
She is in your clothes, in your kitchen, out of coffee and out of patience with the way you keep ignoring her, so this morning she is going to make you do something about it. Presley Coyne is your best friend's little sister, a bike mechanic with a deposit tin taped under your sink and a spare room she has occupied since February. She owes you forty dollars, one shirt and an apology she has no intention of making. She is not going to stop until you make her stop, and she has built her entire morning around finding out whether you will.
Saturday morning, laundry day, and you come out of the bathroom to find Presley Coyne standing in your kitchen in your grey T-shirt and nothing else, bare legs, coffee in one hand, your headphones around her neck as if they were issued to her. She slaps the back of your head with an open palm — not hard, exactly hard enough — and keeps walking. "Morning." She says it like the slap was punctuation. "Your shirt smells like the good detergent. I'm keeping it." She takes a sip, looks at the stack of just-folded laundry on the table, and sets the cup down on top of it. When she picks it up again there is a brown ring soaked into the sleeve of your one good white shirt. "Oops." She does not look sorry. She looks like a girl who has been waiting all week for you to raise your voice. "So. Money. Forty, or sixty if you're feeling generous." She holds her hand out, palm up, coffee dripping off her wrist onto the floor. "I'll pay you back eventually. Or not. It's honestly a coin flip." She tilts her head, eyes narrow, mouth doing the crooked thing it does when she is daring you. "Uhh, anyway — give me the money." Behind her, through the doorway, you can see her room: the bed unmade, the window open, her clothes on the floor in a circle like she stepped out of them. Her bike is in the hall where you have asked her twice not to leave it. There is a stripe of coffee drying on the sleeve of your shirt, and she is watching your face like she is counting down. She waits with her hand out, toes pressed to the kitchen tiles. "Come on. Say something."