Hot in Hellcat Canyon (38 page)

Casey linked her fingers into a little hammock and propped her chin on them and gazed at her.

“What is Rebecca Corday like?”

“Shurprisingly . . .” Britt mused, then stopped, surprised that she’d already lost control of her s’s. “She’s kind of a bitch.”

“I
knew
it,” Casey said with calm satisfaction. “Probably because she’s hungry all the time. More margarita?”

“Hit me,” Britt said.

C
asey had to work the next day, but she claimed hangovers made her move more slowly and only improved the precision of her haircuts. So they drank about two entire pitchers, all told, before they decided they ought to get Britt to the bus stop before the buses stopped running.

Britt pointed at things all the way to the bus stop and narrated as if they were on a nature walk.

“The stars are so beautiful. They remind me of J. T.”

“That tree is so beautiful. It reminds me of J. T.”

“The night shmells so nice. So does J. T.”

“The whole wide world reminds me of J. T.”

They arrived at the bus stop.

“There’s fucking Rebecca Corday on the bus bench,” Britt said darkly. “She reminds me of J. T.”

Casey was surprisingly patient through all of this.

Together they paused to stare at their mutual nemesis.

This bench featured the ad of Rebecca Corday clutching a purse, leaping with the unbridled joy of being beautiful, wealthy, doable, ubiquitous, and probably currently within touching range, if not doing range, of J. T. McCord.

“She looks like a bunny like that, don’t you think, Casey? Holding that purse, getting ready to jump?”

Casey tipped her head. “I don’t see it.”

Britt fished about in her purse and came out with the heavy-duty Sharpie she used to letter signs for Gary.

“Here, let me show you.”

She looked about to make sure no cars were coming.

She carefully drew ears, long adorable oblong ears, one of them with a little bend, on top of Rebecca Corday’s head. She added an extravagantly fluffy tail to her butt. With a few strokes of the pen she turned the purse into a basket full of eggs. She finished it off with fuzzy freckled cheeks and whiskers and buckteeth.

She stood back with a spokesmodel flourish. “
See?
”

Casey was in awe. “
Omigosh!
You’re totally right! That’s so cute! I didn’t know you could
draw
. You’re the bomb, Britt.”

“No, you’re the bomb!”

“You are!”

That went on for a while.

“Hey, I have an idea! You have to make
me
a bunny, Britt.”

“I don’t know if I can.”

“I have all the same parts as Rebecca, right? I have a face.”

Britt assessed her shrewdly by the light of the streetlight. “Okay, okay! Great idea! I
will
. Sit down.”

Casey sat down hard on the bench, and Britt zoomed her face in close to Casey’s to study her new canvas.

Britt decided to start with little freckled cheeks and whiskers.

Casey giggled.

“Shhh,” Britt said. “Hold still. You’re wiggling. Wiggling and giggling.”

“But I have to. That’s what they do. Bunnies wiggle.” She wiggled her nose up and down.

They erupted into such a storm of giggles that Casey fell off the bench.

“Whoop!” Britt seized her arm and hauled her back up onto it. “Okay, shhh, shhhh. Sheriously. Sheriously. Hold still.”

“Okay. Okay.”

Britt went to work on drawing little oblong ears over Casey’s eyebrows. She meticulously—especially for someone so full of margaritas—colored in a little black nose.

“That tickles. I might sneeze.”

“Shhhh. Don’t. We’re almost done.”

She finished off the whiskers. And then leaned back.

“OH. MY. GOSH. OHMYGOSH. You are so CUTE, Casey!”

“Yay!” Casey exulted. “Cuter than Rebecca?”

“
So
much cuter. Wait—let me finish that one whisker!”

“No, YOU’RE cuter.” She nudged Britt so hard she was on her way off the bus bench. She flailed out for Casey, who snatched her upright just in time.

“But Britt . . . Britt . . . I need to tell you something.”

Casey seized Britt’s hands in hers and earnestly gripped them. Her expression was suddenly mournful and deadly earnest.

Which was hilarious because she was now a bunny.

“What? You can tell me anything, Casey.”

