Page 17 of Melt With You

She could go home, pretend that she was a relative. Nobody would know, right?

That is, if she didn’t wake up soon. If she didn’t roll over in bed and realize she’d hit the snooze button on the alarm clock once too often. That she’d missed her flight. That she’d need to spend all day in the airport on standby. But even the misery of flying standby was comforting to her, as was the concept of her real world, her real life, away from this limbo she found herself in right now. She longed for a place where her cell phone worked, a place where she could get her email.

A place where any one of her many friends would come to her rescue at a moment’s notice.

Without any trouble at all, she found the key under the chicken-shaped terracotta planter in the back yard – where it had been kept in case of emergency for as long as she could remember – then opened the back door. As soon as she walked into the house, she felt eighteen again. Or maybe she felt six. Everything about the interior of the rear hallway brought her back to her youth. The smells were exactly what she remembered, a combination of the leftover odors of her mother’s amateurish cooking, her father’s pipe smoke, and the vanilla-scented candles that her mother burned every so often in the entryway – often to mask the scent of yet another incinerated roast.

Dori had been in fast motion on the walk home, but now she slowed down, walking in the manner of someone at a museum, admiring artifacts from ancient cultures. She showed the same reverence as she gazed at the fridge with all the photos on the front, pinned in place with a variety of colored alphabet magnets. Pictures of herself and her brother Miles from kindergarten on up. She continued to move slowly, heart pounding, wanting to run away, and yet wanting to spend the rest of her life in this one room.

This was the place where she had last felt really and truly safe.

She sighed and sat down at the kitchen table, then jumped back up again at a noise. The neighbor’s cat had come barging in through the cat door, heading right to her, hopping up onto the kitchen table to be petted.

She stroked the marmalade-hued Tiger Lily and then headed toward the cabinet in the corner. The liquor cabinet. She didn’t care if her headache hadn’t totally dissipated.

What she truly needed was a drink.

Chapter Eight

Dori was lying down on the hideous burnt-orange suede sofa in the living room, her shoes off, feet up on the arm rest. She was slowly sipping her father’s scotch, balancing the glass on the basin of her belly between swallows and, even though she was well beyond drinking age, she felt happily rebellious sipping the liquor. Even more rebellious was the fact that she was paging through one of her father’s vintage copies of Playboy, which she’d come upon in a box on the top shelf of the liquor cabinet. She wondered how much the collection would go for on eBay, and then realized there was no eBay in 1988.

She had a nice mellow mood going, when she heard a noise from directly upstairs.

Jesus. Would she not get a break?

She set the glass on the coffee table, and then started toward the stairs when self-preservation kicked in. She’d been taught never to enter a house with the front door ajar, never to go looking for an intruder if she heard a noise. In Manhattan, there were plenty of horror stories about what happened to friends of friends or neighbors of neighbors who had done just that.

But this world felt so safe. There couldn’t be anything truly dangerous lurking in the bedroom wing upstairs, could there?

Hand on the banister, she wondered whether she should she run out the back door or play Nancy Drew on her own. After a moment, in which she could hear more thumping and rustling, she decided to quietly tiptoe up the stairs to see what was making the noise – she could always lock herself in her parents’ room and call the police if she had to. She hesitated only long enough to lift a baseball bat from the umbrella stand next to the front door and then cautiously made her way up to the second floor, opening her bedroom door just as Chelsea fell in the window in a blonde, pastel-hued heap.

‘I’m sorry,’ the cheerleader said quickly, standing and brushing off the pleats in her kicky little skirt. She was wearing her blue-and-white uniform, which Dori found odd. Why would she be dressed to cheer during the summer? Especially, late at night.

‘Wrong house.’

‘What are you doing here, Shell?’ Dori asked the question before she could stop herself, so shocked to see her best friend’s twin sister climbing into her bedroom window that she spoke the thoughts as they appeared in her brain without any attempt at filtering.

‘How’d you know my name?’

The teenager and the woman stared at each other, then Dori, thinking fast, said, ‘I’m Bill’s cousin. Dori’s talked a lot about you.’ The lie came easy with the liquor. Maybe she would need to carry a flask on her for as long as this fantasy – or whatever it was – lasted. ‘My niece sent a picture from summer vacation last year.’ That could be true, couldn’t it? No, she and Chelsea had never been close, but they were more friends than enemies. ‘What are you doing in my – I mean, her bedroom?’

Just as the words were out of her mouth, a boy climbed in through the window. Marc Dameron. Chelsea’s beau then, ex-husband now. A rebel from the start, with his punk-rock hair and his battered leather jacket. He looked as surprised to see Dori as Chelsea had been, but he gathered his wits quickly. She’d never liked Dameron much. He had a false sense of superiority, but he was a thief. She’d known that even way back when.

‘Wrong house,’ he muttered, starting to head back out the window he’d just climbed through.

‘That’s what she said. Funny how you two didn’t think to use the front door.’ Marc hesitated with his hand on the window sill, then turned back to face the women. He looked to Chelsea for help. Hadn’t that always been the case? Dori thought. She’d bailed him out for years.

‘Well …’ Chelsea puffed her cheeks out and looked around the room. ‘You see, it’s the right house, actually. I was just returning something of Dori’s. And I knew she was out of town.’

‘Yeah?’ Dori asked. ‘What were you returning?’ Chelsea’s hands were very obviously empty.

‘I mean, borrowing something …’

How crazy, Dori thought. Chelsea and her man had been looking for a place to get it on. Had they actually fucked in her bed while she and her family had been on vacation? Looked that way. The thought made her wrinkle up her nose in displeasure, but she found that she was actually enjoying Chelsea’s obvious discomfort, although she had no idea why. Maybe it was because Chelsea had sworn she’d been a virgin until her marriage night. Or maybe it was because of the grief Chelsea had given her about fucking Luke after the reunion.

‘What did you want to borrow?’

‘Oh, you know. Her …’ Chelsea’s eyes did a tour of the room again, landing on a poster of a girl on a skateboard flipping through the air. ‘Her skateboard.’

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