The day she got into Truman.
Her first text that day was:
MEL: You don’t have to say yes.
And his last reply?
COACH: But I did. For you.
For the last three years, Coach has gone above and beyond for Mel. She owes him so much. It’s about time she did something to pay him back.
FRIDAY, AUGUST 26
8:19 P.M.
LUCI
The AC in Mel’s house feels downright frosty. Luci gets a hoodie out of her overnight bag and pulls it over her head. She knows it looks weird with her dress, but whatever. It’s just the girls now. She checks her phone—no missed calls—and puts it in the front pocket.
Someone’s in the bathroom off the kitchen. Luci waits for a minute or two. There have to be others, she figures, in a house this massive.
She takes a back staircase up to the second floor, then pads down a long white-walled hallway, her bare feet silenced by thick taupe wall-to-wall carpet. Everything in the Gingriches’ house is a neutral: black, beige, white, gray. She opens one door and finds a deep closet with shelves of tightly folded sheets and towels. The next, a library with a fireplace.
Luci doesn’t have to guess what’s behind the third. It’s already cracked.
Mel’s bedroom.
Lining up her eye with the open seam, Luci sees simultaneously exactly what she might have imagined and nothing she could have conjured herself.
The bedroom looks staged, like a shot from the pages of a Pottery Barn Teen catalog. Very gently lived in by someone perfect. The furniture is all the same beachy driftwood style. A tall headboard, fluted with crown molding. Over crisp sheets, a lavender comforter is folded halfway down to accommodate an absurd number of pillows.
The curtains, white and barely diffusing the sunset, lift with a breeze. Seconds later, Luci detects a float of gardenia, but the scent is youthful and not at all like the perfume her grandma sprayed so generously along her collarbone that it made her wrinkled skin slick. That’s because there’s something sweet underneath it. Vanilla. Or maybe honey? Luci breathes deeply but it’s too faint, probably just the remnants of whatever lotion Mel put on before getting dressed.
Luci pauses, quickly looking over each shoulder to make sure she is alone. And then she steps inside the bedroom and quietly pulls the door closed behind her.
Though the bedroom floor is carpeted like the hallway, over it there’s a thick, creamy shearling rug, on which many bags are scattered, probably from a back-to-school shopping trip. Bloomingdale’s, Sephora, Kate Spade, Victoria’s Secret. Luci peers into each one.
On Mel’s desk, the latest edition of Vogue, opened to a dense article.
On Luci’s desk, Chicken Soup for the Soul: Teens Talk High School. Which, even more embarassingly, Luci’s read twice and even dog-eared.
A tall bookcase catches Luci’s eye, shelves sparkling with trophies, medals, glossy plastic streamers of pep rally pom-poms. One trophy is so tall, it is tipped on its side to fit. There are several photographs of the team—each matted and framed—along with plenty of candids of Mel and Phoebe as tourists—casting spells in Harry Potter robes, pledging allegiance in front of the White House, up on metal gates at what looks to be a rodeo—sightseeing trips probably fit in between tournament games. Luci tries to determine in which picture Mel looks the youngest, as if that could collapse the distance between them, prove to her that Mel was once Luci’s age.
On her way out, Luci spies Mel’s Wildcat varsity jacket hanging on the back of the door with its heavy leather sleeves, its striped collar, the terry loops of her C letter. Luci pets it before slipping out.
Back in the hallway, Luci carefully pushes the door until it’s almost closed. When she turns, she runs right into Coach.
“Luci,” he says, a devilish grin gracing his face. “What are you doing sneaking around in Mel’s room?”
It is a miracle she doesn’t die.
He must see the panic in her face, because Coach lifts his hands in a friendly, disarming way. “I don’t actually care what you were doing in Mel’s room.” His breathing is slightly labored, as if he just returned from a leisurely morning run. His mood seems brightened in that way too. Endorphins, blood flow. “I’m just glad I found you.”
“Okay.” Luci has no clue why that might be. She thought Coach had left. Luci feels a tickle of excitement at the thought of him hustling back for her.
He scans the hallway and makes sure they are alone. “I know my speech tonight came off