Page 12 of Melt With You

‘Of course, I do,’ Violet snarled back at her sister. ‘Out of all the people here, I definitely have an idea.’

It was exactly like being back in high school, loving and hating her friends. She remembered this jealous streak of Chelsea’s, and she knew (as an adult, anyway) that Chelsea was dissatisfied with her life. But that wasn’t Dori’s fault, was it? And was anyone ever really satisfied?

She stared at Chelsea again. The woman was nothing like her sister, was she? Thank God. Dori didn’t think she could handle knowing two Chelseas. The blonde had the smile of a barracuda, and her teeth gleamed in the halogen lights overhead. Dori realized that the woman had put the most effort of the four of them into planning for this reunion. Teeth bleaching, definitely. Her hair highlighted to the same wheat-blonde color it had been naturally in high school. Was there some Botox involved with her newly smooth forehead? Chelsea didn’t seem able to properly raise her eyebrows any longer, but she was as snarky as ever. The gossip queen of Redwood High.

‘It was a joke,’ Chelsea said, smile still in place, eyes contradicting her words. Chelsea was the one friend in their group who would send out a mean email with the letters LMAO throughout. As if ‘laughing my ass off’ and sideways smiley faces could take the sting from the cruelty in her words. Dori felt that she was seeing her friend for real for the first time.

Maybe they weren’t really friends at all.

But there was nothing to do about it now. Well, there was one thing. Dori grabbed her phone out of Chelsea’s hand, flicked the off button, and set the device in the pocket of her hobo bag, then raised her hand to the bartender, ready for another drink.

Chapter Five

‘Show me, show me, show me how you do that trick.’

Dori opened her eyes and looked around. At first, she didn’t know where she was. She had to blink for a few seconds in order to make sense of her surroundings. Her initial thought was that she was back home. And by ‘home,’ she meant Bryce’s home. That’s how drunk she’d been the night before. Staggering under the strain of her headache, she made her way to the bathroom. She didn’t even want to look in the mirror, but she forced herself to, confronting a reflected exterior that looked every inch as miserable as she felt inside.

Splashing cold water on her face didn’t help. She remembered reading that Paul Newman was a fan of dunking his face in a champagne bucket of ice water to wake up after a long, hard night. Her former boss, Bette, had told her that, swearing by the chilly morning dunk to close her pores. But cold water on top of a hangover? It wasn’t something that Dori was anxious to try.

Bleary-eyed with a combination of fatigue and the fancy drinks she’d imbibed the previous night, Dori took the longest, hottest shower she could stand. All she wanted to do was climb back into bed, but she had an early flight. She had to get herself together.

The sound of The Cure reached her even over the spray of the shower. This was one of her favorites: ‘Just Like Heaven.’ She couldn’t get away from 80s music, could she? But as she turned off the water and stepped out of the shower, she realized that the band singing wasn’t The Cure. It was a remake. She wrinkled her nose. She preferred the original version by far. In her opinion, there had been no reason to attempt to recreate a treasure.

After dressing and packing her small carry-on bag, she headed down the stairs to the front desk. She’d already settled her tab the previous afternoon. She handed over her key, slipped the strap of her carry-on suitcase over her shoulder, and walked outside, planning on hailing a cab. Her phone rang, surprising her.

Hadn’t she turned it off the night before?

Yes, but right as she’d left the bar, Violet had caught up with her, grabbing the phone out of her bag and turning the tiny machine back on with a push of her thumb on the control pad. ‘I might want to call you in the morning,’ she’d explained. ‘You know, to say goodbye.’

So Dori was expecting to hear Violet’s voice when she slipped a hand into her purse and pulled out the new slim-line Cherry X-phone. She pressed the tiny answer button, and then heard a rapid series of high-pitched beeps. Not exactly what she wanted to hear through the hangover throbbing through her forehead.

Was someone’s fax machine trying to call her? Or had she managed to mess up the phone yet again? She really needed to read the instructions for the damn thing. She didn’t understand how Chelsea had mastered the mechanics so quickly. The girl wasn’t any smarter than she was, simply more cunning.

‘Hello?’ she tried, speaking loudly to be heard over the electronic noises. No voice spoke even after the rapid beeping ended. Shrugging, Dori pressed the tiny button to end the call. And then, confused, she stopped on the sidewalk, standing totally still.

It was as if she’d just seen a heat mirage. The air stirred around her in an inexplicable ripple. Yet the sun wasn’t that high in the sky. The temperature couldn’t have been more than 70 degrees. Dori closed her eyes and opened them again, and then, unable to help herself, pulled off her rhinestone-studded shades for a better look, squinting at the sudden brightness that added infinitely to her headache.

In the place of the five-story parking garage was a funky second-hand clothes store where she and her friends had bought their T-shirts and track jackets back in high school. The items in the window were all emblazoned with skulls and crossbones and off-the-wall sayings like ‘Welcome to California. Now Go Home’ and ‘Madge says, ‘You’re Soaking In It.” Decals covered the door, the types of sticker she and Violet had used to decorate their binders, lockers, and skateboards. In the right side of the window hung a leather jacket that Dori had coveted throughout school, one with a price tag that put the jacket constantly out of her reach. She hadn’t thought of that jacket in years.

She shook her head.

The store had been razed years before. She and Violet had commiserated on the loss the previous day while out window shopping. Violet had remembered the exact year when the whole little block of unique shops had been demolished – 1992 – to make way for the multi-tiered parking lot where the Silicon Valley elite could park their BMWs and Mercedes Benzes, often taking up two spaces per car to ensure safety to their prized vehicles.

What was going on? The parking lot had been there a moment ago, hadn’t it? She was sure she’d seen a car pulling in as she’d stepped out of the B&B.

She must be dreaming.

Slightly light-headed, and more dizzy than she had felt all morning, Dori kept walking, taking the next few steps in a total daze. She found herself standing in front of the Creamery, the little 24-hour restaurant on the corner where she and her friends had hung out after school.

How drunk had she gotten the night before? Could someone possibly have slipped something into her Dirty Girl Scout? She’d heard horror stories of men putting Roofies into women’s drinks. But she’d had control of her own glass all evening. Right here. In the bar that had once been Gael’s Creamery – that was Gael’s Creamery once more.

She stood absolutely still checking out the cluster of rainbow-hued Vespas parked out front. Seeing the teenagers inside, with their large white mugs of coffee and cocoa, she thought she recognized one of them. That girl in the window was Violet, wasn’t it? With her pink-streaked punk haircut and her beaten-in leather jacket with all the zippers and buttons covering the lapel. Internally, Dori spoke sternly to herself in an attempt to regain clarity. The girl looked like Violet – like Violet had looked in high school. Not like the high-end art dealer of today.

But how was it possible that the Creamery was here? And if the Creamery was still here, did that mean … could it mean …?

Heart racing, Dori turned her thoughts to The Majestic. Would it be a big box bookstore, or would it, could it –? She rounded the corner and saw the movie theater. She tilted her head up to read the sign and instead of seeing the names of the New York Times Best-Selling Authors, she saw the words Repo Man and Blade Runner and the times of the shows.

And after that, she didn’t remember anything at all.

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