Tight Knit Read online

  There was no picture, only a headline that wasn’t even the largest print on the spread. The article was given poor real estate, tucked away in the corner of a page next to an ad for fertilizer, which said a lot about where Paige thought Lara belonged. Lara knew she should be happy that Paige hadn’t made the article such a big deal, but she wasn’t. It still existed, and it still made her look bad. The fact that Paige didn’t consider the story major news almost made it worse. It was a routine story, unsurprising for anyone. Just one more piece of evidence that confirmed what Paige and Perry already knew: Lara Spellmeyer was a screwup.

  Even the article was uninteresting. Most of it April had already read. Everything else was didactic, the small, boring details that no one cared about. There was one piece that caught Lara’s eye, though: the byline. Where Lara expected to see Paige’s name, she saw someone else’s instead. Lorraine Bauer.

  Who the hell was Lorraine Bauer?

  “Lara Spellmeyer?”

  Lara didn’t mean to greet the assistant with a scowl, but she could feel her lips slouch into a frown regardless. She grabbed the manila folder in the chair beside her and stood from her seat.

  “Sorry for the wait. Ms. Daley is ready to see you.”

  Lara nodded and thanked the young woman, trying to be as polite as possible despite her sour mood. She was an innocent bystander. Lara’s anger was best reserved for people like Roger Feldman. Or Paige Daley.

  Lara took a deep breath, centered herself, and let the assistant guide her into Paige’s office.

  Paige hadn’t aged a day. She’d aged years. She looked so different, rigid behind her work desk in a blazer, not as she had once looked slouched behind her school desk in jeans. Lara almost didn’t recognize her.

  Paige didn’t have as much trouble placing Lara. The pen twirling between her fingers screeched to a halt as her green eyes flashed with recognition.

  “What are you doing here, Lara?”

  “You wrote an article defaming my business no less than two days ago. Are you really that surprised to see me show up?”

  “I heard you were in town, but I didn’t expect to bump into you here. Figures you’d come to yell at me about the article again.” Paige sank into her seat and rolled her eyes, preparing for another verbal beating.

  “I didn’t. I’m here on other business.”

  Lara tossed the manila folder onto Paige’s desk. It was merely a flake on the snowfall of papers already blanketing the surface. Each page was a different color, a different size, and twisted into different angles. The desktop was a mess, almost as disorganized as the cabinets and shelves behind Paige. Drawers were open. Awards were displayed crookedly. It reminded Lara of Paige’s old dorm room, and she felt herself sinking into her seat like it was the bean bag chair at the foot of Paige’s old bed. As soon as Lara caught herself drowning, she sat up, straightened her spine, and held onto the arms of the chair like a raft. She was here on business, not to take a stroll down memory lane.

  “And what would that be?” Paige’s voice was tired, gruff. Lara expected to see the signature pack of cigarettes peeking its head out of Paige’s blazer pocket, but it wasn’t there.

  “I’m here for a friend. April Helm. She put in an ad for last week and it never ran.”

  Paige’s eyebrows twitched as she clicked the tip of her pen closed and picked up the folder. She sifted through it meaninglessly, eyes not moving enough to read the text.

  “That’s the ad,” Lara said.

  “So what is it that you’re asking me?”

  “I’m asking you to do your job.”

  Paige flipped the folder from cover to cover again, no more attentive this time than she had been the first. “What is it that you want me to do exactly?”

  “Run the ad tomorrow.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because my friend paid for it, and you’re obligated to.”

  “Right. Friend.” Paige sounded unconvinced. It wasn’t like Lara could blame her. Paige knew exactly how many friends Lara didn’t have.

  “Look,” Paige said, her voice softening. Lara knew that opener well. It was Paige’s “I don’t want to be the bad guy” façade that she only put on right before playing the bad guy, a way of shifting blame off herself. She never could own up to being an asshole. She always had to pretend that her own assholery somehow hurt her too. “I can’t help you if it’s not your ad. If the order is under her name, she’s the one who’s going to have to contact me.”

