“Right . . . because you don’t do things I tell you not to do,” she said. “Anyway, you mind eating alone? I’ll meet up with you in a half hour? I threw all my makeup out. I need cruelty-free.”
“Seriously?”
“One day you’ll get it. It’s unbelievable what you’d do for someone you like. In fact, the more unbelievable, the more you probably like them.” Then she thought about what that sounded like. “Not in a codependent ‘he beats me because he loves me’ way, of course. Because that’s certainly not love, honey. Love never hurts—”
“Okay, Mom! You’re going down a weird road.”
After Mom left me to buy makeup, I didn’t want to go back to the main part of the food court with the high school kids, so I sat in the kiddie area with the stroller moms. Halfway through my fries, I saw Digby dressed in his teddy-bear-in-a-tutu dancing toward me. I waved him off, but the kids around me were screaming for his character, Suzie Bear, to come over.
“Get out of here. I don’t feel like getting into it with my mom again.” I waved him away again. But he kept coming toward me.
“I’m not in the mood. Go away.” I put a little something extra behind my whispering to send him the message that I was serious. I shooed him again, but he kept coming. He mocked me, cupping a paw behind the bear’s ear.
“Oh, you can’t hear me? Can you hear this?” I hit him over the ear. “Bet you heard that.”
Suzie Bear pawed me on the shoulder. It was a shockingly hard hit, actually. Hard enough that my fork flicked fries out of the bowl because of it.
“Ow . . . what the hell?” I got up and pushed Suzie Bear away. “Seriously. Let’s talk when you come over later.”
But he kept coming at me and, somehow, we ended up locked in something I later found out wrestlers call a tie-up. By this point, the kids had gathered around. The future troublemakers among them chanted, “Fight, fight, fight.”
I floated out of my body and over the scene. I saw myself twirling around the tables with a giant teddy bear.
And then I saw Digby himself standing to the side, yelling, “Five bucks on Suzie Bear!” It took me another second to process the fact that if Digby was standing in the crowd, then I was tussling with a stranger.
Digby told me afterward that Suzie Bear was being worn that day by a hearing-impaired girl named Wendy. He also said that my agitated waving and whispering probably made Wendy think I had something to say to her.
I didn’t find this out until later because security hauled me off to mall jail before there was any explaining. It took fifteen minutes solid of Digby’s fast-talking about various fur-oriented phobias he claimed I had to convince the mall cops to let me go.
“Hey . . . your earrings are gone,” he said.
I touched my earlobes. I’d been self-conscious when I’d removed them after getting off the phone with Dad. It wasn’t like removing them was some grand gesture, because I knew, of course I knew, that even if Dad had been there physically watching me take them off, he wouldn’t have cared whether or not I wore them beyond the fact that he thought I’d lose them if they weren’t in my ears.
“It’s good. They were a little . . . ‘To-my-suburban-soccer-mom-wife-on-her-fortieth-birthday,’” Digby said.
“Thanks for the fashion advice but what the hell? Aren’t you Suzie Bear?” I said.
“Not always. Sometimes I’m Angelo the Duck and I peel shrimp for Cajun Connection on Thursdays,” he said.
“You have three jobs, you go to school, and you still have enough free time to get me in trouble.”
“Hey, this was all you, Princeton. And I think I just got you out of trouble.”
“Right . . . thanks for that. I don’t need an assault charge on top of everything else. I owe you one.”
I regretted it as soon as I said it, because of course I knew what Digby wanted from me at this point.
“Funny you say that,” Digby said. “Felix will be wearing a red cummerbund, so stick to black, red, or white. Wait, not white . . . you might look like his nurse nanny or something.”
And that’s how my first date in River Heights (first date anywhere, actually) ended up being with an almost-thirteen-year-old.
Later that night, at 8:30, Mom was running late, still upstairs getting ready, when, usually, she would have been gone by then. Digby had been coming over basically every night since he realized on the night of the Dumpster fire that in my house, as he said, “There’s food lying around everywhere.”
I peeked out the glass in the front door and saw Digby jogging down the street toward our walk. I waved for him to stop. We had a frustrating pantomime exchange for a couple of seconds until he finally understood that I was telling him to wait by the side of the house.
I started clearing the dinner table to kill time until Mom left.
“Zoe, could you come upstairs, please?” Mom said.
I went up to her room. “Yeah, what’s up, Mom?”
Mom was dithering over her collection of black boots. “I think black’s too . . . middle-aged? Don’t you have some dark brown ones? Can I borrow them?”
“Hang on.” I went into my room and after rooting around on my closet floor, I found the boots. I got the scare of my life when I stood back up, though, because suddenly there Digby was, sitting on my bed. “God. You scared the crap out of me.”
Digby caught the boot I threw at him. “What?”
“I meant wait by the tree, not climb it, you idiot—”
Digby lobbed the boot back to me and shushed me right as Mom said, “Zoe? What did you say?”
I heard her footsteps approaching, so I grabbed Digby and threw him in my closet. “Don’t touch anything.” I slid the closet door shut just in time.
“Oh, I meant the other brown boots. The ones with the stacked heel.” Instead of leaving, Mom hovered in the doorway.
