Tuesday Mooney Wore Black. Kate Racculia

Чтение книги онлайн.

      Tuesday flicked her fingertip up and down, up and down, over the iPad, scrolling through the guest list. Which didn’t include Dex. Richmont, his firm, had bought six tickets for their employees, but he wasn’t one of them. Her stomach rumbled again. She was starving. They were allowed to grab hors d’oeuvres and drinks after the program ended, but that wouldn’t be for hours. At least she was sitting. At least she didn’t have to staff the cocktail party upstairs, wandering among the guests, answering questions, directing them to the VIP rooms or the bathrooms. All she had to do at registration was be pleasant to white guys in suits. It was a talent she’d honed daily all the years she worked in finance.

      Dex once asked if her general standoffishness, her “aversion to team sports,” as he called it, came from having grown up in Salem, stewing in the cultural detritus of mass hysteria and (literal) witch-hunting. Salem’s natural vibe was part of it. What happened with Abby Hobbes was part of it too, though Dex didn’t know Abby Hobbes existed. Technically it was possible Dex knew the name Abigail Hobbes. He would have been a teenager in western Massachusetts when the coverage of Abby’s disappearance was at its height, bleeding beyond Salem, though her story never spread as far as it might have – if they’d found her body, if the missing girl had been upgraded to a dead girl. But Dex wouldn’t have had any reason to connect Abigail Hobbes directly to Tuesday. For Dex to know, at the time of her disappearance, that Abby had been her best friend, Tuesday would have had to tell him herself.

      “You don’t trust people in groups,” Dex had said to her once, while they were out at McFly’s, one of his regular haunts for karaoke. Well, Dex was there for karaoke. Tuesday was there to drink, and pointedly not to participate. “Or people, really,” he continued. “But especially in groups.”

      Tuesday had never thought of it in those terms, but yes, she didn’t trust people. People, in groups, alone – people disappointed you. That was what they did. They abandoned you. They didn’t believe you. They looked through you like you were made of smoke. You had your family, your work colleagues; you needed other humans around so you didn’t go completely feral, but the only person you could trust completely with yourself was yourself. That was, like … Basic Humanity 101.

      “I mean … do you?” she said. “Does anyone? I thought that was the first rule: trust no one.”

      “Should you be taking life advice from a poster in the basement of the FBI? On a television show?” Dex asked.

      “That poster said I want to believe.”

      Dex rolled his eyes. “I trust people more than you. But only a little.”

      Tuesday hadn’t expected to stay in touch with Dex once they both quit Cabot. But Dex wouldn’t go away. He invited her to lunch. He invited her to the movies. They went to karaoke, even though Tuesday had a strict no-singing policy. They wiped the floor at pub trivia, the only two-person team that regularly took first place. She liked him; she had always appreciated his sense of humor and his intelligence. But he was needy. God, he could be outrageously needy. He texted. He chatted to her at work. In person, he required her approval of mundane choices he might have to make, her assurance that she had heard and understood him. Even the constant invitations, she suspected, had less to do with him wanting her company than not wanting to go into the world alone. Sometimes it felt like it didn’t matter who she was, so long as she was, an audience – any audience – granting him her attention.

      She felt her phone buzzing in her bag, vibrating against her leg. Again. And again.

      I did it, he texted.

      IT’S DONE

      WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME he was so nice and sweet and young and flexible

      She paused, her thumb over the screen. She’d liked Patrick. But this had been coming for a while. Tuesday could tell, from stories Dex told her, from watching the two of them together, that they had fundamentally different versions of reality, and fundamentally different ideas of each other. They were both playing parts.

      He was too young, she texted back.

      Pls don’t remind me, Dex texted, that I’m a decaying hag

      You’re not a decaying hag, she replied.

      Tuesday hated texting. Hated it, for its lack of nuance and tone. She always felt she was saying the wrong thing, or saying it the wrong way. But Dex was a natural, loquacious texter, and even by his standards, he’d been texting like mad lately. It meant he was anxious. And lonely. And now that he and Patrick were no longer together …

      She felt a cold little stab, the looming threat of being needed.

      Hey, he texted. Has anyone from Richmont not showed

      She dutifully examined the list. Three of Richmont’s six tickets СКАЧАТЬ