“Or else you pay the consequences. And in my case, that would mean Ricky sitting on my head and farting or something.”
Ash laughed.
“Besides,” Cassidy said, “it’ll help me not be as creeped out about this place if I’m focused on looking for beautiful things. Plus my mask.”
“Okay,” Ash said. “But I’ll give you a hint. You have to let go of your normal assumptions if you’re going to see the beauty of Skeleton Shack. Take these broken light bulbs, for instance.” He pointed to the chandelier. “It just looks like dirt in there, right? But if you look more closely, you’ll see that there are tiny green blades of grass sprouting from the layers of dust.”
Cassidy leaned in. “Oh wow. You’re right. That’s amazing.”
Ash grinned.
“Okay, so what happens if I win?” asked Cassidy.
“Win?”
“If I find three beautiful things. In my family, if you beat a challenge, you get a prize.”
“Is the prize Ricky not farting on you?”
Now it was Cassidy’s turn to laugh. “Thatandsomething else. Like you take over one of the winner’s chores—dishwashing or unloading the groceries.”
“All right…” Ash said, thinking. “Then if you beat this challenge, I’ll build the rest of the fence for you.”
As soon as he said it, though, he regretted it. Working on the fence was the only excuse he had to spend time with Cassidy after they found her leopard mask.
But it was too late. She was already stepping boldly into the dilapidated kitchen, examining the peeled Formica counter and opening cabinets with aplomb. A flurry of moths flew out of one of them, and Cassidy leaped back with a yelp.
“You okay?” Ash asked, at her side in an instant.
She made a face at the cabinets and the stench of rotting wood wafting out of them. “Yeah, I’m fine. But that is definitelynotbeautiful.”
Igor snarled at the moths as he put himself protectively between Cassidy and the cabinets.
After the kitchen, there was a narrow hallway, its walls lined with floating bookshelves nailed crookedly everywhere. If Ash’s parents ever saw this hall, his stepdad would have a heart attack over the shoddy carpentry—seriously, some of the shelves were attached at angles that made it surprising that books could even balance on them without sliding right off the slope—and Ash’s librarian mom would faint over so many neglected books left to the spiders and rats.
Cassidy, however, paused and ran her fingers over the spines of the worn books.
“‘I carry your heart with me,’” she said.
Ash froze. “What?”
“It’s a famous quote,” Cassidy said, poking at a poetry collection. “By E. E. Cummings.”
“Oh. Right. Of course,” Ash said as casually as he could. But his pulse pounded in his ears without any sense of nonchalance.
“And it’s a beautiful thing,” she said, smiling at the unexpected find inside such an ugly house.
Ash had to stop himself from saying that her standing there was also a beautiful sight. He was appalled by the depths of his own cheesiness and could only imagine the verbal whipping he’d get from Onny and True if they ever discovered he’d eventhoughtit.
He cleared his throat and turned to the other side of the hallway, busying himself with scanning the shelves for Cassidy’s wayward leopard-print mask.
“Ooh, I found another beautiful book,” she said after a few minutes.
“Doesn’t count!” Ash said. “You can’t use two of the same category in the challenge. Like I couldn’t find another little plant sprouting.”
“You didn’t tell me that was a rule.”
“I’m the gamemaster,” Ash said. “That means I get to clarify as we go.”
