Hello Girls Read online

  Dedication

  For Lana, a bad girl with a heart of gold

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  Books by Brittany Cavallaro and Emily Henry

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  Winona Olsen watched her father move through the softly lit banquet hall to the stage, as if carried by the current of the room’s applause. In his blue pinstripes, his elegant stride reminded her of the great white sharks her mother used to take her to see at the Kingsville Aquarium.

  They’d had season passes, and Winona remembered her mother saying dreamily, on more than one occasion, “They even swim when they’re sleeping. Can you imagine, Nony? What that would be like, to keep moving even when you’re asleep but never get anywhere? You’re just stuck in a glass tank.”

  On the stage at the front of the room, her father stepped up to the podium and shook the presenter’s hand.

  “You must be so proud,” the silver-haired woman to Winona’s right murmured to her through the applause. “What is this, his third Changemaker?”

  Winona flashed her perfectly symmetrical smile, a duller, narrower version of the thousand-megawatt one beaming from the stage. “Second,” she answered.

  The woman sat back in her chair, one hand placed over her heart and a look of delighted surprise splashed across her face. Winona knew she’d met the woman before, at some benefit or luncheon or award ceremony—there were only so many philanthropists in northern Michigan and they took turns making speeches and polite small talk at the same few events each year. Truthfully, Winona’s father had won far more awards for his philanthropic endeavors than she’d just copped to, but he would have thought it in poor taste for Winona to rattle off the entire list, and taste was Stormy Olsen’s greatest strength.

  His collection of awards and trophies was rivaled by his collection of modern art, his drawers of designer watches, the rows of pristine suits in his closet, and the rainbow of Tory Burch dresses he’d lined Winona’s with.

  “Well, he just raves about you, missy,” the woman said. “About how you’re going to Northwestern next year?”

  Winona smiled. “That’s right.”

  The woman settled back into her chair as Winona’s father began to speak.

  “Wow,” he said, voice straining under emotion. Stormy was an emotional guy, and the public appreciated that about him; there weren’t many meteorologists who could turn the morning weather report into a human interest piece, but there was just something about him that made people want to sit down for a beer or two and swap stories with him. Acts of kindness, big and small, that was what he was about, what he’d instilled in his only daughter, the light of his life, and the town he loved so dearly. Remember, folks, in the Upper Peninsula, a little bit of sunshine goes a long way!

  The overhead lighting caught on his Rolex and light flashed across the room. Winona realized she’d zoned out—she’d been doing that a lot lately—and jerked her attention back to her father’s acceptance speech. She wanted to remember her favorite tidbits to repeat back to him on the car ride home. She knew it would please him.

  “. . . and I really mean this, I do: the people of Kingsville have made it so easy to serve them. They say when you love your job, you’ll never work a day in your life, and you know what? In my sixteen years at Channel 5, I’d have to say that’s been true for me. Folks, I love my job. But in this last year, partnering with Brain Storm Girls—”He swallowed the knot in his throat as he gathered himself, and the audience tearfully laughed. “Look, I’m no public speaker, I’m a weatherman, so forgive the terrible slew of forthcoming puns.”

  Appreciative laughter hummed through the room as he picked up the glass trophy. “When I lost my wife, Katherine, years ago, I felt like a tornado had ripped through my life, and I’d been left to pick up the pieces. I didn’t think I could ever rebuild the beautiful life we’d had together, but I knew I had to try. I knew I had to do everything I could to empower my daughter, to make sure she knew that the whole world was within her grasp. If the sun wasn’t going to shine, hoo-boy, I would build a movie set for her to live in, all sandy beaches and palm trees and blue skies. That’s what we do for our kids, isn’t it? We hoist the sun up into the sky for them every day until they’re old enough to do it for themselves.”

  That part, Winona thought. That’s the part you should repeat back to him. He’ll like that. She twisted the Cartier bracelet on her wrist, then pressed the metal hard into her skin, a trick she had for imprinting anything important into her memory. Don’t forget. Hoist the sun into the sky until they’re old enough to do it. That was the right line, the perfect one to recite back to him.

  “But what I didn’t realize,” Stormy went on, “was that I was never doing the heavy lifting. The joy of my daughter, the boundless hope and potentiality of children, that is what lights up my life. Partnering with Brain Storm Girls has been more than just a job that doesn’t feel like work. It has been a second sun hoisted up into the sky for me.” He lifted his eyes to the crowd. “And remember, folks,” he said. “In the Upper Peninsula . . .”

  “. . . a little bit of sunshine goes a long way,” the room replied, before erupting into applause.

  The silver-haired woman to Winona’s right pushed her chair back, leading the charge in the standing ovation.

  “Absolutely moving!” she shouted down at Winona.

  Winona had been so focused on her inner dialogue—hoist the sun hoist the sun hoist the sun—that she almost said that aloud in response. Instead she pushed the bracelet into her wrist and smiled wide and lovely. “My father is a rare man.”

