“What’s that?”
Nicola moved the shirt aside. “Let me see the ring!”
“The wha—?” In her panic, Holly had all but forgotten it. “Oh! Here.” She pulled it out of her pocket and handed it to Nicola. “It’s filthy. Don’t touch any open wounds now.”
“I’ve got plenty.”
Relieved that Nicola was able to joke, Holly gave a laugh and went around to the driver’s seat.
Her hand was shaking, but she put the key into the ignition and started the car. She drove out of the gravel parking lot. “Are you okay at all?” she asked, afraid to steal a glance at Nicola for fear of what she’d see.
“I’m not dying.” Nicola dabbed at her nose with the T-shirt. “Though you’d think someone had cleaned up a murder scene with this. Head wounds bleed so much. Yuck.”
“Oh my God. Oh my God.” Holly couldn’t stop her trembling. “Did I break your nose? The nose you spent a lifetime wanting to change? The nose you just spent a fortune on?” This was a catastrophe. She’d ruined her best friend’s life.
“It’s my wrist that really hurts,” Nicola said. “My nose will be fine.” The way she said it, though, it was clear that she didn’t really think so.
It was clear that Holly had ruined everything.
Holly swallowed and pressed a little harder on the accelerator. “Don’t worry, I’m sure they can fix everything at the hospital. Just hold on a few more minutes.”
“Do you still have any water left?”
Nicola reached into the cup holder on her door and handed Nicola the Dasani bottle she’d been drinking from on the drive up. “It’s warm.”
“That doesn’t matter.” There was a sharp intake of breath. “Holy cow.”
“What? What?” Holly glanced nervously over at Nicola and saw she was holding the ring up in the light. The chain still hung down like an old vine.
But the facets of the ring glittered in the light like Dorothy’s ruby slippers.
“I can’t believe it, but”—Nicola shook her head—“I think it’s real.”
21
“Believe me, sweetie, you could look a lot worse.”
Nicola was waiting for her discharge papers so she and Holly could get out of the ER, but the nurse would not stop talking. The only remotely medical thing she’d done was hand Nicola some Tylenol 3 in a little plastic cup. “Huh?”
“Your face. It could be a lot worse, after what you’ve been through.”
“Oh.” What else could she say? Thanks? No thanks. And shut up just seemed a little too harsh.
“You might not feel so hot,” the nurse went on, “but someone who’s been through what you’ve been through might have come out of this a mess.”
For some reason, she had it in her head that Nicola had been in a fender bender, rather than a walk in the woods. Nicola had already corrected her once, but she was too tired to keep doing it. It didn’t matter.
“Here’s a sheet on what we call the RICE treatment for your sprained wrist. Rest, ice, compression, elevate. For the first forty-eight hours, ice is the most important thing you can do, and most people slack on that because they don’t think it will help.”
All Nicola wanted was more codeine. “I’ll ice it.”
“Take the splint off first.” She handed Nicola another sheet. “For your nose, you’re going to want to be very sure there are no dramatic changes, like an inability to breathe or a large bruised bulge on one side or the other. If you leave a septal hematoma untreated, your nose can just”—she snapped—“collapse. Right into itself. It’s one of the scariest things you can ever see.”
“If I can’t breathe, I’ll see a doctor.” She was going to have to anyway, to repair the damage cosmetically. Nicola sighed. “Okay. So what do I do to get out of here now? Do I have to sign something?”
“I’ll go check and see if your papers are ready.” She pushed through the curtain barrier and clopped down the hall.
A few minutes later, there were more footsteps, and the curtain scraped open a little. Holly poked her head in. “How are you feeling?”
“Like leaving, how about you?”
Holly came in and sat down on the chair next to the bed. “The same. What did they say?”
“Sprained wrist, bonked nose.”
“Bonked? Is that the medical term?”
“I did an episode of ER once. I’m pretty sure that’s the medical terminology.”
“I saw that episode! You were a med student. I guess you’re practically a doctor now.”
