19. Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Nineteen
Maddie
I spent the whole day being aggressively fine.
Today is my mom's cancerversary slash Cancer-Butt-Kicking-Day party and I am determined to spend it celebrating Grace Berwick's fight and not feeling sorry for myself.
I'm wearing the fine like a second outfit layered right over the first. I've laughed at my uncle's terrible jokes, refilled the lemonade pitcher twice, and told roughly nine separate people that work is good and nothing is new.
All nine of them believed me, because if there is one genuine skill I have mastered in this life it is looking okay even when I'm not.
Particularly when I'm not.
Today is not for me. Today is all about my mother. Whatever happened to me this week can wait in the dark place where I shove everything else. It can wait out there forever, frankly.
Only Jazz and my parents know about the breakup with Demetrius and I want to keep it that way. I know it's probably as likely to stay a secret as I'm likely to sprout horns and fur, but I'm holding on to hope I won't have to face the gossip mill of a small town backyard gathering. At least today.
So instead of focusing on my own battered heart, I'm focusing on the people around me while lurking as far from the action as I possibly can without alarming my parents.
Jazz finds me hiding by the cooler. I have been stationed there since approximately three in the afternoon because I'm in no mood to face the flood of nosiness headed my way.
It's a small town after all and what could be juicier gossip than a local girl falling for a billionaire and having her heart broken.
Twice. Having her heart broken twice by the same man.
By tomorrow, the whole town will know. I should get it over with and tell everyone, but I just can't.
My bestie drops into the lawn chair beside me and hands over a paper plate with a hot dog on it that I do not remember asking for, but the gesture is Jazz at her most loving, which is to say it involves food. She stays uncharacteristically silent. At least for the first thirty seconds.
"You good?" she asks without looking directly at me.
Like I'm some skittish stray kitten she's trying to coax out of hiding.
"I'm great."
"Uh-huh." She takes a long pull of her lemonade and surveys the backyard with a slightly menacing glare. "Mrs. Kowalski is about to head over here."
I don't look up from my plate. "I know."
"She's been watching you for twenty minutes."
"I know," I repeat, still not looking up.
"There she goes."
Ugh. I knew this was coming, but I still wish I could dig a hole under the patio and stay there until we cut the cake.
Mrs. Kowalski arrives in a cloud of lily of the valley perfume, walking way too fast for a person barely reaching four feet high.
The gnome lady who has lived three doors down from my parents for the past thirty years is the neighborhood gossip at its finest and I just know that once she gets her tiny fingers on this story, the entire town will know faster than I can scream Heartbreak.
She knows absolutely everything that happens in this neighborhood, in this town, and possibly on this coast.
But she loves my mother, so I force myself to look up and slap a half-assed smile on my face as her tiny feet plant themselves in my field of vision.
"Maddie, dear." She stands right in front of Jazz and me and tilts her head the way she does when she's about to ask a deeply personal question. "We're all so glad your mother is doing so well. Your father must be over the moon."
Oh. Maybe I misjudged the elderly gnome after all.
"He really is," I say, and I mean it. "It's been a good year."
"Of course, of course." She nods, then picks an invisible thread off her sleeve. A pause, perfectly timed. "Can I ask you something?"
Here we go. My bad for always thinking the best about everyone.
"Mrs. Kowalski..." I begin.
"Evelyn Primrose told me you were seen kissing Demetrius Thornwood on the pier the other day," Mrs. Kowalski blurts out like she can't help herself, which is probably the case. "I told her that certainly, if my neighbor's daughter was kissing a billionaire, I would surely know it before she does."
I hold very still.
"So, is it true?" She says it with a ravenous expression, like curiosity is eating her up alive. "Are you and Demetrius an item now?"
The backyard contracts by about forty percent and I look down at my feet again as hot, treacherous tears burn my eyes.
I'm aware of my mother at the periphery of my vision, the way she shoots me a concerned glance as she entertains the wives of my dad's employees by the bounce house we rented for the kids.
Jazz puts her lemonade down.
"Mrs. Kowalski," Jazz says, in the warmth-level-zero voice she reserves for bluntness.
Jazz isn't really into coddling, anyway.
"Maddie is here to celebrate her mom. And I'm going to go ahead and run a little interference on the neighborhood bulletin board for a sec.
" She smiles, which is not actually a smile.
"She's taking a break from busybodies today. Okay?"
