“Roux,” I said, trying to bring her back to the present. “I need to talk to you.”
“Is this an intervention?”
“What? No. God, no.” I didn’t have that kind of time, for starters. “I just have some questions.”
“Okay. Come over now. Bring coffee for your good friend Roux.”
“I can’t right now, I have to …” I hesitated, not wanting to mention Angelo. “I have to run some errands for my mom.”
“In the rain? Child abuse.”
I rolled my eyes and rested my forehead against the window. The next time I had to infiltrate a bunch of high schoolers, I was not picking the recently exiled mean-girl drama queen for a friend. I would head straight to the library and find the nerdish bookworm instead. “It is not abuse,” I told her. “Go shower. Do something productive. Gather up all the feathers and make a pigeon sculpture.”
“Pigeons are gross. I wish every pigeon would fly away and take a squirrel with it.”
“Such a charming visual. Look, I’ll be there soon, okay?” Angelo would have to wait for an hour or so. It was all right, though, I knew he loved hanging out at the Frick.
“Okay. Call when you’re on your way. Bring coffee!”
My parents were in the kitchen when I finally emerged from my bedroom, showered, dressed, and grumpy from caffeine withdrawal. “Was Angelo here?” I asked, holding up his business card. “Because this happened.”
“He said to meet him whenever you could,” my mom said, clicking away on her laptop without looking up at me. I could tell she was still pissed. “Take an umbrella if you’re going. It’s raining out.”
I bit back my sarcastic response and reached for the coffeepot. “I don’t know when I’ll be back,” I said. “I might have to go see Roux.” And Jesse, I thought. Just thinking about him made me nervous, which was weird because I never get nervous. My dad used to call me “Steely McGee” because my hands wouldn’t shake, even when I opened the most difficult combo locks, but now when I thought about Jesse, it felt like my stomach was filled with liquid gold, warm and burning.
And to be honest, I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do now that we had made out. Should I text? Was I supposed to send a thank-you note or something? Did Jesse even want to see me again? I needed Roux’s advice, and I knew she’d have no problem giving it to me.
“—car,” my dad said, and I realized he had been talking.
“What, sorry?”
“We’ve got a town car now,” he said. “New rule starting this morning. It’ll take you wherever you want to go.”
I raised an eyebrow. “So, we’re not going to talk about last night and instead you got me a chauffeured car?”
My mom put up her hands. “Hey, not our call. This was all Colton’s idea. You know that.”
I did know that, but I was still annoyed. I sort of wanted to apologize for being so angry the night before, but I also didn’t know what to say or how to say it. My parents and I had always been a team, but now it felt like me versus them, and I didn’t know how to play the game.
“Better go,” my dad said. “The umbrella’s broken, by the way. I found out the hard way this morning.”
Great.
My Hunter rain boots clomped on the floor as I headed toward the front door, but my mom stopped me with her arm. “Here,” she said. “Take an apple. You didn’t eat breakfast.” Then she brushed an invisible piece of lint off my red plaid coat and kissed my temple. “Don’t worry,” she said. “We’ll figure it out.”
I bit my lip and gave her a quick hug. “Don’t stare at the computer screen too long,” I told her as I left. “You kids these days, you’ll ruin your vision.”
Things may not have been perfect, but at least they were a little better when I left.
The anonymous black car took me uptown on the worst route ever, in the slowest traffic imaginable, made slower by the rain, but we finally made it to the Upper East Side. Roux’s apartment building seemed even more austere in the daytime than it did on Halloween night, which was saying something. For starters, it had gargoyles—full-on “I will eat your face, you urban heathen” gargoyles—that leered down at me as I waited for Harold the doorman to let me in to the marble lobby. (Did he ever not work?)
“Oh, it’s you,” he said when he saw me. “Delightful.” He seemed anything but delighted.
“Yeah, because it was a blast for me to carry my drunk friend home,” I retorted. “Thanks for helping, by the way. You’re a peach.”
He waved me away and I pressed the PH button to take me up to Roux’s apartment, where the scene was no less pretty. Every shade was still drawn and there had been some sort of smoothie accident in the kitchen that left the blender oozing onto the granite countertop. My mother would have had a coronary if she had seen the mess.
I, however, had no problem walking away from it and going upstairs to find Roux. I found her, all right, sprawled on her bed in a room so dark that I had to feel along the wall for a light switch.
“You went back to sleep?” I demanded.
“Go ‘way, Pollyanna.”
“You look ridiculous with that sleep mask on. C’mon, rise and shine.”
Roux sat up, her blond hair a huge tangle around her head, and raised her sleep mask to reveal one bleary eye. “Do you have provisions?”