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Charlotte shifts in her seat and I can tell by the semipredatory expression that spreads across her face that she’s about to bring up her plan. She did a psych study once where she had to sit through assertiveness training, which is pretty funny, because Charlotte isn’t exactly a shrinking violet. She kind of got off on the stuff they taught her, and she’ll occasionally throw around some of the techniques she learned. I can tell I’m looking at a few of them right now:
Position yourself directly in front of your conversational opponent. Maintain steady eye contact. Always be the one to initiate a change of subject. Match your opponent’s breathing pattern.
    Personally, I would’ve called it Manipulative Asshole Training, but that’s just me.
    After her training session, they sat Charlotte in front of a big red button and told her that each time she pushed it someone in another room would get a shock. It’s one of those bullshit things they always tell you in psych studies, like anyone would actually be stupid enough to believe that was really what was going on, that some poor asshole on the other side of the wall was really going to sit there wired up to a bunch of cables and let himself get juiced over and over just because someone in a white coat said not to move.
    Charlotte didn’t press the button a single time. Instead, she used the little pocketknife she used to carry around with her to pry the whole damn button out of its casing, and refused to give it back until the researchers paid her in full for participating in the study. “I didn’t want them to think I hadn’t been listening,” she said. “I mean, what’s more assertive than that?”
    But maybe I am still a little raw about Dylan’s disappearing act, because I’m just not in the mood to be on the receiving end of Charlotte’s Psych 101 bullshit techniques this morning. I start untangling myself from the blanket so that I can leave before she starts pressing me for a commitment.
    I’m not totally lacking in self-awareness—I’ll probably say yes to her plan soon enough. I mean, we both know she’ll talk me into it eventually. I can be sort of susceptible to certain types of people. And Charlotte, for all her flaws, just has this way of making her version of events seem so much
better
than anything I could ever come up with. It’s like being best friends with a cult leader, sometimes.
    Sooner or later I’ll drink the Kool-Aid, but sometimes you have to show some resistance, put up a little fight, just to remind yourself that you can.
    Fortunately, Scratch comes out of Charlotte’s room and drags a chair over to join us just in time to distract Charlotte from pouncing on me.
    Scratch. Poor, revolting Scratch. True to his nickname, he’s got a rash. Scratch always has a rash. He’s allergic to damn near everything. You so much as eat something for lunch that ever sat next to a tree nut and he’ll sprout hives if you breathe on him three hours later. He’s the peely-est, sniffly-est dude I’ve ever met, and as much as I’ve gotten used to finding his eczema shrapnel dusting our cushions and hearing him hawking up lung butter in our bathroom, he still makes my skin crawl at times like this, idly fingering the yellow-helmeted battalion of pustules marching up his neck. I would think he’d give the techs a heart attack whenever he walked into a lab, but he’s carved out a nice little niche for himself volunteering in skin and allergy studies; he’ll smear damn near anything on his flesh. I’m pretty sure Charlotte only fools around with him now and then because she feels sorry for him.
    As usual, he bears news. Scratch is the human equivalent of a tabloid magazine—all things conspiratorial and scandal-adjacent will find themselves embellished by his fuzzy tongue. Today is no different, and he’s practically panting to get it out.
    “Yo, guess who’s back in town?” he says, dabbing at a bleeder on his neck with the collar of