I couldn’t think of a way to get her out of my room that wasn’t shady, so I prayed Digby knew what a stacked heel was, cracked open the closet door, inserted just my arm, and flailed around. When I took my hand back out of the closet, I was shocked to see I was actually holding the right pair of boots. “Holy cow. These are the boots!” I checked my excitement. “Here. Have a great time.”
“Okay. What?” Mom said.
“Nothing.” Then, to underscore the fishiness of my response, there was a huge crash from inside my closet.
“What was that?”
“The tension bar in the closet must’ve given out again,” I said.
“Tension is right . . . what are you so nervous about?”
“Nervous? I’m not nervous,” I said. “When will you be home tonight?”
It was Mom’s turn to be nervous. “I’m not sure. What time are you going to bed tonight?”
Game on. Mom had been sneaking her mystery man into our house late at night and sneaking him out super-early the next morning. I’d been letting them think they were fooling me because it was fun listening to her obviously big-boned boyfriend tiptoe on our creaky floors. Sometimes, to freak them out, I groaned and pretended to wake up.
“I don’t know. I have a lot of homework. It could take hours. I could be up all night,” I said.
Mom hesitated, pretending to take her time getting in the boots. I could see her trying to decide whether tonight was the night I’d meet the mystery man. Finally, she said, “Try to save the all-nighters for college.”
I walked her downstairs. Just before she walked out, she said, “Would you put away the chicken, Zoe?”
“Um, yeah, I actually think I’m gonna eat a little more later,” I said.
“Okay, but you’re gonna leave me some for my lunch, right?”
“I’ll try, but . . .” Who was I kidding? Digby was going to pick that bird clean. “But you know I like to eat while I study.”
After Mom left, I got a
pie plate from the kitchen and loaded it up with basically all the leftovers. Upstairs, I found my clothes dumped out onto my bed and Digby gouging away at the plaster of my closet wall with his pocket knife.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“I’m fixing your closet,” he said. “You had this bar just kinda balancing on these pegs. How does this not collapse every time you reach for something, Princeton?” He pulled off a little plastic bag of spare parts that was taped to the bar.
“What are those?”
“These are wall anchors. I’m making pilot holes for them.”
I remembered something Bill said about liking watching men using tools. I snorted.
“What?” Digby said.
“Nothing . . . just something my friend Bill Lowry said about guys who are handy. She’d probably hyperventilate if she saw you right now. She already thinks you’re sexy,” I said.
Digby stopped what he was doing and turned to me. “Oh, so Bill thinks I’m sexy.”
“Yeah. Bill’s this girl in school—”
“I know who Bill is,” he said.
“Anyway. Yeah. She likes you.”
“Oh, yeah? Maybe I should check out that situation. I haven’t seen her since middle school.”
“She’s nice. Really nice,” I said. The insincerity in my voice surprised me.
“Okay, but is she really really nice?” Digby said. “You girls are all so political . . .”
“Ha-ha. Do you know what you’re doing, by the way?” I said. “That doesn’t look right.”
“How would you know it doesn’t look right? You didn’t even know what an anchor was just now,” he said. “Yeah, I know what I’m doing. You got a hammer?”
I didn’t feel like admitting it to him, but I was sick of the closet bar collapsing every time I pulled out something from the back. When I got back with the hammer, Digby was holding up a blue oxford shirt with the Prentiss crest on the breast pocket.
“Dad got that for me . . . the rest of the uniform’s in there too,” I said. I put on the shirt to show him how ridiculous it looked.
“He’s pretty confident you’re going, isn’t he?” Digby said. “So what would happen if you didn’t get in?”
I didn’t want to say it because I knew it’d sound melodramatic, but from my experience, people did what Dad expected of them or they just kind of stopped existing for him. I’d seen him tough-love a whole branch of his family into nonexistence this way.
“His way or no way, huh? I’ve heard that song before.” Digby hammered an anchor into the pilot hole. Impressively, he sunk it in only three blows. I started to see Bill’s point about guys who were handy around the house.
“I helped my father build a tree house I didn’t want and a doghouse on the lawn for a poodle mix who hated getting mud on her paws just to get the guy to talk to me.” He looked embarrassed. “Hey, I was twelve years old.” Digby hammered in the other side. Something about the aggressive way he was working discouraged conversation. Finally, after he’d screwed in the supports and installed my closet bar, he said, “I finally spoke up about not really enjoying doing construction. That conversation turned out to be the last we’d ever have.”
“So just because you don’t have the same hobbies, what? He hates you now?” I said.
“Not like he hates me, exactly . . . more like he figures we have nothing further to discuss,” Digby said. “I mostly just ‘Yes, sir’ him when he orders me around. Luckily, he drinks, so he forgets, like, two-thirds of what he tells me. After I figured out how to tell which third he’d remember, we were on easy street.”
We hung my clothes back on the rod and, as had become our routine, I put on an episode of Twin Peaks for us to watch while Digby ate. It was awkward, though, when instead of sitting in his usual place at the desk, Digby plopped down on my bed.
He patted the spot on the bed beside him and said, “This plate looks awesome.”
