Whistleblower ✓

38 | touching up

On Wednesday afternoon, a freshman chemical engineering major offered me twenty bucks an hour in exchange for extensive grammatical assistance.

If we'd had any champagne in the apartment, I would've popped it.

In celebration of my restored status as an employed person, Andre proposed a dinner party, which was a very grown-up way of saying that we wanted to pool our money to buy Mexican food from our favorite taco stand and feast until we fell asleep watching a movie we'd already watched eighteen times.

It was the perfect night to do it, too. One of Andre's roommates was back home for his mom's birthday, another was sleeping at his girlfriend's apartment, and the third was going on a Wednesday evening bar crawl that he predicted would end on either someone else's couch or a stretcher in the emergency room.

So the apartment was all ours.

Andre ran down to Pepito's to pick up the food. Hanna, who'd had my car keys in her possession since my Sunday evening breakdown, volunteered to drive to Ralph's and pick up the bottle of wine she'd promised me—despite my instance that I wasn't going to drink it until later, anyway.

She returned to The Palazzo with only a jumbo bag of Hot Cheetos cradled tenderly in her arm like a sleeping newborn.

Hanna tossed me my keys. I frowned up at her from my spot on Andre's couch, where I was lounging in my cleaning-the-apartment leggings and a white sweater that had shed so many tufts of fuzz on my pants it looked like I'd wrestled a polar bear and won.

"Did you get—"

"I got your wine, yeah," she said. "It's in your trunk."

I frowned again, but harder.

"Why didn't you bring it?"

"I forgot," Hanna said, peering down at the nutritional chart on the back of the Cheetos bag, which had to be depressing. "Maybe you can go get it? I parked in the garage across the street. Super close. It'll take you five minutes, tops."

Hanna had many artistic talents, but acting was not one of them.

I just couldn't figure out why she wanted to send me out to the parking lot.

I shot a look at Andre, to check if he looked like he knew why Hanna was being so sketchy (Andre was habitually awful at hiding his guilt), but he was busy dividing up the group order of nachos into three equal portions on mismatched plates he'd borrowed from his roommates, each of whom apparently owned only one individual set of cutlery and dishwater.

"So are you mad at me," I asked Hanna, "or—"

"Laurel," she said, exasperated. "Go."

❖ ❖ ❖

She'd parked on the top floor. Now I was absolutely certain she was mad at me.

I stopped on the landing, panting like an overheated dog from the steep climb up the stairs, and looked out across the street. It was golden hour. The Palazzo's windows sparkled peach and gold against blue and lavender skies.

From the east side, the parking garage was a monolith of shadow and concrete, but when I shouldered open the door and stepped out onto the roof level, I was momentarily blinded by sunlight.

I lifted one hand to shield my eyes.

And then I saw it.

My Corolla was one of maybe fifteen cars parked on the top floor. She sat alone along the north wall, her windows and mirrors glittering. There wasn't a single spot of dust or dirt on the body.