The Girl Who Stopped Swimming - By Joshilyn Jackson Page 0,87

that mimicked the pattern of tiny climbing roses around the edges of the real china. She’d make the plates out of a mix of glass and fabric or the piece would be too heavy to hang right.

She needed to bag the pieces of each plate separately, as much as was possible, so they’d be easier to puzzle into wholes later. She snapped a few more pictures, getting close to a plate that had broken into seven large pieces, and discovered a dark hardwood star created in the space between. She snapped it several times; she’d re-create this pattern over and over, quilting it into the coats of the happy dogs and diners’ clothes.

At last she lowered the camera and looked up at David. He was standing in the foyer, his bare feet flat on the floor, a yard or so back from the shrapnel.

“I am sorry about your dishes,” she said.

“These are mine?” David said. “Why do I have dishes?”

“Your mother gave them to us. They were— Never mind. Thank you.”

“You want Ziploc bags?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, surprised. “The big heavy ones for freezing things.”

He was already leaning over and setting down her coffee cup on the floor, exchanging it for a box of the right kind of bags. He’d had them set out by the doorway. He tossed the box to her across the glass. She caught it and stared at it, this solid cardboard rectangle in her hands, the proof she hadn’t found upstairs in her jewel box.

She set it down unopened, looking from the box to him and back again. He’d known what she would see when she looked at this room. He’d saved it for her, and he’d known what she would need, down to the bags. It was a declaration, bald and obvious, though almost as inarticulate as Bet’s had been.

“You love me,” she said for him. He’d never been good with the talking parts.

His hands came up by his shoulders, and he flicked his fingers sideways in an “of course” gesture.

“Then what the hell are you doing with Kaitlyn Reese?”

“Not a damn thing,” said David, vehement.

“She’s pretty,” Laurel said. “And she likes you.” He flicked his fingers again, dismissively this time, and she added, “Oh, but you didn’t notice.”

“Of course I noticed,” David said. “So she’s pretty. So’s Famke Janssen.”

“Who?”

“Movie actress. She looks like a little deer in the face.”

Laurel trailed her fingers along the plush carpet and said, “You don’t have lunch with Famke Janssen. She’s not real.”

“Okay,” David said. “Your friend Mindy next door is pretty. I notice. I notice that Eva down the street.”

“But you don’t—” Laurel said, and then stopped. “Eva Bailey? Trish Deerbold’s friend?” David nodded, and she said, “Her hair doesn’t even move!”

He flushed and said, “But the body,” and then he waved one hand back and forth as if erasing Eva’s body from the conversation. “We’re off topic. I’m a man, Laurel. I notice how women look.”

“It’s not the same,” Laurel said. “Body aside, you can’t stand Eva Bailey. This is the first time I’ve ever heard you use her name in a sentence that didn’t have the word ‘vapid’ in it. I saw you, David, with Kaitlyn. You talked to her like—I don’t know what. Like you’ve never talked to me.”

That was the heart of it. Saying it out loud, she felt every inch of distance between them. The line of duct tape was a wall. She could feel how uneven the floor was under the carpet runner; she was kneeling on crushed glass. He put one hand over his mouth, thinking. Then he dropped it away, and his hands hung by his sides.

“I didn’t like it when you asked me if I was only here because of Shelby. I wanted you before that, when we first met. I wanted to get you a different way, with dinners. Flowers. All that stuff girls like. I didn’t know how to do that. Then Shelby happened. You remember how scared you were when you came to tell me? I wasn’t. It was a shortcut to someplace I was heading anyway.”

She stood up, feeling the glass shift under her feet, breaking down further. She said, “You never told me that.”

“Maybe not,” he said. “But I used to sit around while your friends yakked about that TV show with the people who slept with each other and then had fights about it. I’d work on proving that week’s extra-credit theorem in my head while they talked. They sounded like