Page 84 of Play Nice

YES

Her sisters looked at her. She ignored them.

“Does it…talk to you?” I asked her.

She rolled her eyes. “Not your business.”

“It is my business.”

“Whatever. Never mind,” she said, shifting in her seat. I knew the harder I pressed, the more she’d hold back. She was stubborn in that way. So I let it go. I took the girls home.

Later, when I said good night to Cici, I sat at the foot of her bed for a while, waiting for her to tell me more about the presence in the house that she seemed to have some connection to. That she knew, as I did, was real.

“Elle’s gonna tell Dad,” she said, after about twenty minutes had passed. “He’ll be mad.”

“I know.”

“He wants us to live with him. But it wants us to stay.”

“What’s ‘it’?”

“I don’t know,” she whispered. “Shh. It’s listening. It’s here.”

“Cici. This is serious.”

She started to giggle. This wild, erratic giggling that I’d never heard out of her before. “I’m the favorite,” she said. She suddenly stopped her giggling and looked at me, now gravely serious. “I’m its favorite.”

25

I fall asleep reading, and when I wake up it’s dark. It’s night.

The house is different at night. Or maybe it’s just harder to be brave in the dark.

I grab the vape I bought before I left the city, my phone, and my wallet, slip on my shoes, and walk over to Austin’s.

It’s no longer raining, but there’s a dampness in the air, and it stinks of summer-ripe earth. Grass and mushrooms and geraniums and dirt.

I call Austin.

“Hey,” he says.

“I’m coming over. Okay?”

“Okay.” He hangs up first, which I don’t like.

“Look who’s back in the neighborhood,” he says, meeting me at the end of his driveway a minute later.

I hit my vape, exhale into the space between us.

“Do what you want, but those things will destroy your lungs,” he says, pointing to the vape.

“Appreciate your concern,” I say, hitting it again.

He tosses his car keys up and catches them in the other hand. “Let me buy you some disco fries.”

“My Prince Charming. My knight in shining armor.”

“All right. I’ll throw in a milkshake.”