Mrs. Kowalski opens her mouth. Then she seems to think better of it.
"Oh, I didn't mean to pry, dear. I just thought it was lovely, that's all."
"It really was," Jazz says, with a smirk so precise it functions as a door closing. "Buffet looks amazing, by the way. Grace made her famous potato salad. You're hungry, right?"
Mrs. Kowalski takes the hint. She pats my arm, says she will bring me a plate in a minute, and drifts back toward the grill where the Knitters Club is holding court, glancing hungrily at us like sharks waiting for their next victim.
The Knitters Club minus their ruling sovereign, who is already settled at the rehabilitation center, as Mrs. Fairweather confirmed this morning.
The backyard expands again and I remember how to breathe.
I look at Jazz. Jazz looks at me. She picks up her lemonade.
"Did I ever tell you that I love you?" I ask her.
"Not nearly enough, bestie. Not nearly enough."
I chuckle and it feels so good, it almost brings fresh tears to my eyes. Almost.
That's when I hear it.
A low, deep rumble cuts through the backyard noise. This is not Mr. Prewitt's ancient truck or Mrs. Allen's rickety sedan that backfires on hills. It's something bigger and much, much smoother. Something utterly out of place on my parents' street.
I've only ever heard one engine that can produce that kind of rumble and it makes my heart jump all the way into my throat and almost past my teeth.
That would have been the story of a lifetime for Mrs. Kowalski to spread all over town.
Madison Berwick, vomiting her own heart right in front of her mother's guests.
The conversation nearest to me stutters, then comes to a slow stall and dies. One of Dad's coworkers turns his head toward the front of the house. Then the woman beside him does the same. Then Mrs. Kowalski, who was halfway to the potato salad, stops dead in her tracks.
Jazz sets her lemonade down very slowly. "Maddie, wait."
I'm already on my feet.
I don't know what I think I'm going to do. Intercept, maybe. Head it off. Get there first and deal with whatever this is. That's the plan I make in the three seconds it takes me to cross the yard and push through the side gate.
Then I stop cold in my tracks.
Parked at the curb, half-blocking the road, is Demetrius's monstrous Rolls-Royce. It sits there long and black and obscene in the late afternoon sun, and the neighbors who were already drifting toward the sidewalk stop and stare.
Jazz is right behind me. Her hand finds my elbow, but it's too late now.
The driver's door opens.
The crowd that has gathered on the sidewalk, Mrs. Kowalski and the Knitters Club women and half of my dad's employees and three people I have genuinely never seen before in my life, all of them gasp at the same time when Demetrius Thornwood unfolds himself out of that car.
He is enormous. He is always enormous but somehow the scale of him lands differently in the golden afternoon light, all seven feet of him, the horns, the breadth of his shoulders. The entire neighborhood appears to have grown smaller just by his being there.
People are pointing. Someone behind me whispers his name. Mrs. Kowalski grabs the arm of the woman next to her with an expression of such excitement on her tiny, pointy face that I'm afraid I'll have to call an ambulance for her.
Jazz leans in close and her grip on my elbow tightens.
"You do not have to talk to him if you don't want to." Her voice is quiet and tight in my ear. "We can go back inside right now. I will personally build a human wall to keep him out."
The words reach me. They just don't mean anything.
Because the man who shattered my heart is looking straight at me.
Only me. Like everyone else on this street is furniture.
Then I blink when I notice what he's carrying. Under his arm, cradled against his ribs with the total incongruity of a man who has lost his mind, is a speaker.
Not a tasteful speaker, either. A big black plastic portable thing, the kind teenagers used to haul to the beach when we were young. Huge, obnoxious and certain to cause a small earthquake at full volume.
"Oh, you have got to be kidding me," Jazz shouts, then starts across the grass with murder in her stride.
He doesn't even look at her. He has eyes only for me. Then he lifts the speaker over his head with both hands, holds it up there like an offering to a god who has very clearly stopped taking his calls, and presses a button with his thumb.
The music hits like a weather event.
It is loud. It is so unreasonably loud. It is also the single cheesiest power ballad ever committed to tape by human, beast, or anything in between.
Just when I think my mind is about to explode, he starts singing.
Out loud. To me. With his entire chest.
And so badly, it's a miracle the windshield of his car doesn't shatter. Then again, the damned thing could be bomb and bullet-proof for all I know.