“You do?” Henna asks.
The man looks at her once, then away again, shyly. “Teemu,” he says.
Henna slumps like her clothes suddenly weigh an extra hundred pounds. “Erik?” she says. “Erik Peddersen?”
The scraggly man nods.
“Oh, Jesus,” Henna says, under her breath, but out of surprise, not scorn. The scraggly man blushes anyway.
“Strange shit going on,” he says, still not making eye contact.
“I don’t think it’s vampires,” Henna says.
“No,” Erik says, firmly. “They’d have come for me if it was.”
There’s an empty, silent moment, where no one’s blinking and Erik is obviously growing more uncomfortable. Then “Number Nine,” says the voice of Pratip, the pharmacist, over the loudspeaker, and Erik immediately heads off without looking at us again. We watch him go.
“Friend of your brother ’s?” Mel gently asks.
“In his band,” Henna says. “Haven’t seen him since it all ended. Guess he had a hard time coping.”
She pulls her good arm into herself, almost visibly shrinking. I put my own arm around her, and she leans into me. I kind of hate myself for thinking how nice it is.
“That won’t be us,” Mel says, meaning Erik. “Whatever happens, that’s not going to be us.”
And she says it like she’s demanding a promise.
“Your sister is like a cute little robot,” Tina, our manager, says. “I just want to eat her right up.”
Meredith sits alone at a booth in Grillers. Jared’s piled the table in front of her – the part not covered in homework and school hardware – with enough cheesy toast and blueberry lemonade to ruin every Jazz & Tap class she’s ever taken.
“I want a kid,” Tina says, looking at her hungrily from the waitress station.
“Get one from Ronald,” Jared says, stealing a fry from a plate.
“He’s infertile.” She whispers it louder than her normal speaking voice.
“You should adopt,” Jared says. “Adoption is a moral good.”
Tina makes a face. “Yeah, because Ronald’s exactly the kind of guy who makes a good impression on a social worker.” She sighs, looking around Grillers. “Grumpy night. Everyone’s in a bad mood.”
She’s right about that. I’ve had more complaints tonight than I’ve had in the last six months. One guy even sent back his water.
“There’s a weird feeling in the air, isn’t there?” Tina says. “All those kids killing themselves at the high school.” Jared and I exchange a look but don’t correct her. “You can feel it when you’re driving home at night. God knows what could be out there in those woods.”
Tina would have been twenty or so when the soul-eating ghosts came, so just that little bit too old to be directly involved. Still, you always wonder how much people know and just don’t say. Or pretend not to know. Or purposely forget.
Meredith leans out of her booth to catch my eye, even though she sat in Jared’s section. He’s more generous with the blueberry lemonade. I go over to her.
“What’s up?”
She shows me her pad and swipes through a bunch of web pages. “There’s nothing about it on the main news sites, not even if you search.”
“You shouldn’t be looking anyway. Leave it to me and Mel to take care of–”
“But if you go to the right places,” she says, ignoring me and opening a few locked-door discussion rooms on weird boards for things like obscure Japanese toys and underground video games. She turns the pad to me, several windows open.