KDBookOnline
Share Us
But Wil knew it.
She’d seen it, a string of six letters and numbers that always liked the videos, always. Sometimes the account left a one-word comment likeforearms. Orclutch. A few times it left an emoji, like the fire emoji or, once, the drops of water emoji.
“Htx345.” Wil watched Katie’s face the same way she did when she was getting ready to kiss someone.
Katie’s mouth came open just a little. Wil could see her tongue behind her teeth. “Yes.” Katie shivered and then laughed, but she was breathing hard. So was Wil.
Katie eased back, unfolding her legs and scooting onto her side of the bench seat. But it didn’t feel like she was pulling away. Wil thought that maybe Katie was giving herself the same reminder Wil had. The one about Christmas, and LA, and reunions.
“I brought red Twizzlers and pretzels,” Wil said.
“Do you know how satisfying it is that you can barely handle me?”
Wil laughed, reaching down to grab the tote where she had put Katie’s requested supplies. “Is it?”
“Of course it is. You’re Wil-You-or-Won’t-You Wil, no last name, wildly popular on TikTok, but also,also,you’re Wilifred Greene, hottest girl at East High School. Valedictorian of our class. Softball player, fuckingcheerleaderafter you quit softball. Student council. Orchestra. You”—Katie put her finger on Wil’snose—“dated the quarterback, Wil. That is a real YA novel situation you got yourself into there, and the rest of us noticed. We hadthoughts.”
“Here.” Wil handed Katie the package of Twizzlers. “You’re saying these things to me, but also, you have an Oscar. Golden Globes. Emmys. SAGs. The Grammy from when you played the Appalachian blues singer. Oh! And the Tony! My mom went with Diana to New York to see you on Broadway and had to take two days off work after. You did that toBeanie Greene. A photographer followed you to the Maldives and took a drone picture of you on a yacht sunbathing topless with your cat Trois curled around your head.”
“How good was that picture?” Katie asked, separating Twizzler strands and wrapping them around her finger.
“I mean, it was so fucking good, I and the rest of America deep-dive Google-searched for the highest-res image possible. That is my point. Somehow, you ended up owning the paparazzi so hard by looking that good, and also that you’re…” Wil searched for the right word, but she couldn’t find it, and when she met Katie’s eyes, she wasn’t sure what to make of what she saw there.
It wasn’t pride in being flawless, perfect, accomplished Katie Price. It was something a lot closer to the way Katie had looked the day Wil picked her up off the side of the road with red-rimmed eyes and tangled hair, and they’d sat in the parking lot of the high school for the first time because Katie didn’t want to go home yet, the wind gusting against the Bronco.
Do you ever feel like you’re not real?Katie had asked.
Wil knew exactly what she meant.
Now, Katie was watching Wil the same way she used to watch and rewatch her Criterion Collection movies in Craig and Diana’s den—as though there were things she wanted to know, and the only way to figure them out was to keep her attention completely and utterly on the screen. “Give me your phone,” she said.
Wil handed it over. Katie tapped for a few minutes and handed it back.
“What did you do?”
“I logged into my Dropbox so I could grab the hi-res file of the picture and save it to your camera roll.”
Wil blew out a breath. “We have really got ourselves into a thing here.”
“You’re not worried, are you?” Katie pressed her phone to her chest and smiled a new smile at Wil that made her forget this was an extremely temporary diversion made of nostalgia and two confident women trying to out-flirt each other.
“Yes, I am incredibly worried, actually. But I have no defenses against”—Wil put her hand over the phone in the middle of Katie’s chest—“you. Wait. Don’t lean into me. Jesus.” Wil laughed, gently pushing Katie back into her own space.
“Good. I’m glad you don’t. Are we going to go drive past Mr. Cook’s place or what?”
“I brought us here so we could make a plan. That’s how we do this. We sit in the parking lot, we make a plan, we eat junk food. We usually didn’t get any further than the plan part.”
“We never really did, did we?” Katie put the Twizzlers down and opened the bag of pretzels. “We were terrible stalkers. Or detectives. But now there is a bet. Or at least, there are stakes, and we no longer have a curfew. So what’s the plan?”
“I don’t know where he lives,” Wil admitted. “Like I said, the directory doesn’t have anything to run with. He didn’t pop up with an address on a quick Google search. We could internet stalk him, but that didn’t seem correct.”
Katie ate a handful of pretzels one by one, licking the salt off them before she crunched them, which she had also done in high school, but it hadn’t murdered Wil’s impulse control like it wasdoing now. If she didn’t stop, Wil was going to take off all of her clothes and just exist in the deep end.
“Oh! I know what we can do!” Katie said.
“What is it? Please stop fellating those pretzels.”
Katie grinned and licked another one, very slow. “Hmm. What about those things on the internet that save the things on the internet after someone has taken them off? A fan did that to find my deleted LiveJournal from when I was fourteen, which meant I had to talk about myGrey’s Anatomyfanfic to reporters at Cannes.”