Did I Say You Could Go
Page 27
“I’m going to miss you so, so, so much,” says Bee.
She and Marley hold hands all the way to the bus station.
They park and walk Marley in. She purchases her ticket and they join her to wait in line to board the bus.
“Oh, my sweet girls,” says her mother, getting all emotional. She draws Bee under one arm, Marley under another. “It’s going to be okay. We’re all going to be okay,” she murmurs.
As much as Bee would like to believe this is true, she knows it isn’t. Some of it will be okay. And some of it will suck.
This is it. This marks the end of my childhood, she thinks, standing here at the bus station, wearing a Hello Kitty sweatshirt, in a huddle with my mother and my best friend.
MARLEY
Marley waits until she’s halfway to Sacramento before logging on to the Momonymous pod she created, MY MOTHER MADE ME DO IT.
Marley’s brilliant avatars: WhatYouSeeIsNotWhatYouGet, TortoiseWinsTheRace, OneWayAtATime, and HappilyEverAfter. She’s been plotting her mother’s demise for a while. Putting the pieces in place. Being patient, oh so patient. Playing the long game.
With Soleil, slowly revealing the terrible things her mother had done to her, exactly as an abuse victim would. In fits and starts. Confessions followed by retractions. I shouldn’t have said that. My mom’s so great. She’d do anything for me winky face. She’d made Soleil pull the abuse stories out of her. Extract them like wisdom teeth.
Marley’s no victim. She’d learned the art of sabotage from the master, and then she’d gone and lapped her.
Because she would be the most obvious suspect (as she had direct access to her mother’s computer), Marley had HappilyEverAfter send her mother a link to a gif. This was Marley’s cover, the way she would hide in plain sight. The gif was harmless, but her mother wouldn’t know that. All the Hillside moms were so terrified of unwittingly downloading malware.
Then Marley went to work setting up the Instagram account to catfish Bee. First she installed a VPN on her mother’s laptop, which served two purposes. It would hide Marley’s online activity and, later on, it would make it look like her mother was trying to cover up her tracks.
She dumped photos into files. She purchased fake Instagram followers from Apps-R-Us. She took screenshots of everything. She created the digital trail that would be her mother’s undoing.
Finally, she launched Cam’s Instagram and had him reach out to Bee with the perfect bait—an Emily Dickinson poem. Whenever they DMed, she was careful to sound like a grown-up trying to sound like a teenager, when really, she was a teenager trying to sound like a grown-up who was trying to sound like a teenager.
Her original plan was to have Cam break up with Bee and that would be the end of it. But as she got deeper in, she realized it wasn’t extreme enough. She had to make it look like her mother had done something horrendous, so taboo there’d be no coming back from it. And so she’d taken it one step further and posted the DMs of Bee trashing her friends.
Marley never imagined Bee would try to kill herself. Her intended prey was her mother, not Bee. She felt unbearably guilty; she tried to help Bee move on, but no amount of Atomic Fireballs or Netflix binges would make up for her betrayal. Marley hoped she and Bee would remain close, but she knew that was unlikely. She’d have to live with what she’d done.
When it was time to execute the final part of her plan, she’d gone back to Apps-R-Us one last time and purchased an invite to IN ONE EAR AND OUT YOUR MOTHER, Gemma’s pod. Then came HappilyEverAfter’s big reveal. She’d set her trap and she’d sprung it. It was a KO.
She doesn’t think anybody else was suspicious of her, except maybe Mr. Nunez. She’d made the mistake of letting her mask slip a few times in front of him. The night of the talent show, when he’d warned Bee to stay away from Marley, he wasn’t protecting Marley, he was trying to warn Bee. And the day Lewis Singleton fell on his face in the cafeteria? She’d asked him a simple question about VPNs that he couldn’t answer. Shouldn’t a brogrammer know these kinds of basics? So he’d gone to Mr. Nunez and asked the question on her behalf. He told her this at lunch, thinking she’d be pleased with his resourcefulness. Instead she was so furious, she tripped him. Mr. Nunez was skeptical when she’d told him Lewis had fallen, but he never connected the VPN question back to her mother or to her.
