talk to or even text an apology to his girlfriend. Okay, so he hadn’t officially asked her to be his girlfriend, but fuck that, she was his girlfriend. If she didn’t already know that, she was an idiot. She was too busy being obsessed with their Latin teacher anyway. Fuck him. Fuck her.
Liam’s phone vibrated and he pulled it out of his back pocket. It was a selfie from Ryan, who was in London now, being a model. He was at a pub, a full pint glass of beer pressed against his grinning, expensively moisturized cheek.
#nodrinkingage the text read.
Sublime had gotten in huge trouble for their offensive mock protest and using the anti-gun movement to sell merchandise. They’d had to take down all their posters and every social media post from “the drop.” But Ryan had already been scouted and picked up by a modeling agency by then. No sixteen-year-old had worn a dying tiger on his chest so well. He’d put school on hold until the new year and was actually using the name Black Ryan professionally. He kept sending Liam annoying texts with pictures of himself wearing cool clothes, sauntering down some famous London or Paris street: Fish and Chips and Chanel on Carnaby Street! Je t’aime trés bien asshole! He’d already done a photo shoot on a yacht in the Mediterranean for Vilebrequin swim trunks and driven a McLaren in Monte Carlo. Get out here, bruh! he urged. Milan is next! But no one at any modeling agency had invited Liam to London or Paris or Milan.
Liam kicked the legs of his bed and the back of his desk chair. He sat down on his bed and then bounced back up again.
“Fuck,” he muttered to himself. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
His cell phone vibrated again and he leapt at it.
It was Shy, finally.
I fucking won a fucking table tennis match you cunt!
She sounded happy. Liam didn’t answer. He didn’t want to be a buzzkill. Luckily his dad had introduced him to the Smiths, whose music was moody and morose. He stuck in his earbuds and put his phone on Do Not Disturb.
* * *
“I almost died today,” Wendy announced when she finally returned home to Strong Place with the U-Haul.
Roy was exactly where she’d left him six hours ago—in the library, furiously typing on his laptop.
“I’ll need your help, and Shy’s too, unloading the U-Haul van. I have to return it by nine p.m.” She poured herself a glass of white wine and drank the entire glass standing up. “I’d like to do it soon so I can take a shower.”
Roy did not look up. He was completely engrossed in his writing, which was nice to see, but also infuriating. She really had almost died.
“I believe the person who dismembered that woman whose body parts they’ve been finding in the water is alive and well and living on the far side of Staten Island.”
“Almost finished,” Roy said without looking up. He’d been typing like a madman ever since the table tennis. He’d come to love Isabel’s Russian family so much he’d decided to pare down the assassin nonsense and amp up the amusement of sneaking her family members onto Mars. He’d also thrown in a lot of pregnant table tennis. There were some sad bits too. Now he was working on one of his trademark optimistic endings.
“Where’s Shy? Oh, of course, she’s at a match,” Wendy said, answering her own question. She really did need a bath. The essence of serial killer was all over her. She poured herself a second glass of wine, wishing Roy would get out of his chair and embrace her and make her sit down and put her feet up and tell him all about her near-death experience while he fixed her a Kir Royale and Camembert and crackers.
“Done,” Roy announced, triumphantly hitting a final key and closing his laptop. “I might need to tinker with it and add a brilliant last line and pad it out quite a bit, but it’s mostly there. I’d like to give it to you to read. See what you think.”
“I almost died,” Wendy repeated. She tossed aside her phone and gulped her wine. She didn’t want to read the rough draft of Roy’s new book. In fact, that was the last thing she wanted to do. He always said he threw out about 75 percent of his first drafts because they were completely inane. He could show it to his school nurse friend, his reader, the one