Page 7 of Mr. McBeefcake

JD: I never liked her.

ME: What about Mona? You think Kathryn was jealous because I started dating Mona?

Jude: Obviously.

ME: But Kat’s ghosting started before that. Mona just came along at the right time.

JD: Convenient.

Hayes: Perhaps too convenient.

ME: Mona was always nice to Kathryn. Mona’s the one who told me that Kathryn was tired of hanging out with a dumb jock.

Jude: Does that sound like something Kathryn would say?

Hayes: Or think?

ME: Okay, off to solve the mystery once and for all.

Jude: Good luck.

Hayes: Make us proud.

ME: Fuck y’all!

But I’m grinning as I pocket my phone and head back out to find my KitKat.

When I step into the room, I find her standing over the table peering into a box.

“Really? They thought the two of us could do this? You with your giant man paws and me with my clumsiness?”

“Giant man paws?” I hold up my hands. “These hands are worth twenty-two million dollars.”

She holds up a small glass jar. It’s smaller than a standard eye-drop bottle.

“We have to fill these up with matches,” she says. “Then glue on a tiny sign that says, ‘perfect match.’”

I chuckle. “That’s cute.”

She pulls out a chair and sits. “Which part do you want to do?”

“Either is fine with me or we can both do both.” I sit down across from her. “There’s food and stuff to drink if you want anything.”

“I’m fine.” Then she looks up at me, her face pale. “Um, how many bedrooms are there?”

“Just the one.”

“This is just freakin’ perfect.” She grabs a handful of matches and spreads them on the table.

“Come on KitKat, it’ll be like old times. You do remember how to have fun right?”

“We didn’t used to have sleepovers,” she snaps.

Though we had that one. The day my mom died. I know she remembers it by the way she visibly swallows. We hadn’t talked for weeks before that. But she hadn’t turned me away when she got home and found me on her porch.

As soon as I’d gotten the call about mom’s accident, I’d wanted nothing more than to see my KitKat. Mona had been with me and offered to blow me, which frankly had made me sick to my stomach. I should’ve broken things off with her then. She’d never been more than a sad substitution for the girl I’d somehow lost.

We work quietly for a while, falling into a rhythm of her putting precisely six matches into each tiny vessel, then passing them to me. I glue on the sign and cork the bottles, then put them neatly in a row on the other side of the table.