"Radovic."
"Get out!" Eve jiggled in her chair, grabbed Kim's hands, and then they both let out a wild, high-pitched scream of excitement.
Claire blinked as a mocha was thumped down in front of her. She looked up at Oliver, who was studying her with cool, distant eyes. He raised his eyebrows, didn't speak, and went back to his job.
"Who's Radovic?" Claire asked, since he seemed to be the most exciting thing since indoor plumbing. She couldn't remember which character Stanley was, but she thought he was the wife-beating ra**st - not somebody she felt inclined to squeal over.
"He runs the motorcycle shop," Eve said. "Big biker dude, shaved head, muscles TDF."
"TDF?" Claire cocked her head. "Oh. To die for." She lowered her voice. "So, is he . . . you know?" She mimed fangs. Both of the Goth girls laughed.
"Hell no," Kim said. "Rad? He's just cool, that's all. In that dangerous kind of way. I think he's way more scary than any of them I ever met." By which she meant vampires.
"I guess we don't meet the same ones," Claire said.
"Because mine? Plenty scary." And . . . she knew that all of a sudden, she was trying to one-up Kim, and she didn't like that about herself. She also didn't like Eve and Kim being besties all of a sudden while she was sitting like a poor, pathetic lump on the sidelines with her disfigured face, with Oliver bringing her sympathy mocha.
That was just sad.
Kim barely glanced at her. "Yeah?" She sounded totally uninterested. "Hey, E, can I catch a ride to rehearsal tonight? Would you mind?"
"Nope. Hey, can I come in and see what you're working on?" Eve threw Claire a quick smile. "Kim's kind of an avant-garde artist. She's really cool; I love her stuff." There was a real glow in Eve's eyes, an excitement that made Claire feel cold and a little pissed off. I'm your friend, she wanted to say. I'm cool, too, right? So she wasn't some weird artist type who made art out of used toilet paper rolls and chicken bones - so what? What made that cool, anyway?
Eve didn't hear all the mental arguments. Kim said something about the script, and they both got out their copies and flipped pages, talking about theme and motif and things Claire honestly couldn't care less about, because she was now officially in a miserable mood.
She gulped the mocha as fast as humanly possible, given that Oliver had heated it up to the surface temperature of lava. She felt truly betrayed, not just because Eve had dragged her into the middle of Common Grounds with her face looking like undercooked hamburger, but because she was sitting there chattering away with Kim, ignoring Claire's presence entirely now.
As Claire got up, though, Eve blinked and looked at her. "You're leaving?"
"Yeah." Claire couldn't bring herself to sound too apologetic. "I need to get home."
"Oh. I'm sorry, I just thought - I thought you'd like to meet Kim, that's all. Because she's cool."
"It's nice to meet you," Kim said. She didn't sound all that sincere about it, but more like she wished Claire would hurry up and hit the bricks so she could get back to her BFF-fest with Eve. "Hey, you guys live in that house with Michael Glass and Shane Collins, right? What a couple of hotties!"
Claire didn't like that Kim had even noticed Shane, much less knew his last name. Eve didn't seem to mind at all. She just nodded, eyes wide. "They are, right? Man candy. We know!"
Claire grabbed her backpack. "I really have to go."
"Claire - you okay?"
"I'm fine," she said. Kim was kind of smirking at her behind her drink, and Claire had a wild impulse to dump that coffee all over her.
But she didn't.
"Bye?" Eve said, and made it a kind of pathetic question. Claire didn't answer. She just pushed past Kim's chair, not being too careful about it, and headed for the door.
Behind her, she heard Kim's clear, carrying voice say, "Wow, what crawled up her ass and didn't die?"
Claire threw a venomous look back over her shoulder, and saw Oliver watching her with a very slight frown grooving his forehead. Eve looked stricken, clearly surprised at Claire's departure. Kim . . . Kim wasn't even watching her. She just lifted one shoulder in an I-can't-be-bothered shrug.
Then Claire was outside, taking deep breaths of the dry air and lifting her face to the sudden, swirling push of the wind. Sand hissed over the sidewalk, blown in from the desert.
Claire, miserably aware that she was in a horrible mood, walked home with the feeling that everyone, absolutely everyone, was watching her.
Chapter Four
4