Marley returns to the Momonymous app and shuts down her pod. Her screen populates with a row of mailboxes. The doors open, the original invites fly out and flap away like birds, in search of the original invitees, with a new message.
We’re sorry to tell you the MY MOTHER MADE ME DO IT pod has been deactivated. Please pod with us again!
Marley puts her laptop away and smiles. Luciana painted a mural of the night sky on her bedroom (formerly the office) ceiling. Oscar needs her help with his times tables. Her father had already filled the fridge with her favorite foods. Her heart skips. It jumps. It leaps.
“Excuse me, I need to use the bathroom,” Marley says to her seatmate.
The woman moves her legs to the side and she squeezes past. Once freed, Marley dances down the aisle. She shimmies her hips. Runs her hand over the top of her head. Wipes her shoulders clean of imaginary dust. People look up and smile as she goes by.
For the first time in her life, all eyes on her.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book wouldn’t exist if not for the brilliance of my agent, Elizabeth Sheinkman. You’ve been a true partner for over a dozen years. Simply put, I wouldn’t be where I am without you.
My stellar editor, Marysue Rucci, who saw this book’s potential and helped me realize it: thank you for making this book immeasurably better with your keen editorial insights, gentle nudging, and enthusiasm.
I want to thank everybody at Simon & Schuster, particularly Hana Park, Brittany Adames, Leila Siddiqui, and Heidi Meier, who shepherded this book into the world with great care. Thank you to copy editor Shelly Perron. Also thanks to Rex Bonomelli who designed the stunning cover.
Sylvie Rabineau—I’m beyond grateful to have you in my corner.
A huge thank you to Joanne Catz Hartman, Robin Heller, and Elizabeth Stix—my most trusted beta readers. You read draft after draft and offered invaluable observations, suggestions, and course corrections. I’m indebted to you all.
Also thanks to Dianne Click, Kathy Derby, Lisa Moscaret-Burr, Lisa Rubin, Vickie DeArmon, Graziella Louise Gulli, and Dawn Gideon who gave much needed feedback and encouragement.
Thank you to Amy Weston who years ago planted the seed for this novel by suggesting I write something entertaining and fun.
Benjamin Gideon Rewis—my “teen culture consultant”—thank you for saving me from making myriad embarrassing mistakes.
And lastly, thanks to Benjamin Rewis, who has been on this journey with me for nearly thirty years. This is your book as well as mine.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© JONATHAN SPRAGUE
Melanie Gideon is the bestselling author of the novels Did I Say You Could Go, Valley of the Moon, and Wife 22, as well as the memoir The Slippery Year: A Meditation on Happily Ever After. Her books have been translated into thirty languages. She was born and raised in Rhode Island and now lives in the Bay Area.
SimonandSchuster.com
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Also by Melanie Gideon
Valley of the Moon
Wife 22
The Slippery Year: A Meditation on Happily Ever After
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2021 by Melanie Gideon
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First Simon & Schuster trade paperback edition August 2021
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Interior design by Carly Loman
Cover design by Rex Bonomelli
Cover Art: Condensed glass by Mykhailo Polenok/Eyeem/Getty Images; Woman by Franklin Thompson/Gallery Stock
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gideon, Melanie, 1963- author.
Title: The invitation / Melanie Gideon.
Description: First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition. | New York : Simon & Schuster, 2021. | Summary: “A suspenseful novel about a friendship ruptured by obsession, secrets, and betrayal, with shocking twists that don’t stop until the very end”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020037335 | ISBN 9781982142124 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781982142179 (ebook)
Subjects: GSAFD: Suspense fiction. Classification: LCC PS3557.I255 I59 2021 | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020037335
ISBN 978-1-9821-4212-4
ISBN 978-1-9821-4217-9 (ebook)