She opened the door and motioned them inside. She nodded to the large plastic tote Sonja was carrying, clear with a big red cross scribbled on it in Sharpie. “What’s all that?”
“Emergency kit,” Sonja said, shaking the tote. “Hair masks. Belgian chocolate. The fanciest facial mask sheets in my arsenal. Calming herbal tea. And if that doesn’t work, a bottle of indecently expensive vodka, which we should probably forgo for the sake of the fetus. And a bunch of early 1990s Keanu Reeves DVDs.”
Cordelia shuddered. “It’s so…girly.”
“Well, we promise to make the evening memorable,” Sonja told her.
“I’m sure you will,” Cordelia replied. “Also, I appreciate that you kept the guest list to a minimum.”
“Well, we invited Ingrid, but she said she preferred to stay home and have a lot of sex with Rob,” Jillian said.
“That’s kind of blunt,” Cordelia observed.
“That’s kind of Ingrid,” Sonja said, setting the kit on Cordelia’s cheap laminate coffee table. “We don’t have girls’ nights very often anymore, what with our grown-up relationships taking up our free time. But when we do, it’s usually because there’s some crisis going on. And who doesn’t feel better after watching pre-millennium Keanu Reeves?”
“Except for Johnny Mnemonic,” said Jillian. “That one never made any damn sense to me.”
“It was an outlier,” Sonja admitted. “I promised Dani we would start with Speed. She should be here with pizza any minute.”
“So there’s pizza now?” Cordelia asked.
“Yeah, didn’t you have sleepovers when you were a kid?” Jillian asked, grinning at her.
Cordelia jerked her shoulders. “I think my mother was afraid I would give people too much information if I was out of her sight for an evening.”
“What kind of information?” Jillian asked.
“The fact that I was really psychic?” Cordelia said. “I mean, a lot of people claim to be the real thing and keep up the act full time, but real psychics working the circuit are pretty rare. Word would get around, and insecurities, billing, and money would come into play. It could have gotten ugly. Plus, I could tell them that I hadn’t been ‘home-schooled’ properly. That I was basically raising myself. That my mom skimmed quite a bit off the percentage she was supposed to be paying the owners. Or I could just repeat some of the stuff she said about the other acts, which wouldn’t have endeared her to anybody. So yeah, there were no real slumber party memories from my childhood.”
Sonja looked more than a little chagrinned, so Cordelia added, “I swear, not every subject is a ticking timebomb.”
“Honestly, I should be used to it by now, given some of Dani’s stories,” said Sonja.
“What kind of stories?” Dani poked her head through the partially open door, juggling multiple pizza boxes from a place called Swampy’s Pies.
“Stories from our largely unsupervised childhoods,” Jillian told her. Cordelia realized she had not been watching her boss for the last few minutes and in that time, Jillian had set the table, with napkins and a little candle Cordelia didn’t even know she owned.
“You were way more unsupervised than I was. Gran ran a tight ship,” Dani said, dropping the pizza boxes on the table and shaking out her hands as if sloughing off the residual heat from the greasy cardboard. “And you’re lucky I was passing through Houma when you called. There is no decent pizza in this town.”
“You got plain cheese?” Jillian asked.
“Yes, you heathen,” Dani grumbled. “The pizza guy asked me if I wanted a bib to go with it.”
“The baby hates pepperoni,” Jillian told Dani primly. “You don’t want me throwing up blue lava in Cordelia’s nice new trailer, do you? Everything is plasticky and super-flammable…which is something the League really should think about, considering all the fire-based shifters around here…”
“You throw up blue lava?” Cordelia asked. “That was what I saw in your office?”
“That’s the fire shifter version of morning sickness,” Jillian said. “We’ve lost a lot of furniture.”
“You never liked that couch anyway,” Sonja insisted.
“She only recently stopped throwing up blue lava,” Dani said, prying open a pizza box and helping herself to a slice. “And we are eternally grateful.”
“Just you wait until Sonja is doing a tub birth for Will’s mermaid-seal babies,” Jillian told Sonja. “And then we’ll see who’s laughing.”
“It will still be me, because I won’t be throwing up blue lava,” Sonja retorted, claiming her own pizza.
Cordelia watched these bon mots bounce between the three of them with the practiced ease of people who were completely comfortable with each together. These were not just close friends, but people who had chosen to make a family of each other. What would it be like to have that bond with not just one person, but several? What would it be like to be able to trust like that?
Jillian snorted. “Fair enough. By comparison, Zed’s bear cubs should be low maintenance.”
Dani grinned at her and said, “So, not that I mind a good emergency girls’ night, but what’s all this about? What did I miss? Are we officially inducting Cordelia into our secret ‘League employees who fall for hot locals’ club? Who’d she pick? It wasn’t Balfour, was it?”
From the disdainful expression on Dani’s face, Cordelia was oddly grateful she’d never met Balfour, whoever the hell he was.
“This is what happens when you’re alone in the car for too long,” Sonja told her.
“This is true,” Dani admitted.
Jillian raised her hands in an almost ceremonial fashion. “We have gathered here today because Cordelia really seems to need some people to talk to and—Cordelia, honey, I don’t want to hurt your feelings here—but you seem ill at ease with, well, people in general?”
“I would say you’re wrong, but…” Cordelia trailed off. “Yeah, I have nothing to follow up there.”
“Which brings us to an Ingrid-level blunt transition into the conversation. What the hell is going on with you and Alex Lancaster?” Sonja asked. “You knew each other as kids? What was that like? I didn’t realize he had a childhood. I thought he was grown in a pod or something.”
Jillian frowned. “I think the egg-fetus and I are offended by that.”
Cordelia pressed her lips together, blowing a deep breath out of her nose. “You’ve got to understand, I’ve never talked about this with anyone. Not even my mother. I mean, she knew about it, in the end, but not the good stuff. She only knew what she wanted to know and what she wanted to know was…I’m rambling.”
Sonja waggled her hand. “A little bit.”
“So, you know that I grew up traveling around with carnivals,” Cordelia began.
“I did not know that,” Dani exclaimed. “How—what—how?”
“Long story, I’ll tell you later,” Jillian promised, waving at her in a shushing motion.
“Alex and I met when I was sixteen and just desperately unhappy. I wanted a normal life, in a normal house, in one place, where I didn’t have to go on stage every night to earn the food in my belly, instead of, say, my mom getting a nine-to-five job. And Alex, he understood. In a way that no one else really could or would. His dad, Elliot, was a third-generation mender—a lawyer who fixed problems for the show as it traveled, and there were always problems for any show. Staff getting arrested, issues with the fire marshal, locals complaining because the games were rigged. And because Emerald City had been fading out for a while, Elliot also did the advance work—advertising, permits, easing the way with the local political types—which is really unusual because those are both very important jobs. So, he was under a lot of stress and didn’t appreciate his son being distracted from the incredibly thorough homeschooling he was getting from Mrs. Carver. Also, he didn’t like my mom, for good reason. She caused a lot of the problems he had to fix. And my mom wasn’t too fond of him either, because she didn’t like anyone who thought they had authority over her.