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This version of the party will be different. I’ll be pleasant and palatable, and I’ll pay attention to those Tiki torches, and—no. I won’t even go outside. And I’ll be with Lucie, who with her uncanny ability to instantly belong is the best kind of social armor I can imagine.
Except for some occasional small talk, we walk in relative silence. Proof that we’re not friends, that this is just a last hurrah as roommates before she’s absorbed into the Greek system. I feel too tall walking next to her, Lucie’s tiny heeled boots clacking against the sidewalk.
We’re not even halfway there when she stops suddenly. “What’s that?” she says.
“What?”
She clamps a hand around my arm, her grip tighter than I’d expect it to be. “Something in the bushes,” she says, pointing to a row of shrubbery, and I hear it too. A rustling. The sound of someone breathing.
Slowly, I reach for the canister of pepper spray in my purse. Then, before I can process what’s happening, the leaves part and my heart slams against my ribs and Lucie’s shriek pierces the night.
This time, I smash my finger down on the trigger.
And this time, it sends a sharp burst of orange right into Miles’s face.
Chapter 7
MILES FLINGS HIS HANDS TOWARD his face, squeezing his eyes shut and letting out a low moan.
“Oh my god oh my god oh my god!” I stuff the can back into my bag. “I’m so sorry!”
Next to me, Lucie is ghost pale, frozen in place.
“You sure you didn’t do that on purpose?” Miles bends over, dropping his hands to his knees. This puts him right in the path of a streetlamp, which illuminates the orange-red spray around his eyes and across the bridge of his nose. “Jesus, that stings.”
“On purpose?” In this version of September 21, Miles and I barely interacted. And we were nothing but cordial to each other. “Why would I—I hardly know you.” Instantly, I amend the statement. “I don’t know you.”
“Well, then.” A grimace twists his words. He hasn’t opened his eyes yet. “I’m Miles. I’d say it’s nice to meet you, but…”
Lucie holds up her phone with a shaky hand. “Should we call 911?” she asks, blue eyes wide and worried.
“No—don’t,” Miles says, right before he groans again, swearing under his breath.
“I’m so, so sorry.” I repeat it approximately a hundred more times for good measure. “It’s dark, and you surprised us, and my mom had me carry around this pepper spray…. I just didn’t think I’d be using it so soon.”
A thin scrape of an exhale. “Mmm.”
“We have to get you to a hospital. Or to, I don’t know, poison control or something?” I slip my phone from my skirt pocket. “What should you do if you get pepper-sprayed?” I ask it.
“Sorry, I didn’t understand that,” the warm robotic voice answers. And they say one day technology will replace us all.
Lucie looks a split second from either fainting or sprinting as far away from us as possible.
“You go to the party,” I tell her. “I’ll help him.”
“You sure?” she asks. Upon my nod, she reties her shirt’s knot at the navel and takes off, all too eager to disappear into the night.
And then it’s just Miles and me, and a couple groups of students on the opposite side of the street too wrapped up in their own worlds to notice.
I try to remember that breathing technique Lucie taught us at Island. Box breathing, she said it was called. Eyes closed, deep breath in through the nose, hold for four seconds, exhale… or something. Whatever it was, it’s not working for me right now.
“Does it hurt?” I ask.
Finally, Miles opens his eyes. The whites of them have turned a painful pink. “What do you think?” He blinks a few times. Squints. “I’ll be fine in an hour or so. You can go to that party with your friend, if you want.”
“What, have you been pepper-sprayed before?”
“I—not exactly.”
