Thank you so so much to the people asking if I was okay, love you guys so much x.

🍂🍁

-

"Call him," Lattie says for the one hundred and eightieth time.

"No," I say for the one hundred and eighty-first; she had said it the first time not with words, but with her elfin grin and the impish gleam in her eyes.

She huffs and lays back into the mountain of pillows on her bed, shoving a handful of chocolate-covered popcorn in her mouth and smearing it over her face in the process. "Why did you even get his number then?"

"It was easier than being rude," I say, implying Konrad Fürst to be the flirtatious instigator even though I was the one who had initiated it. It's easier to tell her this than the truth: that I had to come up with an excuse for my rapid heartbeat, which he could hear because he's not a human, but rather a predator designed to kill them. Are false implications considered lies?

"Was he ugly?" She asks.

"No." I feign an extraordinary interest in the movie playing on her TV.

"Then why don't you call him?"

I twist around to look at her from where I'm sitting, cross-legged, on the foot of her bed. "Do you want to date every non-ugly boy you encounter every day?"

Lattie frowns, the chocolate on her face exaggerating the expression. She already knows where I'm going with this. "No, but you never talk to anyone so he must be—"

"Don't you dare say special," I warn her, my stare as serious as smallpox before the 1800s. "If you say special I'm attacking you."

Lattie's face goes through a series of contortions, seemingly at war with herself. In the end, the devilish side of her wins. "The one," she finishes and I launch across the bed at her. She shrieks and I cover her mouth with Nanni in mind, snoring as soundly as a tugboat in the other room.

"Be quiet!" I hiss.

"Get off of me!" She counter-demands.

"Then drop it!"

"No!"

We roll across the bed in a deathly tangle, pushing, pulling, and grappling at each other until I feel the bed's absence beneath me and the shock of midair. I shoot one leg out to meet the floor just in time to catch us from falling in it. We separate in order to dissolve our perilous, edge-of-the-bed position.

"Will you drop it now?" I ask, standing en garde in the middle of her floor.

"Fine," she huffs, quickly retreating back to the mound of pillows. "It's not my business."

"Thank you." I settle back onto the foot of the bed, laying across it this time and tuning back in to the movie on the TV. A girl is dying on screen, bleeding out as her lover desperately tries to staunch the wound on her stomach. Between their heart-wrenching sobs, there is a brief beat of silence as they catch their breath, and in that beat of silence I hear the telltale dial of a cell phone behind my back.

Slowly, I look over my shoulder to see Lattie holding a smartphone to her ear. Even slower, I reach into my jacket pocket where I keep mine. My hand grasps at limp fabric.

"You absolute nuisance," I hiss at her, my jaw hanging open. I flip onto my knees in preparation to tackle her a second time, though before I can, her hand flies up in a wait gesture and a male voice silences the both of us.

"Hello?" The voice asks over the phone.

I turn to wax and melt on the spot, right down into my backstabbing friend's fluffy duvet.

Neither of us speak. "Hello?" The voice asks again, more impatiently this time. Lattie hurriedly waves her hand in a circular motion, prompting me.

I close my eyes, hot defeat falling over me. Lattie, it seems, has won.

"Um, hi," I say, hating myself just enough in that moment to coat my voice in niceness and rainbows. "Is this Konrad?"

"Yes. Who is this? Wait..." A pause elapses in which my nails dig into my thigh through my pants and I hope inadvertently that if I feel enough pain Lattie will have mercy and hang up the phone.

"Leila?"

She doesn't.

"Yeah." I swallow the lump of materialized dread in my throat. "It's Leila." My voice is smiling, but my eyes are looking at Lattie like the devil herself.

~

Tuesday
October 3rd

Consciousness comes with a blur. I blink my eyes, squinting against the cheerful morning light. My body is stiff; I'm on the floor of Lattie's pastel bedroom, lost among the fluff of her white furry rug. I start to move but quickly stop: I'm weighed down by the top half of a body sprawled across my abdomen.

Lattie's head is a catastrophe of blonde, twisted tangles. She's lying on me as though someone had knocked her in the head and this is where she fell. My position is quite the same, laid out on my back without even a pillow—that would explain the headache.

For a moment, a flash of terrifying images form in my mind: the stalker from last night finally getting in, him knocking Lattie and I on our heads and making off with every valuable possession we have, including our kidneys which he'll sell to someone even crazier than himself on the dark web. But those images are exactly that: imagination. Soon the truth surfaces and I remember what actually happened.

Lattie's slumber party.

The truthful memories harbor much different images, like those of a kitchen with dishes strewn across it and chocolate splattered all over the cabinets. Images that contain the smell of popcorn which we'd drizzled the chocolate on, caramelly caffeinated drinks, and the now bitter taste of it all on my dry tongue.

Finally, I remember the phone call Lattie had made without my permission—to a one, Konrad Fürst—and the epic battle we'd had following her hanging up, which had ended in the floor where we lay.

I raise my wrist to look at where I'd written on it with black marker.

Konrad Tour, the marker says, Café 7:30 AM

Those are the plans Lattie suckered me into. I'm to show the werewolf Konrad around Heisenbühl beginning at the café at 7:30 sharp. And currently it's... I glance up at the analog clock on the nightstand beside Lattie's bed.

