Page 35 of Seven Rules for Breaking Hearts

“Ha, ha.” As punishment for my bad joke, she bombarded me with a brush full of powder, and I scrunched up my face. When I was able to open my eyes again, she was debating between two different blushes. I turned to inspect my face in the mirror. It was impeccably smooth, but dusted in so much powder that I looked like I’d stepped fresh out of eighteenth-century France. “Hot and bothered, or in the mood?” Jo asked, meeting my reflection’s eye.

My brain jumped right back to thoughts of Declan. “What?”

“The blush colors,” she said, holding them up.

“Oh.” I turned to look at them directly. “In the Mood, I guess.”

Jo applied the blush, then stepped back and eyed me critically, frowning. Before I could ask what was wrong, there was a knock at the door. “I told Autumn and Liv to meet us here,” she explained, clicking the blush compact shut. I hopped down from the counter and followed her to the door, hovering at her shoulder with my makeup half-finished as it swung open to reveal the person standing on the other side.

Liv only rarely wore makeup—usually, she opted for generously applied ChapStick and flakey, three-day-old mascara—but today she’d applied a dramatic winged eyeliner that emphasized her dark eyes, and she was wearing a blue sequin dress that contrasted nicely with her olive skin. She held up a baking pan covered in foil. “I baked brownies.”

“I didn’t know people still made pot brownies,” I said, hands on my hips as I frowned down at the pan. “I thought they just went to the dispensary and bought those gummies in the fancy boxes.” Mind you, it had been a few years since I’d gone looking to buy pot-anything. I’d gotten high a total of two times in college, the latter of which had ended in me shutting myself in the closet because I was convinced that my roommate was looking at me funny, and the only solution was to hide in the dark where she couldn’t see my face.

We set the pan on the table on my balcony, foil peeled back to reveal an innocuous-looking layer of shiny, chocolatey crust. There were no knives in my room—a minor oversight that might’ve been solved with a quick call to room service—but Liv was already cutting the brownie into jagged squares using a ballpoint pen. “Call me old fashioned, but I like to have some control over the dosage,” she explained.

“So, they won’t be too strong?” Jo asked. She accepted the first cutting that Liv offered, a large corner piece with crispy edges. “Where’d you even bake these, by the way? They look pretty fresh.”

“I convinced some older lady to let me use her kitchen.” Liv passed me the next square. “Though I might’ve forgotten to tell her I was making special brownies.” She tried to hand a piece to Autumn, who’d arrived outside my room about thirty seconds after the brownies dressed in a slinky satin dress that caught the light, but Autumn made no motion to take it. “What’s the matter?” Liv asked her. “Not enough Michelin stars for your liking?”

“Hey, we don’t do peer pressure around here,” I interjected. “You don’t need to eat any if you don’t feel comfortable.”

Autumn gave me a strained smile. “Are you kidding? This is Jo’s bachelorette party. Just … try to cut me a smaller corner.”

Liv obliged by breaking the square in half and shoveling the extra into her own mouth.

“Here goes nothing,” I said, holding my square in a sort of mock toast. “To Jo and Peter.”

Two hours later, I was high as hell sitting at the bar in one of the most expensive restaurants in Avalon, decked in a rainbow of Mardi Gras necklaces and sipping wine through a schlong-shaped straw that made the server do a double take. Autumn had booked a tasting tour on Groupon, which included an appetizer to share as well as a glass of wine at seven different restaurants. Glass number three: a pinot grigio that did not pair well with the Parmesan truffle fries Jo had selected as her appetizer for this stop, but I found myself shoveling handfuls of them into my mouth between gulps of wine nevertheless.

Autumn kept sipping from her glass and then setting it back down only to pick it up and sip from it again. “How do you know when it’s kicking in?”

“You’ll know,” Liv said. I wasn’t even sure she was high, though she’d eaten twice as much brownie as the rest of us. Four times as much as Autumn. Meanwhile, the edges of my vision blurred like static on an old TV as I glanced at my phone beneath the table. The cracked screen was so bright in the dimly lit restaurant that I was certain everyone would notice and pester me about who I was texting, but they seemed more concerned with the drinks and truffle fries.

Declan: How’s it going?

Margo: Wrapping things up at stop number three. I’ll keep you posted

“Margo.” I glanced up. Jo was looking at me. “I’m asking you a question.”

“What?” I locked my phone as the rest of the room came back into focus. Silverware clattering against plates. Chairs scraping against the shiplap floor.

I was certain she was going to ask me who I was texting—and a paranoid part of me thought maybe she already knew—but instead, she leaned forward on the table and gripped my arm like she was about to impart some deep, dark secret. “Be honest,” she said, her tone very grave. “Does my hair look stupid?”

I hesitated. The hair itself wasn’t really a problem, but there was the truly obscene inflatable crown perched among her curls, which I’d placed there earlier and then forgotten about. “It looks …”

“It looks like you have dicks in your hair,” Liv helpfully provided.

“Yes, but does it look stupid?” Jo asked, to which there was no right answer, because yes, it did, but that was also kind of the point.

“These chairs.” Autumn was rubbing the curved arms of the captain’s chair she was seated in, oblivious to the conversation happening around her. “They have this sort of rustic chic to them. They’re homey. It’s like they’re giving you a hug, you know?”

“No,” I said, because the chairs were hard and wooden and I couldn’t imagine anything that felt less like a hug.

Liv polished off her wine and stamped the glass on the table. “Where to next?”

“The world is our oyster,” Autumn said, still stroking the arms of her chair.

Jo looked back and forth between the two of them. “We’re getting oysters?”