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Rhiannon shook her head, chin pointed down. “I just have to go.”
And then she hurried off down the sidewalk in a half run. “Rhiannon! Hey!” Lenna cried. She started after her, but Rhiannon didn’t stop.
Lenna hid in her cubicle for the rest of the day. Head down, marking up pages. At one point, she heard Frederick’s boisterous laugh down the hall, but she ducked down, hoping he wouldn’t see her. What had Rhiannon been so concerned about?
She texted Rhiannon again and again, saying she was sorry. Of course Rhiannon wasn’t holding her back. She’d been a wonderful friend—Lenna owed her everything.
But Rhiannon didn’t answer.
All night, Lenna tossed and turned. In her dreams, she and Rhiannon were going on a bike ride, just the two of them. At one point, the path diverged; Lenna wanted to take the road downhill, but Rhiannon told her not to. “Something bad will happen,” she warned.
Dream Lenna got annoyed and did it anyway, but when she got to the bottom of the hill and turned back, Rhiannon was still at the top, and she was screaming. Something washappeningto her—there were legs sprouting from the middle of her body, and her skin was turning an odd salmon shade. “I’m a bug!” she screamed, her body snapping,Metamorphosis-style, into the form of a giant salmon-colored cockroach. “A ginger bug! I told you not to go down that path, Lenna!”
Lenna shot up in bed, sweating.
The next morning, she dragged herself into the office, resolved to try again with Rhiannon. But when she arrived, Rhiannon wasn’t at her desk.
“Says she’s sick,” Judy, the office manager, reported.
Lenna tried to call her friend, but she didn’t answer. The nextday, Rhiannon wasn’t there, either. “Is she still sick?” she asked Judy.
But Judy didn’t know.
A few days passed. Lenna kept trying to call her, but Rhiannon didn’t answer. She almost considered calling the police to check on her—horror stories of people found dead in their apartments came to mind—but then she remembered that Rhiannon had spoken to Judy when she’d called in sick.
She could barely concentrate on work. Frederick messaged a few times, asking if she’d like to hang out, but she staved him off, Rhiannon’s words ringing in her ears:He’s not right for you.She couldn’t move forward one way or another until she understood what that meant and where Rhiannon had gone.
Friday of the following week, Rich, Rhiannon’s boss, stood at the entrance to Lenna’s cubicle, a flustered look on his face. “Well, your friend has put us in a fine mess.”
Lenna turned and looked at him. “What?”
“Taking leave like this. Says she’ll be back in a month.”
Lenna rolled back in her chair. Her heart was suddenly pounding. “Where did she go?”
“Oregon.” Rich leaned against the cubicle wall. “She didn’t tell you?”
The printer in the copy room let out a groan. Polly, the woman who occupied the cube next to Lenna’s, was on the phone with some sort of furniture delivery company, explaining that her apartment didn’t have an elevator, and they had to carry a couch she’d ordered up another way. Lenna could only focus on the brass buttons on Rich’s blazer, not on his face. This made no sense. Rhiannon talked to Lenna before she ordered a pair of jeans online; she included her in her decision over what latte to choose from the Starbucks menu. Had Lenna’s mistake been what caused Rhiannon to leave the state?
Lenna sent more texts. And emails. She left voice mails. She even went to Rhiannon’s apartment building and rang the buzzer. No one answered.What the hell was in Oregon?
The weekend dragged. There was a pit in Lenna’s stomach. Rhiannon still didn’t answer her.Fine,she thought. A wall went up. But it was a thin shell; it immediately developed cracks and holes. What was so wrong with her that someone would justvanishon her? Or maybe it wasn’t a friendship at all. Maybe she was just a distraction for Rhiannon.
Work held no joy. With Rhiannon out, one of the writers was temporarily promoted to her position; technically, there was an opening for someone new to take that writer’s place. Lenna knew she should throw her hat in the ring. But she couldn’t bring herself to summon the drive. The opening had come at too great a cost.
A week later, she was hurrying to work. It had started to rain, and she didn’t have an umbrella. She pulled her jacket over her hair, but it was useless—she was getting soaked. She’d had another dream that Rhiannon turned into a bug. In this version, though, her mother appeared next to Rhiannon as the metamorphosis happened and held out her hand to help Rhiannon up. “Come on,” she said. “We need to go now.”
Lenna was flummoxed. Her mother was here, after so many years, and she didn’t even want to say hi? “Wait!” Lenna cried, but Rhiannon and her mother both turned and flew away.
The dream rattled her so much that she called her dad the next day. “To what do I owe this honor?” he’d asked. They didn’t speak on the phone much.
Lenna wished she wouldn’t have to say it out loud—that he’d justknow.She missed Mom. It was what she always said when she called him. Besides baseball, it was their only other point of conversation.
A woman’s laugh tinkled in the background. A few years back,her dad had moved down the coast to an over-fifty community; his place was a tiny one-bedroom with a balcony that overlooked a man-made lagoon. It was never a move he would have made when Lenna’s mother was alive—living in a “community” wouldn’t have been her cup of tea—but he seemed happy about the change. Sometimes, he sent Lenna texts about how he’d gone Rollerblading, or played thirty-six holes of golf, and there was a members’ club on the premises with a bar and restaurant and theme nights. She’d suspected he was dating someone, too, but she hadn’t yet been introduced. Lenna didn’t blame him for burying his grief and moving on. In a lot of ways, she wished she could, too.
Now, she heard footsteps behind her, and then someone called her name. When Lenna turned, she saw a petite woman around her age with round eyes and wavy, frizzy hair. She was smiling at Lenna expectantly, proffering a huge golf umbrella.
“Room enough for two,” the woman offered.