“Exactly. Though I doubt CVS would honor my prescription for Percocet.”
Holly laughed. “They gave you Tylenol Three, huh?”
“It’s better than nothing. A little.”
The nurse came back in with a clipboard. “Okeydokey, you are all set to leave. You just have to sign here.” She pointed to a line on the page. “And here. Good. Here are your prescriptions, and you’ll need to follow up with your doctor in a couple of days.”
“Thanks.” Nicola started to stand but felt woozy and sat down again.
“Take it slowly,” the nurse said. Then she looked at Holly. “Were you in the accident, too?”
“Accident?” Holly glanced at Nicola.
Nicola rolled her eyes and shook her head.
“Um, no,” Holly said.
“Good, so you can drive her home.”
“That’s the plan.”
“All right. Good luck! Hope all goes well for you!” She waved her clipboard and went into the next cubicle, where Nicola heard her say, “Oh, my! All of this happened from falling while you were on a hike?”
“Ready?” Holly asked, assisting Nicola to her feet. “I was thinking we ought to just hang out and rewatch season one of The O.C. tonight. You up for it?”
“Definitely.”
“Think you could hook me up with Benjamin McKenzie?”
Nicola gave a laugh. “If I could, you’d have to get in line behind me.”
They started to walk slowly out of the ER. Nicola ached all over—her head, her arms, her back, her butt . . . everything was sore.
“I’ve got it!” Someone shouted behind them.
Nicola glanced over her shoulder as the nurse came bustling toward her. “Do you know who you look like? Well, apart from the black eyes and the blood and stuff.”
At the moment, she couldn’t even imagine. “Who?”
“That girl—” She frowned and clicked her tongue against her teeth. “She’s an actress. What is her name? She was in that movie—Duet.”
“I just can’t get over it. This concealer of yours is amazing.” Nicola was looking at her reflection in the visor mirror of Holly’s car. It was two days since they’d gone to Camp Catoctin, and the swelling and bruising had gone down enough so she could put makeup on her face and actually look normal.
She actually looked like herself again.
Her real self.
Not exactly, of course. The break hadn’t happened so neatly that she’d gone back to being an exact replica of her former self, at least not to her own eye, but as Holly had pointed out, she looked enough like herself to do a damn good impersonation.
“It’s Benefit Erase Paste. Maybe you should get some.”
“Definitely.” They were on their way to Sephora to present Lexi with the ring. Nicola was both excited at the prospect of helping someone out in this pseudo–fairy godmother capacity and terrified at the idea that Lexi would instead see them as thieves.
Which was way more accurate.
“What do you think she’ll say?” Nicola took the ring out and examined it for the millionth time in the light. It was gorgeous. A clear stone, with perfect facets that caught the light and scattered it all over the inside of the car like little stars. If it was a fake, it was a magnificent one.
They’d cleaned it up with jewelry cleaner Holly had gotten from Target, and with every stroke of the cloth, the metal had bloomed with luster and the stone had grown clearer and brighter.
Holly pulled into the parking lot by Nordstrom and put the car in Park. “Are you ready?”
“I’m not sure. But I know we don’t have a choice. We have to do this.”
“It’ll be fun!”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
“Maybe.”
Simultaneously they each took a bracing breath and got out of the car.
“Let’s do it!” Nicola said.
“We are entering through my lucky door,” Holly pointed out. “We could stop in the shoe department on our way out.”
“Sounds like exactly what the doctor ordered.” They stepped into the air-conditioned vestibule. “That and Tylenol Three.”
“Which one do you think will help more?”
“No contest. The shoes.”
They took the escalator to the second floor and walked into the bright artificial atmosphere of the mall. “Wow, it’s changed since I was last here!”
“Which was, what, like twenty years ago?”
Nicola nodded. “Fifteen, twenty. I think Nordstrom had just come in.”
“There’s some good stuff here. We should make the drop and then make a day of shopping!”
“I thought you had to get to the gallery.”