  As Stormy stepped off the stage, he stumbled, temporarily blinded by the stage lights, and missed the first step.

  It happened in a second, a tiny blip, but Winona saw it as if in slow motion.

  Her stomach rose up like she was on the Tower Drop, and her mind and vision sharpened to present the scene in perfect clarity.

  The slick heel of Stormy’s Ferragamo wingtip hitting the edge of the step, the part without grip tape, and sliding downward.

  His weight thrown back, his body off-balance.

  His salt-and-pepper head dropping down-down-down. His toothy white smile—the one that meant he was stressed—stretched across his mouth right up until the last millisecond when—

  The back of his skull cracked against the edge of the stage.

  Blood spurting out in a crown around his head. The room beginning to scream. The silver-haired woman shrieking, then collapsin
g dizzily into the chair. The presenter, for some reason, taking his suit jacket off—because it was hard to get blood out of Italian wool? Because Sturgis “Stormy” Olsen might be cold there, lying at such an odd angle on the stairs?—and scrambling toward the edge of the stage, the five feet ten inches of crumpled pinstripe. The blood, so much blood, glistening in the soft light.

  And Winona, sitting there, still as her father’s favorite Rodin, as the screams around the room escalated, gruff shouts of “Call 911!” and “I’m a doctor! Let me through!” going up like flares throughout the tumult.

  And still, Winona, frozen in her chair.

  An orphan in two seconds flat. Totally alone in the world. Totally alone. A big, empty house waiting for her at the end of a long driveway, and a senile grandfather across town.

  Totally alone.

  Tears pricked her eyes at the thought. She blinked them away.

  She blinked it all away.

  Stormy caught the handrail on the stage, and his foot met the second step with ease. He came toward her, like a shark swimming through the applause, and she stood as she knew he expected her to, pushing the bracelet into the tender, burned skin on the underside of her wrist. Hoist the sun hoist the sun hoist the—

  Of course she had imagined it. Nothing could kill a man like Stormy.

  Winona Olsen would never be that lucky.

  She accepted the glass trophy her father passed to her, the perfectly practiced kiss he planted on her cheek as he squeezed her shoulders.

  It was probably just as well, she told herself. If her dad had died, she would have starved to death.

  She didn’t have the key to the locks he kept on the pantry.

  Two

  Lucille Pryce kicked off one of her hot pink no-slip clogs, then took the other off with her hand and pitched it against the wall. “Why aren’t the lights on, Marcus,” she yelled, slamming the front door behind her. She tried the light switch again. Again. Then she slapped the wall with her open hand. “Marcus!” Her mother’s spoon collection rattled in its wooden case on the wall.

  The linoleum was sticky against her bare feet as she stalked into the living room. The linoleum was always sticky, no matter how many times Lucille got up before school to mop it so her mother wouldn’t do the thing where she walked in the front door, dropped her purse, and blinked, slowly, like she was still in utter disbelief this was her life. There were a lot of reasons why Lucille mopped the floors, and scrubbed out the shower, and worked doubles at the diner, and haggled for the stolen supermarket steaks that Mr. Jessup sold out of the back of his El Camino so that her mom didn’t have to eat something out of a can on her goddamn birthday. But that was the main reason. That blinking, like her mom’s whole horrible life somehow got stuck in her eye, all at once.

  It had no effect on her older brother. No effect at all.

  “I wrote the check last weekend,” she said to the figure hunched on the sofa. “I stuck it in an envelope. All it needed was a stamp. A stamp! I gave you the money to walk down to Meijer and get it!”

  Marcus coughed. “Meijer’s a grocery store, idiot.”

  “They sell stamps,” Lucille said, “at the counter. So what, so you didn’t pay it—so you just like left the power bill where?”

  He shrugged. She could see him do it even in the dark.

  “Goddamit,” she said, and picked up the landline from its cradle on the wall. Then dropped it, because without power, it was, of course, dead. With a growl, she fished her phone out of her purse. It was a secondhand iPhone 4 with a cracked screen and a serious inability to work. When she couldn’t pull up the power company address, she texted Winona, and waited. She wouldn’t text her mom. Her mom didn’t need to worry about this.

  Marcus was still hunched over his own phone, like God’s own message to the angels was at the end of this level of Candy Crush. She didn’t ask him for help. She knew it wasn’t worth it. Instead she asked, casually, “How much battery do you have left?” The need to charge his phone could spur him into action.

  “Twelve percent. But I have one of those external batteries. Don’t worry about me.” He said it without a trace of irony.

  Lucille took a deep breath, dragged her hands through her knotty hair. It was eight thirty. She’d been the first cut at the diner tonight, but her mom would be there until ten. Then she’d lock up, and since she let Lucille take her car, she’d walk the fourteen blocks home. There was still time to fix this.

  If the power company answered their phone after hours. If they could turn the power back on before tomorrow.