  “She’s been trying. For a week. She’s talked to every person here but you, and they’ve all told her that you’re the person she needs to get in touch with. Except, apparently, you don’t answer your calls.”

  “I’m busy.”

  “Busy answering other complaints? Busy calling me when I don’t want to talk to you?”

  Paige bit her tongue. Literally. Lara watched the teeth clamp down like a cheetah suffocating its prey.

  “I’m not helping you,” Paige said.

  “Because I’m me?”

  “Because you’re not the client.”

  “The client sent me.”

  “Are you family?” Paige asked. “Lovers?”

  “No.”

  “Then, no, I won’t let you manage her accounts.”

  Lara scoffed. “Good thing you stick to arbitrary rules of conduct. If only you stuck to your deadlines too.” It felt good to be crass, but Lara was bluffing. If insulting Paige didn’t get her anywhere, then it was nothing but selfishly cathartic. She’d promised April she could do this. She’d promised herself she could do this. “Look, you owe me this.”

  Paige raised an eyebrow. “Owe you? I’ve already told you: I don’t owe you anything.”

  “After running that article on me, yes, you do.”

  “That wasn’t personal, Lara, and it has nothing to do with this ad.”

  “Yeah, right,” Lara taunted. “It was so not personal that you weren’t even brave enough to put your own name on the article. You threw some intern under the bus.”

  “Lorraine’s name is on the piece because she’s the one who found the story, and she wrote most of the local content. I gave her credit where credit was due, and she was happy to take the lead.”

  “Then why were you the one to call me?”

  Paige rocked back in her chair ever so slightly. “I figured you’d rather hear from me than a stranger.”

  “I would have preferred the intern.”

  Paige took a deep breath. Her nostrils puffed out like a dragon disturbed from its slumber, but her chest fell and her face relaxed before the fire could burst forth from her mouth. The papers in her hand wavered. Her mouth opened as if to speak, but as quickly as she faltered, her jaw clenched shut again. Paige slapped the file flat against the mess of the desk and slid it back to Lara. A few of her own papers scattered with it. Paige didn’t seem to care.

  “I think you should leave.”

  Lara’s heart stopped. She’d blown it. “So this was all a waste of time?”

  “Looks like it.”

  Of course this was a waste of time, just like thinking she could do something nice for April in the first place, just like thinking Paige would actually help her after what had happened between them. Lara shut her eyes and tried not to have a brain aneurysm on the spot. She settled for accepting the migraine pounding at her temples as punishment for her defeat.

  Lara picked up the folder and put her brain power toward thinking up an excuse for April rather than thinking up another way to convince Paige to do something that she clearly wasn’t willing to do. “Fine. I’ll see myself out. Not like you’d even exert yourself to show me the door.”

  As Lara got up, she heard the scratch of the other chair sliding across the wooden floor. Paige opened the door before Lara could get it for herself. It was simultaneously the most gentlewomanly and the rudest Paige had ever been.

  Well, maybe not the rudest, but she sure didn’t seem sad to see Lara go.

&n
bsp; “Sorry we couldn’t come to an agreement.” She was all business again. Too calm, too formal. Paige never did let herself feel. She had never operated like a normal human being with emotions. She hadn’t been able to give Lara the love she’d felt four years ago, and she couldn’t give Lara whatever she was feeling now.

  Lara scoffed at the formality. An agreement. She hadn’t wanted a business contract. She’d wanted Paige to not let her down just one time. She was stupid for ever thinking there was a chance of that happening.

  Paige went back to her desk, and Lara lingered just outside her open doorway, fuming and disappointed. Being back in the main part of the building only made her feel worse. Everything was so organized and productive. It was the exact opposite of how Lara felt.

