Page 31 of The Starfish Sisters

“I’m a regular customer!” he protests. “She’s a Hollywood elite who—”

“Is safe here. You get out.”

He whirls around and storms out, muttering. I drop to my knees and grab Jasmine. “What were you thinking?”

“He was being mean!”

“I know, but you just can’t do stuff like that.” Tears well in the back of my throat. What if he’d had a gun? What if he’d hit her? “Let adults manage things, will you?”

Suze is standing there, frozen. Her hands are shaking, and Ben comes up beside her. “Let’s get you home.”

“We should report it to the sheriff,” I say, standing. “Considering the squirrel.”

“Squirrel?” Ben echoes.

I cover Jasmine’s ears. “A dead squirrel on her doorstep.”

Suze’s face goes pale. “Do you think he was the one who did it?”

“I don’t know. If it was, I would feel better because he’s clearly not part of an organized group like the LNB.”

“How could you possibly know?” Ben asks.

I raise my eyebrows. “He seems incompetent, more like the guy who yells at you for crossing his lawn than part of something so organized.”

Ben scowls. “Don’t underestimate people like him. There’s a lot of anger and frustration in the world.”

Suze is visibly shaking. “Let’s get you home and call the police,” I say.

She nods jerkily, and I feel a wild sense of the unfairness in the world and the weight of my own guilt. Suze has suffered plenty, mostly thanks to her father, but I’ve played a role, too. I have secrets I’ve kept too long.

Is it too late to put them right? I think of Blue River Electric. That might be a way to begin.

THEN

I THINKI LOVEYOU

Phoebe

The Saturday before Thanksgiving, I was up before the sun, and by the time my dad had his first cigarette and cup of coffee, my suitcase was in the car. “Anxious to get to Amma’s?” he asked with a wink.

“Yes. My friend Suze and I have a lot of plans.”

He stroked his thick mustache, eyeing me over the curling blue smoke of his L&M cigarette.

“You need to make friends here,” my mom said, bustling into the kitchen. She wore her silky robe, belted tight around her middle, and a pair of mules with feathers on the top. Her toenails and fingernails were red. She poured a cup of coffee. “What about the girls you had over to swim?”

I rolled my eyes to cover the intense embarrassment that still burned in me over that night. If she thought I was contemptuous, it was better than if she felt sorry for me. “Not everyone needs a million friends,” I said.

“Not a million,” my mother said in her direct way. “A couple would be fine.”

“Mom!”

“I’m saying that maybe if you reached out and tried to be friendlier, you’d have more friends, more of a social life.”

“Like you?” I shot back, because really all she did was work and have cocktails with her lawyer friends.

It was impossible to get her mad, though, and she raised an eyebrow. “I’m allowing the Thanksgiving week trip, but you are not going to spend the entire Christmas break in the back of beyond, hiding from your life.”