Page 12 of Cross Checked
And for the first time all day, the noise in my head did not feel like noise at all.
3
Bliss
By the time Aura decided my outfit needed legal intervention, Charm was sitting cross-legged on my bed with a curling iron in one hand, a slice of cold pizza in the other, and the kind of confidence that only came from being raised in a house where people casually used words like foyer without irony.
“No,” Aura said from inside my closet.
I looked down at myself. “No what?”
“That.”
“Thatis so specific. Thank you.”
She stepped out holding the black top I’d already rejected twice and gave me a look sharp enough to pass the bar exam early. “You are not wearing a giant sweatshirt to Hockey House.”
“It’s not giant. It’s comfortably spacious and looks cute as a dress.”
Charm pointed the curling iron at me without looking away from her reflection in my vanity mirror. “Baby, it could house a family of four and their unresolved generational trauma.”
I glanced down at the oversized KFU hoodie swallowing half my body, then back at them. “It’s raining.”
“It’s misting,” Aura corrected.
“It’s Northern Michigan. That’s commitment issues.”
Charm grinned around her pizza. “And yet somehow Cade Mercer will survive seeing your arms.”
The second she said his name, warmth crept up the back of my neck so fast I wanted to throw something at her, preferably something soft enough not to damage her face because CharmHarlen’s face was expensive in a way mine and Aura’s had never been. Not because she acted like it. That was the thing about Charm. She came from the kind of Sutton County money that lived behind iron gates and old trees, but she had never once made us feel like we were visiting from a different planet. Her parents had money, real money, the kind that didn’t announce itself with logos because it had been sitting in investment accounts since before any of us were born. But Charm had shown up in sixth grade wearing glitter sneakers, crying in the bathroom because some girl told her she talked too much, and Aura had told the girl that was brave commentary coming from someone whose entire personality came from a clearance rack, while I handed Charm a paper towel and asked if she wanted to sit with us at lunch.
That was it. Our very own origin story of The ABC’s.
Aura, Bliss, and Charm.
It sounded ridiculous when adults said it, like we were a girl group from a children’s show, but to us it had always meant something else. It meant emergency sleepovers and shared lip gloss and three toothbrushes in every house because somebody was always staying the night. It meant Aura knowing I hated orange soda before I knew I hated orange soda. It meant Charm’s mom buying three matching Christmas pajama sets every year because by seventh grade, she had stopped pretending Aura and I weren’t partly hers. It meant my dad, Daniel, and Aura’s dad, Ray, working the same fire department for so long that our families had blurred together before we were old enough to understand where one house ended and the other began.
Aura and I had been stuck with each other since we were born. Charm became inevitable by twelve. By now, there was no version of my life where they didn’t exist in the frameworkholding me up. There was a time they kept me breathing without even knowing that was what they were doing.
Aura tossed the black top at my chest. I caught it on reflex.
“Put it on,” she said. “Then the jeans. Then boots. Then we discuss whether your hair needs volume or secular intervention.”
I paused with the shirt clutched against me. “Secular intervention?”
“You get weird when I say divine.”
“My dad raised me right.”
“Your dad raised you to apologize to vending machines and overthink eye contact with attractive men.”
Charm lowered the curling iron with a dramatic sigh. “Honestly, both are very on brand.”
“That machine took my money,” I muttered.
Aura disappeared back into my closet, already working the situation like a courtroom. “Also, before you deflect with jokes, are you actually asking Cade about the project tonight?”
I pulled the hoodie over my head and reached for the black top. “I was thinking about it.”
