OH SHIT.

Those are the only two words echoing in the walls of my mind as I run out of Cipriani. I wish I didn't decide to wear heels. I was hoping the extra three inches would help me compete with Nick's new date for height, but now they feel stupid. It's snowy and wet outside, and I nearly slip and break my neck three times before the Uber arrives.

Ruth and I are best friends. I can't believe I went to the holiday dance and slow danced with Jake. If I only know, I would have stayed home to show support for my grieving friends. Somehow, in Piotr, I'm always the last to hear about anything.

I feel so bad about what I did that I decide I need to apologize to Ruth before she sees the pictures from the holiday party pop up on social media. I'm sure after the scandalous Natalie's ex-boyfriend stealing dance I performed; I don't have much time to do damage control before we're all over Facebook.

I give the driver Ruth's home address uptown. She lives on 83rd street, which is a bit further up from Nick's apartment. I get off at the Dean & Deluca two blocks away from her house and pick up a batch of Black&White cookies. They're not much, but I can't show up to Ruth's house empty-handed, all while wearing a pink satin dress and gold heels. My black peacoat is doing little to make my outfit more appropriate, especially since my floor-length pink dress is fluttering all around like ghostly butterfly wings in the December wind. I think about going home to change, but I can see Holiday Party pictures of Jake, and I are already blowing up Facebook.

Yes, that's me. The Lunatic Queens. The Queen of Scandal. I'm just glad I didn't go wearing a gold tiara as Ruth had suggested. The memes that would come from that would be absolutely hilarious.

I had never been to Ruth's house before, but I knew her address because we agreed to exchange Christmas cards earlier this month. As I run up the stairs to her brownstone house, I'm a bundle of nerves. I think about ringing the bell and then leaving the cookies if no one answers. I'll text Ruth that the cookies are an apology gift for being oblivious enough to go to the party on the week my best friend's sister died.

Ruth will understand. She's so nice. I've never seen her angry about anything.

I don't deserve to have a friend like her.

And Nick, my poor Nick, his grief over Jessica's death explains why he blew me off yesterday. I was such a jerk to think my kiss with Jake in front of the pizzeria was the only thing that mattered.

I ring the doorbell and wait.

~*~

It's a middle-aged man with gray hair and a black bathrobe who answers the door. He looks unshaven, and his eyes are weary, bloodshot.

"Who are you?" He sputters.

"I'm one of Ruth's friends from school," I say, holding my coat closed with one hand and handing my cookies to the man with my other. "I am just stopping by to drop this off and to see if Ruth needs anything."

The man nods absently and waves me into the house. I was hoping he wouldn't invite me in, but now I have no choice but to venture inside.

"Artemis! It's another one of your friends!" The man hollers, but no one answers.

I feel even worse now that I see a bunch of flowers and boxes piled around the front door. So, Ruth's other friends had heard through the grapevine and had paid their respects already. Some best friend I turned out to be.

I leave my gold heels with the little black bows sitting by the door. They look frightfully out of place with all the somber shoes lined up by the door.

"She's upstairs," Ruth's father tells me. "You can go up and give them to her."

He leaves me standing by the mahogany stairwell. The house is damp and stuffy as though the air itself were permeated by the unhappy memories. I go up the stairs as quietly and respectfully as I could manage.

I don't know which room is Ruth's, but there's only one door open on the second floor. The light is on inside, so I decide to check that room first. As I step inside, I notice that the bed is perfectly made as though it hadn't been slept on in days. In the middle of the bed, there is a pile of fresh flowers.

At the very top of the pile, there are a dozen roses with a handwritten note.

Jesse. You live on in my heart, now and forever — Nick.

Yeah, this isn't Ruth's room. Wrong room. I have no right to be in this room.

I step inside anyway.

I can't contain my curiosity. Who was this girl whose place in Nick's heart I could never hope to replace? I look at the photos on the walls of a young girl on horseback in the Hamptons, a group of girls smiling together on the last day of summer camp. I recognize some of the girls in the pictures from school. There's a photo of Jessica and Ruth holding tennis rackets while wearing matching polo shirts.

They look so wholesome, so glamorous — so happy. They could be on an ad for girl scout cookies.

These girls are nothing like me, with all my secrets and my nighttime adventures online.

