I push some rice around on my plate. “I do like a good list. You’ll have to stop talking to Kara or she’ll give away all my secrets.”
“I’m sure you have more exciting secrets.” His lips turn up in a smile and mine do, too. We’re back to the flirting, the witty banter, and when he drops me off at my house, he doesn’t kiss me, but I can tell he wants to. But he’s a nice guy, the kind that tries to impress you on a first date, and doesn’t steal kisses. And as I’m sitting at the kitchen table eating one of my mom’s famous chocolate chip cookies, a text chimes on my phone.
It’s true—almost. Tonight was a perfectly adequate night, but I’m not sure that when Kara grills me about it, I’ll call it fun. Caleb is nice enough, but there’s definitely something missing there. And for the first time in a long time, I don’t feel like waiting ten days to find out what exactly that thing is.
Oh god.Did I seriously just typecasual?
I’m just tucking my phone into my pocket when I open the door to my bedroom and my bare feet come into contact withsomething wet and cold. A breath later they slip out from under me. I crash onto my back, and my hands slip and slide as I struggle to grab hold of anything in the darkness of my room. Something thick and oily coats my hands and my feet, and as my eyes adjust, I see that the floor is shining with a white slickness. While I was out with Caleb, being completely traumatized by last night’s kiss, Asher was continuing to torment me. He was rolling out what must be hundreds of feet of Saran Wrap. It’s thick under me, taut over the thin, worn carpet, running in every direction, like a second floor under my feet. I raise a hesitant finger to my nose.Mayonnaise.Ihatemayonnaise.
In my brain there are a million perfectly orchestrated pranks prepared for this summer. But as the light of the little fish-cleaning house glares into my room, throwing slashes of light over my floor that now glistens with the world’s most disgusting condiment… a new idea overshadows all of them.
It’s on.
DAY 8
Asher
When I leave for a run around ten, I’m not nervous that Sidney is sitting on the deck staring daggers at me. Because Sidney doesn’t do anything on a whim.She’dnever decide at 8:05 p.m. to go to the store and buy twenty rolls of Saran Wrap. To her credit, she would have worked out the square footage and known that she didn’t need twenty rolls. That it was total overkill, and she could get by with twelve.
After two hours of watching a movie with our parents, I snuck away to the bathroom, opened her bedroom window, and then told everyone I was going to bed. I felt like crap so I’m sure I looked it. Totally believable. Twenty minutes later, when everyone moved down to the fire pit with giant margarita mugs in hand, I slipped in through the window and went to work.
Sometimes the beauty of a prank is in the spontaneity of it. The thrill of being caught, the last-minute problem-solving. It took me an hour just to tape the Saran Wrap to the baseboards and stretch it in a giant haphazard weave across the room, making sure I covered every square inch. Of course, if I had planned things out like Sidney, I would have realized I should start the mayo at the far end of the room, and work my way back to the window. Sidney wouldn’t have had mayonnaise-covered shoessitting in her room all night. But even if those sneakers smell like mayo for the rest of my life, it will be worth it to think about Sidney sliding across the room when she got back from her date.
It’s a sweltering hot day, and I spend it on the lake, swimming the shoreline after lunch and lying on the dock through the afternoon.
“Ash!” I’m sitting on our deck reading a book when my mom’s voice rings out of the kitchen. It’s close to dinnertime, and I take my book with me, knowing I’m about to be enlisted for some sort of food prep. But Mom isn’t working on dinner, she’s purging or something. The table is covered with the contents of our fridge as my mom holds a package of some sort of meat up to her nose.
She thrusts the package at me. “Smell this.”
“Um. Okay?” I sniff the package she’s holding out toward me. “It… smells like meat, I think.”
“Like good meat?”
“Yes?” I don’t know if I’ve actually smelled raw meat before. “It sort of smells like nothing?”
She nods at me, like I’ve just confirmed she’s not losing her mind, and turns away from me, pulling another white Styrofoam package out of the refrigerator and giving it an appraising glance before sniffing it. I’m about to ask her what she’s doing when I smell it. I can’t pinpoint exactly what it is, just that it’s wrong and out of place, andbad.
“Go smell the drains in the bathroom,” Mom says with a sigh. “Maybe something’s backing up?”
I don’t know if that’s how plumbing works, but Mom looks so frustrated sitting on the floor of our kitchen sniffing all of our food that I’m not going to question it.
“Where’s Dad?”
“I sent him to the store for baking soda boxes.”
I nod, even though the longer I stand here, the less I believe baking soda is going to fix this problem.
In the bathroom I smell the sink drain, and the tub, and then the toilet, just to cover all of my bases. But now that this odor has invaded my nose, it’s all I smell.
Smells are weird. On one hand, they’re unmistakable. The smell of pancakes on the griddle can take me back to Saturday mornings at my grandma’s house the second I smell it. I can tell if a pool has too much chlorine without ever getting in the water. But right now, the smell overtaking our house is like a word stuck on the tip of my tongue. Every time I think I can name it, it’s just out of reach.
I go from room to room, pulling up blinds and opening windows as far as they’ll go. First the living room, then my parents’ room, the bathroom next to it, and then my room. I might throw up. There’s nothing different about my room, except for the overwhelming smell. Whatever is in this house, my room is ground zero.
“Mom?” I shout toward my doorway as I start to pull things away from the wall, looking for vents. The only explanation for a smell this bad is that something has died somewhere.
My mom stops a few feet back from the door. “Oh god,” she mutters.
“I think something died in here. Maybe we should have Nadine call somebody?”
