By her twentieth birthday, there are a few things Valarie Ricci knows for certain.
She knows that her waitressing job barely covers the costs of living out of a beat up old van. She knows she's stuck in the dead end hometown her high school friends...
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Alice stuck around until Valarie finished her shift. She fell asleep in one of the diner's booths, her head pillowed in the crook of her arm as she curled over the table. The coffee mug that she'd drained three times hadn't made a dent in her exhaustion, it seemed.
As Valarie served the sporadic customer and prepped the kitchen for the morning shift, her eyes kept gravitating back towards Alice every few minutes, like she'd disappear if Valarie looked away for too long. Maybe she wanted Alice to disappear...
It was all so weird. She'd agreed to drive with Alice to Toronto? The furthest from home Valarie had ever been before was on a class trip to Halifax back in elementary school. She'd been too scared to fall asleep in the hotel room so her Nonna had to stay on the phone with her until past midnight. When one of the teachers questioned Valarie about the room's phone bill the next day, she had broken down in tears in the middle of some museum tour.
An old grief rippled under her skin at the memory. There was nobody left for Valarie to call when she was scared, or when she just wanted someone to hear her cry. The past few years had been the worst kind of crash course into adulthood, and the only thing Valarie had really learned from it was that being an adult fucking sucked. People now seemed to run on some invisible clock that everybody but her was able to see. Places and things that she should be doing or owning or learning or being, but she just wasn't.
Going on some random-ass, impromptu road trip across the country seemed like something people her age were supposed to do. Yet, she was pretty sure ghosts didn't factor into the travel photos and smiling models that social media was constantly bombarding her with.
Did Valarie believe in ghosts? No. Did she believe that Alice believed in ghosts? Sure. Something had clearly changed in the time they had spent apart, and if this was what Alice needed to process what happened to Grace...
She couldn't let her do it alone. It simply wasn't in her, even if it probably should have been, after everything. This was Alice, and even now there was a not-insignificant part of Valarie's brain that was concerned Alice's neck would be in pain from sleeping at such a weird angle.
She wondered if she'd ever stop hitting new levels of pathetic.
Half an hour after Valarie's shift was supposed to end, her manager finally walked in to relieve her. She wore huge sunglasses, a messy bun, and a name tag that said Kylie in curly font and was skewered sideways on the front of her uniform. A wave of floral perfume hit Valarie when Kylie approached the bar. "Girl," she said. "I am so fucking sorry I'm late."
Valarie shrugged. "It's fine."
Kylie removed her sunglasses, revealing bloodshot eyes that looked deep into Valarie's soul. "I really hate my kid sometimes. I know I'm not supposed to say that, but it's the truth." She pointed to her own face. "Look at me. I haven't slept in three days. My eyes hurt, Val. They hurt."
