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It was just what had happened to her, somehow, in the years since Katie got famous.
Katie leaned forward. “I have to tell you something else.” Her voice was low. Soft. “I didn’t mean to not see you after your dad died. I thought I would. There was a reason I didn’t make it back for the funeral, a reason I didn’t have control over, but I’ve regretted it. I regret that I didn’t make it.” She blinked. Her eyes were shiny. “I really liked your dad. He was the only grown-up who would ever do karaoke with me. He had such a beautiful natural tenor.”
Wil nodded. She couldn’t think what to say. She looked down at Katie’s plate and noticed the hole by her hipbone was all stretched out. She could see a teal elastic from what had to be very small underwear.
She cleared her throat. “I didn’t hold it against you.”
Katie nodded. She reached out one finger and tapped it against Wil’s knee, and that tap echoed through Wil like Katie was knocking on a door, asking Wil to let her in. “Tell me more, then. Tell me why your life needs exploding.”
Well, that was easy. Wil conjured up her mother’s list. “I rent. I still live with housemates. I still drive the Bronco, like, as my full-time ride. But not because of money. I could afford better.”
“What do you do for work?”
“I’m an insurance adjuster. I came up for a promotion two years ago that would put me in charge of all the adjusters for my company in the Fox Valley, but I’d have to change to another office, so I haven’t taken it. They ask me every eight weeks like clockwork. I don’t know.” Wil shook her head. “There’s probably something with Almond Butter, too.”
“You still have Almond Butter?! Oh my God! I love Almond Butter! Do you have a picture? Gimme.” Katie held out her hand, so Wil fished her phone out of her pocket, unlocked it, found a picture of Almond Butter, and handed it over.
“Oh, she looks so good! I can’t believe how good she looks! What would she be, sixteen? Seventeen? I forget her birthday.” Katie was swiping through Wil’s photos, one after the next, and it was true most of themwerepictures of Almond Butter, but it wasn’t a photo set. It was Wil’s whole camera roll. There was other stuff. Random shots of things like receipts or her health insurance card she’d had to upload for a medical appointment.
Also, pictures from kissing sessions. Some stuff that had happenedafterkissing sessions a few times.
Katie swiped, and one of those pictures filled the screen of Wil’s phone as though Wil had conjured it with her thoughts. Katie’s perfect eyebrows shot up. “God.” She looked at Wil. “I remember him.”
“Them.”
Katie nodded. “Sure. I remember them. That was a good one. Holy shit.”
Her finger hovered over the screen of Wil’s phone as though she wanted to keep swiping, to flip through a slideshow of what had happened between Wil and Emory after they finished filming the TikTok.
“That’s the only picture.” Wil took a bite of peanut butter cookie, because she couldn’t think past the heat in her cheeks and between her legs.
Katie put the phone to sleep and handed it back to Wil. “Okay. So, I am very sorry for invading your privacy. I get excited about cats, but that is not an excuse, just an explanation.”
“No worries.”
“All right.” She did an exaggerated nod, her whole torso bouncing up and down with her head. There was no food left on her platter. Wil wasn’t sure where she’d put it. Or when. “Hammering this out, then. If I win, you do adulting things. Fix your renting and housemate situation, buy a real car, take the promotion, maybemake an end-of-life plan for Almond Butter?” She looked at Wil with a question in her eyes.
“Yeah. The vet suggested this might be a good idea.”
“And if I lose, which I won’t, because there’s no way a teacher at East High has carried on a double life in a town of a hundred thousand souls for a dozenish years, I will go on your TikTok. I should warn you that if that happens, it’s not going to be a small event in your life. It will be everything that happened before you kissed Katie Price on TikTok”—she gestured to the left of her body—“and the aftermath”—she gestured to the right.
Then Katie went still, frowned, and blew out a long breath that let Wil see the tiredness around her eyes again. “Actually, even if you don’t kiss me on TikTok,” she said. “Even if someone takes our picture when we’re out in public together. It could be a lot of things, and they’d all mean exposure, the kind of exposure that’s not in your control.”
The kind of exposure, Wil assumed, that would throw her name into the morass of speculation around Katie’s love life and her breakup with Ben Adelsward.
Because Katie’s press, when it wasn’t about her current project or her cats, was always about Ben. Wil had never, on any level, understood the appeal, but she’d figured at the time he swooped Katie away to LA that if Ben Adelsward made Katie happy, that was good.
It had been intimated over the years between Diana and Beanie, however, that this was not the case.
“Maybe we should walk this back,” Katie said. “It’s fun for me to see you, but I don’t want to get carried away and cause problems for you.”
Wil looked across the room. Beanie was still by the front window, talking to Diana and a man with a mustache. There was Christmas music playing quietly in the background.
Katie was the one who lived in Los Angeles, but Wil couldn’t help thinkingshewas the one who wasn’t supposed to be here. At Diana’s for a holiday party with Katie Price. In Green Bay.
Healthy and whole, with her whole life in front of her.
“I don’t want to minimize,” Wil said. “I know that it’s not anything in my experience to have literally everyone on the globe not only watching you but also talking about you, having their lives changed by your work, thinking about what you made them feel. But I will say that there are ways my own life didn’t even start until recently. I don’t know what to do with it yet, but what Ihavedone, so far, is let a lot of people look at me. And I don’t mind telling you that I haven’t stopped letting them, and it’s not because of the passive creator income stream from TikTok. Also—”