Three Ghosts and a Debt

Chapter 14: Three Sentences

The diner smelled like the inside of a fryer and like the cinnamon roll tray, which was down to two, and like coffee that had been on the burner since before either of them had been born.

"Three sentences," Wren said.

She said it before he had his jacket off, which meant she'd been carrying it up the hill with her.

"Sentences," he said. "As in, grammatically."

"As in, three times you open your mouth." She stripped the paper off her straw and dropped the paper on the table. "Then I decide whether I'm still annoyed with you. If I am, I finish my drink, I leave, and you sit here with the check and think about what you did."

"That's not a conversation."

"It's a conversation with a limit. You're a person who likes limits. You told me that. You like knowing the rules of a thing before you do the thing."

"I said that about games."

"This is a game."

He picked up his shake, which was mostly air, and drank it anyway.

"Start whenever," she said. "I'm not sitting here all day."

He had, by his own count, said about four hundred things to Wren Lennox and gotten away with maybe sixty of them. That was a better average than he had with anyone else alive. He should have felt fine.

He said, "You can still order something. If you're hungry."

She put up one finger. She didn't say anything with it. She didn't have to.

"That one didn't count," he said. "That was a warm-up. I was testing the—"

"It counted."

He stopped talking.

"One," she said, and drank her coffee.

The waitress came by with the pot and topped off Wren's cup and then his, and she'd heard the finger thing, and she looked at Wren and then at him and made a face that meant good luck, kid, which was worse than an insult because it was kind.

Two left. Two, and then the rest of his life.

Okay. Strategy. He had one thing in his pocket nobody could be angry about, because Becca had told him that morning, and nobody could be angry about the news itself — only about how you brought it up, and he was not going to bring it up badly.

"Ahem." He sat forward. "Becca told me this morning that Julian asked you out. So. Congratulations. Truly. The two of you—"

Over the register, the speaker had gone into the slow one, the one about headlights, the one that had been in three movies that year. He raised a hand at the ceiling speaker as the line came around and sang it, flat, in the manner of a person who knew he was flat and did it anyway. "'If I'd known you then, I'd have said it better.'" He put his hand down. "Which is what I'm doing. Saying it better. Congratulations, Wren Lennox. Sincerely. I mean it."

The waitress's head came around at the singing. So did one of the two men at the counter.

Wren didn't put up a finger this time. She put her hand flat on the table and closed it into a fist, and then she put her head down, tipped forward, hair sliding off her shoulder onto the tabletop, and her shoulders started to go. Once. Twice.

Shy.

He actually thought that. He was going to be thinking about it later, at bad times.

Then he saw her knuckles, and he knew it wasn't shy.

That was two. He'd spent one on offering her food and one on singing congratulations at her about a boy, with her full name on the end of it like a bow on a present, because he'd thought the full name was respect, and respect was what you did when you were out of ideas.

He swallowed. One left, and then the whole rest of his life.

There was one question, and it was the wrong question, and he could tell it was wrong because his body had been telling him so since the front gate. It was also the only one he had.

He said, "You like Julian."

Wren lifted her head. The three were gone, and the rule with them, and she hadn't gotten up.

"Is that the thing you most wanted to ask me?"

Her voice was flat. She wasn't leaving. She wasn't anything. It was the not-anything that scared him.

Ethan was terrible at rhetorical questions. He could never tell whether a person wanted him to answer or to die, so he answered. It came out as a nod.

She turned her cup a quarter turn and let the question go, and that was worse than if she'd pushed it.

"Is it because of the pictures on my page?"

He looked at the table. He had a straw wrapper and a coffee ring and a scar in the Formica, and he looked at all three of them very carefully, and made a sound through his nose.

"So that night," Wren said, "when you told me you were going to bed. You were on my page. You went through my pictures, and then you decided something about my evening, and you went quiet on me."

The shake went down wrong. He did not know how air went down wrong, but it did, and he coughed twice into his elbow and waved his free hand back and forth like he could erase the last forty seconds off the air.

"No. No, no, no. I was tired. I was genuinely—"

"You're lying."

"I wanted to play a game," he said. "My game. I was in the middle of—you know what, that one's true. That one's actually true. I wanted to play and I didn't want to talk to anybody and I'm not proud of it."

Wren put both hands on the table and leaned in over her coffee and looked at him the way people look at a card they're deciding whether to keep.

"You know what happens if you tell me the truth right now?"

"What."

"My opinion of you goes up ten points."

That's a trap. That is a trap with a light on it and a sign on it. Nobody just gives you the answer. Nobody sits across a table and tells you the right thing to say so that you can say it.

"Are you happy right now," Ethan said, "or are you not happy."

It came out worse than he wanted, and slower. He'd been going for steady. It landed like a kid asking whether the dog was going to be okay.

