25
O n Christmas morning, MC woke up to a thud.
She’d slept in the guest room with the door open on account of the overactive radiator, tangled in an old quilt.
It’d been a fitful sleep. Too many trips to the bathroom.
Bad, realistic dreams. Now it was well into morning, and the room was filled with crisp winter sun.
Her eyelids fluttered as she tried to adjust to the cutting brightness.
Another thud came, but it was more muffled this time, accompanied by tinkling.
The Christmas tree.
“I thought you were a good person!” Gabby wailed.
MC swung her bare feet to the cold floor and scrambled around for a sweatshirt. When she heard glass shattering, she thought better of it and bounded out in her giant T-shirt, a gift from Joe sophomore year, featuring a certain groundskeeper looking beatific in a halo. It said, HAGRID LOVES YOU .
Gabby was in the living room. She’d washed her makeup off, but she was still wearing her party dress. MC wondered if she’d stayed with her family or gotten a room in a hotel. She looked exhausted, bereft, and incandescent with rage.
“I know you’re mad right now,” MC said, putting her hands in the air. “But can we talk for a minute?”
Gabby looked at MC like she’d never seen her before. “Did you know?”
MC wanted to say she’d only officially found out a few days ago, not mentioning that she’d suspected something for months. But Conrad was stumbling in just then, and she didn’t want to throw her brother under the bus. He looked like he’d already been run over as it was.
Gabby seemed ready to reverse the bus at full speed and pancake him to the asphalt.
“Fuck you both,” Gabby said, eerily calm. “I’m just here to get my stuff.”
“Gab,” Conrad said, his voice cracking, “please don’t go. Can I just try to explain—”
“Explain why you fucked your boss?”
“Well, technically—”
Gabby threw a plastic Santa cup filled with peppermint patties at his blond cowlicked head. He managed to duck it. A framed picture on the wall was knocked askew, the two of them laughing together in a convertible on some sun-drenched highway.
“You broke my heart,” Gabby said. Her hands were shaking. “I can’t even look at you.”
“Gabby, I understand if you never forgive me, but—”
“Get out of my fucking sight!”
“I will, and I’ll give you as much space as you need, I just want to—”
“Shut up , Conrad! I don’t want to hear your excuses, or whatever it was she did for you in six months that I couldn’t do in nine fucking years.” She started to cry.
“This isn’t about you versus her,” he whispered. “It’s about me being a horrible idiot.”
“You are a horrible idiot!”
“I agree!”
There was a knock on the front door. Everyone froze.
“Is that the cops?” MC said. The D’Angelos, their neighbors across the street, had a tendency to call the police at the slightest hint of noise.
Gabby raised an eyebrow. “Or is it her?”
Conrad shook his head vigorously.
Three more knocks, short and sharp.
“You know,” MC said, “I think they have to say if they’re police?”
“Answer it!” Gabby screamed at Conrad.
“I’ll do it,” MC said.
“No!” Gabby and Conrad shouted at the same time.
Conrad leapt toward the mudroom. MC followed, Gabby right behind her, all of them trying to see through the narrow glass panels in the door.
“Oh,” Conrad said, turning the knob. “Uh—”
He stumbled back.
Just as MC realized it was Nora, Nora was right in front of her.
She grabbed MC’s wrist. Then she yanked MC out the door, at which point MC stumbled over a planter, lost her balance, and landed on her back in a puff of snow.
The icy cold started creeping through the back of her T-shirt. White flakes twinkled in her eyes. She tried to get up, but Nora pushed her right back down.
“I could kill you,” Nora breathed. Her eyes were wide and teary. “I could kill you.”
Dread surged in MC’s gut. Had Nora’s editor caught wind of the article and tipped her off? Or had Seth and the A-team decided to publish early?
MC realized it didn’t actually matter either way.
She’d missed her chance.
Her voice came out in a whisper: “I’m so sorry.”
Conrad appeared at Nora’s shoulder. “Back off,” he said.
“You back off,” Nora snapped.
“Fine,” he said, “but can everybody just calm down?”
“I will not calm down!” Gabby cried from the doorway.
“I was so stupid to trust you,” Nora said, still staring at MC.
“What is she talking about?” said Gabby.
Gabby was looking at Conrad, who looked to MC. His brow was creased with guilt.
“He knew about this too?” Nora said. She was shaking her head. “Fuck you both.”
“Yeah,” Gabby said, “fuck you both!”
But Nora only had eyes for MC. “You have ruined my life.”
“Me?” MC was surprised to hear herself yelling. She got to her feet. “You’re the one who decided to write a novel about our senior year where you didn’t change a single fucking detail!”
“I never planned to publish it! And I’m not a very imaginative person, okay?
