He blinks. "Fine. Vampire Red."

She makes a pshhh sound.

"Fuck that noise." She hurls the Vampire Red box at his head. "I was always going to choose Blackbird Black, dummy. You can't sway fate. Tsk, tsk, tsk. And that, dear boy, is the lesson we learned here today."

And with that, she darts back into the bathroom and slams the door.

NINE

The Notebook

Ashley hears the faucet start.

"Perfect," he says. He hops down, grabs Miriam's messenger bag sitting by his feet where she dropped it, and hoists it up onto the bed.

He casts one more paranoid glance at the door. She should be in there a while. A home dye job isn't quick work. All that washing, all that combing through, all that waiting.

Satisfied, he starts going through the bag.

Item after item ends up in his hand, then on the bed. Lip balm. Hair ties. Small MP3 player so scratched and dinged it looks like it has been run through a wood chipper. Pair of tawdry romance novels (one with Smooth Blond Fabio on the cover, another with Dark Goateed Fabio). Clark's Teaberry gum (he doesn't know what the fuck "teaberry" is). A squeaky toy for dogs; it looks like a squirrel clutching an acorn in his mouth. Before he has time to think on that, out come the weapons. A can of pepper spray. A butterfly knife. Another can of pepper spray. A hand grenade –

"Jesus Christ," he says. Swallowing hard, he gently sets the grenade down on the pillow behind him. He steadies it, takes a deep breath, and then goes back into the bag.

Finally, he finds what he's looking for.

The diary.

"And Bingo was his Name-O."

It's a black notebook, its plastic cover nicked. The book is swollen, like a tumor filled with words instead of blood. He gives it a quick flip-through: tattered pages, some dog-eared, all colors and styles of pen (red, black, blue, Sharpie, ballpoint, uniball, one in fucking crayon, by the looks of it), each page dated, each page starting with Dear Diary and ending with Love, Miriam.

"So what about you?" Miriam asks, and Ashley damn near voids his bowels. He looks up, heart racing, expecting her to be standing there, but she's not. She's still on the other side of the bathroom door – she's yelling through, talking to him while she rocks the dye job.

He takes a deep breath. "What about me, what?"

"Where you from? What do you do for a living? Who are you?"

He flips to the front of the diary.

"Uh," he says, trying to focus on the words. "I'm from Pennsylvania. I'm an, uh, a traveling salesman."

"Yeah, right," she calls back. "And I'm a circus monkey."

"I've never had sex with a circus monkey before."

He flips a few more pages. His eyes drift over the words. His mouth starts to go dry. His heart races. It makes sense, but… He turns another ten pages and reads more. He mouths the words he reads without speaking them aloud –