Chapter 3
All that’s left of Penny’s birthday dinner are plates of half-eaten confetti cake and discarded bright green margaritas with salt crystalizing on the rims. Plastic silverware and faux–severed finger stirrers litter the tables.
Cobwebs is the best bar in the city, and I’ll verbally fillet anyone who disagrees.
Sure, Penny and I are biased: We live two flights of stairs above the place and the owner let us in even before we were of age.
And yeah, our landlord gave us a discount on rent because of all the noise and permeating bar smells and the occasional kitchen fire, but we don’t mind them one bit.
It has the only karaoke machine this side of the Chasm, all-you-can-eat rubbery mozzarella sticks, and cozy, well-worn leather booths.
Penny and her gaggle of normal friends—some wealthy childhood pals, some coworkers from the elementary school where she teaches art—are singing a valiantly committed version of one of the birthday girl’s favorite pop songs.
And Penny looks ravishing. She always does, but tonight especially.
Her curled, straw-colored hair whips around as she sings into the karaoke mic; a dewy sheen of sweat dusts her nose and forehead from the balmy summer night and harmonious exertion.
Her cheeks are pink from too many of those campy green margs—she’d never have the courage to belt a girl-band anthem before a dwindling crowd otherwise—and her generous curves are accentuated by her tiny, shiny light blue dress.
I fish my camera out and snap a photo of her mid-belt, hand to her chest, eyes crinkled in joy.
It’s all I could want for my best friend’s twenty-second birthday. I just wish I hadn’t missed it.
I suck in a bracing breath and sidle up to James as he pays the bar tab. “Hi.”
When he jumps nearly a foot in the air, I remember once again that my increased speed, agility, and reflexes must be used on deviants, not my boyfriend.
“Hey,” he says with an exhale, pressing a kiss to the top of my head. “We missed you.” With his sister’s same tawny hair and ivy-green eyes, James looks like the quarterback on a TV show about a small-town high school football team. Kind, harmless, blandly handsome.
“Wasn’t the real birthday dinner the friends we made along the way?”
James cocks his head in confusion, and I wonder why I even try.
“Tell me she wasn’t sad.” I plop onto the barstool beside him and dump all my bags on the floor.
He turns his attention to his sister, and we watch Penny nearly faceplant into the faux spiderweb–covered jukebox as she picks out her next song. We both exhale audibly when she catches herself safely on the glass display.
“She wasn’t,” James says in the end, putting a reassuring hand on the small of my back. “She’s having a blast.”
That one hurts, but I guess it’s what I wanted to hear.
“I wish I could get her out of this dump, though.” James lifts his other hand from the bar and wipes whatever stickiness clings to his fingers on a cocktail napkin. “Both of you.”
Annoyance zips through me. “We like our place. Penny doesn’t want to live in a stuffy penthouse North of the Chasm that your parents pay for. You can’t bribe her into moving out.”
James’s eyes widen. “I wasn’t…I won’t offer again.”
Guilt pools inside me. “I’m sorry. I just got an earful from my mom about the same thing. She dropped off a box of my dad’s stuff this morning too.”
James rubs my back and nods in understanding. The music blares and I try to breathe through my anger. It’s not his fault I’m like this. James is great. I’m trying very hard to fall for him. I have been for years. And it’s not James, it’s me, which is not a line, I swear.
It’s all any dark, weird girl with a secret can hope for: that her best friend’s catch of an older brother will fall head over heels for her and whisk her away from her miserable life.
But here’s what they never tell you in all the rom-coms and romance novels: It’s not the best-friend’s-hot-brother that’s the issue.
It’s not that he’s a player or a jerk who can’t tell the offbeat heroine is beautiful until her glasses come off.
It’s the dark, weird girl with a secret who’s the problem.
She’s incapable of romantic love! Probably because she’s killed too many werewolves.
Or lost too much blood over the years. Or because her family hates her and she watched her dad die.
I don’t know, I don’t make the rules.
All I do know is that when everyone, my mother included, begged me to give James a chance, there was nothing on planet Earth that sounded worse.
But then he went to college, and I grew up, moved out, lived on my own.
