introduce me to?”
“It’s more like he’s not someone I want to share right now. Not while I’m trying to work things out with him. I guess what I’m saying is I need my space.”
Rachel flinched, as if my words were a stick that had poked her. “Fine, Embie, okay. I can handle that. He can be your secret Mr. Wonderful; I’ve got no problem with that. But don’t shut me out completely, either. I mean, come on…” Her voice trembled, and I knew she was trying to keep it together. “Best friends since kindergarten should count for something. And I still want to be friends—if you just tell me how.”
But Rachel had said this to me before, last year. We’d had this fight…I could feel the reverberations of it, a distant ripple through my brain. “Let’s talk about all of this later, okay? Or I’ll be late for yearbook,” I said. “I’ll come find you after, and we can hang out.”
“Only if you want,” she said quietly. “Don’t do it as a favor to me, Ember.”
I nodded. “Right.” She knew me too well, knew that I ached to make it better. But in half confessing Kai, I’d put her on guard, and I was thankful that I didn’t run into Rachel again—though it took some careful footwork, including leaving campus to hit the corner soup kiosk for lunch and skipping my last afternoon class.
Mom was waiting for me as I walked in the front door.
“So I thought you could take me on an errand!” She tossed me the car keys. “I need to get to the post office. I already took the car out of the garage, so we’re set.”
“Oh! Cool.” I’d assumed that Mom was either going to “forget” about my request to drive today or put up a resistance when I reminded her. “Let’s go.”
Unlike the station wagon, the Prius handled light and silent. Sort of like maneuvering a paraglider after steering a barge. With Mom buckled in, I eased it gingerly out onto the road, then began the journey by inching around the block, and finally onto Cadman Plaza.
The cold snap was here to stay, and there was a threat of rain in the wintry air; plus the Friday-afternoon rush hour was in full trafficky tension. Similar, I realized, to the conditions of that night. Which was not a good thing to dwell on.
“You can go a little faster,” Mom murmured. Mom was a good driver, and I’d liked to think I’d inherited her skill. I wondered if I’d ever be considered a “good” driver again.
A guy behind me zipped past me illegally, honking long as he leaned out his window.
“Learn how to drive, you idiot!”
“Some people.” Mom sighed. But as I pressed and released the gas-brake-gas, I knew that I was going too slow, second-guessing basic actions and overly attentive to the road rules. By the time we pulled up to the post office, I was sweaty with the effort.
“Stay here. I’ll be right out,” Mom promised.
I nodded, but after a minute or so I got out of the car myself, to buy a coffee at a corner food cart. I felt shaky, and flashbacks of this afternoon’s conversation with Smarty weren’t helping. Through my nerves, my longing for sleep was like a brick wall I could feel myself hurtling toward.
Back in the car, I leaned against the headrest and closed my eyes. The rapping on the window startled me. Hot liquid sloshed from my cup onto my wrist—“Oh!”—as I pressed the button to unroll the window.
It was Isabella from El Cielo. She looked even tinier in her street clothes—a beige plastic raincoat that flapped past her calves and a clear rain hat that poked up like a wizard’s cone to accommodate her bun.
“Ember.” Her eyes on me were a complicated fixation of sorrow and curiosity—the same as when she’d seen me at El Cielo.
I nodded.
“It was good that you came in, that night.”
“It was?”
“Yes. You were right to come.”
I stared, shy. My brain was a thick fog, offering me no certainty for what I was supposed to say next.
“And I want you to come back again,” she continued. “Come assist me in the kitchen. I watched your hands—how you wanted to chop, to work. I saw it in the way you were watching me. You want to learn. I will teach.” She touched her fingertips to her heart. “Ayúdame, and it will help us both.”