Chapter 20
Tyler
On Monday, we were back to work at the café. Katie, for the record, was wearing the green dress again, but this time, her
hair was half up and secured with a massive matching bow. She’d lined her eyes with something shimmery and smooth and baby
blue.
“Okay, so,” she said through a slurp of iced latte. “This displacement event. How long, realistically, do you think that sort
of damage would keep Willa out of her house? At least the summer, right?”
I typed her question directly into my browser’s search bar and laughed. “I think we may have over-displaced her. The sheer
size of the home. It’s—”
Katie’s phone rang. Lola, who wasn’t working today. According to Katie, she was in Jersey for a second interview—an all-of-a-sudden
teaching position at the state university’s Camden campus that started in the fall.
“Hi! How was it!? Did they love you again?” Katie’s smile, at once, turned. Her forehead creased. Her posture stiffened. “Wait,
slow down. What do you mean, uninhabitable? What did Maria say, exactly?”
I leaned forward a little. Mouthed, What’s wrong? But Katie never answered. Instead, she hung up the phone, shut her laptop, and rose to her feet.
“I have to go,” she said, stuttering. “There was a gas leak at my apartment. The fire department went to fix it, and they
found, like, a dozen other code violations. Our neighbor told Lola they’re saying nobody can go inside. That we’re all lucky
to be alive.”
“What? You mean you’re being displaced? Like in our book?”
“Yes! No! I don’t know!” She was already halfway out the door. “I’m not fucking Willa, though! I’m real! And all my stuff’s
there! I don’t know where I’m going to live! I need to go, I—”
“Katie, wait,” I said, throwing my shit in my backpack. “Slow down. I’ll come with you.”
Fifteen minutes later, we were standing in Katie and Lola’s clearly Katie-decorated Thumbelina-themed studio apartment, packing
up every last thing Katie owned. She and I’d raced the three blocks north to get more details, only to find her street overflowing
with firetrucks and her sidewalk barricaded with yellow tape. Desperate for entry, Katie batted her eyes at a fireman who
suddenly became very interested in making her life easier, and the rest was history.
“This is insane,” I said.
Katie shoved what must’ve been her seventeenth stuffed animal into a trash bag. The fireman had given us thirty minutes. He’d
also given Katie his phone number. “Not helpful, Tyler.”
“I’m just saying it doesn’t make any sense. It’s too big of a coincidence.”
“It’s New York! This sort of stuff happens all the time! Just”—she tossed a duffel at me—“throw some shit in there, okay?
Stop it with the conspiracy theories and make yourself useful.”
I glared at her, then began corralling the rest of her plush objects while she moved on to her closet. By the time my bag was zipped and I’d asked for my next assignment, I realized Katie’s eyes had welled with tears.
“Hey,” I said. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Yeah! I just don’t totally know where I’m going to stay, is all. I guess it sort of hit me again. How stressful this
is.”
“Can you . . . can you call your parents, maybe?”
She laughed. “Nope.”
At that, my chest tightened. I exhaled and released my apparently clenched fists. “What about Lola? Can you guys get a hotel?
Where’s she going to stay?”
“Juniper’s, I think. The per diem isn’t great. I guess I could go to Danny’s, or . . . I don’t know. I could probably go to
Juniper’s too, but not for six weeks. She has a roommate, and . . .”
I was about to say something, probably something like, Juniper’s sounds like a great idea, actually; I’m sure her roommate won’t mind, when Katie’s phone rang again. She pushed back her shoulders before answering it. Her voice, at once, was high and perky and
not the same.
“Hey! Can I call—” A muffled, imperceptible command. Then another one.
I took a step closer, and Katie put the phone on speaker. Selma. She wanted Katie to make a few final tweaks to Meredith’s
last manuscript, and she wanted them made now.
“I might need a few hours,” Katie said, setting the phone on her dresser.
There were still a few tears in her eyes, but she was making quick work of her underwear drawer all the same.
It was—and I say this with respect—very confusing.
“My apartment’s uninhabitable. I have to move.
I need to figure out where I’m going to stay and get settled before I do anything. I’m packing right now.”
“What do you mean, move?” Selma said. “You’re staying in New York, right?”
Katie flung something very small and very red into her open suitcase. I rubbed my throat.
“Don’t know.” Another thong—ice blue. Jesus. “This guy I’m seeing, he’s got a place in the Village. I could probably ask him,
but it’s not like he’s my boyfriend or anything. And my parents’—that’s not an option. And I don’t want to go to a motel in
Hoboken. It’s going to be, like, two months, and—”
“Can you hold that thought,” Selma said, “for just one second? Stay on the phone. Don’t hang up.”
There was a little clucking, a little cursing, and then silence. A minute later, Selma was back on the line. And indoors,
it seemed. The clack of a keyboard, the ding of an inbox.
“You’re going to Meredith’s,” she announced.
“Huh?” Katie and I said, almost in unison. I beat her by half a second.
“Tyler?” Selma said. “Is that you?”
I walked closer to the phone, scratching the back of my neck. “Selma, hey. That’s, um, that’s kind of crazy, isn’t it? Katie
going to Meredith’s? We don’t actually know her. And last time we were there, well . . . There’s no service, and she . . .”
Selma’s typing stopped. “She what, Tyler?”
Katie stared at me. Neither of us had told Selma about Meredith’s behavior last week. At the time, doing so seemed unprofessional
and unlikely to do us any favors.
“I just . . . I don’t know if it’s safe,” I said.
Selma literally guffawed. “Safe? It’s the safest place on earth. I’ve known Meredith since she was your age. Younger, even.
That house is a fortress.”
Katie was still looking at me, deer in the headlights. Her packing had come to a complete and total stop. I tapped the mute
button.
“I don’t think you should go,” I said. “We’ve never even stepped foot inside the actual house. This isn’t professional, and
it doesn’t make sense to me. Something feels off. You don’t have to say yes.”
“I don’t want to go.” Her bottom lip trembled. “We’re on a roll. I want to stay here. I want . . .”
I stepped closer and curled my hand onto the edge of her dresser. “If you wanted . . . I mean, if you needed . . . You, uh,
you could always—”
“I can hear everything, you two.” That was Selma. I, apparently, had not tapped mute. “Katie’s going to the Hamptons. Meredith thinks this’ll be good for the book, for Willa’s development. That
the setting descriptions were a bit lacking, anyway. Maurice was already in the city returning an ottoman—he’ll be there soon.
It’s a done deal.”
“Selma, please,” I said. “We’ll figure something else out. This isn’t something Katie is comfortable with. We need to write
together, we—”
“Tyler,” she said. “How many times do I have to explain this to you? What Meredith wants, Meredith gets. She thinks this will
improve the manuscript, and nobody here can argue that she isn’t correct. End of discussion.”
And with that, Selma hung up the phone, leaving me with nothing to do but help Katie dump the last of her very skimpy bathing suit collection into an box and then watch from the sidewalk with my mouth half-open as Maurice whisked her away.
The high-noon sun burning so bright, I couldn’t say for sure whether I’d seen the brake lights of his car disappear into the city at all.