“So Kurt didn’t propose,” Marnie sighed. “He must not have seen me.”
“Totally,” I said.
“That’s okay,” she said, leaning back against her pillow. “Love is for suckers.”
I didn’t answer.
“Did you have a boyfriend?” she asked. “Back in Connecticut?”
I hesitated for a moment, and then told her about Aiden. How we’d met the first day of freshman year, when he beaned me with a kickball in gym class. How we’d spent practically every waking moment together after that.
“Did your parents like him?” Marnie asked.
“Mom did,” I said, staring down at the bedspread. “But … we grew apart. And eventually we broke up.”
“It’s never ‘we,’ ” she said. “Who did the actual dumping?”
“He did,” I said, remembering the crestfallen look on his face as he told me how he couldn’t bear being shut out any longer. “He did it on the anniversary of my dad’s death.”
“No,” Marnie said, sitting up. “Are you kidding? What a horrible person!”
I felt a guilty little pang, because I knew it wasn’t that black-and-white. Aiden hadn’t meant to hurt me. He just couldn’t stand how much our dysfunctional relationship was hurting him. He was losing weight, losing sleep, losing control. It was so hard, for both of us. And in the end, he was the one who was strong enough to do something about it.
But I have to confess, it was kind of nice to have Marnie take my side.
“What about you?” I asked. “Have you had a boyfriend?”
Marnie pulled a pillow into her lap. She sighed and looked down at her hands. “Kind of. I wouldn’t call it a boyfriend, per se. It’s complicated.”
Marnie was the queen of taking simple situations — like being at a movie premiere — and turning them into complex puzzles — like pretending to be a pair of TV stars. For her to call something complicated was saying a lot. I was definitely intrigued. “What do you mean?”
She looked up at me, her cat-eye liner and dark mascara making her eyes seem giant and mysterious. “Remember how I told you to stay away from Wyatt Sheppard?”
My heart began to beat faster. Wyatt … and Marnie? Was that why Wyatt had warned me about her? Had they gone out? I assumed that Wyatt was too low on the social scale for her. Though when I thought about him now, with his dark eyes and square jaw, I admitted to myself that he was definitely sort of cute, in a hunky nerd way. And he was super smart. I could see how he could be Marnie’s type.
I nodded, dying to hear more.
Marnie leaned in closer. “Wyatt and I actually used to get along. We were … friends. Our parents knew each other, and they would hang out most weekends, so it seemed natural. We did your basic friend stuff — movies, going out to eat, wandering around. I don’t even know what we did, honestly. How do people not die of boredom before they can drive?”
I waited for her to get to the part where they dated.
“But as the year went on, I started to feel awkward about it. Like maybe he was a little more into the whole thing than I was. He started getting annoyed if I wanted to hang out with other people. Once he even accused me of flirting with someone else, and he was angry about it! I mean, how messed up is that? I can flirt with whoever I want.”
I held my breath.
“So finally, it sort of … imploded. He was supposed to come over and watch a movie, and I had a really busy day, and I tried to cancel but it was too late, and he showed up and he had brought a bunch of balloons. And he came in and was like, ‘Happy anniversary.’ And I was like, ‘Excuse me?’ And he was like, ‘It’s been six months since we started going out.’ And I was like, ‘Hold up, cowboy, I think you have the wrong idea.’ ”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Right? It was so weird. I guess I … went along with it, in a way? I mean, I tried to downplay it and laugh, like it was a joke. We watched the movie and hung out, and then he left, and I was relieved that he was gone. After that, I decided to spend less time around him. But he had this way of … showing up, you know? It was kind of odd.”
I nodded. “Kind of odd” was a fair way to describe Wyatt. Maybe even a little generous.
“So whatever, fine. I’m like, I can be nice to this guy, we’re friends, our parents are friends, yada yada. But then the next week, he comes over totally raging. Going on about how selfish I am and how I only think of myself …”
“Seriously?” I asked.
“Seriously. I was pretty freaked out. And at the end of it all, he broke up with me.” She let out a helpless laugh. “I mean, we’d never even been of a status where we could break up. But he dumped me. And I was like, okay, at least now he’ll leave me alone. But then …” She plucked at the pillowcase and shook her head. “He started texting me, and calling me, and stopping by my locker. There was this blog thing with pictures of me, with, like, our names…. And then I realized he had my email password.”
My heart had begun to thud like a drum. I felt sweat beading around my hairline, but this time I knew it wasn’t because of any ghost.
“I thought about it and realized that every time he’d shown up someplace unexpectedly, it was a meeting I’d talked about in an email. Went to lunch with my aunt at Spago? He was there. Went to a secret sale at Nordstrom? He was there. It started to feel like he was … everywhere.”
“So what did you do?” I asked.
Her huge owl eyes blinked at me. “I told him straight out that he was a stalker and I was going to call the police if he didn’t stop.”
“And he stopped?”
She shrugged. “I guess. I stopped noticing it as much, anyway. And then he found his murder mystery to obsess over and I got out of jail free … so far.”
I didn’t know what to say. Yes, Wyatt could be argumentative and inconsistent. But something about Marnie’s story didn’t totally jibe with the guy I’d been spending time with. Almost like there are two Wyatts, I thought.
I certainly wasn’t going to tell Marnie that Wyatt and I had been hanging out, visiting local psychics, or that we regularly held perfectly pleasant conversations during chemistry class. So I said, “Wow. I’m sorry you went through all that.”
“Oh, it’s no big deal. I mean, I wasn’t a trembling victim in a corner. I started to get weirded out, that’s all. My instincts told me it was time to put a stop to it. And I have excellent instincts.” She smiled at me. “I picked you out of the crowd, didn’t I?”
The next night, I was home, asleep in my own bed, when a sudden noise woke me up.
I lay there, adrenaline zapping through me like lightning bolts, unsure if the sound had been real or if I’d dreamed it.
Then I heard it again….
Knock. Knock. Knock.
My whole body tensed.
In a moment of desperate, naive hope, I thought, Who would be knocking at the front door in the middle of the night?
Reed? With some urgent middle-of-the-night news?
But it wasn’t the sound of a person knocking on a door. Not a normal person, anyway. It was more like someone was sending a coded message, each knock separate and deliberate.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
It was coming from my bedroom door.
When I heard the next knock, I forced myself to sit up straight and called, “Hello?”
Maybe it was Jonathan. A lot of what he did was kind of formal and stilted. In theory, he could knock like that. It almost suited him.
But Jonathan didn’t answer me.
No one did.
The three knocks finished, but the sound seemed to hang in the air.
I went down the short, terrible list of suspects: an intruder — a robber, maybe, or a serial killer. Or a ghost.