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“That’s nice,” Missy says, with a glazed smile. She looks away and spots me coming up the walk. “Carrie.” She jumps to her feet. “Thank God you’re here. I have to practice,” she says, making a piano-playing motion with her fingers.
“Nice to see you,” Lali says. She stares at Missy’s back until she’s safely inside. Then she turns to me.
“Well?” I say, crossing my arms.
“How could you?” she demands.
“Huh?” I ask, taken aback. I’m expecting her to beg for forgiveness and instead she’s attacking me?
“How could you?” I ask, astonished.
And then I notice the rolled-up manuscript in her hand. My heart sinks. I know immediately what it is: my story about her and Sebastian. The one I gave to Gayle weeks ago and told her to hold. The one I was planning to tell her not to bother publishing.
“How could you write this?” Lali asks. I take a step toward her, hesitate, and then gingerly take a seat on the other side of the table. She’s playing the tough guy, but her eyes are wide and watery, like she’s about to cry.
“What are you talking about?”
“This!” She bangs the pages onto the table. They scatter apart and she quickly gathers them up. “Don’t even try to lie about it. You know you wrote it.”
“I do?”
She hastily wipes the corner of her eye. “You can’t fool me. There are things in here that only you would know.”
Double crap. Now I actually do feel bad. And guilty.
But then I remind myself that she’s the one who’s responsible for this mess.
I rock back in my chair, sliding my feet onto the table. “How did you get it anyway?”
“Jen P.”
Jen P must have been hanging out with Peter in the art department and she found it in Gayle’s folder and stole it. “Why would Jen P give it to you?”
“I’ve known her a long time,” she says slowly. “Some people are loyal.”
Now she’s being really nasty. She’s known me a long time too. Perhaps she’s chosen to skip that part. “Sounds more like a case of ‘like attracts like.’ You stole Sebastian and she stole Peter.”
“Oh, Carrie.” She sighs. “You were always so dumb about boys. You can’t steal someone’s boyfriend unless he wants to be stolen.”
“Is that so?”
“You’re so mean,” she says, shaking the manuscript. “How could you do this?”
“Because you deserve it?”
“Who are you to say who deserves what? Who do you think you are? God? You always think you’re just a little bit better than everyone else. You always think something better is going to happen to you. Like this”—she indicates my backyard—“like all this isn’t really your life. Like all this is just a stepping-stone to someplace better.”
“Maybe it is,” I counter.
“And maybe it isn’t.”
We stare at each other, shocked into silence by our animosity.
“Well.” I toss my head. “Has Sebastian seen it?”
The question seems to further agitate her. She looks away, pressing her fingers over her eyes. She takes a deep breath as if she’s making a decision, then leans across the table, her face twisting in pain. “No.”
“Why not? I would think it would be another useful brick in your we-hate-Carrie-Bradshaw edifice.”