8:00.

Shit.

"Lattie! Get up!" I shake her and roll her off of me, fully into the floor now. She comes to slowly, groaning and glaring out from her puffy eyelids. "We're late," I tell her, already up and grabbing my bag of spare clothes for nights such as last.

The café opened three hours ago. Three hours. Which means Nanni has been there by herself for as long, and due to her granddaughter's sticky fingers, an unfamiliar werewolf is now there with her.

I burst out of the bathroom in fresh clothes to find Lattie just pulling on her final sock. She's changed out of her pajamas into a simple white shirt and jeans, though that isn't enough to create the illusion that she's been awake for more than five minutes. But five minutes is all we have time for, so I grab her wrist and pull her off the bed anyway.

"No, no, no, wait—My hair!"

"There's no time!"

I whip us around the corner and into the hallway, the only thoughts running through my head those speculative ones of what could be happening at the café this very instance—or what already has happened.

"Leila, hold on, I—" Lattie begins to protest, but falls silent once we reach the stairs, focusing instead on not tumbling down them.

Outside, Nanni's Buick is gone and my stomach flips at the empty space left in the driveway. As Lattie climbs into the Hummer, I lock and slam the front door behind us.

~

The entire ride to the café—usually five minutes but cut drastically in half today—Lattie's hands cling to the seatbelt strapped across her chest. She doesn't utter a word and neither do I.

She knows we're late: for work and for the tour. She knows Nanni is running the café on her own and that when we arrive there, her seventy-year-old grandmother will flog us both for it. But even knowing these things, I don't think she believes that any of that is why we're flying through the town, haphazardly dressed and with uncombed hair.

When I wheel into the café parking lot, there's the slightest squeal of tires on the blacktop. I park crooked in two spots and hardly get the engine turned off before my feet are pounding against the ground, running across the lot.

The overhead bell chimes delicately as I burst through the door.

The simultaneous chatter of forks against plates and spoons in teacups hesitates at my abrupt arrival. I feel discreet eyes on me, but none that I care enough to trace back to the owners. I spot who I'm looking for right away, and without the adrenaline to hold me up, I nearly collapse in the floor right there from relief.

Nanni is sitting on the inner side of the counter, laughing her crackling laughter as she's smiling and looking at someone sitting at the customers' end of the bar: assumedly the teller of the joke. Her laughter dies a swift and painful death when she finds me here, taking her smile begrudgingly with it.

"Leila, what are you—" Bumping into me from behind, Lattie halts in her tracks and bites off her sentence as the joke teller swivels around on his stool to follow Nanni's displeased gaze.

At my hip, I ever so subtly put out my hand, a barrier to keep Lattie from going any closer. Whether she understands this deliberately or if her instincts have taken control, she remains behind my shoulder.

"Leila, dear," Nanni says in that tone that makes my muscles clench, that tone that is authoritative and sweet, but sweet in the way that I'd rather her just be mean because her attempt at veiling it is a cruel, ineffective euphemism. "This is the young man you were supposed to show around this morning."

I realize that having a conversation across the café will raise more red flags than desired. I force my legs to move, to carry me to the bar with six feet of distance between myself and the werewolf. Lattie comes with me on her own.

"I know, Nanni." My voice is tight.

"His name is Konrad Fürst," Lattie's petty grandmother continues. "Where have I heard that before?"

I manufacture, with great pain, a small smile to offer Konrad as he stands and greets me, as I greet him back.

"I wouldn't know," I reply to Nanni. I intend to keep the chill out of my voice but fall short. Nanni is aware of my attitude in this moment, and unless I can veil it, Konrad will soon catch on.

"Shall I buy you a clock?" Nanni asks me.

"No, Nanni." Now it's Esmerelda McNamara to whom my false smile is given. "Thank you."

Konrad looks between Nanni and I, and I notice his feet ease down to touch the floor from where they were previously relaxed upon a bar between the stool's legs.

"Is... this a bad time?" He asks.

"Yes!—" "—No!" Nanni and I answer at once.

My fingers clench around the edge of the countertop.

"We can go now," I follow up quickly, before Nanni can throw another wrench into the situation.

"Of course," Konrad promptly stands up from his barstool, a flash of relief crossing his tensed face. Without my knowing where he pulled them from, he suddenly has a car remote dangling from his finger. "I can drive us."

I snuff out my attitude once more and smile at him congenially, giving him an "after you" gesture to the door. He smiles in return and heads toward it.

That's it, I think as I watch him walk toward the door, go away from the McNamaras, away from the café and the customers. Go somewhere secluded where no one would see one of us knock the other in the head....

A hand grabs my arm when I start to follow him. "Leila."

It's Lattie.

"What are you going to do?" She whispers her words, pulling herself in close where her grandmother can't hear us.

"What do you mean?" I murmur back, "I'm giving him a tour of Heisenbühl before he leaves."

"You don't trust him," she says. It's a statement, not a question, and a correct one at that. "Don't go."

I squeeze her wrist reassuringly, then I separate from her and follow Konrad Fürst out the café doors.