Riley sighed. “You’re so hot when you’re prepared.”
He was this close to making her say his name in that breathy, anxious way when the piercing sound of the smoke detector rang out.
“Are you kidding me right now?” he snarled.
“Hey, Nick.” Mrs. Penny’s voice echoed from her bullhorn over the incessant beeping. “There’s a fire in the kitchen. Willicott microwaved a burrito in the tin foil again.”
“We need a new place to live,” he muttered, reaching for his pants.
11
6:25 a.m., Friday, August 14
“Pathetic.”
Something hard and pointy jabbed Riley in the rib as she tried to suck humid air into her lungs.
“My grandmother could have outrun you on her one-hundredth birthday.” Elanora sniffed in derision and slammed her walking stick into the ground. “And she was missing her right leg from the knee down.”
Riley rolled over onto her stomach and accidentally sucked a blade of grass up her nose. “What…does…running…sprints…have…to do with…being…psychic?”
Ten feet away, Gabe vomited gracefully behind a tree. His wind sprints had been half a mile long.
The sun was up, and the early morning swelter was accessorized by the obnoxious buzzing of cicadas. It was too early for the bumper-to-bumper rush hour commuters. But there were plenty of joggers loping past and shooting sympathetic glances their way. She was too tired to block out their thoughts.
That old lady reminds me of Sister Gertrude from junior high.
I can’t believe I wasted a bikini wax on that guy.
Did I just run through Justin’s fart cloud? God, what did he eat?
“I do not need to explain my teachings to you,” Elanora announced.
“No, but it would be nice,” Riley wheezed.
The thick breeze stirred, bringing with it a scent so bad Riley had to take another whiff just to verify that it was indeed the worst thing she’d ever smelled. Burt, however, seemed to enjoy smelling rotting, half-cooked roadkill and nosed the air for more.
She wondered if it was the fart cloud from the jogger and if he’d had his intestinal tract looked at.
Burt snuffled off onto the overgrown lot where knee-high dried grass and dying trees dotted the unkempt lot. In the center of the land that nature had given up on reclaiming was a Tudor-style home that had once probably not been an eyesore. Abandoned for the past decade, it squatted on the land under a coat of peeling paint and boarded-up windows.
The For Sale sign had been there as long as Riley had lived next door.
“Burt, come back here,” she called. The dog lifted his head then looked back and forth between her and the house, debating.
“Now, please.”
Reluctantly, the dog trotted back to her side, and she leaned on him to regain her feet.
It still smelled like something earthy and gross but fainter now. In Central Pennsylvania, bad smells were quite common. Between paper mills and mushroom farms, breezes always carried with them a hint of something awful.
“You will complete twenty push-ups. Now.” Her grandmother announced, returning to her folding chair and sitting primly. Burt wandered over and collapsed in the shadow of Evil Elanora, tongue lolling in the grass. He’d survived two of the ten wind sprints Evil Elanora had forced on her.
Apparently burning off physical energy honed the mind…or some bullshit like that. Riley was too dehydrated and nauseated to remember.
“Why are you limping? Basil women don’t limp,” her grandmother complained.
“I slipped on a flaming burrito while running for a fire extinguisher.”
