and hat and headed out the back door.
She shut her mouth, still trying to figure out how she felt. Mostly she just seemed...confused.
Eve was in the kitchen making pancakes. Alone.
"Morning, girlfriend," Eve said, and dumped some lumpy batter into a hot pan, where it immediately started to sizzle. "You look like you need carbs."
"Totally," Claire said, and sat down to rest her forehead in both hands. "Thanks."
"Yeah, no problem. Here." Eve grabbed a mug, filled it with coffee, and slid it to her on the table. "Caffeine. Makes the world all bright and sparkly, or maybe that's just me. Look, I gave you the fun mug."
In Eve's world, it was. It was a coffee mug with a dead-guy chalk outline on it, and it said he had decaf.
Claire mixed the coffee with all the things that made coffee drinking possible for her--milk, sugar, a little cinnamon--and sat nursing it, staring into the light brown surface but not seeing anything. She couldn't think. All she could do was...feel awful.
She needed to tell Eve, but saying it out loud would make it all real.MIT wants me to go there . Because part of her was so excited it was vibrating apart, and the other part, the practical part...that was crying. Did shewant to go...leave behind Morganville? Well, yes, obviously. But that meant leaving the people, too. Eve. Michael. Myrnin.Shane.
She wanted to talk about that, badly, but she just...couldn't. Not yet.
"Incoming!" Eve said, and as Claire looked up, slid a plate in front of her with two thick, steaming pancakes. A pat of butter melted like lava on top, and Eve thumped down a bottle of syrup. "Everything
gets better with pancakes. It's a law of the universe. Bonus for bacon, but we're out."
Eve had a plate, too, and sat down opposite her. Claire hadn't noticed, but Eve was makeup-free this morning, and her Goth-black hair was tied back in a simple ponytail. Even her clothes were subdued, or as much as Eve ever got--a form-hugging tee with a black-on-black skull design and a pair of black jeans. She picked up her fork and dug into her own plate.
Claire just watched the butter melt and poked at the pancakes a little. She dragged her fork through the syrup and spelled outMIT . Finally, she took a bite. They were good, really good, but as soon as she started to chew, tears came to her eyes and she could hardly swallow. She coughed to cover it, but Eve was watching her with a steady kind of focus that made it unnecessary.
"Hey," Eve said. "You know you can talk to me, right? About anything?"
Not about that. Not yet. But the other thing, yes. "Shane hates me," Claire said in a very small voice, and dragged her fork through the moat of syrup around the fortress of pancakes.
"Seriously?" Eve waited for Claire's nod before eating a bite of pancakes. She chewed and swallowed before she said, "Sorry, Claire Bear. He doesn't."
"You didn't hear what he said to me last night." That did it--the tears came now, for real, and she picked up her napkin and tried to wipe them away with shaking hands. God, what a mess she was.
"I heard what he said this morning before he blew out of here. He was angry at himself, not you--or, at least, more than at you. He said you'd gotten dragged away by Myrnin last night and he'd acted like a dick about it. Isn't that what happened?"
"Well, sort of. He was right--Idid go off with Myrnin."
"On a job."
"Yeah."
"Not on a date."
"Oh, God, no!"
"Then Shane acted like an ass, and he's got nothing to be jealous about, and he knows it. I saw him, Claire. Believe me, he knows he was wrong. He feels bad."
"Then why--?"Why didn't he come talk to me? Why didn't he try? Why did he just...leave?
"He's cooling down. It's a guy thing," Eve said. "He'll be okay when he gets back. And you? He said you were all angry about him watching sexy commercials on TV, which, frankly, is weird--you being mad about it, not him watching them, because I'm pretty sure teen boys get a pass on that. They can't help hitting the pause button when the half-naked girls show up."
"No, that wasn't it. It was--" She replayed it in her mind. A blur, a flutter of curtains. Whispers and laughter in the dark.
In the end, nothing she could truly say wasn't just a product of her tired mind and of jealousy.
"I thought he