Alice’s beautiful words.
When I see my Alice’s incredible pencil sketches of the Red Queen falling in love with her Alice, I want to pretend it’s actually us falling in love. Maybe it isn’t pretending at all.
With a flick of a thumb, the direct messages feature appears on my screen. My chat with Alice is at the top.
Curious-in-Cheshire 3:41p: Incredible.
I hit send. I’m not finished gushing.
Curious-in-Cheshire 3:42p: This is even better than I could have imagined.
Curious-in-Cheshire 3:42p: I won’t be home tonight, but let’s talk tomorrow, okay?
Alice isn’t online, so there is no answer.
Sometimes she’ll pop online a second or two after I message her, but she doesn’t this time.
With an overdramatic swoosh, Rhodes swings her long legs over the side of the bed and pushes herself to standing. “If we want to get dinner before we go out tonight, we should probably get going.”
She doesn’t wait to see if we’re following her. One minute she’s standing in the middle of the dorm room, and the next the door is slamming behind her and she’s already halfway down the hall with her eyes on her phone.
“You sure you want to do this?” I ask Sarah, who remains frozen in her spot on the bed next to me.
Sarah flicks at her septum ring with one chipped black thumbnail. “You’re both my best friends. I don’t want to think about my birthday without either of you.”
I hand Sarah her dad’s Walkman cassette player—the small, simple connection between Sarah and her obsession with terrible music from the nineties. With a quiet glance at the door, Sarah takes a second to pop the Antestor cassette into the cradle before she clips it onto her hip.
I’m the first to march to the door. Sarah’s reflection in the closet door mirror breaks my heart: She rubs her face with both hands and swipes under her lower lashes with her middle fingers to tidy the liner rimming her eyes. Her shoulders tug toward the floor, and with a frown, she grabs her keys from on top of the microwave to lock their dorm room door behind us. When my phone finally pings again with a Slash/Spot notification on the way to the car, I’m in no position to answer it.
CHAPTER 2
RHODES
We all have that one friend we make poor choices with, one who gives you permission to leave your problems in the rearview mirror and only focus on what’s in front of you. The kind that wouldn’t know a good decision if it slapped her in the face, that pulls you into her vortex of weird ideas, and family drama, and cassette tapes of nineties Christian metal bands because they’re the only topic she and her dad know how to talk about.
She’s my roommate and my “manic pixie dream girl.”
It isn’t flattering for either of us to admit I think of her that way, even if it’s only a 99 percent platonic MPDG situation and I’m not actually objectifying anyone.
But still: I know it.
She knows it.
And I also know that tonight I chipped off a little piece of her “manic pixie dream girl” heart earlier. I don’t know why I did it. I don’t know why I act that way, and I don’t know why I lash out at her when it’s Iliana I hate, and I don’t know what I’m doing here tonight at all.
I don’t deserve to be her friend, and I wish she would have just done what I feel like she probably wanted to do (and the thing I know Iliana would have wanted): to tell me to stay home.
Sarah’s eyes are rimmed in heavy black liner that screams against her pale skin, and she seems to have largely forgotten about our three-way suckfest back in the dorms before dinner. She’s a peroxide-bleached blur in the dark, running and laughing with the handles of painter’s buckets swung over each arm, her dad’s red-and-blue flannel button-down billowing behind her with each blast of chilly autumn wind. Iliana Vrionides’s short legs pump twice as fast to get her half as far as the rest of us, and her body practically vibrates with tension: Her shoulders are tense, and her hands are balled where they swing at her sides. She’s Venus of Willendorf, short and strong and feminine in shredded jeans and a shirt that reads “unapologetically fat.” Ninety-seven percent humidity has given her honeyed curls sentience.
I don’t need to be Iliana’s friend anymore to know what she’s thinking: Not again.
She’s eighteen now, and trouble will stay