“You do not talk to me this way! I am your MOTHER—
” Nicholas has never interrupted his mom before, and he’s making up for it now. “This whole time, he was never real. All along, it was … Shia LaBeouf! Method acting!”
Deborah’s figure is shadowy, but I can see her balled hands and jutting chin. When her voice emerges, it’s so guttural that it would make Lucifer lock his doors. “Nick—”
“I drop-kicked him out of a moving train and he’s at the bottom of a ravine somewhere, busy being extremely dead. There is nothing for you here, then, so go on and be banished.” He spreads his fingers wide and thrusts them outward like he’s casting a spell. “I banish thee!”
I think he might be losing his mind a bit, because his giddy laughter drowns out whatever Deborah’s down there squawking. She’s spitting mad, Nicholas has thrown all his fucks to the wind, and it’s glorious. The most beautiful display of childish behavior I’ve ever witnessed.
“Yeah, you tell her,” I say goadingly. I love seeing him brave enough to give that woman a fraction of the hell she’s owed. “You cast D-Money right out of here.”
“I cast you right out of here, D-Money!” he yells at the top of his lungs, and I. Completely. Lose it. I can’t breathe. Neither can Nicholas, who breaks down in the middle of his banishment chant and is laughing so hysterically that no sound escapes save for little gasping sobs. Tears stream down our faces.
“Look what you’ve done!” Deborah screams, shaking a finger at me. “You’ve corrupted my sweet boy! I know this is your fault, Naomi!”
I take a bow.
The spell is a success. Deborah gives up and stomps back to her car. Her tires squeal ominously when she tears off into the night, which is probably pretty close to the same sound she’s making twelve inches from Harold’s face right now.
I wipe the tears from my eyes and give him a high five. “Holy shit, dude!”
“I know!” He’s got a crazed grin, chest heaving deeply. “Unhinged” is my new favorite look on him. I think back to the conversation we had in the car after my stop-and-run fiasco at the traffic light in Beaufort, and how he said that messing with his parents could be fun as long as he was in on the joke, too. He really meant it.
I slide my palm over his cheek, matching his grin. “I’m proud of you. I wish I could see your mom’s face right now.”
“She’s going to kill me.” His smile freezes as he realizes what just happened. “Oh my god, she’s going to literally kill me.” He leans over, hands on his knees, breathing in through his nose and out his mouth like a woman in labor. I pat his back and a few anxious honking noises thump right out of him. “Did I seriously say all that? To my mom? Can we run off to an uninhabited island?”
“I like islands. Let’s go. We’ll have coconut pie every day.”
“I can’t believe I did that.” More honking. “I got a little carried away, didn’t I?”
“I want to see you get carried away all the time.” I get a zap of inspiration and tap the windowsill. “Hey, can you go down there and stand where your mom was standing? Just for a sec? I want to check something.”
He arches a brow at me but obliges. While he heads downstairs, I dash into my bedroom and fish a package of balloons out from under my bed, which I’d purchased when he and I were still sabotaging each other. I race into the bathroom, fill one up with water, and return to the window.
“Okay, I’m down here,” he says, voice drifting up with a coil of white breath. “What did you need to check?”
“This,” I say, letting the bomb drop. It doesn’t land on his head as planned, but splatters all over his shoes.
Nicholas jumps back, arms out, staring at the dark spots on his pants. A thrill chases up my spine. Slowly, slowly, he lifts his head and growls, “I’d run if I were you.”
With a gleeful scream, off I go.
I spend the weekend getting entirely too used to being on friendly terms with Nicholas. He teaches me how to drive Frankencar, which I’m initially resistant to out of nerves. But I get the hang of it pretty quickly and drive us to Beaufort to buy a canoe, which we strap to the roof of my car. We buy three oars and paddle out to rescue his wayward canoe. We spend Saturday on the pond, stabbing our oars at chunks of ice and playing bumper cars. Then we sit on the sofa in the drawing room, side by side, and watch the snow fall while we drink hot chocolate. He plays Nightjar (on my account, so that he can play God with my trident and exclaim, “Hey, you have to come look at this! I’m a unicorn! Look, Naomi, I have a horn!”) while I read Riverdale fan fiction on Tumblr, and it’s mellow and ordinary and achingly perfect. It makes me so sad that all the good parts in the story of us are rolling in right at the end.
An evil twist of fate: I don’t think I want it to be the end. Not anymore. But while we seem to be learning how to treat each other’s feelings with more care and making better choices, we’re not what an engaged couple ought to be.
When he comes home on Monday all I want to do is gather up all my failures into a pile and sweep them under the rug, but instead I make myself share the parts of myself I’m not so proud of. I make myself say, “Today sucked. I spent half an hour on an online application before it got to the last page and they said a minimum of five years’ experience in the food industry was required.”
“What sort of position?”
“Assistant manager. It was the only opening they were hiring for.”
He looks down at the rug as he toes off his shoes, and I wonder if he’s thinking about Eaten Alive. Mr. and Mrs. Howard wouldn’t even make me sit for an interview; if I said I could move to Tenmouth, they’d give me a job without hesitating.
“I’m sorry. Demanding a minimum of five years’ experience is stupid. They miss out on so much talent by limiting themselves that way. It really is their loss.” I can’t help tearing up a bit at hearing such strong support from him. “If it cheers you up any, I stopped at the supermarket and saw a couple help wanted ads on the bulletin board.” He hands me two flyers. They’re for small, local businesses I’ve driven past but never patronized. Their parking spaces are always empty. They’re the sort of workplaces I know Nicholas thinks are set up to fail because they can’t compete against today’s big retailers, but he still took the time to bring them home to me.
I start to drift off toward the couch, wanting nothing more than to escape into a television show until my eyelids are so heavy I can’t keep them open, but he takes my hand.
“What are you doing?”
“Going to go make dinner. Come with me?”
I raise a mystified eyebrow at him. “Sure?”
He sends me a little smile that I return and doesn’t drop my hand, lacing his fingers through mine. What world am I living in, that now I’m holding hands with Nicholas to walk from one room into another? His grasp is confident and sure, the sort you’d want leading you through a crowd. “You’re a pretty good hand-holder, you know,” I tell him.
“Just reminding you of all the things your Dr. Claw could never do.”
Ahh, Dr. Claw. Evil villain of my dreams. With a limo, red suspenders, and a face like that (in the movie, at least), he could still get it even if he had two pirate hooks. “He’s still got his other hand.”