  The pink-and-green light from his phone turned Marcus’s face into a deranged Care Bear’s. He had his foot propped up on the ottoman, like he always did, in a blue Velcro cast he’d bought himself off Craigslist six months ago. It was his excuse for everything, that foot. Not having a job. Not going to school. Not eating anything except Oreos and skulking out only at night to buy root beer at the 7-Eleven at midnight, like he was some kind of soda werewolf who was only healed at the stroke of twelve. Before that, it was a burn on his left hand that he’d gotten hitting his new bong. Marcus was twenty, but in terms of his priorities, he acted like a four-year-old who couldn’t see beyond the McDonald’s ball pit.

  When Lucille looked at him, she felt something inside of her chest shriveling up so violently that she was sure, someday, her mother would hear it and know her for the bitch she was.

  He just needs to grow up, Lucy, her mom liked to tell her, running her hand over Lucille’s thick blond hair while her daughter complained about the PlayStation 4 Deluxe Bullshit Edition that Marcus had just bought while she was working late to pay for her gym uniform.

  Yeah? she’d ask. Then why did I have to grow up first?

  Lucille picked up her work clogs, then went out the front door. She settled herself on the front step to wait for Winona’s response. It was long past dark, but that was always the case up here, a hundred miles north of nowhere. The sun belonged to people who lived in less godforsaken places.

  Already the neighbors’ porch lights were on. As Lucille pulled out her phone again, Cousin-Tammy-Next-Door stuck her head out her perpetually open window. “You okay there?”

  “I’m okay,” Lucille called, and put her hand up. “Just waiting on a call.”

  “Take care, sweetie. Say hi to Bonnie for me.”

  The fact that Cousin-Tammy-Next-Door didn’t say hi to Marcus made Lucille smile. “Say hey to Boomer and Sticks,” she said, even though Tammy’s calicos were mean little jerks.

  Tammy nodded, then snapped her window shut. Lucille’s phone buzzed.

  Here’s the number for Kingsville Electric, Winona wrote, and included it. Did Marcus screw up?

  Is the Pope Catholic?

  When Winona didn’t immediately text back, Lucille wrote, You okay?

  That was when her phone died. She swore, then swore again. Cousin-Tammy-Next-Door’s window opened half an inch, and Lucille shut her trap. The last thing their neighbors needed was to hear more about their money troubles, even if they were family. All of Kingsville knew that Lucille’s family was trash, the same way they knew that you’d go to hell for killing someone.

  Lucille believed in hell. She believed in her mom. She believed in getting out of Kingsville before it sucked the last of the piss and vinegar right out of her.

  With nothing else to do, she walked to the end of the drive and opened the mailbox. Coupons for Food Fair, for Meijer, credit card offers in her brother’s name that she immediately shredded there on the lawn. A circular from the brand-new Target that was open all night. It reminded her that she’d been meaning to go there with Winona, get candy necklaces from the bulk aisle. More bills, for water and her mom’s Visa and cable. Lucille did the math in her head.

  She’d been saving up for her and Winona’s Chicago Adventure (she secretly thought of it like that sometimes, like it was a Disneyland ride that was also very Adult and Boozy) for months now, but she didn’t have anywhere close to w
hat she needed. Not for their escape and the family’s bills, especially now that the Pryces would have to pay the reconnection fee for the electric. If Lucille still had the stash she’d been hiding away since she was fourteen—

  She stopped herself, firmly. She didn’t have it. Marcus had taken it from her. He had taken it from her, and that night, at the police station, the world had given her Winona back in exchange.

  It was repayment with interest, as far as Lucille was concerned.

  As she stood there, toeing the dirt, staring off into the middle distance (the place that correct math answers were usually kept, in Lucille’s experience), her eyes focused in on the Crown Vic across the street. A little beaten up, a little rusted out, especially around a dent on the driver door handle.

  Lucille didn’t know that dent, or that car, which wouldn’t be weird outside of Kingsville. But Lucille was 50 percent Pryce, 50 percent Folgarelli, and at least 80 percent related to every soul in this neighborhood. And none of them drove a car that looked like it rolled right out of a cop charity auction.

  She tilted her head—she tried not to do that, she knew it made her look like a golden retriever—and she squinted, and there he was, a man hunkered down in the driver’s seat, texting like he was an actor in an off-brand soap opera. A plainclothes cop. Who ever texted with their elbows up on the wheel? Someone who wanted you to see their phone, that’s who. Someone who wanted you to think they were doing anything other than casing your house.

  Lucille swore for a solid minute before storming back in the front door.

  “Marcus,” she yelled. “Marcus!”

  To her shock, he came hobbling in from the living room. His face was sallow from his processed-sugar diet and his apparent allergy to sunlight.

  “There’s a cop outside,” she said. “He had binoculars around his neck, like he’s a forest ranger and you’re Smokey Bear.”

  Marcus shrugged, and turned, ostensibly to return to the couch.

  “Oh, so I guess this isn’t news to you? Of course not,” Lucille said, and she stormed after him into the kitchen, backing him up against the counter. “Are you dealing again?”

  He stared back at her like she was a Super Bowl hologram or a ghost.