  Lara was so out of it that she didn’t realize just how much her loitering was offsetting the scheduled balance. A young woman with a flowing scarf and springing curls of red hair barreled down the hall with green eyes locked on her phone. By the time Lara noticed that she was in the way, it was too late. The redhead collided with her, shaking them both up and causing the girl to drop her mobile. The shrill inhale of a gasp and the shattering crack of broken glass pierced Lara’s ears before she had time to stabilize herself from the impact. The redhead crouched to retrieve her phone as Lara struggled to regain her balance.

  “Sorry!” The girl’s voice was youthful and high pitched. Lara could tell the apology was some combination of actual guilt and grief over her broken phone.

  Lara was in the middle of opening her mouth to say that accidents happen and she was sorry about the phone, but when the girl rose to her feet, her eyes bulged out at the sight of Lara. It scared Lara enough to silence her.

  “Oh my god, you’re Lara Spellmeyer! You’re actually here!”

  The girl reached for Lara’s hand and practically yanked her arm out of her socket with her handshake. “I’m Lorraine Bauer, the one who covered you in The Daily Page. I’m a huge fan!”

  “If you’re a fan, why would you want to publish anything about that Trend Bender article?”

  “You made national news! That’s awesome!”

  Had she read the article? “I made bad national news.”

  Lorraine shrugged. “All press is good press.”

  “Tell that to my sales,” Lara said. “I had almost ten people call and cancel orders this week. Two of them were from Perry.”

  Lorraine pouted, but she didn’t look as guilty as Lara was trying to make her feel. “I’m sure things will turn around soon. You have over one-hundred thousand followers! BuzzFeed wrote an article about you! People love you!”

  They used to. They wouldn’t for much longer if people like Roger and Lorraine had anything to say about it.

  Lara heard footsteps and braced herself for another impact. She was prepared for a collision, but she was not prepared to see Paige emerge next to her.

  “You have a following of that many people?” Paige asked. “I didn’t realize it had become that successful.” Her voice was laced with disbelief, but also astonishment.

  Lara shrugged, feigning humility. “They’re mostly there for the cat pics. Customers send me pictures of their cats wearing the sweaters, and I post them. I don’t think anyone is actually there because of me.”

  “You didn’t tell me that,” Paige said. Her voice was soft. It had lost all of the bark she’d used in her office. She spoke to Lara like Lorraine wasn’t even there. Their conversation became more personal than it had been the entire time they were shut alone in a room together.

  “I haven’t seen you in four years,” Lara said. “Why would I tell you anything?”

  Paige tried to stutter out a response but came up short. Lorraine broke the tension, blissfully unaware of anything but her own excitement.

  “How could you not know?” As annoying as the girl was, Lara enjoyed watching Paige wince, clearly just as annoyed by Lorraine’s shrill voice as she was. “Didn’t you see the BuzzFeed video on Facebook?”

  “I run a newspaper,” Paige said. “I prefer to get my news from sources other than the people I went to high school with and my racist parents.”

  Lara didn’t know why she was surprised. Paige had always acted like that, haughty, holier than thou, better than everyone else because she thought she was so much smarter. She wasn’t. Not really. She and Lara had both gotten into the same college, had both started their own businesses, had both ended up in Perry after graduation. The only difference was that Lara hadn’t stayed stuck here.

  Lorraine, defeated by Paige’s lack of enthusiasm, slapped her phone against her thigh, as if wiping the screen of dirt would also wipe away the cracks. The curls of her hair seemed to lose their springiness as she whipped her head around to face Lara.

  “It was great to meet you.” The hand that wasn’t holding her phone stretched out, and Lara shook it with as much of a smile as she could muster after such a shitty morning.

  “It was nice to meet you, too.” It wasn’t, but Lara didn’t need to tell her that.

  Lorraine looked back at Paige, wiped the smile off her face, and continued on to wherever she had been heading when she’d bumped into Lara. Part of Lara was happy to see her go, but part of her was sad that the girl had left her alone with Paige. Again.

