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“What was that about?” Lynn asked as she followed me into Malcolm’s room.
“Someone dumped a pitcher of pun
ch over her head,” I said. I watched Lynn closely.
“Oh, no,” Lynn cried. “Do you think she’s okay? Should I check on her?”
“Later,” I said. And then I kissed her. Because when you’re faced with that much crazy, you have no choice but to embrace it.
23
“Did Shelly seem like a raging psycho when you fucked her?” I asked Malcolm, watching him closely over the rim of my beer mug.
He stared down at the table for a second, his hands braced against it as his brow furrowed. Then he let out a long breath. “Shelly is a raging psycho, man. This much you already know.”
I did know. I just wanted to know more. “But when you fucked her, what was that like?” I’d always wanted to know, ever since the day I walked in on them.
“I know they look alike, man,” Malcolm started, “but they’re not.”
“I know they’re not.” I did know, although looking at Shelly was like looking into a mirror with Lynn standing on the other side.
“You thought it was Lynn that day, when we walked out of my room,” he said quietly.
“Only for a minute. Then I realized.”
“Man, I never felt so guilty in my life,” he admitted. He scrubbed his hand across his forehead. “At first, I thought Lynn was playing a trick on me. Then Shelly started to talk, and I knew she wasn’t Lynn. Those two are nothing alike.”
“What happened?” I asked. “You never really said.”
“I felt too fucking guilty. I should have stayed out of your shit.”
“So, you were at that party…” I began. I rolled my hand, prompting him to continue.
“Yeah.” He coughed into his fist. “We were all at the party, and I had just seen you and Lynn out in the living room. I went to the bathroom, and suddenly the door opened and Shelly slipped in with me. I put my junk away fast and tried to laugh it off, but she didn’t seem to care.”
“Did she say anything?”
He looked uncomfortable. “No.”
“But…” I raised my brows at him.
“She just jumped on me, man. She climbed me like I was a tree, her tongue in my mouth and—”
“And you still thought she was Lynn.”
He nodded. “For a second, I did. But it was weird. They looked so much alike. But I had just seen Lynn in the living room and she was wearing a red turtleneck. Shelly had on a pink sweater with white lace at the neck. I remember because it scratched my skin.”
“What happened next?”
“I shoved her away from me, and asked her what she was doing. I said, ‘God, Lynn, what the fuck?’ but she laughed. When Shelly spoke, she had a Southern accent, and I knew Lynn didn’t have one. It was bizarre.”
I said nothing.
“She told me she wasn’t Lynn and I said, ‘Yeah, right,’ and I tried to laugh it off, but she laughed louder. She nodded toward the living room. ‘Go look,’ she said. ‘Go talk to Lynn. Ask her about me. She’ll tell you. Then I want to fuck you.’ Dude, I had to go look. But you weren’t in the living room. I walked around the house trying to find you and Lynn, and then I found you on the sun deck. Lynn was wearing red, just like I remembered, and she was sitting in your lap and you were snuggled all up with her and everything. I called her name, and when Lynn looked up, in Lynn’s eyes I didn’t see any of the darkness I’d seen in Shelly’s. That right there should have been enough to make me stay away from her.” He snorted. “But it wasn’t. It wasn’t enough.”
“Then you went back to the bathroom?”
He nodded. “She was gone, though. I should have been glad. I was so weirded out by it that I went to my room. When I got there, Shelly was naked in my bed.”
