Page 50 of The Getaway List
Chapter Seventeen
By the time we all crawl back out of bed around eleven in the morning, it’s clear that the camping trip isn’t happening tonight. We all would have needed to be on the train with camping gear and supplies in hand within two hours, and the group chat might as well have crickets chirping in it, for all the effort we’re making to set that in motion. The only text on my phone is from Mariella: Can we meet up? I can come to you.
I explain that I’m actually not far since I’m at Jesse’s, to which she responds with three “yikes” emojis, which pretty much covers it. A half hour later I’m at Mariella’s place, a cozy apartment that faces an inner courtyard, sparing it from the noise down below. I catch her parents on their way out the door, clad in running gear that includes belts full of enough of those energy-goop packets that I’m not uncertain they’re leaving for an apocalypse.
Her mom’s smile is as full-cheeked and broad as Mariella’s when she instantly clocks me as “Tom’s friend Riley” and pulls me in for a warm hug. I sink into it gratefully—at her tiny height it’s nothing like a hug from my own mom, but it’s the closest I’ve come in weeks and I don’t know how much I need it until her mom is giving me an extra little squeeze like she knows it, too.
“Are you one of the kids our Mariella’s been running ragged with deliveries?” her surprisingly tall dad asks. He must have clocked the “Dear, Love” Dispatch hat I am wearing to cover up some gravity-defying bed head.
“Sure am,” I confirm.
I assume he means the deliveries from her secret admirers, only her mom adds, “The whole idea is just so sweet. And the coding so advanced!” Her mom taps a finger on top of Mariella’s nose. “You should be putting that app on resumes.”
I raise an eyebrow at Mariella. If her parents didn’t already know about it, then I guess the cat of her being involved in the app isn’t just out of the bag but fully wandering around the city now. She gives me a rueful smile back and then rushes her parents out “before you embarrass me any more thoroughly than your matching T-shirts,” which do in fact both say VROOM VROOM, VASQUEZ on the back in what appears to be Comic Sans.
“They’re training for a marathon together, it’s gag-me cute,” Mariella explains, letting me inside and leading me from the front entry into the small kitchen.
It’s sun-dappled and cozy, with a yellow-tile backsplash and little flower accents on the teakettle, on the cups, on the little tea-bag rest. Along the walls are mismatched, framed family photos of Mariella’s parents on either side of her in all her different iterations—little-kid Mariella in princess pajamas, middle-school Mariella in a glittery party dress, Mariella beaming with her diploma.
I linger on what must be a recent one of Mariella in a bright purple bathing suit at the beach, surrounded by a cluster of kids of various ages all clinging to one another, some midlaugh, some midscowl, all in motion.
“My cousins. We go to Puerto Rico every year,” she explains. “My parents met here, but grandparents on both sides are still over there, plus some of my aunts and uncles.”
“What time of year do you go?”
“End of August. When you’re leaving.” She cuts a quick, knowing glance at me from the little kitchen. “Allegedly.”
I bite down a smile even if I don’t cop to it just yet. Mariella may be back to her ordinary sunny self, but I can see she’s every bit as worn out as Jesse and I were during our fire-escape talk this morning. It’s clear she wants to get last night off her chest.
Sure enough, when I look up from the photo, she turns to me and says abruptly, “So I fucked up hard.”
Mariella says this while offering me a cupcake, which is a deeply unnecessary gesture, although an appreciated one. What the Walking JED have in talent they severely lack in their ability to stock a pantry, so I’m hungry enough to eat her kitchen table.
“I know you didn’t mean anything by it,” I say carefully.
Mariella sinks onto one of the stools by the little kitchen island, propping her elbows on the counter and planting her face in her palms. “Yeah, well. You have full license to be pissed. I’m sure Tom is, too.”
I sidestep this because I’m not sure how Tom feels about it. “I’m not,” I say, and I mean it. “It was going to come out eventually. I’m more worried about you. You were upset yesterday.”
“A smidge,” she says ruefully.
“Did something happen with Luca?”
She momentarily buries her face in her hands, embarrassed. When she pokes back out of them she says, “Well, something happened with everything? Not to excuse my idiocy, but to paint a picture for you, the whole day was a self-sabotage snowball. Yesterday morning my parents were planning this year’s trip back, and everyone there is so proud of this whole ‘computer nerd in the family’ thing that they were suddenly getting on my case about wanting me to tell everyone I was still studying next semester so nobody would think I wasn’t their nerdy little golden child anymore. And I was like, ‘I’m an adult, mind your business,’ blah blah, the works. So apparently that conversation wasn’t put to bed after all, which, you know. Cute.”
“Oh, shit,” I say.
She lifts her hands in a “what can you do” type gesture, then says, “So I was already in a mood and figured, why not make it worse? So then I did something stupid and—” She winces. “Well, Tom’s told you by now that I set up the backend of the app, right?”
“Among plenty of other things,” I say. It occurs to me that if Tom was trying to find someone else to run the “Dear, Love” Dispatch that Mariella has likely known he’s planning to leave, too. I’m not sure if that’s another secret I can swallow after all this.
“All right, well, then he also told you it was supposed to be anonymous even to us, but I was already upset and feeling reckless so I looked up Luca’s number in it before I met up with him yesterday. It turns out his phone number was connected to yours, which means he’s sent you something through the dispatch, which of course I reacted to with all the maturity of a sleep-deprived toddler.”
My eyebrows shoot up in surprise. I know Mariella put him as an early contender for the mysterious admirer sending things, but I dismissed the idea as soon as it came up. Luca certainly never said anything to indicate he might have, and Luca seems about as incapable of keeping a secret as a Times Square billboard.
So which one was he, then? The random hunk of cheese or the notebook that I’ve been opening and skimming my fingers along the edges of, reading the inscription of over and over again, scoring into my heart? They came one after the other, after Jesse sent his—is it possible that he’s both?
Before I can think to ask, Mariella adds miserably, “Which would have been bad on its own except—well—the kids from our school who were at the karaoke place last night were the same ones who were so shitty to me about that app. And they were all drunk and being buddy-buddy with me and I was a goddamn idiot and let them be? Like I guess even now it was such a relief to have them be nice to me that I just acted like it didn’t matter that they threw me to the fucking wolves?”
