Page 35 of Just One Little Bargain

Maddie’s jaw is still hanging open. Her whipped cream is starting to slide. She yanks my tote over the table and roots through it with zero regard for my personal property. A second later, the cinnamon roll container is unsealed and the biggest one is halfway in her mouth.

“That,” she says, chewing aggressively, “is not what I thought you were going to tell me.”

“Glad I could surprise you.”

“This obliterates every version I’ve been told today, and I’ve been told many.” There’s a smudge of black eyeliner under her left eye that she either missed this morning or carried over from last night. With Maddie, both feel equally plausible. “Tommy at the gas station said the guy was your ex-boyfriend’s brother. Mrs. Finch told two separate people he was a debt collector.”

“Seriously?”

“She seemed very confident.”

The knot between my shoulders loosens by a fraction. Seeing the absurdity reflected back in Maddie’s face makes the whole thing shrink into something I can manage.

She finishes chewing and her left dimple fades. “But for real, are you okay?”

“I’m good.” I fidget with the straw wrapper, folding it into tiny triangles. “Look, in the moment? It was the scariest thing that’s ever happened to me. But today, sitting here, I can’t make any of it hold together. Demons aren’t real. Cats don’t summon things. And locked doors don’t just stop working.”

“When you frame it that way . . .”

“Exactly.”

“So we’re going with weirdo?”

“Yup, and calling it weird but explainable.”

“Solid plan.” She nods firmly. “Of course, the other possibility is that you’re straight up going insane.” She tilts her head, considering. “I’ll be honest, that’s a genuine option with how you’ve been running yourself into the ground for months. Your brain probably just . . . glitched.”

My foot snaps forward and catches her right in the shin. She yelps.

“I didn’t invent an entire person, Madeline.”

“I’m just saying. You also once convinced yourself that a raccoon on your porch was a bear.”

“In my defense, it was dark, and the thing looked enormous.”

“It was four pounds.”

“It was aggressive.”

We stare at each other until we both crack. Maddie snorts first, which sets me off, and then we’re laughing with reckless volume that makes Nora glance over from the counter with her eyebrows raised.

This is what Maddie does. Takes whatever catastrophe I’m holding and compresses it until it fits in my pocket. She perfected the technique in the sandbox behind the community center, when Rebecca hurled a fistful of sand at my face because I touched a yellow shovel she’d abandoned.

I remember sitting there, grit in my eyelashes, too stunned to cry. And this girl I’d never spoken to marched over, planted herself between us, and told Rebecca that if she did it again, she’d eat her snack pack.

Rebecca burst into tears. Maddie sat down next to me, brushed sand off my shirt with her grubby little hands, and asked if I wanted to dig a hole to China.

And that was it. The origin of the most important friendship of my life.

She has no concept of boundaries where I’m concerned. Reads my texts over my shoulder. Steals food off my plate mid-sentence. She’ll ask me anything, say anything, and dig through every compartment of my world because, in her mind, her clearance is permanent and irrevocable.

There isn’t a single wall between us. Maddie knocked them all down years ago, and I never bothered rebuilding—wouldn’t want to. The drafty, wide open floor plan of this friendship is the only layout that works.

We finally calm down. Maddie reaches across for another cinnamon roll, one thumb rubbing the scar on her opposite wrist that she got climbing the fence when we were twelve. “So . . . are you coming to the festival with me?”

“Hard pass.”

“Wrong answer. Try again.”