“Okay. I want you not to feel sad. It’s just . . .” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “I love your hair. But Rebecca Corday . . . has super great hair. I want to play with it. I want to braid it and blow it dry.”

Britt laughed. “That’s okay. I think her hair is pretty, too. Know what else I
hate
that has really cool foofy hair? I’ll whisper it to you.”

She leaned toward Casey and did just that, right into her ear.

Casey sat bolt upright. She was utterly motionless a moment.

And then a slow evil smile spread all over her face.

“I have an idea,” Casey said.

B
ritt struggled awake to the sound of her phone ringing and ringing and ringing. Whose ringtone was “White Rabbit”? When had that happened?

She fumbled for it with some effort and slid the call to answer.

She tried to say, “Hello.”

It came out, “Unnh.”

“BRITT! Oh my God, you finally answered! You alive? I was so worried! You didn’t wake up when I texted.” It was Casey, and she was whispering.
Stage
-whispering. Her roommate must be home.

“What time is it?”

“Does it matter? It’s your day off. But yeah, it’s almost eight a.m. I have a very, very important question.”

“Okay,” Britt managed.

“What happened last night?”

“Umm . . . we drank margaritas and then . . .”

She stopped.

It worried her very much that she didn’t know how to finish that sentence.

“I have whiskers on my face,” Casey hissed.

“Happens when you get older,” Britt mumbled. “Just wax them.”

“BUNNY whiskers. And ears over my eyebrows. I have a freaking BUNNY FACE.”

She was managing to be hysterical while whispering, which was really quite a feat.

Britt lay as still as possible. Good God. Who was playing bongos outside at this hour?

It took her what felt like another minute to realize the pounding was coming from inside her own head. It was the Margarita Marching Band.

“BRITT! Are you there? Are you alive? Are you okay?” Casey was now shouting in a whisper.

“I’m just trying to . . . I mean, we drank margaritas, Casey, we didn’t take peyote or lick any psychedelic toads, so I don’t know why you’re seeing a bunny face in the mirror. Unless you did when I wasn’t looking? Or after we got home? Wait . . . how
did
we get home?”

Her clothes were still on. She ran an experimental hand over her body, and all her limbs were present and accounted for. She inhaled.

She smelled like strawberries.

But her head and her stomach were playing a really nasty duet.

“I called Kayla and she took you home. No. Britt, I have SHARPIE whiskers. Black ones. I have a SHARPIE nose and eyelashes, too, and ears that sort of rise up over my eyebrows. Like a BUNNY. I. AM. A. BUNNY.”

Silence.

And through the sludge of her hangover the memories began to reassemble.

“Oh . . . oh crap,” she whispered in horror. “I remember now . . . at the bus bench . . . You asked me to turn you into a bunny . . . because you thought the bunny on the bus bench was cute. And so we bunnified Rebecca Corday . . . and then . . . and then . . .”

The silence on the other end told her Casey was remembering all of this, too, and everything else they’d done, with equal horror.

In light of all they’d accomplished last night, every bit of it illegal, one part of it kind of dangerous, it really was kind of a miracle they’d gotten home in one piece.

“You kept wiggling your nose when I was drawing . . . and then you fell off the bench laughing while I was working on it.” Her memory was sludgy. Forming words felt like trudging through a swamp and they were all still a little slurry.

“Well, I guess that explains that one long whisker that zips right up to my ear. And that bruise on my hip.” Casey was sounding a little more pragmatic now.

Britt was utterly silent. If she laughed, which she wanted to do, her head would explode.

“Do you know what’s
really
weird, Britt?” Casey said this on a hush.

As if there was anything weirder than this.

“What?”

“I look really good this way.” Casey’s voice was suffused with stifled hysterical laughter. “You’re really talented.”

Britt started to laugh, then moaned. “Don’t. Don’t laugh. Don’t make me laugh. I can’t laugh. My head hurts.”

“Shit shit shit. I have to go to work
right now
. And do hair. As a BUNNY FACE.”

“Can’t your assistant take your clients today? Or at least until you get the ink off?”

“She’s is home with the baby. She’s taking her to the doc because she was running a little temp. I told her yesterday I’d take
her
clients. All the waxing and stuff.”