  “Sorry,” Paige said, apologizing for Lorraine’s rude behavior far more easily than she ever apologized for her own. “Interns.” Paige rolled her eyes and grumbled in a way she clearly expected Lara to understand.

  Lara didn’t. “I can show myself out.” She started towards the door.

  “Wait!”

  Lara’s feet stalled, despite her brain’s insistence that they shouldn’t. Paige fished into the pocket of her pant leg and extracted a small stock paper card. She handed it to Lara. “Call me later.”

  In her palm, the image of Paige’s gapped-tooth smile looked up at her.

  Her business card. Paige had actually given her a business card. This was the most impersonal thing she could think of, and it took every ounce of willpower not to rip the paper in Paige’s face. Wordlessly, Lara slipped the card into her pocket, left the office, and stepped out onto the empty downtown sidewalk.

  CHAPTER 4

  The stack of papers felt comfortable in Lara’s hands. It was therapeutic for her to organize them, collecting them one by one as they shot out from the printer. Tapping the stack against the side of a nearby bookshelf to align the pages uniformly, it felt like she was chronicling magazines at the back of the library again or helping the local kids print out their school assignments. There was a comfort in the nostalgia. That routine and security of it was something Lara hadn’t realized she missed.

  How had it already been four years since she’d left her job at the library to move to Oklahoma City and knit cat sweaters full time?

  Lara took a deep breath and set the papers on the checkout desk with conviction. “Genie, I need a favor.”

  Genie was short standing up, but she was even shorter seated behind the counter. Lara towered over the older woman, who rested slumped backwards with her feet up on the desk and an open Cosmo magazine in her lap. Genie tilted her head, lifted her eyes, and let her glasses slip down her nose before taking them off completely. The cat-eye frames swung around her neck like a pendulum from a thick purple string of yarn before dropping onto her chest.

  “I’ll grant you a wish, Spellmeyer, but, remember, you only get three, and you used your first one to get yourself out of this place.” With a groan and a few cracks of her joints, Genie carried her boots back down to solid ground and sat up straight in the chair. “What do you need, dear?”

  Lara felt something bump her side. “Excuse me.”

  When she looked down, a young boy was next to her, standing on his tiptoes and balancing himself on the edge of the counter so he could see Genie over it. A man Lara assumed was his father trailed behind and gave Lara an apologetic smile.

  “Do you have any books about monster trucks?” the boy asked.
r />   Genie stared him in the eyes and gave a deadpan “Nope.”

  The boy and his dad were frozen in space, shifting awkwardly. Neither had prepared for this outcome. “Oh.”

  “Relax, I’m joking.” Genie shot a quick glance of disbelief Lara’s way, as if the man and his son were too dumb to notice her searching for solidarity. “Go up to the second floor and make a right. You’ll see the sign for the automotive section.”

  The boy’s face lit up. “Thanks!” Once again, he took off without his father.

  “Hey!” Genie shouted.

  The boy stopped, his expression strained with guilt at being caught.

  “If you’re going to run in the library, at least put your back into it. Pick up the pace, kid!” She motioned for him to get moving, and he did, footsteps echoing as he stomped his way up the staircase, his light-up shoes transforming the stairwell into an aurora borealis of colors. The father shot a disapproving look at Genie before begrudgingly trudging after him.

  “Sheesh, no one has a sense of humor anymore,” Genie said. “What did you want, Lara?”

  Lara tapped the stack of freshly-printed papers, and Genie stretched her neck to look at them. “My friend April is hosting a knitting club. I figured this would be a good place to put up a few flyers and spread the word.”

  “Sounds boring. What do you need me for?”

  “I just need permission.”

  “Permission granted. You worked here for six years. Do you really think I care if you hang up ads for your knitting circle? Or that you need my permission?”

  “Figured I’d be safe rather than sorry. I didn’t think you’d have a problem with it. I was just worried about —”

  “Ah. I see. You want someone already in your corner in case Sanchez doesn’t like it.

  “Well…yeah, to be honest.”