“Tillie Jean, you are sobusted. Nice try, sis. That really worth leaving Max alone for?”
She jumps back up straight, wipes the guilty look off her face fast enough that it’salmostlike it was never there, then gestures around the room. “What are youdoing?”
“First rule of superstitions.”
“What’s the first rule of superstitions?”
“Can’t talk about it or it won’t work.” I jerk my head toward the door. “If you want the Fireballs to win tomorrow…”
“Dude, you have anice sculpture. Where’d you even get that? Did you drive an ice sculpture all the way in from the city? And you need pink balloons and streamers for your superstition?Why?”
“To make you ask why when you crashed my private party for one.”
The disco lights hit a speck of glitter in one of her eyebrows while she peers at me. “You’re stressed.”
“You’re here. Of course I’m stressed.”
She grins.
I grab her by the arm, realize Grady’s goat is loose in my house again, that Waverly’s hiding beneath the table with all the food on it that Sue will undoubtedly want to eat, and I have lost all control.
A walkie-talkie buzzes to life on Waverly’s dude. “Cloud Six, we’ve apprehended an elderly woman on the west—”
“Who’re you calling elderly, you poophead?” Nana’s voice interjects on the walkie-talkie.
“Oh my god,” Tillie Jean whispers. She wrenches free of my grip and dances across the bare living room floor. “Pop, Cooper’s got a celebrity up here. Does Beck know?” She lifts her own walkie-talkie. “Grady. Go see Beck and Sarah. They might have the—hey.”
Waverly’s guy has her walkie-talkie now. And the goat. “Leave,” he says.
“Don’t talk to my girlfriend like that,” Max growls from my stairway. “Who the fuck do you think you are?”
My stairway. How did he get in here? Did he climb the fucking wall? How long has he been in here?
“Teammate rules,” I say. “The big guy belongs. Can’t talk about it. Need you to leave. Take TJ and Grady and the goat and whoever else is up here before you ruin the rest of the season for me.”
He frowns at me and folds his arms over his chest.
Can’t blame him.
I’m rarely this straightforward. I always have an excuse for everything and never let my weaknesses show.
It’s a curse and a gift.
“You know all these people?” Waverly’s security guy asks. Pretty sure he’s the second in command, but I don’t know his name. And while the rest of my family looks goofy with the disco ball lights flashing over their faces, he looks downright scary being irregularly lit by a rotating mirror ball.
Good quality in a pop star’s bodyguard.
He’d probably be terrifying in a glitter accident too.
“Family,” I say. “If you catch a middle-aged couple—”
“Got a middle-aged couple making out on the north border,” his walkie-talkie announces. That sounds like Kiva. “What the fuck’s going on?”
“Nosy family, according to Rock,” the guy next to me answers her.
He’s angling to the table too, like he knows where Waverly’s hiding and he’ll protect her privacy at all costs.
I’m not enough.
