Say You Will (Trust & Tequila Book 3)

Prologue

“What are you doing in here?” I scowl at the skinny little girl who has no business being in my bedroom, let alone lying on my constellation carpet.

She’s obscuring just enough of Orion’s Belt to make it impossible to make out the entire thing, but not enough to completely cover it. It sets my teeth on edge. It should be one or the other. All the way or not at all.

I dragged myself up here ready to collapse in my bed and try to sleep without closing my eyes. I’m getting good at it. The trick is to read something distracting or study the stars until I don’t remember the falling asleep part. Awake with my eyes open. Then asleep. None of that in between with my eyes closed.

I’m starting to think the place where I was shot is always going to hurt because the doctors said I was “recovering nicely.” But it still pulls and burns, and when I close my eyes blood is all I see.

The little girl in my bedroom is one of my sister’s friends, so she can’t be more than eight years old. She sighs gustily, and blows her wispy light brown bangs out of her eyes. She’s wearing glasses and doesn’t seem to care that they’ve slid halfway down her nose. Her hands rest on her abdomen, and she’s laid out exactly like a painting I once saw of a dead lady, except the lady was holding flowers and wearing a filmy white dress while this girl is in pink rubber ducky pajamas.

That painting didn’t look at all like the real dead people I’ve seen.

I shudder, then square my shoulders. “You need to leave.”

“Is this your bedroom?” she asks.

“Yes, and you shouldn’t sneak around into strange men’s bedrooms. It’s violating my privacy.”

At that, she rolls onto her stomach, props her chin on her palms, and says, “You’re not a man.”

“I’m twelve.” I sniff. “Compared to you, I am.”

I expect her to continue to argue, but she sends a nervous glance toward the door, then back at me. “I have to leave?”

For the first time, I notice that her eyes are rimmed in red. Her face is splotchy, and her nose is tipped pink. Her eyelashes are all spiky, too, framing deep brown eyes.

I move closer and crouch down next to her, frowning. “Did someone hurt you? If they did, I’ll do something about it.”

She shrugs her bony shoulders and rolls onto her back, assuming her former dead lady pose. “Just my heart, and that doesn’t count.”

“Do you need to go to a hospital?”

The girl vaults into a sitting position. “I don’t want to go anywhere. I want to stay here for the sleepover.”

At the muffled shriek of laughter from the room full of little girls across the hall, I shoot a glance at my door once more.

“I’ll go back to Bronwyn’s room when the movie is over,” she says.

At this, I stand. “You don’t like the movie?”

“It’s scary.”

“Bronwyn isn’t allowed to show you scary movies. Does my mother know about this?”

“No one else thinks it’s a scary movie. They think it’s funny. There’s a doll with button eyes.” She lies back down and shudders.

Ugh. Button eyes are horrifying. “You’re supposed to be watching Coraline?”

She shakes her head. “They don’t care. When something scares me at home, Mom says it means I have to do that thing more, so I’m not a stupid baby about it. But I don’t have to do it here. Bronwyn said it was quiet in your room. She said you have the best carpet, and you wouldn’t be home for hours. So I’m lying on your floor, imagining my heart doesn’t hurt.”

“Why does your heart hurt?” Mine does too. More than my heart. My entire chest and throat and pit of my stomach ache all the time, but I know it’s nowhere close to the same reason as hers.

“My mom is sending me to live at a school in Vermont because I love Nanny who changed my diapers when I was a baby, and she loves me, so she got fired because I’m not supposed to love employees, only my mom. And my father liked Nanny too much too, so my parents are getting a divorce because my mom is a narstick bitch, and my father is a filannering asshole.”

“Philandering.”

She blinks at me, and I explain, “Your mom is narcissistic, and your father is philandering.”

She heaves another gusty sigh. “That’s what I said.”

She looks back at the ceiling. “I wanted to be away from noise and pretend my heart doesn’t hurt.”

“You should talk to a therapist. They can help you feel better.”

“Does a therapist teach you not to care when it hurts?”

I frown. “No.” Mine teaches me to understand what people mean when they say things that don’t make sense and how to avoid overstimulation. “Lately, he tries to convince me not to blame myself for making mistakes.”

“Everybody makes mistakes. Nanny says, ‘mistakes are for learning.’” She lapses into a sad silence.

“Not all mistakes are about math problems.” Some mistakes cause people to die.

