Mark burst out laughing. “I’m not sure whether I should be flattered by that, or offended.”
“Flattered,” I said thoughtfully, but then quickly changed my mind. “No, actually! You should be offended, because I broke up with you, Mark. You’re my ex and no matter how drunk I am, I am not phoning you.”
He laughed even more, a big smile spread across his face. “Why did you break up with me?” he asked, playing along with the strange and nonsensical conversation in my head.
“Because you rented me some seriously terrible movie. Why would you do that, by the way? Why would you give me a movie about someone having to saw off their foot!”
“Nah,” he said, “I don’t think our break-up had anything to do with the movie, I don’t think you really loved me,” he teased.
I shook my head. “Perhaps I didn’t. Perhaps I was just taken in by your spell.”
“What spell?”
“Oh please!” I stopped and put my hands on my hips. I looked him up and down for added effect. “Let’s not pretend you don’t know that half the town is practically giddy in love with you, because you have some sort of . . .” I waved my arm around in the space between us and he looked down at my hand. “Some sort of . . . magical, voodoo thing going on.”
“Voodoo?” He sounded really amused now.
“Don’t act all innocent. You even got me for a moment!” I realized what I’d said and quickly corrected. “But only for a moment. I am totally over you now.”
“I didn’t know you were on me?”
“I was. For about five seconds while you were strumming your guitar all sexy, moody vibes.”
“Sexy, moody vibes?”
I nodded and then whirled around again, did a full 360-degree playful pirouette of sorts. It kicked up the dust around us and I stopped to watch it settle back down on the ground. “I was too big to do ballet when I was young. And I wanted to do it so badly. I loved how ballerinas looked, so long and elegant and beautiful, and I wanted to be a ballerina so badly, but I couldn’t,” I heard myself say.
Mark stopped walking and his eyes swept over me, as if he was trying to reconcile this person with a bigger person.
I flapped a hand at him. “You can see my throwback Thursday pics on Instag— OH!” I laughed. “You can’t.” I twirled around again. “I used to be ‘fat’!” I said. “That’s how I became an influencer; I lost shitloads of weight and suddenly everyone wanted to know who I was, and what I was eating for breakfast.” I twirled again. “My sister was a beautiful ballerina.” It was meant to sound light and frivolous, but landed with an air of iciness that I hadn’t intended.
“That’s . . . terrible,” Mark suddenly said and I stopped twirling.
“What’s terrible?”
“Terrible that people only wanted to know you after you’d lost weight. That seems . . .” He stopped talking, as if thinking about his next word carefully. “Shallow.”
I blinked at him. Gob smacked. I’d never thought about it like that. I’d always thought about it as a positive thing, but the way Mark had just put it . . . it didn’t sound that positive after all. I didn’t like that thought, and distracted myself by humming and walking again. And then I realized what song I was humming.
“Ice Ice Baby,” I sang and heard Mark laugh behind me. His amusement only seemed to spur me on even more, so I started rapping, totally fucking up the lyrics.
“Like a harpoon nightly and daily and tightly and will it ever stop?” I pointed my finger at Mark and raised an expectant eyebrow at him.
“YO! I don’t know,” he shot back to me. I clapped and giggled happily at this, our masterful attempt at nineties rapping. But when our laughter tapered off and everything around us was silent again, our eyes found each other. We froze.
It seemed like the entire world froze too. The crickets went quiet and the breeze stopped blowing.
CHAPTER 36
In this light—the light that was coming from the stars and the now faint town lights, the light from the small torch Mark was holding—his brown eyes seemed more black. A dark and stormy sort of black. A black that seemed to wipe all those cute-boy looks straight off his face. The color aged him and gave him a streak of something else, something that was the complete opposite of the slightly unkempt, nerdy guy from the video store who was wearing a faded Metallica shirt now.
I cocked my head to the side and looked at him, as that strange familiarity bubbled up inside me again. I tilted my head the other way, looking at him from another angle.
“You know, in certain lights you really do look familiar—”
“Shhhhh,” Mark cut me off, putting his finger over his lips. “Listen,” he said quietly, under his breath.
“Listen to what?”
