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Billie itches to scratch her scalp, so clutches the milkshake glass tight instead, as if to fight off the urge. “I hate Adam Sandler movies.”
“You hatecomedy,” Tonya corrects. She passes off the joint to Carmine before she sets to packing up her hair products into the duffel bag they’d fished out from the trunk of her car.
Billie just shrugs, then parks herself on the pouf. It wasn’t a lie. Comedy wasn’t her thing, not at all. But give her some gory sci-fi (Hello, Alien Resurrection and Event Horizon!) and she’s happy.
The tape as it turns out is not rewound, so Kate—huffing and puffing—attacks the buttons on the VCR. She mutters under her breath, “Not your greatest pick, Carmine.”
“I love Adam Sandler!” Carmine argues.
“A romantic comedy when B just broke it off with her guy of… how long?”
Billie scoffs. “I dunno. Like… eighteen years, maybe? Not including the breakups,” she adds as an afterthought. There were years when they were apart more than together, and in those off-times, she wasn’t loyal to her ex.
Preston doesn’t know about that.
Carmine thins her mouth and shoots Billie a look, a‘sorry’.
Billie just forces a pained smile back.‘It’s fine’.
But she’ll avoid the movie as best as she can.
Nursing her beer, Billie snags out a magazine from under the pouf and drops it onto her lap. And as Tonya joins Grace and Carmine against the pillows on the bed, she flicks through the mag, but her mind is elsewhere, distracted from the glossy pictures of Madonna, Mariah and Aaliyah smiling at her from the pages.
Tossing the magazine aside, she reaches out for her water bottle and—as the movie starts up on the screen and Kate gets comfy on the air mattress—she tops off her rootbeer float with a kick of vodka, courtesy of Jim’s Joint.
The look of disgust from Tonya doesn’t go unnoticed. But Billie likes the boozy kick to her rootbeer, so she can mind her own business.
“Thanks for coming, guys.” Grace’s quiet voice somehow makes it over the absolute racket coming from the TV, that orchestra-type ballad that comes on before the movie starts but in poor sound quality. “Stupid to worry, since it was only a recluse, nothing to do with me, but since Henry…” She forces a smile. “Well, it’s good to have you all over. It’s like old times.”
Billie’s the only one that doesn’t cheer or pat her on the leg or, like Kate does, raise her rootbeer float in salute. Of course the others are keeping up an act. If they were all silent, like Billie, it would be suspicious. Obviously.
So she hides her blank look by dropping her head, touching her lips to the straw, and sucking up a foul mixture of ice cream, root beer and vodka.
Don’t mistake. Billie doesn’t feel regret. Not right now, not true remorse. But fuck, it’s uncomfortable. And it’s wrong. So damn wrong for all the girls to be back in this bedroom that they’ve had about half-a-dozen sleepovers in before—before they killed and butchered Grace’s brother, then threw him to the gators.
The cops ruled it as a missing person. Not a homicide. No reason to suspect foul play. Case is still open, but no one is looking for Henry anymore. It’s been seven years, after all. Cases go cold eventually.
Grace went all hermit for a while, then her parents took her away for the last year of school, and when she came back… distance was still there. She stayed tight with Carmine, but the others kept their space from her.
Billie wishes it had stayed that way.
So it’s a relief when, almost halfway into the movie, Tonya chucks a piece of popcorn at her. “Gotta wash that out now.”
Gingerly, Billie touches her hand to the plastic on her head. And it’s got someheat. A bud of worry appears in her chest, worry that her hair might just melt off her scalp.
As she grabs the PJs she’s borrowing from Grace, Tonya calls out, “Call Gigi, will ya? Tell her to hurry up. I’m out of smokes.”
“Got it.” Billie slips out of the room and closes the door over, not fully shut, but ajar, then heads down the hall to the bathroom.
She pulls the faucet in the shower-over-the-tub, letting it heat up as she strips down and kicks off her boots. The only place to dispose of the plastic bag is in the trash can next to the toilet. Stinks, since it’s potent bleach, but she stuffs it in there anyway.
Before she steps into the tub, under the running water, she checks her cell. No missed calls or texts from Gigi, but… two from Preston. Well, just missed calls.
He’ll be at the Joint with Trevor, still. Drinking. Hoping she walks in. Or at least picks up his call.
But she can’t. If she sees him, talks to him, she’ll break.
All she has is a frayed piece of string tied to fractured strength, and she holds onto that with all her might. It’s not enough to stop the sobs from hitting her when she steps into the shower. It’s not enough to keep her standing as she sits down in the tub, drawing her knees up to her chest, and hugs herself.
