They moved out of the chapel and through more winding hallways. Marcie had no idea how anybody could maneuver through the house without getting lost. Every hallway had branching paths like it was built to be some sort of maze. She tried to make a mental map of the path they were taking. Left, right, right, left, left again. It was no use. Just how big was this place? There was nothing but grass and flowers outside. Were they even in the city anymore? Marcie was tired of having questions and she was sure Mrs. Ruiz would get tired of answering all the ones she had. She would only impose on her for one lecture.

  The moment they walked in the kitchen, Marcie was filled with aromatic bliss. The smell of fresh tortillas, chopped cilantro, and steak marinating with toasted chiles hung in the air like an all encompassing comforting blanket. She could see Tío outside through a mesh screen door, filling a grill with charcoal. Luisa Reveles was chopping herbs in one corner while Susana was showing Grant of all people how to hand-press the masa dough. What was he still doing here? Shouldn’t he have run along after Hunter like he always used to?

  “Marcella!” Susana called in relief, “He’s such a helpful young man! Come! Look how amazing these are!”

  Sure enough, Grant presented her with a perfectly round, perfectly flat piece of dough.

  “Crazy, right!” He said with genuine pride, “I’ve never made big tortillas before or any tortillas before, actually.”

  “Mhmm,” Marcie said, curtly.

  “You never told me you had such a handsome friend? You should date him, no?” Susana smirked.

  Grant and her met each other with the same skeptical expression.

  “Him?” Marcie said, incredulously.

  “Her?” Grant said, doubtfully.

  They both locked eyes again, eye in her case, and laughed. Something eased up between the two of them in that moment. She didn’t quite know it at first, but in the short time it took for their giggles to die down, she’d made a silent truce with her old friend.

  Susana must have noticed this new air between them because she suddenly smacked Grant’s back, snapping them out of whatever stare they must have been giving each other. Though, she not-so inconspicuously let her hand rest on his muscles before saying, “Uh huh…I’m going to go check on Jacinto. You're doing good, young man. We’ll make tlayudas tonight. Lots of cheese!”

  “Oh, I’m…uhh…lactose intolerant,” Grant said sheepishly.

  “Aguántate, guapo!” Susana smacked him again before excusing herself.

  “What does that mean?” asked Grant.

  Marcie poked him in the gut. Goddamn! His abs were like a brick wall. “It means tough shit.” She didn’t give him the satisfaction of translating the last bit.

  Grant picked up a ball of dough and started making another perfect tortilla. Marcie did the same, though hers was definitely not going to turn out quite as good. They worked quietly next to each other.

  “So hey,” she managed to break the silence.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Last I knew, the most cooking you ever did was heat up a frozen meal? How’d you become such a good handler of doughy balls?” Marcie snickered at her own dirty joke.

  “Tff. I’ve long since conquered the microwave,” Grant’s eyes rolled back so far he could’ve seen backwards. “After I moved back in with my mom, I don’t know…something hit me. Neither of my parents were all that into cooking and I think the divorce took a lot out of her, so she wasn’t even eating most days. Didn’t have the energy to order anything or go to the store. I don’t know how the hell Michael thought she was doing fine, cause he’d just leave her wallowing for like days. Sorry…I shouldn’t be trauma dumping on you of all people.”

  “Nah, it’s fine,” Marcie shrugged.

  Grant relaxed and went on, “Yeah, basically Vinny’s had me fill in for their pizza slash sandwich slash deli station for a couple weeks and I got pretty good at it, started taking those skills home. Mom still doesn’t really eat a lot though and she hates a mess. So this is kinda comforting actually. Being able to do this with a family.”

  “Huh,” was all Marcie could say. She was really trying to keep jealousy out of her tone, but it was difficult. Here she was with this guilty feeling that she’d abandoned her family, and there he was, the guy who had certainly abandoned her, looking all at ease and shit.

  “So you guys had a fight?” Grant asked, trying to reinvigorate the conversation.

  “Huh?” The question caught her off guard. “Oh. Yeah, we did.” She looked down, then realized she’d been forming her dough into a misshapen lump.

  “Mmm,” he acknowledged somberly, “I caught him as he was walking out the door. We talked for a bit, and I had a feeling. God, sometimes you guys just…” He shook his head.

  “Yeah…” said Marcie. Her thoughts were so all over the place. She ended up balling up her dough so she could start over.

  Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!

  Grant was already finishing his third pristine tlayuda. “I don’t know if you’d want my two cents, but I think I kinda know what’s going on.”

  “Do you? Cause I’d love some answers right about now.” Marcie said, giving up on her tortilla entirely.

  “Mar–”

  “–You’re not allowed to call me that anymore.”

  She’d meant to say it playfully, but Grant flinched back and shrank into himself. An immediate pang of guilt washed over Marcie. She looked around at who could’ve seen his reaction. Luisa had joined Susana and Tío outside at some point. Even Mrs. Ruiz had disappeared from the room. It was just them. Good, no one was there to make her the asshole.

  But, Marcie still didn’t get it. She was the one who forced Hunter into talking to Grant, she was the one who got him involved. But he wasn’t supposed to be so willing, not the guy who covered up parts of her death. He wasn’t supposed to be so sad, not the guy who bullied her gleefully for four years. It took all four of those years to convince herself that the old Grant was gone, lost to the cruel temptress of highschool popularity. She wasn’t supposed to regret lashing out at him. She wasn’t supposed to feel like maybe the Grant she used to know was still in there.