“Nah. I’ll let Lacey cover it.”
“Well, listen to you—I haven’t heard you being so spontaneous in . . .” Nicola thought about it. “Apart from this week, I’d have to say ever. I haven’t ever known you to be so spontaneous.”
Holly nodded and, for just a moment, looked uncertain. “Ever since I saw Randy with that girl . . . I don’t know, it was like I realized I’ve been so wrong about so much for so so long. What I thought was up turned out to be down. Black is white. Fat is thin. And thin”—she shrugged—“is fat. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to figure out what everyone else is thinking without ever giving any consideration to what I think.”
“I’ve tried to tell you that for years.”
“True. But what I didn’t realize until I actually hit the bottom was that being good to yourself doesn’t mean you have to be bad to everyone else. I always thought it was either-or.”
“So you were good to other people at your own expense?”
“Sometimes.” She paused. “A lot of times. I lost all this weight because I thought Randy would love me more if I did. How sick is that? But I realized a few days ago that I had more power over my own fate than I was admitting. So I decided to take control.” She gave a laugh. “Now I’m just trying to hold on to that control.”
Nicola smiled. Holly had a magnetic charisma no matter what she weighed. There was no way to convince her of that, but for the first time in the years that Nicola had known her, it sounded like Holly was finally realizing something of her worth without regard to how much she weighed.
It was like a miracle.
Or, better yet, it was like it should be.
“I think that’s incredibly brave,” she said to Holly. “I am so damn proud of you for figuring out that no man was worth what he put you through. And I don’t mean the weight. You could lose that or gain it, depending what you wanted to do, regardless of what some guy wanted. But the thing is, you wasted so much thought on him. So much energy. You gave him more of yourself than he deserved. But somewhere out there, there’s a guy who does deserve you.”
“And I’ll know him if he doesn’t ask me to lose weight in order to marry him.”
“That’ll be a start, anyway.”
They laughed.
Then Holly said, “So I had a strange opportunity recently. To do something utterly unlike myself.”
Uh-oh. Nicola braced herself. What was coming next? Self-acceptance was one thing. Dyeing your hair black, calling yourself Sasha, and moving to Russia—or something similar—would be quite another. “What is it?”
Holly stopped and faced Nicola. “You might think I’m crazy.”
“I’m ready.” Nicola raised her brows in question.
“Have you ever heard of Guy Chacon?”
She thought about it. “I don’t think so. Who is he?”
“An artist. He was regionally popular at first, but now he’s making it big all over the nation. The JW Marriott in San Francisco just bought a bunch of his work to display in the lobby.”
“Oh! Is he the one who did all those impressionistic paintings of the cherry blossoms?”
“Bingo.”
“Okay, so . . . what? He asked you out?”
“No. No, no.” Holly paused. “He just asked me to take my clothes off for him.”
Nicola took a moment to process that. “I’m sorry?”
Holly gave a nod. “Seriously, he asked me to model for him.” She glanced right and left, then added in a stage whisper, “Nude.”
Nicola clapped a hand to her chest. “Are you kidding me?”
Holly crossed her heart with her index finger. “Totally serious.”
“Are you going to?”
“Well . . .”
Nicola stopped again and put her hands on Holly’s shoulders. “Tell me you said yes to a famous painter wanting to paint you!”
“Actually I said no. Or, more specifically, no thank you.”
Nicola got her reaction in check. She was from a different place, after all, a more artistic community. Maybe, to Holly, such a suggestion was shocking or too immodest. Maybe she was just too shy. It wouldn’t hurt her if she declined his invitation.
But what an opportunity to accept and possibly be part of history in a great artist’s portfolio.
Still, she let go. “At least you were polite.”
“I was.” Holly hesitated. “Do you think that was stupid? To say no, I mean. It’s the chance of a lifetime, in a way.”
“No. I don’t think it’s ever stupid to do what your inner voice tells you to do—or not to do, as the case may be.”
