Page 66 of Devious Lies (Cruel Crown)
My eyes honed in on Emery, Durga’s messages on my mind.
Like dirt.
Like less than dirt.
Emery sat on the couch, her eyes trained on the television, on the part where Ariel undergoes the fish version of plastic surgery to please her man and then loses her ability to talk in the process, but hey, it’s not like the woman had anything valuable to say.
(Note to self: If Reed ever has a daughter, she cannot watch princess movies unless it involves an essay dismantling them.)
Emery wore a black hoodie, unzipped except at the bottom, where she’d fastened the zipper without bothering to pull it up; a shirt that read eccedentesiast, which for all I knew could be an S.T.D. warning; and black Chucks that looked like they’d been bought used from a pigéage facility.
Meanwhile, Cayden dressed in a three-piece suit, outfit completed by a striped pocket square tucked in a double-point fold. The other girls wore dresses and heels, their hair actually brushed and faces congealed by makeup.
“Oh, come on!” Emery’s zipper unfastened as she threw both arms in the air, nearly hitting the blonde sitting on the couch beside her. She turned to the woman, eyebrows pointed at the ceiling, “Tell me this pisses you off, too, Ida Marie.”
Wide-eyed and bearing remarkable resemblance to an Asian tarsier, Ida Marie stuttered, “Um… what?”
“Ignore her,” Hannah remarked from one of the desks, not bothering to glance up from the computer screen. She sounded harsh without the Carolinian drawl to soften her vowels. “She’s been doing this for the past thirty minutes.”
“Past hour,” Chantilly corrected from the other desk. Her tiny scarlet dress inched up her thigh as she leaned forward and squinted at her screen.
An F5 tornado couldn’t faze Emery as she gestured to the television, this time almost hitting Cayden on her left. I recognized him from our Redondo Beach project last year. He had a keen eye, sharp wit, and a British accent that landed him more ass than a stripper pole.
Emery stood and turned to Cayden and Ida Marie. “This chick basically changes how she looks for a guy, then she washes up on shore, and dudebro prince sees a hot naked chick and wants to smash? Are y’all for real?” Her Southern accent strengthened the more worked up she got. Wide-eyed and jaw unhinged, she looked manic, a second from being escorted out in cuffs by security. “This is worse than The Titanic!”
“What’s wrong with The Titanic?” Ida Marie crossed her arms and inched away from Emery. “It’s romantic.”
“It would have been romantic if Rose had shared her raft.”
“What about Snow White?”
“She’s fourteen, Ida Marie. Fourteen!” Emery shook her head, then swiped the drawstring of her hoodie aside when it swung at her face. “Snow White trusts a twenty-something dude she’s alone in a forest with because he sings to her? Sings. And the Queen gets jealous of how pretty a fourteen-year-old girl is and decides to poison her. Unbelievable. She didn’t need seven dwarves. She needed a knife and two body bags.”
r /> “You are disturbingly violent.”
Her chin tilted up. “Thank you.”
Chantilly lifted her wrist and glanced at her watch. “It’s two past nine. He should be here by now.”
True, but I wasn’t in a rush to end this amusing display. In another life, I might have liked Emery. Unfortunately for her, liars and murderers appealed to me as much as making out with Able Small Dick Cartwright did. As in, I’d rather take my chances with a Guillotine.
“Who should be here right now?”
Chantilly ignored Emery’s question and gestured to her shirt. “What are you wearing?”
“I’ve been here for an hour. If you had a problem with what I’m wearing, you should have told me while I had time to change.”
“This is an office of business. I shouldn’t have to tell you it’s inappropriate to wear jeans and Converse to a meeting. Delilah Lowell may have gotten you this job, but I don’t play favorites in my department.”
“This is a half-finished construction site,” she corrected. Her eyes dipped to Chantilly’s open-toed Louboutin pumps. “There’s still a closed-toed shoes policy.”
She reminded me of an active minefield. Volatile. Dangerous. A liability to herself. Because when a mine exploded, it’d take her down with it.
“So…” Ida Marie began, her voice trailing off as the silence persisted. “What do you think about Mulan?”
Emery scoffed and finally took a seat on the couch again. “She’s sixteen, and he’s, like, ten years older than her and her boss.”
Our age gap, I noticed.