My eyes drift to the desk, and I see a desktop computer. Jessica was the trusting type. She had scraps of paper taped to her monitor with all her usernames and passwords scribbled on them.

Goldylocks145 at gmail.com

Password - PrincessGold.

I don't mean to pry. It is purely by accident that my eyes drift down to an opened drawer. I see something that I can't possibly be seeing.

An author always knows her own words like she knows her own children. I reach down and pull the drawer fully open. There, lying among a messy pile of papers, are the words:

Ava ran into the night after him. He was her only salvation, her only desire, her one and only love.

That isn't all. There are pages and pages of it. The drawer is full of my words — of me. What are my stories doing here, inside this drawer, of a girl whom I had never met?

My writing sat inside that drawer. It had been nearly printed out on sheets of paper. My novels were lovingly separated and placed in binders. She even printed out my covers with a color printer!

I flipped through the other papers. I found all my novels in that drawer, all sitting in a pile, one after another. I had never printed out my stories myself because I didn't want to waste the paper.

Jessica did all this, and I had no idea. She was my biggest fan.

All this time, as I had been trying to become Jessica, to know her, to match her — she had been thinking of me. As I had been living her life, hanging out with her friends, kissing her boyfriend— she had been living in my world, exploring the landscape of the dream world I created through my werewolves.

"Corrine, what are you doing?" A voice snaps from the doorway. I drop all the papers in shock. The binder clips snap off, and then I'm standing in a snowdrift of loose papers. My writing is scattered all over the floor now. I instinctively begin to pick it up because I feel naked with my words lying all around me, but Ruth stops me.

"Oh, you found Jesse's secret stash," Ruth laughs and wipes a tear from her eyes as though seeing the stories brings back memories of her sister. "It's silly, but these books were the only things that brought her joy in the past year. Sometimes, you need to turn your mind off and enjoy the simple and predictable."

"It's okay," I insist as Ruth shoves a handful of papers into the drawer and tries to slam the door closed in embarrassment. "Who doesn't enjoy a dumb love story now and then?"

"Oh, I know. I hated her obsession at first. Jessica wouldn't stop talking about some amateur writer who doesn't spell-check. She even wrote this girl fan mail, and this stupid girl doesn't have the decency to write back. I hated it so much; I just wanted her to stop obsessing about this random stupid internet girl."

"Yeah, that makes total sense," I say as the wheels start to churn in my head. I didn't write back to Jessica when she sent me fan mail? Maybe I was just having a bad day. I got so many letters, sometimes I just deleted a few if I was feeling tired, or sad, or for any reason at all.

"No, it was crazy," Ruth laughs and sniffles loudly. She wipes her nose on the back of her sleeve. "Then I became obsessed with hating this girl because I thought my sister deserved better; I guess maybe I wished Jessica spent her time with me instead of these dumb stories. But now that Jessica is dead, I think understand — she was just looking for a distraction."

"You're so sweet, Ruth. You loved your sister; I get it."

"No, I was just crazy, obsessed. I started a message board; I wrote hate-mail, I-I even made friends with strangers just to hate on this random girl. It's like I had a part of myself that I needed an outlet for, a part of myself that I couldn't show anyone at school. And maybe a part of me that wishes this girl would just acknowledge us."

"Princess Artemis!" A man's voice yells from outside the door. "Did you find your friend?"

"I did, dad!" Ruth screams back. "Corrine's in Jesse's room with me."

Ruth wipes her nose with the back of her hand. She is trying to hold it together. As she smiles at me through her tears, I start to understand why Princess Silver got so angry when I made fun of her.

Princess Silver, Ruth is Princess Silver.

Jessica is Princess Gold, and Ruth is Silver. Gold and Silver that explains the gold tiara Ruth tried to lend me.

"I'm crazy, aren't I? Do you think I'm a bad person?"

"No," I insist and reach out to pat Ruth on the shoulder. "You were suffering. It's okay. It's okay, Ruth." As Ruth starts sobbing, I wrap my arms around her and hold her close.

"I miss her," Ruth whispers as she glances in the direction of Jessica's empty bed. "I miss her so much."

"I know . . .I know," I say and rub her back. "I just wish I had a chance to meet her. I really wish I had a chance to meet Jessica just once. I think she and I might have had some things in common."

Ruth laughs and rubs her tears away with the back of her hand.

"Seriously? Do you also read internet romance novels?"