Holly frowned and nodded. “That’s what I thought. I just can’t help but feel that it’s foolish to refuse to pose for a famous painter.”
“Not if it would make you uncomfortable,” Nicola assured her. “And speaking of paint, here we are.” She swept her arm forward.
Holly followed the gesture and saw the storefront for Sephora. “Mecca.”
“What if she’s not working?”
“Then we wait for her shift. I was here again on Thursday and that was her day off, so the way I figure it, she’s got to come in today.”
“Unless she’s part-time.”
“Don’t borrow trouble. I’m sure she’s here.”
They walked in and looked around.
Nicola wasn’t sure what she was looking for, since she hadn’t seen Lexi for twenty years. And the fact that Holly saw the woman and her name tag for as long as she did before she put two and two together made her even more skeptical of recognizing her. “Tell me if you see her,” she said, and set about checking the name tags on every employee they passed.
Everyone looked twenty.
“I don’t see her,” Holly said after about ten minutes. “I’m going to ask. Oh! There’s the cashier who checked me out the last time I was here!” She hurried over to a kid who looked about eighteen, and Nicola followed.
“Excuse me,” Holly said, drawing the girl’s attention. “I’m looking for Lexi Henderson. She works here.”
“Lexi?” the girl repeated. “Hey, you were here before!”
Holly nodded impatiently. “I was, and Lexi helped me. She’d just started then. Do you know if she’s working today?”
The girl shook her head. “She doesn’t work here anymore.”
Even Nicola felt the sting of that. “She doesn’t work here anymore?” she asked.
The girl looked at her, then at Holly. “What, are you guys cops or something?”
“Cops?” Holly looked so incredulous that Nicola decided not to add anything to further how ridiculous the accusation was.
Holly’s shock was clearly proof enough of the truth.
“No,” Holly said to the girl. “We knew her years ago and have someth
ing she might want.”
That was bad. Nicola decided to step in. “Actually, she was a friend in camp, and then when my friend”—she indicated Holly—“ran into her here, she was so surprised, she didn’t think to get her phone number. She just thought she’d be able to come back and find her, but apparently that’s not the case.”
She wasn’t sure, exactly, when the girl had stopped listening, but it didn’t matter. She was on to Nicola.
“Ohmigod, are you Nicola Kestle?” she asked, glancing nervously around as if she hoped no one else would join them in this moment.
“I am.” Nicola was so glad to be recognized again that she didn’t bother with false modesty or trickery.
“I am such a fan of Duet. Can I have your autograph?”
Holly glanced at Nicola, and her meaning was clear.
“Sure,” Nicola said. “But, first, do you know where Lexi is?”
“Well . . .” The girl put a finger to her chin. “She might have left a new address on file for her final check. Do you want me to look?”
“Would you?” Holly asked.
“Please?” Nicola added.
She shifted a glance from one to the other, then gave a single nod. “I’ll take a quick look, but don’t tell anyone.”
As soon as she’d walked away, Holly turned to Nicola. “Who the hell does she think we’re going to tell?”
“Her boss, I’m guessing,” Nicola said quietly. “Now, shhh. Don’t draw their attention.”
“Fine.” Holly turned away and assumed a face of overplayed nonchalance.
Nicola hoped the cashier wouldn’t notice and think something weird was going on, since, to look at Holly, there was.
“This is the address we have on file,” the girl said as she returned. “I have no idea if it’s right, but . . . whatever.”
“Thanks.” Nicola took the paper and shoved it into her front pocket. “We really appreciate it,” Nicola said as she gave her autograph. “There’s just one more thing.”
Holly shot her a death look.
Suddenly Holly was an expert on when to shut up.
“Can you show me where the Erase Paste by Benefit is? I need to pick some of that up before we leave.”
“So what should we do next?” Holly asked over a BLT pizza at California Pizza Kitchen. “Should we just go straight over there? Or warn her somehow first? Maybe try a reverse lookup on her phone number?”
Thin, Rich, Pretty Page 26