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“Thanks. It’s the thought that counts, though I’d never want that. Even the thought of you brandishing a weapon kinda freaks me out. Like a Killer Kewpie Doll,” I reply, watching her plop down on my couch.
She grins, a full showing of her teeth like it’s a really funny joke. “You know me, I’m just your everyday FBI consultant Barbie doll. I’ll shoot you full of holes, infiltrate your organization, and discover all your dirty secrets. Then I’ll make cupcakes, paint my nails, and break your eardrums with my karaoke. Gotta have balance, you know?”
The sarcasm is a newer development in Maggie’s personality, and I like it. She used to be exceedingly sweet and innocent, but her man Shane has apparently changed that a little.
She still doesn’t curse, which of course means I’m even dirtier in my talk around her, trying to get her to let an F-bomb drop. So far, I’ve succeeded exactly once, an effort that took a lot of wine after a customer at Petals grabbed her ass, but today might be number two.
“You wanna drink?” I ask. “Oh, you can toss the jacket anywhere.” I vaguely gesture to the hooks by the front door, which are so overloaded that there’s a pile of hoodies on the floor too. At least they’re in the general vicinity of where they’re supposed to be.
Maggie looks around for the first time, seeing the mess I’ve created over the past two weeks. I’m not exactly a neat freak to begin with, and two weeks of going to work and then crashing on my couch haven’t done a thing for my cleanliness, though some of it’s been TJ. He went through here with a stick and some doohickey, checking every wall I’ve got. And then he moved stuff out of the way to install new camera-less smoke detectors. Only problem is, he didn’t put everything back.
“Why don’t we just head out?” Maggie finally offers. “Our appointment’s in thirty minutes anyway.”
Foregoing the idea of a drink, I nod and follow Maggie out, making sure to lock my door behind me. Her car’s in the parking lot, a nice, new, very bland-looking Suburban.
“You planning on killing the planet one-handed?”
“Bureau issue . . . I gotta return it on Monday,” Maggie says.
We get to the salon, and it’s not until we sit in the big vibrating chairs with our feet soaking in the tubs that she finally looks over, her eyes piercing.
“Okay, what happened? Hit me with the whole sordid story.”
This is us, what we have done countless times before. We’ve been through a weird tumblypants change in our friendship, but through it all, we’ve just become closer. And this is how we do our thing.
I give her an edited version, leaving out names because you never know who is listening. “And then after agreeing to transparency and telling me about some of it, he leaves out the biggest fucking part.”
“What?”
“The spying! He had cameras all in my apartment. And he didn’t tell me! When I caught him, he was fiddling with the smoke detector!”
Maggie cringes, biting her lip worriedly. “Yeah, that’s awful. I mean, we have cameras at our place for security, I get that. But we know about them.”
I shake my head, my deep sadness of the last days replaced again by fresh anger.
Maggie eyeballs me. “Okay, so let me just say something and have you not bite my head off, deal?”
I don’t like the sound of this, but I nod.
“So if you were dating a celebrity or a politician or something, would you mind the guards, the trackers, the reporting of your whereabouts, the cameras? Because, not that Shane is any of those things, but that sounds oddly familiar to my life.”
I open my mouth to answer, but before I can, she reaches into her purse, pulling out her phone. “See? Tracker. Cameras at home—want to see my bedroom right now?”
She clicks a few times on the screen, and her made-up bed, complete with pink floral pillows, pops into view. “And while I may not have a guard right now, I do partner up when I go into the field. When it’s not with Shane, he gets so nervous I swear he pees his jockeys if I don’t check in with him.”
“But you know about all that stuff, and knew it going in,” I argue.
Maggie holds up her hand, and I sit back, holding back my frustration. It’s not her, it’s this whole shitty mess. “I know,” she says after I’m fully in my seat again. “I’m just trying to figure out what the exact problem is. Is it the monitoring or is it that he didn’t tell you, because those are very different problems with potentially different solutions.”
“I’m not sure,” I admit. “I just know I’m mad. And sad. And just grr!” I finish with a growl of . . . confusion? Frustration? I’m not quite sure.
