A Sinister Quartet by Mike Allen & C. S. E. Cooney & Amanda J. McGee & Jessica P. Wick

Author:Mike Allen & C. S. E. Cooney & Amanda J. McGee & Jessica P. Wick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mythic Delirium Books
Published: 2020-06-09T00:00:00+00:00

4

Lori does not see Ethan again for two weeks. It is a surprise to find herself pining.

She texts, and he texts back, but the replies are perfunctory. Lori lies in the bed where she told him her secrets and stares at the words on her screen and tries not to feel the restlessness they evoke. She cannot make herself call. She cannot be so vulnerable again.

So instead, Lori binds up her stinging heart. She goes to work at the cafe, listening to the college kids she works with gossip about boys and bands and exams. For the first time, she feels like joining in. She wants to tell someone how it feels, to suddenly want something. How she finds herself checking her phone in hope, just like them, and exhaling deeply when the screen is still, inevitably, blank.

When Lori moved, she cut all ties. She left Texas nearly overnight. No forwarding address, no word to her and Annie’s friends. The contacts are still in her old phone, dead in a drawer, but would they even want to hear from her after everything?

She could call her birth mother. What an alien idea, to call Hannah, but Lori sits with it for a moment before rejecting it at last.

When Lori leaves work that Thursday, four days into Ethan’s absence, she fetches her sister’s urn with its polished marble face and takes off in her Toyota.

The car is small, which was an advantage in San Antonio where parking was sometimes a hazard and the highways were several lanes wide. In Vermont the interstate is nearly empty. The road noise is Lori’s only company, that and her memories. Annie helped her pick this car out. Her sister had a broken-down secondhand Nissan that rattled when it started and had red, chipped paint, but Annie refused to get anything newer while it still ran. Lori was the more practical one, as always. She insisted they had one decent car between them, and this dark blue four door was the result.

They take a roadtrip once a year, or they did, usually around Annie’s birthday. It is not Annie’s birthday now. That passed in the last months of her illness. There had been cake and ice cream, balloons and card games. The friends Lori has worked so hard to leave behind had crammed into their small house in San Antonio with paper flowers and liquor and food—tamales in their rippled corn husks, salsa in bright reds and greens, macaroni and cheese, chicken tikka masala with its aromatic bite, a fruit tray arrayed like a sunburst, long stalks of grilled asparagus—all of Annie’s favorite things. Together they had feasted until they groaned, screamed with laughter and stories, and Annie presided over it all in a paper crown sitting on her newly grown curls. A few weeks before, the doctors had officially ceased her chemo treatments. It was her twenty-eighth birthday. She had told none of her friends that she had only six months at best. The cancer took her in two.

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