eight
“Okay,but why would you open the door with your face mask still on?” Violet laughed.
“Because I thought it was you,” I said. I swear she’d asked me for the story three times in our fifteen minutes of rollerblading and she laughed a little bit harder every time. I hadn’t bothered to tell her about it when it first happened, but now that she knew who Charlie was, I figured it was a fun story to share.
“But a face mask is so easy to take off.”
“It said to leave it on for fifteen minutes, and it hadn’t been the full time yet! I’m not going to waste my money by throwing out a face mask while it’s still working.”
“Well, then you run into this as a potential problem,” Violet said.
“Maybe I’ll just never answer the door again.”
“Better yet, never leave your room again,” Violet said. “You can have your parents put a little food slot on the door like in Harry Potter.”
“Does that mean you’ll break me out of my room with a flying car at the end of the summer so we can go to school?”
“Obviously,” she said with a big grin that made her freckles wrinkle up cutely. Despite my continued embarrassment andannoyance at how my morning had gone, I smiled back just as widely. Violet had this contagious personality, where if she was happy, it meant you would absolutely be happy too. It was one of the things I loved most about her.
“So, are you looking forward to starting work?” Violet asked.
“How dare you bring up the forbidden topic?” I shook my head and tsked. All I wanted was a few days where I didn’t have to think about my job and everything terrible that came with it. “Honestly, we were having such a lovely afternoon and you have to go and ruin it by— Hey!” I yelled as Violet shoved me lightly, making me veer off course slightly. “Interference!”
“You can’t call interference,” Violet laughed. “It’s not like we’re in a competition.”
“I will call interference where I want and when I want!” I crossed my arms over my chest and started pumping my legs faster to get ahead.
“Okay, okay, I’m sorry!” Violet called after me. I slowed down a little as she sped up and caught up to me. “Forgive me?”
“I shouldn’t,” I said, trying to keep my face straight but utterly failing.
“Good thing you always do anyway, right?” Violet asked rhetorically. “But if you want a change of subject… how about we talk about Charlie?”
“I swear, if you ask me for that story one more time, I am going home.”
“You’re going to go home... where Charlie is?” Violet asked with a raised eyebrow. When she’d swung by to meet me, Matthew and Charlie had been making some weird protein smoothie concoction in the kitchen. Charlie had offered to let us have some, but I didn’t even want to smell it, let alone taste it.
“You don’t know that he’s there,” I said. “He and Matthew could have left.”
“They could have,” Violet conceded. “But do you think they did?”
“I hate you,” I said.
Violet laughed. “Come on, seriously. What’s going on between you and Charlie?”
I frowned. “What do you mean? Nothing’s going on between me and Charlie. Do you mean what happened the other morning? Because I really don’t think he was actually upset by it or anything, you know.”
“No,” Violet said pointedly, “I’m talking about the fact that you have a mega-crush on him.”
Oh. That.
Honestly, if I’d known Violet was going to make such a big deal about this crush, I would have done a better job of hiding it. I wasn’t sure why she found it so interesting, honestly. I had a new crush practically every week, and while this one being my brother’s best friend made it a little more interesting than usual, it didn’t mean it was that different from the rest. Violet was acting as if I was going to start dating him any second, even though I’d told her I absolutely couldn’t do that—as she herself had pointed out, my brother would kill me. She seemed to have forgotten that little key piece of information. Even though the forbidden nature of it made it all the more tempting, it wasn’t worth the risk.
“Nothing’s going on,” I said. “And nothing is going to happen between us.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Violet said.
“What makes you say that?”
