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Nothing.
I banged the side of my fist against the door. “Hey!”
A whisper, too close, filled my ears. Indeterminate. A string of word-like sounds that my sluggish mind couldn’t make sense of.
“No.”
I shook my head, pulling my knees to my chest to hug them close, pressing my head between them. There wasn’t anyone outside.
It’s just the drugs,I told myself when another indistinct whisper filled my ears despite them being firmly cut off by my knees.Not real.
I wasnotgoing crazy.
I wasn’t.
Becca sat rigidlyin a stool at the bar upstairs, staring at something on her phone that made tension radiate up her arms. She sighed, all but tossing her phone face down on the bar in favor of the glass of clear liquid I didn’t think was water.
“Hey.”
She jumped as I dragged out the stool next to her.
“I-I swear I’m going to pay for this,” she stammered, indicating the vodka. “I just lost my wallet somewhere at the Docks and—”
“Becca, I don’t give a fuck about the vodka, drink as much as you want.”
Her cheekbones flared, but she nodded. “I just wanted the one. To take the edge off, you know?”
“Corv said it was bad.”
“She was… until the Docks, I’d never seen a dead person you know. Well, not unless you count my mom, but they had her all made-up and pumped full of whatever the fuck they put in dead people to make them look alive at a wake. Julia was way worse than the Aces at the Docks. She died badly.”
She was rambling, and she realized it before I could say anything, sighing before she sipped the vodka, her hands trembling slightly.
“What were you looking at just now?” I asked her. “Before I came up here.”
Becca shook her head, snorting derisively. “Nothing from Ava Jade if that’s what you’re thinking.”
It was hard to keep the disappointment off my face, but it was clear whatever it was upset her. If AJ were here, she’d ask her friend what was wrong. I didn’t have a lot of time, but after all the shit Becca had had to endure over the past few months, deserved or not, I owed her at least a few minutes of my time.
“What was it?”
She bit the inside of her cheek, flipping her phone over to flick open the screen and slide it over to me.
On the screen was an open email. An acceptance letter to CalArts. No, it was a scholarship. As if Becca Hart needed scholarship money.
I’d all but forgotten her love of art. She was leagues better than me and my notebook scratchings. Her talent was probably what had gotten her in.
“Congrats.”
“A couple months ago, I would have been over the fucking moon if I saw this. Now, I just… I don’tfeelanything.” She sipped her vodka. “Doesn’t matter anyway. I’m going to tell them to give the scholarship to someone else. My dad would never let me go. He expects me to follow in his footsteps. Already has an in for me at fucking MIT.”
“But that isn’t you.”
“Tell him that.”
She finished her drink and set the glass down, fixing me with a hard stare. “So?”
I lifted a brow.
