The Invitation

Chapter 4

The whispering never stopped, not really. It softened, then swelled again like a tide that refused to learn its limits, but we learned to live with it. Mara and Janelle stuck close; they defended me in the small, clumsy ways friends could a text, a sharp look, a message to someone asking them to back off. I avoided parties like they were contagious. The week crawled and then stumbled to an end, and I was foolishly grateful when the weekend finally arrived. I wished it would last forever.

Evening came and the house felt too quiet. I lay half asleep on my bed when the bell started ringing a frantic, steady insistence that made my stomach clench. I pretended not to hear it, pulled the blanket tighter. My parents moved through the house below, muffled voices like two people in a different life.

The ringing went on. Then the front door opened. Footsteps. My mother’s voice, bright and surprised. I froze.

“Lucia!” my mother called up the stairs a beat later. “Change Leora’s here. She says she wants to talk. Maybe you two can—”

That was all it took. I felt my body uncoil like it had been wound too tight. The speed at which I moved from my room, down the stairs and into the living room would have embarrassed a superhero; I was past human reflex and straight into instinct. If flashes had legs, they’d have been late.

There she was, like a sun that had turned up at my door in someone else’s life. Leora stood in the foyer, hands folded, eyes wide but calm. My father’s hand rested on the door as if to steady himself against the awkwardness. He smiled, that cautious smile parents wear when they try to smooth over cracked things.

I grabbed Leora’s hand without thinking not gentle, not polite. Harsh, abrupt; the shock of my grip was a message I didn’t bother to spell out. I dragged her outside, past my mother’s open mouth and my father’s frozen expression. The air hit my face like clarity.

“Okay,” I said, folding my arms across my chest and leaning my weight against the porch rail. “What do you want?”

Leora looked at me looked through me a beat and then back, as if choosing a word from a favorable shelf. “You haven’t told them yet.”

I almost laughed. “Oh, I haven’t told them that the girl they waved at during PTA and brought home for dinner and took in as their daughter is a lying, backstabbing—” My voice snapped off. I kept it down, but my eyes burned.

“No, I haven’t,” I said slowly. “But maybe I should. So they’ll know not to welcome dogs into the house.”

Her face changed surprise, then a venomous, practiced hurt. “What do you want, Leora?”

She crossed her arms, and for a second she looked small, like something fragile that had been propped up too long. “I came to get my things.”

I blinked. “Your things?”

“The things I left here. The things I bought. My—” she hesitated like the word embarrassed her—“my things.”

I felt something cold and heavy settle in my stomach. “You couldn’t call?

You blocked me.”

My voice held a quiet cruelty that surprised me. “Sucks to be you, then.”

I smiled thinly. “I could as well burn them,” I said. “Wait here.” I moved toward the open door like I intended to test her

I went inside while my parents watched me like a television show whose plot had taken an unwelcome turn. I pulled the large cardboard carton from under the sink, fingers fumbling at the tape, and then climbed the stairs with the determined swiftness of someone who has rehearsed revenge in private. I grabbed everything I knew belonged to her perfume bottles with half their contents left, a scarf with a muted print I remembered lending her, a friendship bracelet (plastic beads faded at the edges) that used to be ours, not hers alone. I even scooped up the little Polaroid of us at orientation , Leora’s arm looped through mine and shoved it in.

So much for friendship.

When I was sure I had it all, I stormed back downstairs. Leora was still there, one hand on her phone. I thrust the carton into her arms without ceremony.

“Is that all?” she asked, voice small and brittle.

“Yeah.” My reply was a flat thing. The carton felt heavier when I shoved it toward her, like all the weight of everything we’d been was inside it.

She straightened, and for the first time I saw a flash of real apology or the imitation of it. “I’m sorry, Lucia,” she said.

The apology sounded practiced, like a line from a play. I stared at her, genuinely lost. “Sorry for what, exactly?”

“For stabbing you in the back,” she replied, as if someone had handed her that script, “for cheating with your boyfriend, for… for being a lying—”

“For what, Leora?” I demanded. “For what?”

She launched into a side of the story no one had asked for, hands making the motions as if she were rearranging the truth to fit a nicer frame. “I’ve always liked him. You’ve always been… you. I backed off because of you. But things changed over the summer.”

My brain stalled. “Things changed? You mean you were with him all summer and I was supposed to just what? Cheer you on? Sleepover at my house while you were sleeping with my boyfriend?”

Her words tried to find footing. “You told me back then you said go for him if you liked him.”

I laughed, and it was sharp, stunned. “That summer boy? That one? I told you to—” My hands grasped at air. “Wow, Leora. Wow.”

“You can have him now,” I said slowly, each word a pebble thrown into a still pond. “He’s all yours. I hope you last.”

She murmured something like an apology again, but it was small, and it did not mend anything. I turned on my heel and planted my shoulder into the door with force, letting it slam behind me in a way that said I was done inviting her into my life.

I saw my mother in the kitchen, the bright light haloing her as she looked up with the practical concern of someone who wants to stitch things together. “Leora’s staying for dinner?,” she asked, hopeful like a child expecting a party.

“No,” I said, and my voice was final. “No. She is not.” It sounded louder than I meant. My mother’s face changed a mix of surprise and hurt and then she softened, like someone who has been asked to cancel an invitation. “Oh. Okay.”

That was the last time she would see Leora, I told myself as I ran upstairs and slammed my door.

Inside my room, I sat on the floor with my back against the bed and let everything that had been stuffed down over the last week anger, shame, the absurd sting of betrayal unravel in small, hot sounds. I thought about the bracelet in the bottom of the carton: how it had once been a promise, a silly thing we’d traded at sixteen. Now it was proof of a lie.

Outside, the night sounded ordinary cars nodding along, a dog barking in the distance but inside me, the world had shifted on an axis I couldn’t find the edge of. I pressed my palms to my face until the room was a white blur and let the tears come because there was nowhere else for them to go and because screaming them into the dark felt like a kind of answer.