“My roommate and I have been calling you the Cookie Girl for so long it’s hard for me to remember your actual name. And also, no offense, Deb, but you sort of don’t seem like a ‘Deb.’ ”
Deb smiled. Craig liked that there was the tiniest gap between her two front teeth. It was the kind of thing most girls he’d known would have had four thousand dollars’ worth of orthodontia work to fix, but it was cute on Deb. She said, “So, what do I seem like?”
Craig shrugged apologetically and admitted, “You seem like a Debbie?”
Her smile faded then, and she looked down into the mug of tea he’d made for her—or, really, that she’d made for herself after he’d nuked the water. When he couldn’t find a tea bag, she’d gone to her own apartment and come back with two.
She said, “I used to be Debbie. I changed to Deb when I came here. I thought it might make it a little harder to Google me. The whole story’s there, of course, and my photograph right along with it. But Richards is a common name. ‘Deb Richards’ confuses it a bit, or so I was hoping. At least it would slow someone down.”
Craig grimaced. “Sorry,” he said. He thought a minute and then said, “Maybe I could call you Debbie, like, in private?”
“If you must,” she said. “But can I call you Craigy then?”
“No,” Craig said. “Sounds like a negative adjective.”
She took a sip of her tea, and then looked at him and said, “You’re really smart, Craig.”
“Thanks,” Craig said. “But you also think I’m crazy.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t think you’re crazy . . . exactly.”
They both laughed, but then she put the mug of tea on the floor and turned to him. She said, “But I do think you’ve been through something terrible. Something crazy-making. I used to see him around, too, Craig. I mean, I saw him every time I closed my eyes, but I’d catch him out of the corner of my eye, too. Like, at the library. I’d be on one side of the shelves and there’d be someone on the other side, and, you know how you can get a little glimpse between the books sometimes? I’d get that glimpse. This happened more than once, and it was always him. So I quit going to the library in town. I made my mom drive me into the city. I mean, it’s different with me. I didn’t know him before I—”
She stopped before saying “killed him,” but they both knew it was what she was going to say. They’d talked for hours. Never once had she called what had happened to her an “accident,” but the one time she’d spoken the words killed him aloud, she’d had to run from the room to the bathroom, where Craig had heard the water running in the sink for a long time.
“So it was easy to think that every guy about that age, blond, skinny, was him. And every time I saw a guy on a bike. Even still.”
She squeezed her eyes shut. Craig reached over and put his hand on her shoulder.
“I didn’t really think it was him,” she went on. “I didn’t think he was haunting me or anything, but it was like what you described tonight. It would just happen. I’d think I’d seen him, and suddenly everything would be different. Like, the whole world. My whole life. In that second. Instead of being horrified, I was happy, and the universe was suddenly operating with these completely different laws, and—”
Craig said, “I know.”
“And all the consequences, they were just nothing. It was like, for those two seconds, I was free, and—”
“I know,” Craig said. He was laughing now, despite himself, but she was shaking her head.
She said, “Except that I’d be wrong. It wasn’t him.”
Craig nodded. He took a sip of the tea. It was minty, green. It tasted to him like something a witch might have come up with to cure a broken heart or a bad case of hives. It tasted like a supernatural garden. He had always hated the herbal teas his mother tried to convince him to drink, but he loved this tea.
He inhaled, looked up from the mug, and said, “Except, Debbie, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, but this is different. I saw her. I truly saw her. This was Nicole.”
Deb gave him a sad little smile. Not happy, but not surprised.
“I’m going to go back there tonight,” he said. “If I have to sit outside the OTT house for five years, I’m going to talk to her. I’m going to ask her what the hell—”
Then, Perry opened the door, and Craig stood up, went to him, took him by the shoulders, and said, “I’ve got something to tell you, man. Something huge.”
“Yeah,” Perry said, sounding weary. “I’ve got something to tell you, too.”