She shrugs and makes no move to get up to leave.

“Slide over a little,” I say.

She frowns but doesn’t move, so I indicate the partially covered design. “You’re on Orion’s Belt.”

Her smile is sweet as she slides over. Then it falls away as she resumes looking at the white ceiling.

“Want something to look at while you forget it hurts?”

“Maybe.”

I stride to the light switch and flip it off. When darkness descends, she laughs, the sound a twinkle. Like Christmas jingle bells. “Funny joke. Now it’s black and there’s nothing to look at.”

“Give it a minute. Let your eyes adjust. It won’t be quite so stygian in a moment.” I fumble to find the basketball-sized dome on my bedside table.

“You’re smart. You talk like a grown-up.”

Warmth blooms inside my chest at her praise, but I have to admit the truth. “I like vocabulary words. I memorize them and learn new ones every day, but sometimes I forget which words are normal ones and which ones aren’t. I’m good at math and spatial relations too. I’ve already taken a couple college classes.”

“That means your brain is so big and full of smart things you don’t have room to be small anymore.”

For safety reasons, I don’t usually talk to anyone outside of our family’s inner circle about being neurodivergent. I don’t understand why I want to tell this girl. Maybe it’s because she radiates uncomplicated acceptance.

“Some people think autism makes you stupid. It doesn’t. Then there are people who think being autistic automatically makes someone a savant…a special kind of genius. That’s equally as annoying. There are things I’m good at and things that are hard. Everyone is different, like having blue eyes and brown hair.”

“Or being short or tall,” she says. “I have a short leg.”

I glance down at her feet. The difference is slight. I’d never have noticed if she hadn’t mentioned it, but her heels don’t line up. “Yes. I like studying the stars. That’s what I want to do for a job when I’m an adult. I’ll work for NASA. Or teach people about space. I love everything about it. The real, scientific things, not science fiction like Star Wars.”

“That’s cool. I like stars. You can’t see them in real life here in New York. But I saw them on TV.”

“That’s because of light pollution. But there are a couple of places like the High Line and Brooklyn Bridge Park where they’re visible on a clear night.”

“Jonny won’t take me to Brooklyn Bridge Park.”

“Who’s Jonny? Your driver?”

“My dad.”

“You call your father by his first name?”

“That’s how it is. Sometimes dads don’t like to be ‘Dad.’”

She shifts slightly. “What was that word? About the dark?”

“Stygian?”

“I like that word. Stygian.” She stretches the syllables out. “It sounds like a warrior in the dark. A good one. A place for secret battles where the warrior fights his enemies. Like one of my mom’s movies. She played a lady named Helen, and whole countries fought for her.”

I smile. “You’re brave enough to be a warrior. You’re going on an adventure to Vermont.”

She smiles. “Really? The Stygian Warrior,” she intones like she’s voicing a movie trailer.

Now that I can make out her shape in the darkness, I carry the projector over to where she remains prone on the carpet. After I place the object on the floor, I lie next to her with about two feet between us. “Are you still watching the ceiling?”

“Yes.”

When I flick a switch, the girl gasps as my bedroom becomes a planetarium. Fake, of course. Just a light show. But Dad’s research and development company designed it for me. I know Dad was trying to give me something else to think about other than the screaming and blood. It’s a relatively sophisticated piece of equipment that I can program with latitude, longitude, and a date, and the computer inside configures the constellations.

I’m about to explain, but she points and says, “There’s a W.”

“That’s Cassiopeia.”

“Pretty.”

“I guess it is.”

“My name’s Francesca, by the way,” she says. “But everybody calls me Franki.”

“My name is Henry. Everyone calls me Henry.”

We lie there for a long time. In my head, I silently name all the constellations. Then I picture star charts for different times of the year for the Northern Hemisphere. I don’t tell her about them, though, because I think she might need the quiet as she struggles with the pain in her heart.

Finally, I peer at her through the gloom. The deep darkness is lit by a wash of violet and blue with stunning diamond-bright points of light that play across her round little face. Like this, I can’t see the red of her nose or the tears still hovering at the edge of her lashes.

Much later, when she’s left, I close my eyes and try to sleep. For the first time since that night, it isn’t blood I see when I do. In my mind’s eye, I only see stars. Reflected off Franki’s glasses and sparkling in her pretty brown eyes.