Wren sat back. Something in her face let go and then got put away again.

"Barely." She set her cup down. "Adequate. You get an adequate."

"I'll take it."

"So what do I do," he said. "Next time. When it's like this."

"Next time with who?"

"Any—"

"Cora Bennett?"

He picked up his straw wrapper and folded it in half and folded it again. Wren watched him do it. He put a hand up to the side of his face, checking the tape on his jaw, and she watched that too, and the not-saying-anything went on long enough that he could hear the fryer and the radio and a man at the counter asking for more coffee.

Wren rolled her eyes at him. "You've got the wrong idea about what I'm doing. Let me correct it. I'm not teaching you how to get a girl. That's not the project. The project is you. I'm trying to make you into somebody who doesn't end up where you end up. There's a difference, and you keep missing it."

"Okay. Fine. I'm the project. What does the project do."

"Two answers," she said. "There are two answers, I'm giving you both, and you're going to use the first one forever."

"I'm listening."

"One. End on a question. Every time." She drew a line through the ring her cup had left on the table. "Not a creepy one. One they actually want to answer. One they'll be thinking about in the car. You leave the last brick out of the wall so they have to come back and put it in."

He was already typing. Thumb, thumb, thumb.

"Two—" she said.

"Mm-hm."

"Look at me."

He looked up. "Okay."

"Don't say anything."

He didn't say anything.

After a moment he said, "So what's two?"

Wren shoved the table. His coffee sloshed and her chair rolled back a foot, wheels squealing on the tile, and she sat with her arms folded over her chest and her eyes shut, breathing out through her nose, and the waitress looked over and decided against coming over.

"Okay, but—" Ethan held up one finger. His turn with the finger. "—socially. Is that rude? Just looking at somebody and not talking? Because that seems rude to me, and I'm the one who's bad at this, so if I can tell—"

She picked her phone up off the table.

"Was everything today from my page?"

"Uh. Most of it."

"All of it?"

"Most."

She started tapping. Fast, no ceremony, thumb moving down the screen, pause, down, pause, and he watched her face and not the screen, because watching the screen felt like standing in a room while somebody took their own house apart.

"Okay," she said. "Done."

She turned the phone around and held it out, and he looked.

Her grid was empty. Not dimmed, not archived. Empty. The pier at six in the morning when nobody was on it. The ones from the gym with the light in the high windows. Her coffee with the receipt taped to the cup, the caption saying the price had been wrong and she'd caught it. All of it, gone, and it had taken her nine seconds.

"Why'd you do that?"

"Because it was standing between me and a conversation." She set the phone down on the table, screen first. "I don't like things standing between me and a conversation."

Ethan straightened his cup so the handle was square and then straightened it back, because it hadn't been square the other way either.

"So you really don't like Julian."

"I like him."

The way she said it was easy. That was the part that got in him, how easy it came out.

"But that was a lifetime ago," Wren said.

A lifetime ago.

His brain, which was a bad machine, went where it always went: save file, load it up, run it again. She'd seen the ending once. She'd come back to the last checkpoint with the map already drawn.

He didn't say any of it.

"Come here," she said.

"What for."

"Just come here."

He got up and went around the table. He was still working out where to stand when she got two fingers on his cheek and pinched, and his mouth went sideways on its own, and there was a click.

She turned the phone so he could see it. A boy with his face pulled crooked and one eye squinting shut, and beside him a girl who'd gotten away with something and wanted everyone to know.

"Delete that," he said.

"Absolutely not."

"It's a terrible picture of me."

"It's an honest picture of you." She was already doing something to it, thumb moving. "That's not the same as a bad one."

The check came. He reached and she reached, and her hand got there first, and she put down a twenty and a five and didn't look up. He wrote the number down inside his head and kept it, because he'd started keeping them.

Outside, the light had gone yellow and long, and the street was doing its thing, sliding down toward water he couldn't see.

His phone went off in his pocket. Then again before he got it out. Then a third time, in his hand, while he was looking at it.

— anything?

— even nothing

— hale. come on

"Who's texting you?"

"What?"

"This whole time." Wren had stopped. "That's not me. I'm standing right here. Who is it?"

"It's a group chat I'm in. Somebody posted pictures. You don't want to know."

Her ears went red. All the way up.

"That's disgusting," she said, and she said it like she meant it, and she turned and walked.

She got about fifteen feet, bag swinging, and didn't look back, and there was nothing in her stride that invited him to catch up. He stood in front of the blue and white awning with the phone going in his hand.

He typed *i need a favor* and deleted it. He typed *one favor. tomorrow. dont ask what* and sent it before he could take it back.

Marc's reply came while he was still standing there.

— name it. i owe you a thing

He typed *not yet* and sent that too, and put the phone in his pocket, and started up the hill toward the gate with his jaw aching under the tape.