Page 2 of Hearts Adrift
To Mr. Cal Mason: Welcome to your Breezy Bungalow and thank you for choosing us to take care of you! Inside the basket, you will find menus from our local eateries who deliver to your door contact-free, including grocery stores. If there is anything you need, contact the housing manager at our direct line listed below or swing by the main office located just down the road within walking distance. As an added token of our deepest appreciation, please do enjoy these complimentary passes tothe Hopewell Fair during your stay. All the best, Brooke Hopewell.
I belatedly feel the stinging, which pulls my focus from the letter. I turn over my arm. The crooked red smile drawn across my elbow tells me I earned a bloody gift breaking in through the back window.
This is why we have stunt performers, I’ll point out.
My wound rushes the last portion of my tour down a short hallway that branches off to a big bedroom, a smaller second bedroom, a coat closet, a narrow window-lined hall leading back into the other end of the kitchen that has a washer and dryer tucked into a nook, and a little bathroom, inside which I locate a first aid kit under the sink next to an unexplained empty faded pink bag and box of condoms. In dressing my reckless gash, I catch my gaze in the mirror.
That’s when I let myself see how sunken my eyes look, I guess from the single hour of sleep I managed last night. And my hair, sweaty from being stuffed inside a hood all day, hangs in short tangles down my forehead. I look paler than I realized. Sickly. Exhausted.
In other words, I look exactly like the villain they say I am in every comments section since the video got out.
I look away from my reflection and notice my knuckles are still as red today as they were yesterday, as if a makeup artist snuck up unseen to retouch their reddened appearance for another take.
This is why we have fight choreographers. Specialists trained in the art of fake ass-kicking. First rule: safety first and no one gets hurt.
But what if I wanted the director to hurt? What if it was the most satisfying thing, to plant my knuckles in his smug jawline? How do you safely choreograph that?
I close my fingers.
Then my eyes.
I just realized my phone stopped ringing.
This might be the first moment of true peace I’ve had in twenty-four hours. First chance I’ve gotten to take a real breath. Even if that breath is full of orange-scented cleaner and bleach from whatever the housekeeper used to wipe up the shower and toilet before I arrived, assuming it wasn’t to cover up the odor of a corpse. Pretty sure someone’s died here. I probably glossed over that part in the ad.
Oh. I left my phone in the car. Probably on purpose.
That must be why I haven’t heard it ring.
As lovely as it is to exist in this life without one, I am just as much a slave to the toxic stream of information it provides as anyone else. So when the coast is clear, I make a quick trip to the car to fetch it—as well as the bag of hot Cheetos that hid it from my view—and hurry back inside. Then I take a seat on what we shall call the “ambiguously beach-colored couch”, and munch on the Cheetos with one hand while flipping through missed calls with the other.
Not half a minute later, my phone rings.
It’s the first call I’ve gotten today that I answer. I turn on the video, showing my tired-ass self. “Hey, angel-boo.”
“What the fuck?” Anya shouts after her face pops up—my short-haired lesbian bestie and moral compass since the college days. We did the acting thing together for a bit until she pivoted and became a lawyer—a good one at that.
“What?” I ask innocently. “Did something happen?”
“Yeah, and half the internet knows, and the other half is finding out as we speak.” She comes nose-close to the phone. “What the hellwasthat, Riv?”
“Not at liberty to discuss it and honestly don’t wish to. But just between us, this is actually kind of fun. I’m hiding out like acriminal.”
“Youarea criminal.”
“Clips on the internet never tell the full story. Not even the funny ones, half of which are staged. Is it weird that the excitement of this is giving me a semi?”
“Have you talked to legal? What’s your agent saying? Did he set you up somewhere until the dust settles?”
“Can I get tetanus from glass? Is that a thing? Asking for a friend. Your friend. The one you’re talking to.”
“At least tell me you’re okay.”
I’m about to crack another joke, but her question stops me. I think it’s the first time in weeks someone’s asked me that without being paid to. “Always,” I answer plastically.
“How bad is it?” she presses. “As bad as it seems?”
Worse, I want to say, but instead I smile. “I’m in some beach town bungalow on the Texas coast that looks like your Aunt May’s old house and smells like the retirement place she’s in now. I broke the key in the lock, then broke my elbow getting in.”
