Gathering Dark by Candice Fox (best life changing books txt) 📕

I dug in the chocolate box for a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, his favorite. As Jamie headed for the doorway he took it from me, turned, and wrapped his arms around my waist.

“See you, Blair,” he said as he bounded out into the night.

“See you, baby,” I said. I pressed the door closed and burst into tears.

I dreamed about Dayly. We were standing with the counter of the Pump’n’Jump between us, crowded closer than we had been in reality. The jumble of chips, candy, fried goods, and magazines that stocked the store had somehow festered and grown like jungle vines all around us, almost blocking the windows. There was only a hole the size of a dinner plate in the window over the cash register through which I could see the parking lot. I knew someone was out there, looking at us from the darkness. Someone bad.

“He’s coming,” I told Dayly. “Hide.”

The raw panic ripped up through the center of my chest into my throat as I was torn from dream to wakefulness by my phone. I grabbed it and answered in the still blackness of midnight.

“Get. Your ass. Over here. Right. Now,” Sasha growled.

“What? What?”

“Jamie has a rat in his room.” The fury coming down the line was like nothing I’d ever heard from her before. She seemed to be forcing the words out through clenched jaws. “A rat! A fucking rat!”

“What…” I sat up, gripping my head. “What the hell does that have to do with me?”

“He says he got it from you!”

A coldness flooded over me. I tore off the sheet and stumbled out of bed. In the kitchen, the ice cream container on the counter felt sickeningly light as I snatched it up.

“Oh, Jesus.”

“You gave our kid a pet rat?” Sasha wailed. “Without asking me?”

“No,” I said, reminding myself to later celebrate her reference to “our” kid. “No, I did not. He’s taken … uh. I don’t know. Something’s happened. There’s been some mista—”

“I have Francine Readley over here,” Sasha snarled. “Do you understand? Governor Readley’s wife. Everyone is here. Everyone who is fucking anyone from the neighborhood is here and my son has a rat in his—”

“I’m coming,” I said. I grabbed the keys to the Gangstermobile. Sneak was collapsed on the floor between the coffee table and the couch, a pillow under her head and pills all over the table, snoring loudly. The stitches I’d put in her earlobe looked like tiny spiders in the dark. In the background of the call I could hear Jamie’s frantic voice, but not the words. “Listen, don’t do anything,” I told Sasha. “The rat isn’t a rat. It’s a gopher and it’s not mine. It’s a very important animal, okay? It belongs to—”

“You better haul ass, Blair,” Sasha said. “I’m putting a rat trap in the room and blocking the door. You get here and it’s dead, that’s on you.”

Dialing, dialing, dialing. Too late for anyone to answer an unknown number. I crushed the caiman-leather steering wheel cover with one hand and dialed frantically with the other, the breath caught in my chest, refusing to go in or out. Night walkers on Jefferson eyed the car from the shadows outside closed clothing stores and cafes. I passed a homeless camp under a bridge, watched the shapes moving inside tents draped with clothes and towels. My thumb danced over the phone screen. Finally, an answer.

“Wassup?”

“Who’s this?” I asked. There was a lot of noise in the background of the call. People laughing, the pop and tinkle of a bottle shattering on a road. The thumping of bass.

“Huh?”

“Who’s this?”

“This is Miranda,” she said. Her voice high and crisp, a little slurred.

“This is Blair.”

“Bear?” She laughed.

“Where are you?”

“I’m outside the Pig Pen,” she said, sniffed hard. When she spoke next, her mouth was away from the phone. “Get me a vodka! Ice! Ice! I said ice!”

“Sounds like a fun night.”

“Not so far, we’re stuck in the damn line.”

“I hope you get in soon.”

“What the hell do you want? I don’t even know who this is.”

“I’m no one,” I said. “I just wanted someone to talk to. Someone to listen to.” I knew the Pig Pen in Culver City, had passed it on my bus ride to work a hundred times. The interior was painted all pink, pink neon signs out the front, pink shag carpet stapled to the front of the bar, worn and dirty from a thousand thighs and knees passing it by. A young people’s place. Chalkboards out the front advertised cocktails in colorful plastic cowboy boots. My eyes left the dark road ahead and I imagined Miranda standing in the line with other girls in shiny miniskirts, pink lights making their platinum hair look like cotton candy. I felt the thump of the bass in my chest, smelled beer on the road, vomit in the bases of potted palms. The ringing of Sasha’s voice in my ears was replaced by security guards waving people back.

“This ain’t a suicide hotline, Bear,” Miranda said, and hung up as I climbed the winding hills into Brentwood. The night walkers disappeared, the only eyes peering from the shadows now the scopes of security cameras and motion sensors.

Sasha’s house was full of people. Women in form-fitting dresses and towering heels. I saw the faces of a couple of the women I’d known from the time before my great fall, pool-party buddies and ladies I’d jogged the streets with, lamenting the closing of our favorite boutique coffee-roasting house and the price of a good car detailer. A troupe of women bent in the window of the sitting room to watch me walk up the drive in my slippers and Walmart sweatpants, covering their mouths, holding their wine glasses to their breasts. Oh, what I had become. I didn’t have to knock on the front door. Sasha wrenched it open.

“You have got a lot to answer for,” she seethed. I put my hands up in surrender.

“Go back to your party,”