basket.
Well, screw that. She had one giant egg named Holden Hampshire, and into her last basket he was going.
Fifteen minutes later, with her friends installed on her sofa, Maya poured tequila for Eve and made a sad face at pregnant Nora.
“Well?” Eve demanded. “Is he coming?”
“Yes! Holden Hampshire is coming!”
The girls reacted with glee, and soon they were dancing around to “Petal Power.”
“Man, I loved this song back in the day,” Nora said, giving up partway through the song and returning to the sofa and putting her feet up—she’d been complaining about her feet hurting lately.
“Me, too,” Eve said. “Two Squared was kind of known for their whole boys-sing-vaguely-girl-power-esque-songs thing, weren’t they?”
“They were,” Nora said. “But in retrospect, I wonder why we didn’t listen to girl bands singing about girl power.”
“Hello, Spice Girls?” Maya said.
“Yeah, but they were a little before our time. I would think especially yours, Maya.”
It was true that Eve and Nora were older than Maya, but that was no excuse. “So was Mozart. So was Shakespeare. You don’t ignore Shakespeare because he was”—she made quotation marks with her fingers—“‘before our time.’”
“Did you just compare the Spice Girls to Shakespeare?” Nora asked.
“What if I did?” Maya winked. “I have highbrow taste and I have lowbrow taste, thank you very much.”
“Maybe you have unibrow taste?” Eve joked.
“Anyway, the point is, Holden is coming and I’ve promised him a place to live. And since I will be paying him every cent I have left, I need to transform my apartment into a small-but-glamorous pied-à-terre suitable for a B-list ex-boy-band member slumming it in Moonflower Bay for the summer.”
“But do you have any cents left?” Nora asked. “You already aren’t paying yourself.”
“I had enough to pay Richard and Marjorie and the mortgage on the theater through the end of September. The September money will now be the Holden money. If my Holden Hail Mary works, it works. If it doesn’t, I figure it doesn’t really matter if I default on the theater mortgage, or if I have to do layoffs a month earlier than I’d planned.” She tried to keep her tone light. Ha ha, failing a month earlier than planned, no biggie! But the thought made her breathless.
“So you’re giving Holden all your money and your apartment,” Eve said. “Where are you going to live?”
“At my parents’ house. Unless…” She made puppy-dog eyes at Eve. She loved her parents, but she did not want to move back in with them.
“You can stay in the pink room if you want,” Eve said.
Yes! “I was hoping you’d say that.”
The pink room was a tiny room at the top of the Mermaid that had not been included in Eve’s recent renovation. It had been Eve’s room as a girl, when she’d come to spend summers with her great-aunt. It had also briefly been home to Nora when she’d needed a place.
“Jamila can lend you furniture for this place, I’m sure,” said Nora, whose stepmother-in-law was an avid antiques collector. “We could go full-on Victorian with the furniture and juxtapose that with your exposed brick and the loft-like atmosphere of the place.”
“That would be awesome.” Maya looked around at the dump she called home. “Though ‘loft-like’ is kind of a stretch.” There was an exposed brick wall along one side of the main room, but it was less “industrial chic” exposed brick and more “the wall is crumbling” exposed brick.
Her no-good slumlord, a guy named Harold who had retired to Florida while he let his real estate holdings in Moonflower Bay go to pot, refused to turn the heat on until December first or to fix the stove when it crapped out. But he was also ignoring the fact that she was currently behind on her rent, so she wasn’t exactly occupying the moral high ground with him.
Still, she was pretty good with a paintbrush. “I’m going to treat it like a stage set. Make it look good on the cheap, and it only has to be superficially good. It doesn’t have to last. Richard is going to help.” Her tech guy had embraced the challenge even though she hadn’t told him how high the stakes were. Somehow she hadn’t found a way to say, Help me fix up this apartment or I’m going to have to lay you off.
Ugh. And here came the panic part of the cycle again.
“Jake and Sawyer can help, too,” Eve said.
“I’ll get Jamila going on furniture,” said Nora.
“We can store your stuff in the basement of the