Tim Wynne-Jones - The Uninvited

“I just got here, remember?”

“Sorry,” he said. “It’s none of my business.”

You’re right, she thought. But she needed Jay on her side and bickering didn’t help.

“Hey,” he said. “I really am sorry. I’m just, you know, anxious.”

She nodded and thought that he was always low-grade anxious, as far as she could tell. “Thanks. It’s a sore point,” she said. Then she thought of something else and shook her head.

“What?”

“Oh, nothing. Just a random little memory that came to mind.” She pointed at her head. “Sometimes it’s like bumper cars up there!”

“Tell me,” he said. “I like bumper cars.” He grinned and she couldn’t help grinning back.

Then she had to look away. The intimacy quotient was climbing way too fast.

Still, he might as well know what kind of a crackpot he was dealing with. “Lazar Cosic-he’s the prof-he even accompanied me to one of Marc’s openings.”

Jay’s head jerked, as if he’d been sucker-punched. “An opening? So, like, Marc was there?”

“Of course. That was the point.”

He looked perplexed. “You wanted Marc to see you with-”

“A man almost his age? Yeah. Don’t ask why.”

“And?”

“And nothing.” She laughed, a sad little laugh. “If Marc noticed, he didn’t say a thing.” Then she shook her head. “And that is the end of the amusing part of this broadcast. Lazar confused going to the opening with taking him home to meet the folks, which is when he started talking about leaving his wife.”

“Yikes.”

“And I freaked.”

Jay chewed on his sandwich and looked to be chewing on what she had told him. “And so now you’re going to turn the whole thing into a movie,” he said.

“Well, you’ve got to admit there is some dramatic potential.”

“I guess.”

She leaned her elbows on the table. “I’m thinking maybe in the screenplay, the professor turns out to be a psychotic killer-the real kind.”

“That sounds like fun.”

“Uh-huh. Luckily my part is played by Angelina Jolie. And she’s got great weapons.”

He smiled wryly. “She’s a little old for a freshman, isn’t she?”

Mimi shrugged. “Yeah, maybe. So who do you suggest?”

But Jay was finished playing. He looked as if he had eaten something sour. “Men are such assholes,” he said.

Mimi gawked at him.

“Well, it’s true. Not all men, obviously. But really! A professor?”

“That’s sweet of you. Thing is, it wasn’t entirely his fault. I mean it was consensual.”

“No way,” said Jay. “He’s in this position of power. It’s harassment. Did you go to the dean?”

She shook her head. “No,” she said. “I went to Canada.”

Jay sat back in his chair and sighed. “So what happens next year?”

She shrugged. “I’m thinking of UCLA or maybe the University of Singapore, if they have a film studies program. Anywhere that’s about a gazillion miles away.”

“That is such bullshit. He’s the one who should have to leave.”

She thought about that for a moment. “I dunno. He started getting serious and I got seriously cold feet and it sort of went south from there. Bam! Suddenly I’m in the middle of a midlife crisis.”

“A quarter-life crisis,” said Jay.

“Hey, cool. Like the John Mayer song, right? But what I mean is I was in the middle of his midlife crisis.”

The scene of their last meeting, unwished for, bullied its way into Mimi’s mind: Lazar’s face like something from a horror movie, his raised fist, his voice all ragged and out of control.

“Was he scary?”

She realized the scene in her head must have been playing itself out on her face.

She glanced at Jay and nodded. “Really scary,” she said. Then she flung herself back in her seat, swore a bit, and crossed her arms. “Listen. I don’t want to talk about this right now, okay? You asked me what I was doing here, and I said I wanted to work on a screenplay. Can we leave it at that?”

“Okay,” he said. “I hear you. But I still think this guy sucks.”

My big brother, she thought.

“Thanks, Jay. The thing is, right now what I want-what I need — is to be here. To be far away from the whole mess. Not to mention far away from him!”

She looked Jay squarely in the eye. “I am totally capable of staying out of your way. Seriously. I won’t be coming up asking if you want coffee. I won’t ask you to read scenes. I won’t sing or tap dance or put up a lot of shelves. I won’t distract you. Honest.”

“It’s not that,” he said. He looked down at his plate. His hands rested lightly on the table. He flexed his fingers as if he were about to play the piano.

“There’s still this other problem,” he said.

“The creep?”

He nodded. And she could see the concern in his face. “I guess I was hoping whoever was doing this shit would get tired and go away. I mean sometimes there’s nothing for weeks. I figured maybe I was winning the waiting game. But when I realized he’d taken the movie camera right out of your car, taken that footage, and then put it back, well…”

“And now the framed picture,” she added.

He nodded again, combed his fingers through his hair, left it standing in a softly spiky heap. Then he looked at her with such considerate eyes, she thought she might fall in love with him, anyway, despite all the taboos about that kind of thing.

“I’m worried,” he said.

“I’m not afraid.”

“Yeah, but I can’t be there all the time. What if you were alone at night…?”

She favored him with a really big smile. “Wait here,” she said. She went off to the guest room and came back with her purse. She sat down and rooted around. “There are two reasons why I don’t want you to be worried for me,” she said. “First of all, this,” she said, and held up her cell phone. “I’ll put the local cops on speed dial, if that’ll help.”

“It would take them twenty minutes,” he said. “Assuming they didn’t get lost.”

“Which is where this’ll come in handy,” she said. She held up a miniature spray canister, with a red plastic top.

“What is that?”

“Mace,” she said. “One spray and the creep is blinded. Temporarily. Just long enough for me to hit him with something large and get the hell away.”

Jay shook his head, but he was smiling-a ghost of a smile. He was giving in.

“Listen, Jay,” she said, grabbing his wrist. “This has been the strangest couple of days in my whole frigging life. And I’m not going to pretend I’m not a little freaked by what’s going on. But it’s good to be in the know, you know? And assuming there’s only one of him-if it is a him-well, it’s got to be better if there’s two of us.”

“Except for the nights when there’s not two of us.”

“Except for the nights when there’s not two of us. Agreed. But those nights it’ll be me and my friend Mr. Mace.”

Slowly, reluctantly, he nodded.

“Shake?” she said.

“I already am,” he said. And they both laughed, a little hysterically, as if they’d been holding way too much inside.

It was Wednesday before Cramer saw Mimi again. Just a glimpse, and it wasn’t up at the snye but at the Page place on Riverside Drive.

The Taurus was not a car people noticed. It wasn’t old enough to be antique or rusted enough to be an eyesore. Cramer himself wasn’t sure what color it was: gray, green-he had no idea. The car, as large and ugly as it might be, was invisible. Which was just as well, when Mimi and Jay suddenly pulled out of the driveway in her Mini Cooper. There were high hedges to either side of the entrance, and so Cramer didn’t see them until the last second, even though he was parked pretty well right across the road. He had a map open on the steering wheel as an excuse, a lost traveler. But neither of them so much as glanced his way. They were talking up a storm, oblivious. It wasn’t just his car that was invisible.