” Nora balled her hands into fists. “It was just supposed to be for fun, online. But then an editor offered me a book deal, and I really needed the money for something. I never thought, in a million years...” She spread her arms. “Whatever. That’s what I wanted to tell you last night, when I thought I needed to apologize.
But you don’t even deserve it. Because you sure as hell didn’t publish my fucking Myers-Briggs results to help someone out. You did it for your pathetic ego.”
“My ego ?” MC’s head was spinning. “Are you serious? I did it for Joe. He needed a big story, or he was going to get fired.”
“So you destroyed my privacy over Joe Khoury’s job at a gossip website ?”
“I didn’t destroy your privacy. I used our fictional names.”
Nora shook her head. “How na?ve can you be?”
“What do you mean?”
“My fandom figured it out, MC.”
Her heart sank. “They did?”
“Of course they did! You made it so goddamn easy!”
MC’s brain struggled to keep up. Her article was out. Their identities were out? “I thought I covered us.”
“Not even close.”
“Can someone explain to me what the hell is going on?” Gabby said. Conrad had started inching toward her as Nora and MC went at it.
Nora looked at Gabby and Conrad. “Earlier this year, I published a rom-com under a pen name, which protected my identity—until this morning, when MC and Joe put out an exposé on me for an incredibly dumb website he thinks will save him from obscurity. And yeah, my book was inspired by some real events from high school. Including, among other things, MC’s old crush on you, Gabby, which you and Conrad were totally oblivious to, despite how insanely obvious it was. ”
Gabby and Conrad turned to stare at MC.
MC felt yet another wave of heat rushing to her cheeks.
But Nora wasn’t done. “Thanks for sending every crazy homophobic troll to my front door, MC.”
MC swallowed. She’d been so sure she was protecting Nora. “I swear I don’t know how this happened.”
“You don’t know anything.”
Nora turned and walked away.
MC wanted to call her back, to keep arguing, but she had nothing to say for herself.
She looked to her brother, who had a confused expression on his face. Then to Gabby, who’d put her fingers on her temples and was shaking her head.
“I thought you were working on a novel,” she muttered.
She went back into the house and slammed the door.
MC crossed her arms. “Should we wait for her in the car?” she said to Conrad.
He trudged over to the Destroyer of Worlds and got in the driver’s seat. She scampered after him and got in the passenger side.
“That’s why you never talked to me about girls,” he mumbled.
He pulled the unwrapped book from the pocket in the door and turned it over, his eyes scanning the copy on the back.
“‘Back in high school, Nicole Penny had it bad for Michaela Carson. But Michaela was too hopelessly obsessed with Abby Rodriguez—her brother’s hot new squeeze—to notice.’”
“She’s exaggerating,” MC said.
He didn’t seem to be listening to her. “Is this why you hardly ever visited us? Because I ended up with Gabby, even though you never bothered to mention you were interested in her?”
“No, that’s not it at all.” She wrung her hands. “It upset me at the time. But I’m totally over it.”
He tossed the book in her lap. “I don’t know what to believe anymore.”
“Believe me,” she said quietly.
“Why? You haven’t given me a single reason to trust you. Until yesterday, I guess. And even that was half-assed.” He scrubbed his face with both hands. “I can take you to the train station now.”
“But—”
“When Gabby leaves, I’ll wait for you to run in and grab your stuff.”
“I feel like you shouldn’t be alone right now.”
“Well, MC, you’re the last person I want to be with.”
Tears welled in her eyes. “Come on, Con. Don’t do this.”
He got out of the car, tramping off to the woods behind the house.
MC sat, her heart pounding, and watched him go.
Her phone buzzed. Joe was texting again.
DUDE Seth pulled a fast one on me.
I SWEAR I had no idea.
But also.
SHIT IS BLOWING UP!!
She held her breath.
She blocked him.
Then she deleted Instagram, and all her other apps, even as the numbers in their red notification bubbles were climbing so high it was basically a malfunction.
After Gabby stormed out—flashing her middle finger at MC—and got in a car that’d pulled up by their mailbox, MC went back into the house and changed out of her pajamas. She waded through the ruined decorations, trying to tidy up what she could. Trying to be useful, even now, as if it mattered.
She should never have come back here.
On her way out, she righted the Christmas tree, getting pine needles in her hair and sap all over her fingers. She left through the garage, but stopped when she saw a bright, shiny new object in the center of the empty space, a bow on the handlebars.
It had a little tag on the seat. The tag had a note in Conrad’s chicken scratch.
We heard you ditched your old one in the woods on the side of the road. Try to be less sketchy with the new one! Love, Con, Gab, and Nor Dog (who told us the real story)
MC sat down in an oil stain and started to cry.