Page 2 of Smash

“I really hope so. Because we’re about to give her something worth watching.”

A few minutes later, Nat swung Sparky into a parking lot. Velvet Thunder. It was 2:12 in the afternoon on a Thursday, but the neon sign was flashing. A lone pickup truck had been parked crookedly in front of the entrance. Nat pulled into the spot beside it and killed the engine.

“We are not eating at a strip club,” I informed her.

“No.” She pointed down the block. “Wendy’s is a two-minute walk. But we’re parking this thing here.”

My phone started ringing.

We both stared at it. Then we lost it.

“Leave your phone in the car,” Nat said between laughs. “’Nessa’s going to lose her shit.”

***

“Wow.” Three-and-a-half hours later, Nat stared out the driver’s-side window as we stopped at a light on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn. Both sides of the busy six-lane road were lined with picturesque brownstones—stone stoops, arched doorways, wrought-iron railings. “It looks just like on TV.”

I followed her gaze. A woman jogged past pushing a stroller with one hand and holding an iced coffee in the other. A guy in a suit stood on a stoop arguing into his AirPods. An old woman wearing a floral dress and a matching kerchief pulled a metal wagon piled high with groceries.

“It does.”

Nat shook her head. “You’re actually doing this.”

My stomach tightened. “I am.”

“You’re moving across the country.”

“Yep.”

She turned toward me. “We’ve lived next door to each other since we were born.”

“Technically, you lived there first.”

“By three whole weeks—because I was late and you were early. Per usual.”

The light turned green, and the car behind us blasted their horn. Nat’s response was to roll down the window and stick her middle finger out.

I smiled. “Are you sure you’re not the one moving here? You’d fit right in.”

We drove another few blocks in traffic. “I remember the day you met Calder,” Nat said. “You FaceTimed me and wouldn’t shut up about the cocky guy from New York who was so funny.”

I smiled, thinking back. “Except he was from Philly. All East Coast accents sounded the same to me.”

I’d met Calder Monroe my sophomore year at the University of Montana. He’d transferred from Penn State and had an East Coast energy I was instantly drawn to—fast talking, sharp-witted, and ridiculously smart. Not to mention handsome, in the best All-American way. I used to tease him that he looked like a real-life Ken doll with his neatly cropped blond hair, broad shoulders, and perfectly straight white teeth.

“Then he told your friend he was going to ask Dahlia out, because he thought that was your name, and you were crushed because you actually had a friend Dahlia.”

I laughed. “He’d never heard the name Talia before and thought that’s what I’d said.”

Nat went quiet. “I have a confession to make,” she said. “I didn’t like him at first. You two spent every waking second together. I might’ve been…a little jealous.”

I softened. “I knew.”

My mind drifted back to Montana, to when I first met Calder. Everything had felt so simple. College classes. Football games. Study sessions that turned into late-night bar hopping. First true loves. Calder and I had dated for two years before graduation. After, we did the long-distance thing for a while, surviving one day at a time and talking on the phone for hours about our dreams of a future together in New York—me as a published author, Calder on Wall Street. But all those dreams had come to a screeching halt six weeks ago when my dad had a heart attack after bringing in groceries from the car. One second, he was in the kitchen talking about making chicken piccata for dinner and the next—I swallowed—the next he was dead. It didn’t feel right to leave my mom after that. Or my two younger sisters. His death still hadn’t fully sunk in. The night before I left, I’d set five plates for dinner out of habit.

“I almost didn’t come,” I admitted quietly.

Nat didn’t look surprised. “I know.”