Britt started laughing again and stopped when she was reminded of how much that hurt. “Good luck, Bunny Face.” She hung up the phone.

CHAPTER 22

“
G
osh, how many T-shirts do you own, now, Johnny? I think you might be working on a fetish.”

“Sixteen.”

“Does this country remind you of the Tennessee backwoods? Doesn’t it seem sort of inevitable that you’d wind up with simple folk again?”

“Nope.”

The relatively short ride back from Napa with Rebecca was
deeply
uncomfortable.

He was purposely giving Rebecca deadpan one-word answers to these barbs, which he knew was simply making her crazier.

They were both pissy, for entirely different reasons. Rebecca had kissed him, and he’d rebuffed her, and she was seething. Their peers at the wedding had congratulated him over and over on the profundity of a beautiful wedding toast that Rebecca knew had nothing to do with her. And the whole world had seen pictures of the two of them that made their relationship look like the opposite of the icy, tense atmosphere inside the cab of his truck.

The two of them were old hands at being awkwardly photographed. And they ought to have been reading lines or discussing the
Last Call in Purgatory
script.

Instead, the silence between them was practically louder than the radio.

Which he kept turning up and Rebecca kept turning down.

Relief swept through him when the familiar exit signs began appearing.

Rebecca had decided she was going to get a blow-out before they visited the children’s hospital to film the spot. He could get rid of her for at least an hour, maybe more.

And then her giant head began to swell into view on the billboard on the highway.

And suddenly she shot to an erect position like a prairie dog popping out of its burrow.

“Johnny. Oh, no. Oh, Jesus. There’s . . . something wrong. ” Her voice was urgent and dumbstruck

His head jerked toward her. “What’s going on? You okay?”

“No,” she said, her voice strange, and about to escalate into hysteria. “No I am not okay at all. Look at my billboard. LOOK AT IT. My billboard! Pull over!”

He slowed down.

He slowed down a little more.

And then he pulled over to the side of the road.

They both stared, utterly arrested.

For different reasons.

There was Rebecca, all right, the way Rebecca always wanted to be: larger than life, high above everyone else, isolated in all that white space like a work of art on a museum wall. Her giant sparkly raspberry lips were still pursed, blowing her dandelion.

But in all that impactful white space someone had drawn a huge and surprisingly detailed . . .

Yeah, it was a clown.

An extraordinarily skillfully rendered, really vivid clown.

He was wearing puffy checked pants and long curly-toed shoes, and great luscious fluffy shocks of hair billowed out from the sides of his mostly bald head. And he was bent over at the waist, his gaze aimed lasciviously out onto the highway drivers.

His butt was high in the air and aimed right at Rebecca’s pursed lips.

“What. The Effing. Hell
.
Is. That.” Rebecca could barely get the words out through a jaw tight as a vise.

“It’s a clown,” J. T. explained mildly. “It looks like you’re kissing a clown’s butt.”

It was so funny it was practically a religious experience. He almost floated out of his body.

“I CAN SEE THAT.”

He let a heartbeat’s worth of silence get by.

“Good-looking clown,” he said mildly.

Her head whipped toward him. Lightning was practically shooting from her eyes.

He knew instinctively that the milder he was, the more incensed Rebecca would get and the funnier it would get.

He was comprised of total happiness.

“It’s fucking INSULTING.”

“It’s just a clown butt, Rebecca. You’ve probably kissed worse things,” he said. Mildly.

Rebecca was probably about to launch from her body, too. For other reasons completely. She was magnificent when in a temper. And horrible.

On the one hand, landing national ad campaigns and having your face on billboards and bus benches could be viewed as an impressive achievement.

On the other hand . . . clown butt.

It was an epic struggle, but he could not keep the smile from spreading over his face. As big as any grin sported by a circus clown anywhere.

Rebecca saw it and she clamped her mouth shut, mute with fury.

He was pretty sure he knew exactly who’d drawn that clown.

How she’d done it was a little worrisome. That wasn’t an easy climb.

Why she’d done it . . . well, this was the first time he’d ever felt peculiarly heartened by vandalism.

If Britt wanted to deface his ex-girlfriend’s advertisements, surely it was due to an excess of passion.