she was at all times. Anything I could do to show her I wasn’t him was a good thing, so I settled for playing my banjo and thinking about her and hoping Ric would remember what I said tomorrow and leave us the hell alone.
***
Ric was gone when I got up the next morning, and from a quick look outside, so was her car. Damn. I just hoped she’d been sober enough to get home without having a fender bender. She didn’t leave a note or anything, and her calls went straight to voicemail when I tried to check up on her. I was just putting on a new shirt so I could go to her place and make sure she was ok when someone banged on my door.
“Stryker! I swear to God, you never answer your fucking phone!” Trish.
I yanked the door open.
“What? You came to yell at me some more?” Then I saw that she’d been crying. Trish never cried. It was a bit like seeing the moon rise in the morning instead of the sun.
“Ric was in an accident early this morning. She…um, she didn’t survive.”
Katie
It was going to take more than a week to catch up on just the reading that I’d missed while I was gone, but my brain wouldn’t focus. Things like school seemed so pointless. I mean, what was it for? I didn’t even have a major, didn’t have any idea what I wanted to study or do with my life. I thought that once I got to college, I’d have some sort of epiphany, like in a movie, and it would all be clear what my true calling was. Yeah, I was still waiting for that call. It had me on hold and the music sucked.
Once my eyes started to swim, Lottie and I called it a night.
“Can you believe Trish’s real name?” Lottie said as we both lay in our beds with the lights off. I didn’t think either of us felt like sleeping.
“I can’t believe that was what she was so pissed about. I mean, really? Trish doesn’t seem like the type to get that royally ticked over something like that.”
“I don’t know, did you see how she got when Nicholas Sparks was brought up? I thought she was going to strangle us all.”
“True.” Still, there was something nagging me about the way Trish had been treating Stryker.
“Crazy, she gets,” Lottie said.
“Amen.”
We said goodnight, but I knew I wasn’t going to sleep. Most nights I spent in thinking about anything I could to get myself to be tired. I’d started reading when I was home to try to bore myself to sleep, but I’d ended up staying up all night and kind of liking the books. My parents didn’t have many in the house, but my dad had a small collection of classics. I’d had to read them in high school and I’d been bored to tears, but maybe it was because I didn’t have to read them now that I liked them.
Once I heard Lottie’s deep breathing, I snuck out of my bed and went to her overstuffed shelves. She had pretty much anything, and I knew from living with her which books were where.
I went for a historical fiction. Lots of ballgowns and gentlemen kissing women on the hand and declaring their undying love with beautiful poetry. That was exactly what I needed. I had a flashlight in my desk for emergencies, and I tucked myself under my covers so the light wouldn’t bother Lottie and started reading.
I turned the pages, the hours passed and my eyes stayed open. In the part of my mind that wasn’t focused on the book, I thought about Stryker. Would I have slept better if Stryker was here? Probably.
When the daylight started creeping under my covers, I put the book back and settled back on my bed so I could at least get a few hours of sleep. My eyes had barely closed when Lottie’s alarm went off and her groan followed a few seconds later.
So much for sleep.
***
“You sure you’re ready to be back?” Lottie said as we got dressed. We were all going to breakfast, and I’d texted Stryker to ask him to come, but he hadn’t messaged me back, which wasn’t unusual. He also wasn’t a morning person.
I shoved my foot into one of my calf-high boots and zipped them up. “I don’t really have a choice. I need something to fill up my time, and my parents paid