“It looks like something frightened villagers offered up to an angry volcano god,” I said. I tried not to be weird when my bed sagged and pushed us up together.
I don’t think Digby noticed. He plowed through the chicken and didn’t stop until he was scraping sauce off the bottom of the pie plate with his dinner roll.
“Maybe tomorrow I should defrost a pizza too,” I said.
“Uh, actually, I have plans tomorrow night,” he said.
My heart immediately started to race. After years of watching Mom get played by Dad, I was used to looking for the real reason behind the excuse. “Working late” really meant a romantic dinner with someone else. “Urgent injunction application to be filed in the morning” really meant overnighters in a hotel. I couldn’t help it. My mind started parsing the phrase “plans for tomorrow night” until I realized what I was doing. But it was too late. The emotional roller coaster had left the station. I felt close to tears. I hoped Digby didn’t notice.
“I guess I could bring Felix here instead. Work on our thing here . . . the catering’s good.”
Why did I feel relieved to find out he was just hanging out with Felix?
Digby pointed at my blue Prentiss shirt. “But I don’t know how focused he’ll be on our work with all this hotness going on.”
“Hotness? This ugly thing?”
“You know nothing about the way the male mind works,” he said. “Are you blushing?”
“Of course not.”
“When Sally disappeared, it was like a fog came down in my house. We walked around, bumping into each other, no one talking. I’d ask my mother a question and she’d just look right through me. I used to get so angry,” Digby said. “Even at the time, I knew I was being selfish. I mean, obviously, they were just . . . wrapped up in what happened to Sally.”
“But you were, what? Seven years old?” I said.
“Anyway, one of the few useful things I learned while I was getting my head shrunk is that when you get rejected a lot, you start to hear rejection all the time, everywhere, even when there hasn’t been any rejection. And here’s something else she told me that you need to remember . . . after rejection you feel shame,” Digby said. “Rejection and shame. Those two always go together. The yin and yang of low self-esteem.”
“So what are you saying I should do? How did you get over it?”
“I never said I did,” Digby said. “But I also learned that just because my mother occasionally shows up in my wet dreams, it doesn’t mean I’m a psycho. That part’s less useful for you, though.”
I was starting to recover and my heartbeat was coming back down to normal, but now my mind was post-gaming and just like Digby said I would, I felt embarrassed.
“It gets better, Princeton.”
TWENTY
As planned, I borrowed Mom’s pantsuit and met up with Digby and Henry the next day outside Marina’s house, a huge mansion in a neighborhood called The Gates. Physically, it was behind my neighborhood, but spiritually, it was a universe away.
The Miller mansion was a big ivy-covered brick building that looked like something on a college campus. An expensive college that gave freshmen laptops.
“This is her house?” I said. “How many people live in it?”
“Her parents . . . her half sister. Live-in help,” Henry said.
“What was she doing in public school?” I said.
“She got expelled from private school,” Henry said.
“Besides, this is Marina’s stepmother’s pile. She’s the rich one. Maybe she didn’t like her stepdaughter enough to pay for tuition,” Digby said before dialing on his phone and walking away, saying, “I need to place an order . . .”
“I heard Digby got you to go to the dance with Felix,” Henry said.
“Did you hear why?” I said.
“Yeah . . . it’s too bad. Wendy’s nice,” Henry said. “You know, back in the la
b, I thought Digby was asking you to the dance.”
“How weird would that have been? Me and Digby . . . posing for the formal photos . . .”
“Totally weird,” Henry said. “Wait, does that mean you would’ve said yes?”
Strange. Thinking of Digby that way was . . . well, not exactly unpleasant, I guess. Definitely unsettling, though.
“I guess you’re going with Sloane?” I knew he was. After all this time hanging out with Henry, I was surprised to find that I still minded.
“I’d invite you guys to dinner with us, but . . .” Henry said.
“She hates me?” I said.
“Not just you. Digby too.”
“That’s cool. It’d be weird anyway.”
“So weird,” Henry said.
Digby came back to the conversation. “What would be weird?”
“If we all went to the dance together,” I said.
“Oh, no, Felix has something special planned. He sent me photos of the restaurant he’s taking you to. He even highlighted the fire exits,” Digby said.
“Wow . . . he’s pretty excited. He probably thinks he’s gonna get lucky or something,” Henry said.
“But he’s not her type. Princeton likes them . . .” Digby said. “Heroic? Is that the word?”
“Douche. That’s a word too,” I said.
“Okay, that’s enough wordplay for today. We have a mission. Somewhere in that huge house is a clue to where Marina is,” Digby said. “Maybe. Probably. Well, you never know until you try.”
“Great,” I said.
Digby took a camera out of his backpack and handed it to Henry. “You’re Brandon Spano and you’re taking photos for a special article in our school paper.” To me, Digby said, “You’re Brianna Wick and you’re my editor. I’m Taylor Berry and I’m writing the article. Taylor, Brianna, and Brandon. Got it? I’ll do the talking. Princeton, just hang back and put on your sourpuss face.”
“Sourpuss face? What sourpuss face?” I said.
“That’s perfect,” Digby said.
Trouble is a Friend of Mine Page 14