I met a lot of pricks, kissed too many frogs, lost out on good guys because I had demons to hunt and ghoul goo to wash from my hair.
And by the time James moved back to Astera and began asking me out again, I realized I’d probably never find love and I’d be lucky to land a man like James, who knew me well and still seemed to genuinely like me.
Who had a stable job and didn’t try to sell me Bitcoin.
Who made my family proud to be related to me. Or prouder, at least.
The first dinner our parents had together that James and I attended as a couple, my mom was beside herself.
She looked at me like I’d done something right for the first time in my life.
At least, for the first time since the night the police brought me home without my father and I couldn’t explain why I’d come back and he hadn’t.
I’m ashamed to say what a high it was—to see myself like that, through her eyes. When I stood there, my dark nails clasped in James’s soft, uncalloused hand. I hadn’t seen her that happy in years. I’ve been chasing that feeling for about six months now, with mixed results.
“Viv!” Penny squeals.
“Happy birthday!” I cheer, feeling something like relief for the first time all day.
She launches herself at me and I am enveloped into the warmest, most joyful Penny hug. The scent of her gardenia perfume mingles with the tequila on her breath. “You made it!”
“I’m sorry I missed dinner. And singing.”
“And cake,” she slurs.
“And cake,” I amend, tucking some sweaty blond strands behind her ear. “I am really going to work on the time management thing. It’s one of my many birthday presents to you.”
I also have a set of canvases and her favorite horsehair brush up in the apartment.
Plus a new plaid bow for Hound, which he’ll hate but she’ll love, and I convinced our landlord to fix our pipe issue for free.
Now we don’t have to keep flushing the toilet and turning on the garbage disposal at the same time to get hot water.
“It’s okay! I didn’t really think you’d make it,” Penny admits. “We are who we are. You know?”
If my smile slips, Penny doesn’t seem to notice. I change the subject to ease the burn. “Where’s Claude?”
“He couldn’t make it.” Penny pouts. “Stuck in Vienna.”
James and I sneer in unison. Penny’s art dealer boyfriend is universally abhorred by everyone but Penny. My protective nature especially does not take kindly to the way he walks all over her. “That guy is—”
“I love this song!” Penny throws her hands into the air with reckless abandon and bolts in her bright white Keds back to the jukebox.
I can’t help my laugh. Thank god for Penelope Pine.
Penny was the only girl who talked to me my first week at Belaire after my mom got her fancy government job and moved Nora and me to the Hesperides.
The only person who never looked at me with pity or judgment.
And Belaire was tough: I wasn’t blond and push-up-bra-capable—I was dark-haired, flat-chested, and new money, something I quickly learned was worse than having no money at all.
I wasn’t a cheery, pleasant tween, either—my father had just died.
And then my loving, thoughtful mother had become unrecognizable.
It was like in the span of one awful night I’d lost them both.
All the while I had—and I guess still have—a vicious secret I couldn’t share with anyone, which made me feel like even more of an outcast than I already was.
Despite it all, after Penny and I met, we were inseparable. When she left for college, it was as lonely as I’d ever felt. And when Penny’s mom got sick and she dropped out, we moved into the shoebox above Cobwebs together. I don’t know what I’d do without the girl.
Penny finishes her solo and slumps down into a booth with a friend of hers I recognize from Belaire. I don’t want to interrupt, nor do I really want to talk to James, so I help clean up, gather people’s purses, and cling-wrap the leftover cake.
After Penny belts one last song, James and I carry her up to the apartment and tuck her into bed.
“I’m tired enough for sleep now,” Penny mumbles as I pull a blanket over her.
“You were a rock star up there.”
“Only shattered one of my eardrums,” James agrees, rubbing his left ear.
We both frown at him.
“I’m sorry again,” I say even though I know she’s too drunk to care or remember. I realize it’s selfish and could bring down her vibe, but still I add, “I really wanted to be there tonight.”
“Honestly,” Penny says, pulling me close as if sharing a tidbit of juicy gossip. “I didn’t even notice. Don’t worry, for real.”
I know she’s only trying to help and I’m the one who pushed for it, but the words bite right through me. And this apartment is too hot and I’m starving and suddenly I wonder if I’m going to cry.