The Uninvited by Tim Wynne-Jones

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