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Just right there bold as brass, where anybody could clock him.
And then just in case that wasn’t bad enough, the thing he was shouting was hername. It was her whole entire fucking name. “Mabel Willicker,” he yelled up at her. “How long you gonna keep me waiting out here like a doorknob?”
To which the answer was, of course:
Until I think of a way to murder you.
Though she couldn’t say it. She couldn’t say anything. If she opened her window and yelled back it would be bedlam, it would be hell, she didn’t know what would happen. Her only option was to somehow get down there if she wanted this to stop. So that was what she focused on. She wiped herself all over with a soapy sponge and threw on her clothes and stuffed crap into her bag, and then pelted down her stairs so fast she felt her teeth clack together at the bottom.
She almost bit through her fucking tongue.
But honestly it wouldn’t have mattered if she had.
He took one look at her as she burst from her door like a wild-haired confetti bomb sent from somewhere south of wherever the Care Bears lived, and immediately stopped his hollering.Shit, his face said.I’m in for it now.And he was right, too, he was. Because her tongue was still intact, and now he was going to get fricking told. “For the love of heck, stop bellowing after me like some hairy Richard Gere in the ten-pence version ofPretty Woman. Things are bad enough as it is,” she hissed the very second she was within a reasonable distance of his daft-arse self. And she didn’t regret it once she had, either. Not even when she processed that she’d just referred to them in a slightly romantical fashion.
Because he didn’t care about that. He didn’t see things that way.
Things were not that way between them, and never would be.
And that just left the current disaster to go over.
Though she got him into the car first. She made him sit down and then climbed in and sealed them both safely inside. And only then did she let him say what she knew he’d been saving since she’d held up a hand to tell him to stop and get in the bloody car. “How do you mean things are bad enough as it is?” he asked. Though his face said it all.
He knew it was not going to be something he wanted to hear.
Or even something he was likely to understand on any level whatsoever. And he was right about that. “So you’ve not seen Twitter, then,” she said, and got the exact answer she expected—his face turning into a maze of confused lines.
And then this:
“I don’t know. Is Twitter the one that’s ruining democracy?”
She couldn’t laugh, however. It wasn’t a laughing matter.
“They’reallthe ones that are ruining democracy. That’s not the point.”
“Then tell me what the point is. Quickly. Before I start to panic.”
How to explain, she thought,to a man who still has a flip phone.
Then tried to break it down into chunks as manageable as she could.
“There are pictures of me at your house going round,” she said.
But even that wasn’t enough, apparently. He just shrugged.
“Yeah, I’m not seeing the problem. That’s what happened.”
“Right. But people aren’t just taking events literally, the way you do.”
“There’s no other way to take them. Nothing else happened. Or at least, nothing else that was visible to them. They couldn’t have possibly seen me plaiting your hair. And even if they did, so fucking what, it didn’t mean anything,” he said in a way she thought he intended to sound scornful and sure.
But to her horror, it didn’t come out that way.
It came out jittery and weird.
Like he’d gotten lost down some dirt track on the way to making his point.
And then he’d said that thing on the end. About it not meaning anything. Even though he had no reason to say that at all. Because of course it hadn’t meant anything, of course it hadn’t, why on earth did he feel he had to make it a thing?