  “Marcie,” Grant started, then waited for permission to continue. He took her silence as an invitation. “You do this thing—how do I say this?—”

  “Just say it,” Marcie demanded.

  “You’re very stubborn,” he said, but this time he didn’t pause for a go ahead. “It’s sort of always Marcie’s way or the highway. You want what you want and you’re like an unstoppable force at times. I was pretty jealous of that for a while. Still am, I think. But it’s like you have blinders on and can’t see the other people that get swept up into what you want. God, you basically stole my best friend and left me in the dust.”

  “I—wow. Did you really spend all of highschool bullying me over that? Confession accepted, I guess?” She responded, indignantly.

  “Mar—Marcie. No. I’m sorry. That’s not what I meant,” he scolded. “Just hear me out. When we…when I was putting you through all those awful things, Hunter tried his best to protect you.”

  “Protect me? I did not need protection. I was handling you assholes just fine—”

  “Let. Me. Finish,” Grant demanded. She shut her mouth. Where was this side of Grant coming from?

  He let out a frustrated breath. “He knew you wouldn’t want it to look like you were hiding behind him and that in order for you to get through it, you needed to be the one in control. But the whole time, he was working out how to protect you without you noticing.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “Because all this time he was protecting you from me,” Grant stated. “You may have been the one standing up to us and telling us off, but Hunter was the one taking punches for you in the locker rooms. Anytime you thought the trash we stuffed in your locker had miraculously missed your textbooks was cause he was buying new ones to replace them. But he was okay with it then, because you were both on the same page. You were Hunter and Marcie and we were the douchebags trying to tear you two down and your plan was to stick it to us by being the most badass underdogs anyone would ever see. And he wanted that too. But right now, I can tell, he doesn’t know where this train leads. You both have taken a road that’s leading somewhere where he can’t protect you anymore. And I think he’s terrified of that.”

  Marcie was stunned, but she couldn’t help feeling that everything Grant was saying was somehow spot on. “When did you get all wise?”

  He sighed again, “About the time I wised up to the fact that I was kind of a terrible person. Believe it or not, this is not the first time we’ve had a conversation like this.”

  “Really?”

  “Mhmm. You and Hunter were having a bit of a rough patch during his first semester away.”

  “Oh? I…I don’t remember that.”

  “I figured,” Grant shrugged. “It’s not my story to tell. Anyway, I think you should talk to Hunter. Ask him what he wants. I’m sure you’re upset, but I think it’ll be good.”

  He held out his phone towards her, opened up to a text chat with Hunter.

  “Thanks,” Marcie took it hesitantly. A part of her was glad that Grant could be honest with her. The other part wanted to deck him for calling her out, even if she sort of maybe needed to hear it. “For the advice. And…” Then came the hard part. “I know it was a long time ago, but I’m sorry if it seemed like I was cutting you out of the picture. That wasn’t my intention but I’m sure it felt that way.”

  “It’s okay, Mar,” he smiled at her, for what she realized was the first time since she’d met him again. “He’s like obnoxiously in love with you. It wasn’t only your fault. Besides, we were in, like, middle school. Middle schoolers be that way. Feel free to take my phone for the night. Just, let me know if my mom texts or something or if my boss is up my ass about taking too much time off. I’ll show you where my room is after dinner.”

  “You’re taking time off work to be here?” Marcie asked, feeling guilty all over again. “Why?”

  “Cause you needed help,” Grant said, simply. “And also because apparently I’m now at risk of being killed by evil spirits and I think I’ll stick with the pack of demon-slaying werewolves.”

  “They’re not werewolves, dummy. They’re more like soul-guides,” she tried to explain.

  “Ahhhh.” Grant nodded in mock understanding.

  “Hey, another thing.” Marcie leaned back against the counter to look Grant straight in the face. “How the hell does Annabelle know Veronica?”

  The question caught Grant off guard. He stammered out the beginning of an explanation but couldn’t seem to put it all together. After the third false start he said, plainly, “She was implicated in your note. Julie called everyone mentioned in it to her yacht to…make sure we were still in the clear. Someone had recreated your note and slipped it to Julie. It freaked all of us out considering we–we, uhh–swept it under the rug. Veronica met all of us then, but that was the first time she even knew about the note.”

  Marcie hadn’t thought about Veronica in years. Or she guessed she had that night at the kick-back, but thinking about her now struck her with an old feeling of betrayal and abandonment. She could venture a guess as to why her first friend, her best friend before Hunter and Grant, was included.

  “Julie wanted all of us to stay vigilant and keep quiet. She got Veronica on board to keep an eye out on ‘your side of town’. At first I thought maybe it was Hunter who gave Julie the note, but when I asked him, he had no idea. And it certainly wasn’t you since you two have been together since….” He cut himself short when he saw the look on Marcie’s face change.

  “Mhmm.” She really couldn’t escape the thoughts of Hunter, could she. Betrayal. Abandonment. Funny that it keeps happening over and over. First Veronica, then Grant. She shook off the fear that eventually, Hunter would leave her too.

  “Ayye! You two!” Susana yelled from the door, “Where are my tortillas? The grill is hot already! Chop chop!”

  Grant and Marcie smiled with each other again.

  “Guess we should get to work,” he said.