Page 28 of Sweet Ruin

I’d be doing it to spare myself. And the second I do that, I’ve told them one more time that what they think of my body is the most powerful thing in the room.

No.

Hell no.

I want them to know that their opinions mean nothing to me anymore.

And then I want them to fucking burn.

“In it goes,” I say aloud. “Nobody gets spared tonight. Not even me.”

So the jokes go in. I crop a few of the most vicious ones and add them to the folder I’m building.

Then I take a dish towel off the oven handle and wipe the iPad down, front, back, edges, the little metal band around the outside.

I don’t know if fingerprints on an iPad are a thing anybody has ever checked in the history of the world. But my sister got caught by a machine doing something she didn’t know about, and I’d rather be paranoid than be her.

I unplug it, coil the cable, and start sliding it back into the drawer under the menus, arranging them the way they were, more or less, which is to say chaotically.

And then the screen wakes in my hand.

A banner slides down at the top.

VIVIAN: what time can u slip away tonight?

The implication is obvious. Hotels aren’t enough anymore; they want to find a closet or a guest bedroom or a well-shaded shrub around the corner to fall into and rip each other’s clothes off.

While I scurry around my mother’s living room, roleplaying as Cinderella.

Every vengeful cell I possess wants to open it and type out a scathing reply to my sister.

But I don’t. It’s not time quite yet.

Instead, I photograph the lock screen. The newest receipt in the collection.

Proof that tonight isn’t just my plan.

It’s theirs, too.

Then I turn the iPad face-down, settle the menus back over it, and close the drawer on everything.

I pick up my keys and my phone and go back to the front door. Next stop: the bakery.

After that, the party.

I check Connor’s dot on my way out. He’s in the parking lot now. Shopping done, I guess.

I can only shake my head. I wonder if he has any clue of what I’m doing, or of just how soon his life is about to go up in spectacular flames.

Then I laugh.

Relax, my sister told him. She never notices anything.

Turns out they never notice anything, either.

6

DELILAH