Page 98 of Heartbeat

I guess

Our place?

I’m two minutes away

I’ll be there in five

I took a long, deep breath and made my way to the café.

Marcy Stevens was seventeen years old. We met when we were thirteen, at a birthday party I remembered quite well because I almost died choking on a toffee. Liam had been going on for weeks about his new friend, “the coolest girl I’ve ever met.” We all thought he was enamored, but it turned out he’d quickly become best friends with the new girl everyone in school seemed to find too cool and so very intimidating.

Her reputation had always preceded her. Naturally beautiful, short tempered, and with very little tolerance for bullshit, Marcy Stevens was something of a legend. She’d been expelled from her previous school because she’d made herself throw up on a teacher she thoroughly disliked. However, once she got to Magnolia, that story had already been transformed into an attempted arson, a possible affair, and some sort of conspiracy involving a famous student. Truth was, only those who were lucky enough to be her friends got to know the real story, and out of all the people in her life, the only one who could actually claim they knew the real Marcy Stevens was one Liam Hart.

The day she found out about the accident, Marcy went to her room and refused to see or talk to anyone for the week that followed. She appeared at the memorial service, sat at my mother’s side, and never said a word. Weeks later, when I went back to Magnolia, she seemed to have gone back to her normal self, never mentioning Liam’s name ever again but simply referring to him by a pronoun or some demeaning adjective. Even on the rare occasions she did allow herself to bring him up, she never once showed anything other than indifference.

After I was taken to St. Yve’s, following the incident with my mother’s pills, Marcy started to grow more distant, as well as more aggressive (especially toward me). The second time I left the hospital, I received a text from her that simply read, “Stop.” It was the last time I’d had any contact with Marcy Stevens.

Balcon was a place like no other. Five blocks away from Magnolia, the café had a wooden sign outside on the sidewalk, indicating the special of the day—a different coffee everyday named after a famous author. Those who went through the red door found themselves inside an old bookstore/coffee shop. Instead of booths, coffee tables separated sofas and chairs that didn’t match, making up different seating areas surrounded by endless shelves against the walls, filled with books of all sorts that the customers could take and read freely.

The moment I walked in, I saw her. Her long black hair was up, and her thick, black mascara turned her hazel eyes the lightest shade of caramel, easily noticed from afar. And she wore her trademark red lipstick. She sat at our old spot, the farthest left corner, on a brown velvet love seat next to the French literature, and she’d buried her face in a copy of Camus’s “The Plague” the instant she realized I’d arrived.

“Hi,” I said, after walking over and sitting across from her.

She looked up, closed her book, and watched as I put my phone on the table between us. “Hi.”

“How are you?” I asked, having no idea what to do with my hands.

“What do you want, Tommy?” she asked coldly, giving me her very best drop-dead look.

“I, uh…” I put my hands together and interlocked my fingers to keep them from visibly shaking. “I wanted to ask you something.”

She crossed her arms and sat back, frowning, either in anger or amusement—I couldn’t really tell.

“Do you know a girl named Kim, by any chance?” I asked.

“Kim Sato? Sure. Why?”

“Noah. He has a crush.”

“And you’re playing Cupid?” She smirked.

“I suppose. Only, I don’t really know her.”

“Ah. You want me to play Cupid? What do you need? Her Insta? TikTok?”

“Nothing like that. You see, he sort of convinced me to throw a party—”

Just as I spoke, my phone lit up and vibrated on the wooden tabletop with a text from Ethan. I quickly placed it screen side down. Marcy watched my every move without reacting whatsoever.

“A party?” she asked tersely.

“A costume party. Yeah.”

“Summer was right,” she said bitterly.

“Marcy—”

“Who’s coming to this party?”

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