Lost King Piper Lennox (ready player one ebook .TXT) 📖

Wes tells me to think about it. I nod, but I don’t think I mean it.

We slap hands through the window. I promise I’ll text him when I’m safely back in the Hamptons, and then I’m gone.

A few miles out of Brooklyn, I check my rearview. The lights of the skyline shrink until they blur into singular little beads. They almost look like pearls.

I grab the mirror and twist, so that all I can see is the backseat.

36

“Are you fucking serious?”

While Frankie laughs herself stupid on the floor, I burrow deeper in my bed and continue scalding my mouth on the drink she brought me: a cinnamon flat white, my favorite seasonal beverage. It tastes like licking an envelope seal and a Big Red wrapper, which is actually an improvement. What little else I’ve consumed today has tasted like cardboard.

When I called out of work again, she knew something was up. Now, after spilling my guts and recounting every detail to her, I watch her die of laughter and wish I’d stuck to my cover story of having the flu.

“Thanks for the support.”

“I’m sorry,” she cackles, “but it’s you. You! Never in a million years did I think you’d be the type to cook up some revenge scheme like that. I’m impressed.”

“Well, don’t be.” I take the stopper stick from my drink and jam it back in the now-empty cup, then pitch it at her head. She flips me off. “I didn’t have the guts to go through with it, and I didn’t have the guts to come clean. So I fucked up every possible outcome. I didn’t get revenge, and I didn’t get....”

Oh, God, more crying. I’m so damn tired of the crying.

I didn’t get the guy. Same old shit. Story of my life. I may look and act totally different from who I was seven years ago, but I’m just as spineless as ever. Maybe Mom was right with all that “the only thing that matters is what’s on the inside” crap.

Frankie sighs, her sympathy taking over. I know she was only laughing at the situation, not my pain; that’s actually how she makes me feel better, most of the time. She’s good at finding the humor and absurdity in any situation. Just not this one.

“Hey,” she says soothingly, climbing into the bed beside me and pulling me against her, “I wasn’t making fun of you, or whatever. I just found it funny that, the one time I’m out of town, you actually go and do something bold for once.”

“It wasn’t bold. It was stupid.” I mop my face with the top sheet and roll away from her. “And I’m not just crying because I lost Theo. I’m crying because I was wrong. Because I’ve spent years hating him for what he did, and then I find out he didn’t even....”

“If that’s even true.” Frankie digs through the pharmacy bag at our feet and produces two giant boxes of Dots candy, her favorite. She tears one open, pours some into her palm, and picks out the yellow ones for me before shoveling the rest in her mouth. “Maybe he was the one who filmed it. You don’t know.”

“That’s the thing.” I sit up and pull my knees close, rolling the candy back and forth in my palm. “Even when I still thought he did it...I’d started to not care.” I look at her. “He wasn’t that person, anymore.”

“So, what—it doesn’t even matter to you now if he’s lying or not?”

“On principle it would, I guess.” I eat a Dot. Tasteless as it is, that doesn’t stop the sugar from making my teeth ache. I kind of welcome it. It’s a decent distraction.

“But not in practice,” Frankie deadpans, rolling her eyes when I shrug again.

I remind myself not to expect glowing advice from her. Frankie’s a good friend and all, but there’s a reason we stayed pretty much just “summer friends,” then barely spoke when I moved back to Jersey permanently. We see the world too differently.

For instance: she never saw much of a problem with how Callum treated me. Given the kind of men her family churns out, and the fact generations of women keep mysteriously putting up with it, I can’t blame her.

But I do pity her. Her life plan consists of staying with her so-so rummy boyfriend until he proposes or gets her pregnant, whichever comes first, and banking on him suddenly transforming into husband material.

She thought I was crazy for always wanting to break up with Call. “Just wait it out, Ru,” she’d tell me. “He’ll grow up.”

But I was tired of waiting. Too many of us wait for things to change: for something to click, and for our lives to start, until one day we look up and realize it started without us, all the same.

“She’s out of bed! It’s a miracle.” Frankie hums a few praise songs while I vanish into my closet. When I step back out in jeans and a sweater, and a determined stare that not even dragging a comb through my bird’s nest of hair can shake, she whistles. “Where you off to, looking like that?”

“Like what?” I check my reflection. I actually cleaned up pretty well. I still look like I’ve cried in bed for the better part of two days, but at least I’m not sloppy anymore.

“Like you’re about to go raise hell.”

I smile while I put in my mother’s pearl earrings. “Who said I’m not?”

Frankie tails me as I get ready. When I put on my best perfume, she tells me not to be an idiot. When