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The carriage shudders with the final jolt of the train. It stops at their platform.
“Alright,” Kate starts as she pushes up from the seat. “You grab those, I’ll get the beanbag.”
In answer, Billie just grunts and reaches down for the two bulky boxes. Not all that big or heavy, but boxes are a pain to carry even when they’re light and medium-sized. Still, she scoops them up in her arms and pins them against her chest, as though that’ll stop them from toppling onto the sticky platform floor.
Billie stumbles to keep pace with Kate through the platform. And though it reeks of piss down here, Billie can always sniff out her one true love. Vodka. It’s in the coffee cup in the hand of the businesswoman in a blue pantsuit that she passes on the stairs.
As though it’ll help, Billie clenches her mouth shut and rushes up the steps, right on Kate’s heels. In the boxes, both the toaster and the lava lamp rattle around like they’re threatening to smash to pieces if Billie doesn’t slow down.
But she doesn’t slow.
Not even as her white platform heels clonk and clack on the stairs, or when the rush of trapped winds spears down from the street above and lifts the hem of her mini-skirt, or even when a stray feather from her fluffy white bag comes free and lands in the cleavage of her pink halter top, instantly irritating her right breast with an itch—
Not even the burn of pain in her thigh from where the knife was plunged into can stop her from wearing what she wants.
Ignoring the feather as best as she can—and the too-many smells of booze dotted all over the street—she keeps up with Kate’s brisk, all-business pace to campus. And there, Billie sticks out like a sore thumb. Might be because she’s looking a little Brittany Spears today, or that everyone at this college seems to dress all-in-drab, like they’re just waiting for their own funeral or something, but whatever it is, Billie ain’t one to back down on her fashion choices just because of a few grimy looks from strangers.
Besides, it’s not like any of these dull losers on campus would know a thing about looking good. Billie scrunches her nose at dozens of the students they pass on their way through campus, the murky brown colors they wear if not already draped head-to-toe in greys and blacks.
Even Kate stands out here, with her (of course) Chanel bag and baby-blue plaid skirt paired with a basic white t-shirt and, in true Kate fashion, a white set of Mary-Janes. Looks like she belongs at a country club more than this colossal campus.
And this place is colossal. About half the size of Dosserport. It’s old, too.
That’s no secret as the girls carry the boxes and the pink-velvet beanbag through the halls of the dorms. The walls are papered along the top, but wood-paneled beneath, and the doorknobs are engraved brass balls that—even to Billie’s untrained eye—obviously come from another time.
It’s Kate’s room, though, that gives it away completely. The dorm room is bigger than Billie’s trailer back in Dosserport. With a mammoth-sized fireplace carved into the wall.
But Billie doesn’t have time to wander around and inspect every detail of the dorm room. Not between the time it took the delayed subway to actually arrive for them in the Upper West Side and just how long it took for Kate to pick out a lava lamp from the store.
“Gotta go,” Billie says with a glance at the white-gold watch dangling from her wrist, a watch she sure as hell didn’t have the money to buy herself.
Kate writes it off as yet another of the many gifts Preston showers her with, like he’s never learned the lesson with Billie that she just doesn’t care about wealth. Can’t buy her.
“Hot date?”
Billie, having abandoned the boxes at the foot of the bed, uses her now-free hands to comb out the knots in her hair. “It’s our last dinner before Preston’s parents come back to the city.”
“Surely they’re not staying in the penthouse with you?”
Billie pulls a grim face. “God no, I’d throw myself off the terrace first. No, they have their own place, but…” she pauses to sigh, her shoulders and chest deflate. “Preston starts his job next week, and you’ll be in college again, and… you know, his mom will just… she’ll be unbearable, really. Between me basically alone in the city when you’re all busy, andthe engagement… I don’t think I’ll be getting much peace from her.”
Kate’s face hardens slightly. Always does wheneverthe ringcomes up in conversation. That big, polished Tiffany’s monster on Billie’s finger.
Billie was fresh out of Eden Park, still in the car on the way to the city, when Preston slid it onto her finger. The same ring from his bedroom back in Dosserport.
No romance about it, no ceremony. He just slipped it onto her finger, eyes as dark as the swamps at night, and that was that. The unspoken condition he set:I paid your bills, I saved your life, I got you clean, and I’ll be looking after you now—you owe me this.
That sort of thing.
He wasn’t asking her. He was telling her.
And since Billie doesn’t give a rat’s ass about weddings, even her own, she can see the bright side in it all—Preston’s mom, Bunny, will soon glide into the city and sweep up all control over the arrangements. But Billie just doesn’t want to hear about any of it, doesn’t want to know about flower colors or the venue or whatever shit she’s supposed to worry about.
If she has it her way, she’ll just turn up on the day, be told where to stand, then it’s done. Hopefully, that’s what happens when Bunny comes into town tomorrow.
“She’ll start planning that early? So you and Preston aren’t going to wait a little while?” Kate asks—
She asks the first real question about the engagement since Billie told her about it and showed her the ring.
