More so, if anything.
Yep.
I definitely do not belong in this group.
I’m the not-even-new-girlfriend.
I’m the woman he was mad at last night for tricking him into a spite date. And I’m incredibly wary of how happy he’s been to see me.
“Your mother?” Simon asks Lana.
“She settled down. Two neighbors came over to sit with her when they heard you were here solo with the boys.”
“Very kind of them.”
“They’re the best.” She turns to me, still smiling, though not as big as Simon usually smiles. “Hi. I’m Lana. And you’re Bea Best. My mom used to send me articles about your family. Nice to finally meet you.”
I shake her hand, and the anxiety and weirdness immediately fade. “The good articles, or the bad articles?”
“The bad ones. Better for gossip, unfortunately. But I crashed my bike at your parents’ house once, when I was eight or nine, and your dad gave me a cupcake to make me feel better. I always remembered him because of how nice it was to get a treat for crashing instead of being yelled at to get off his lawn.”
That sounds like my dad. “If you’d been two houses over…”
“Don’t I know it.” She shudders. “The Stoffels were the worst.”
“Still are.”
“Only the good die young,” Simon murmurs.
Charlie flings an arm around Lana’s shoulder. “Mum.Mum. Mum, can we have cotton candy?”
Eddie crowds her other side. “You haven’t bought us cotton candy in forever.”
“Not since we were babies.”
“So long ago we can’t even remember.”
“I bought them six meals apiece,” Simon tells her.
Lana smiles again. “Clearly, you should’ve done seven.”
“And we want to do musical chairs,” Eddie says.
“But Bea can’t come,” Charlie adds. “She’s banned.”
“She’d be bad luck.”
Lana looks at me.
“She’s terrible luck,” Simon agrees. “The worst kind of awful.”
“The best kind of bad is what we call it in my house,” I tell them all. “You know. Because we’re theBests.”
He suddenly looks at me. “Bestie.”
“Yes?”
“Did you tell me a story about your name beingBestie?”
