Something about Glenwood feels different. Almost apocalyptic with chaos. Driving past the woods around Russo’s Creek, you can see the daily search party reconvening for the night at their headquarters tent, the dejection and weariness clear in the way their shoulders slump and their brows furrow.
The streetlight outside Grandma Lou’s flickers, like it’s about to die out, and it’s enough to distract me so that I only notice the white Tesla in the driveway the moment I put my car in park.
I run inside, not even bothering to grab my backpack. And there’s Dakota in my kitchen, wearing Grandma Lou’s Cranky and in Charge apron, straining a bowl of pasta over the sink while Grandma Lou sits at the kitchen table sipping her black coffee, no cream.
“Told you she’d be here!” Grandma Lou chimes. “Faith, you didn’t tell me you knew the girl from your shows.” She turns to Dakota, waving an arm out ahead of her. “She’s got a huge poster of you and all your friends taped to her ceiling. You kids are the last thing she sees before bed every night.”
My stomach drops to the floor, and everything feels too hot all of a sudden. Obviously, Grandma Lou has never heard of playing it cool.
“Is that right?” asks Dakota, a smirk curling on her lips.
“It’s a Friday night.” Surely she has better places to be. “What are you doing here?”
“I have today and tomorrow off.” She shrugs as she pours the pasta back into the pot and carefully considers the ingredients lined up on the counter. “We’ve been going nonstop since filming started, and I wanted to spend some time with you. Maybe even get to know the legendary Grandma Lou.”
Grandma Lou raises her coffee cup. “Cheers to that!”
“Is that okay?” Dakota asks, reaching past me for a measuring cup.
“Yeah . . . of course.”
“Here,” she says, dipping a small spoon into what looks to be a green pesto sauce, “try this. Does it need more salt?”
I open my mouth and she slides the spoon over my tongue. “It’s perfect.”
Her gaze pins me in place, and I think I could suffocate. But maybe it wouldn’t be the worst way to go. Death by Dakota Ash’s gaze.
“It better be!” Grandma Lou pipes up. “The girl’s some kind of mad scientist over here with this recipe. Pine nuts! Who puts pine nuts in spaghetti?”
Dakota grins, and I can tell that she’s absolutely charmed with my grandmother. “You’ll thank me later, Grandma Lou.”
My heart swells. Something about the idea of two of my favorite people getting along makes me giddy. “Put me to work!” I say. I want to ask Dakota where she’s been, but I love this moment too much to let it go.
I’m given instructions to shave some fresh Parmesan cheese, and soon we’re all gathered around the kitchen table with a meal so perfectly plated, it could be in a magazine. The only thing that gives it away is Grandma Lou’s old yellow plates with green and orange flowers and little bluebirds.
“All right, all right,” Grandma Lou says. “The fancy spaghetti was worth the wait.”
Dakota tells Grandma Lou all sorts of insider stories about famous people she’s come across and who has weird or gross habits or who doesn’t tip and which ones are all bark and no bite. Grandma Lou tells Dakota a few of her favorite dirty jokes, the kind that make Miss Ella huff and use words like unladylike and untoward.
After dinner, I do the dishes while Grandma Lou and Dakota shout Jeopardy! answers at the TV, and the sound of them both hollering and laughing is sweeter than my favorite song.
After we each have a bowl of strawberry ice cream, Dakota turns to me, every bone in her body serious, and says, “Now, I’ve got to see this poster.”
I groan and do my best to stall as she trudges up the stairs behind me. “This is so awkward. Why? What’s the point? You know I’m a mega fan. It’s just a poster.”
“What if I want to sign it?” she asks, dodging past me, taking a lucky guess and swinging my door open to reveal my room.
My room isn’t too big and it isn’t too small. The roof slopes down on the side where my headboard is, and on the other side are my dresser and desk. It’s not like I put posters on the slanted ceiling so I can stare up at the cast of The Grove as I fall asleep, but it doesn’t hurt. And while this is plenty embarrassing, I’m at least relieved that I didn’t get around to hanging up my solo poster of Dakota that I ordered online over the summer.
Dakota flops down on my bed, and I plug in the twinkle lights that outline my ceiling.
“Wow,” she says, her voice breathy. “This is a great room.”
“Pretty childish compared to the whole house you have all to yourself,” I can’t help but scoff.
She looks down at her feet as she says, “Turns out being an adult is pretty lonely.”
“But don’t you have tons of people with you all the time? The cast is like one big happy family, I thought?”
Her expression hardens. “A family built on business.”
I walk around to the other side of my bed and lie down, patting the space beside me.
Dakota kicks off her shoes and joins me, our shoulders pressed together. “It’s a family with conditions. We all love each other, but what you’ve got with Grandma Lou—and your friends, Matt and Ches—that’s different. I don’t really have that with anyone.”
After a long moment, I practically whisper, “You can have that with me.”
She turns to look at me, and we’re so close our noses nearly brush. “Are you sure your friends don’t hate me?” Her voice comes out husky as her eyes travel from my forehead to my nose to my lips to my eyes.
I’m this close to asking her to stay still enough for me to count her eyelashes.
And then she’s lunging toward me—no, past me. “What are you doing with this?” she asks, grabbing the A+ out of the ring dish on my bedside table. “Faith, you don’t take this shit, do you?”
“Me? No. No, definitely not.” I’d seen Dakota do tons of antidrug ads, but I didn’t realize she took it this seriously.
“I’ve seen this shit circulating around town.” She closes her fist around the baggie of pills. “Swan, I think. That’s who I saw had it.” She shakes her head. “Don’t mess with this stuff. Drugs like this . . . it feels like it starts out small, but suddenly you need it to get by and you’re doing whatever you can . . . betraying whoever you have to . . . for your next fix.”
And then it hits me. Her mom. Stupid, stupid, stupid Faith. Of course she would freak out about a good friend doing any kind of drug after all that she went through with her mom.
“Dakota.” I take her fist in my hand, realizing then how small her hands are. “Some dumb kid at school was handing these out as samples. Trying to drum up business, I guess. My journalism teacher was talking about something like this circulating at the prep school, so I just pocketed it to take a closer look and forgot about it. I was never going to actually take it. I would never.”
“You promise you’ll flush them?” she asks.
I pry her hand open and take the pills, hopping off the bed and walking straight into the hallway bathroom. I don’t think twice before dropping them into the toilet bowl and flushing.