windows.
How can I hold a grudge against my mom for lying when I’m doing exactly the same thing? That makes me just as bad as her. Worse, because I’m not just hurting myself. I’m hurting Lucky, too.
What’s going to happen to him?
BEAUTY COURTHOUSE 1857: Chiseled into locally quarried marble, this sign graces the entrance of a historic municipal building on the town common. A disgruntled farmer once dragged the body of a dead sheep inside the lobby and a ship captain shot up the ceiling in protest of taxes. (Personal photo/Josephine Saint-Martin)
Chapter 5
It’s after one in the morning when we get back to the Nook and park in a designated spot tucked into a narrow side alley between us and the Revolutionary War–themed Freedom Art Gallery next door. As soon as we climb the rickety stairs to the above-shop apartment, Evie slides up to me in socks and attacks me with questions and apologies. Why did I leave the party? What was I thinking? Am I okay?
“I’m fine,” I lie.
“She wasn’t arrested,” Mom reports. “They just took her in with Lucky. He’s the one who broke the window, not Josie.”
“Lucky broke the window?” Evie says, brow furrowing.
Ugh. I ignore the tightness of my stomach and whisper to Evie, “Don’t tell her about the photo. I’m sorry for making everything worse.” Then I nearly start crying again.
“Don’t be stupid. You didn’t do anything,” she says, wrapping long arms around me. Then she murmurs in my ear: “I was wrong about everything. We shouldn’t have gone to that party. It’s the curse. It works in weird ways. I’m sorry you got hurt in the blowback.”
While Evie and I lean on each other, clinging, Mom relays the story to Evie about the window, asking me for details occasionally. Like Mom, Evie seems to buy the lie. And I let her. Because I don’t know what else to do.
Well. That’s not exactly true.
I know I could confess. There are, in fact, several moments in the conversation when I think Right now! Do it now! Just tell them! But I hesitate, and the moments fall through my fingers like sand. The longer I stay silent, the harder it is to speak up, and the sicker and sicker I feel about it.
So I finally just tell them I’m tired, that I need to sleep. And because they are both better people than me, they don’t suspect anything is amiss.
If they only knew.
I’m so confused about the whole thing, and all I can do is go back over what Lucky said in the police station. What we talked about there … what we discussed behind the pool house at the party. Our old friendship before I left town. How much had changed.
And the flirting.
I consider what my mom said, the Bonnie and Clyde comment.
And the pit-pattering-panic I felt behind the pool house fills up my chest again. Dear God. I have to stop thinking about that. There’s no way he’s suddenly filled with amorous longing for his former best friend and because of these feelings, decided to take the fall for her crime.
Correction: accidental crime.
Anyway, now we’re back to square one.
Why in the world did he do it?
I think before this goes any further, it’s best I find out.
* * *
Because it’s officially summer break now, I’m working extra shifts at the Nook along with Evie and a couple of other part-time employees Mom has on staff. Summer season is serious business for the entire town—definitely for our bookshop. Yesterday, I was happy about putting in more time at the Nook. It’s Step Two of my three-step plan: Save up enough money for a plane ticket to Los Angeles.
Today, however, I want to bail on my shift and run across the street to Nick’s Boatyard, because I can plainly see through our front window that Lucky’s red Superhawk motorcycle is parked out there, which means he’s working for his dad today.
And I really, really want to talk to him.
But I’ve already been warned against doing that just this morning.
“I seriously don’t want you hanging around Lucky Karras anymore,” Mom told me at breakfast. “I’m not going to ask for details about the seriousness of your relationship with him, but all I know is that he’s in deep shit, and rumors will be spreading around town like wildfire.”
She doesn’t know the half of it. “I can handle it.”
“Don’t care. I don’t need our name tangled up in it,” she says, getting agitated. “So stay away. Period. Putting my