Last week, there was a moment when I was sure Asher was going to kiss me on the swings. There was music playing on his phone—this guitar-heavy ballad about girls and cars—and he wrapped his arm around my chain, so we were right next to each other. But it didn’t happen, and I don’t know if that was me or him. Maybe we were both just waiting. For what? I don’t know.
But right now, Asher isn’t waiting for me on the swings. He’s not even alone on the swings. Lindsay is on my swing, her seat swaying gently, as she and Asher kiss. I shouldn’t watch, but I do. Because I hope that he’ll pull away. That he’ll scream, “No, I’m saving my swing-kiss for Sidney,” and he’ll shove her into the dirt. But that’s howmytwisted brain works, not his. Because he doesn’t pull away, and he doesn’t push her, but inside all I can do is scream.
That night, I don’t go down to the fire. I tell my mom I’m not feeling good—which is true, I feel like my insides have been ripped out—and while everyone else is roasting marshmallows and smashing them between graham crackers, I get to work filling Asher’s shampoo bottle with mayonnaise, and adding cayenne pepper to his toothpaste tube.
I manage to avoid Asher for a full twenty-four hours, but thenext day I fall on my face when my flip-flops are glued to the stairs outside our deck. Asher thinks he can kiss Lindsayandknock me on my ass? Anger coils inside me. If he wants war, I’ll give it to him.
DAY 49
Sidney
“How are you two liking the house?” Mom is looking at Sylvie and Greg, but it’s obvious she’s talking to me and Asher. “I know you were skeptical about sharing. The house. The bathroom.” She does look at me now. “But it seems like it worked out.” Yes. Somehow, against all odds, this has all worked out.
This feels likethe moment.The one I’ve been waiting for, where we’re presented with footage of our morning breakfasts and late-night couch snuggles. We’ve gotten a little braver since our overnight at Asher’s house. I’m sleeping in his bed more often, sometimes all night. Because there’s something really comforting about being in the same space as Asher. And even though the doors are locked and our parents are long asleep, and most nights we start a strategic load of laundry in the little room between his room and his parents’, sometimes I can’t shake the feeling that they must know there are two people breathing in that room. Bionic parent hearing, or something.
While I’m mentally panicking, Asher says, cool and calm, “Sidney isn’t as bad of a housemate as I would have expected.”
I smile and roll my eyes. I don’t even have to pretend when I say, “Ditto.”
Mom takes a bite of her burger and when she puts it downon her plate I can feel that something is coming. But there’s no confrontation. There’s just a glance exchanged, from Mom to Dad. An eyebrow raise from Sylvie, and a nod from Greg.
It’s Sylvie who speaks first, her shoulders rising a little as she announces, “We’re buying the house.”
“Thishouse,” Greg adds, in case Asher and I are feeling extra slow this evening. But there is nothing slow about my brain right now. If anything, it just got a serious adrenaline jolt and is running laps around the room.Buying this house.I love this house.
Everyone is talking at the same time, my Dad saying what a good price they’re getting, Sylvie suggesting they rent the house out for a few weeks a summer, since “the kids” won’t want to hang out with them for an entire summer anymore. “Maybe if we bribe them,” Mom says, giving me a soft smile. “Free food all summer,” Sylvie says, with a glance at Asher. Greg wants to turn the laundry room into a second master bathroom.
Asher isn’t saying anything, he’s just eating his burger and sneaking glances at me. And it’s like I can see right through him. To the fears that finally have a concrete location in my mind. These are the rooms that it will happen in—when it’s all over, this is where Asher and I will be forced to coexist. It won’t be a dinner here and there shared at each other’s house, it will be all of this. The couch where we crossed out of enemy territory, the bed where he kissed me, the kitchen where I made him pancakes. Someday I won’t just have to see him, I’ll have to marinate in these memories. And how many new memories—bigger memories—will there be by then? Asher smiles at me, and I push it all away. I look at the happy faces that surround the table, and I let mine join in.
Asher
I like to think I couldn’t have made it through the last five years without knowing how to read Sidney, but she’s not giving anything away tonight. When we leave the dinner table I’m braced for the meltdown. The announcement that our parents are buying this house together seems like the ultimate fuel for Sidney’s particular brand of panic. But dinner ends and dishes are washed, and I don’t get one. As the silence stretches on into the evening, I can’t help but wonder if this is worse than a freakout. If all of this silence means she’s thinking up scenarios worse than I could ever imagine. What we need is a distraction. Something to take our minds off of this wonderful—but also horrifying—new development.
“Let’s go to Nadine’s tonight.”
Sidney’s face is pressed against my arm, and she pushes herself up off the couch. Last night we were in my bed, but tonight we’re back to the couch. “Tonight?”
“We bought everything already. And trash day isn’t for two more days, so Dad’s got frozen fish guts in the freezer.” Sidney’s nose scrunches up and I wonder if she’s as traumatized by fish as I am. “Let’s just do it.” It feels like I have to do something, and this is the only thing I can think of. Our war on Nadine is what brought us together. Maybe it can keep us from falling apart.
Sid looks a little groggy, like maybe she had fallen asleep against me. It’s hard to tell when she hasn’t really talked to me all evening. “I guess.” She rubs her eye with her palm and smooths her hand over her hair as she sits up. “We have everything?”
Sidney
An hour later, close to 2 a.m., we’re pulling into the driveway a few houses down from Nadine, where Kara’s grandmother lives. I like to think we have a standing invitation to park here, since it’s too late for me to call Kara so she can give her grandma a heads-up. But it’s so late there’s no way she’s going to even notice us here, unless we’re loud. And that’s the opposite of what we’ll be.
I open the back trunk and start tearing open the white cardboard containers filled with plastic forks. Five boxes later, I dump them into a brown paper bag, and then get to work on the next five. Asher thinks we’re going to need at least twenty boxes to finish. Tonight’s prank is our last, our pièce de résistance. While I fork the yard, Asher will Saran Wrap Nadine’s car with enough layers that it will take her hours to untangle it all. And between the layers, he’ll wrap in frozen fish guts, courtesy of our dads’ fishing trips. They won’t be frozen by the time she has to unwrap it. I can’t help thinking—again—how much I wish we had a camera out here, so we could see her reactions. Our imaginations will have to be enough of a reward for this one, though.
With a brown bag of ammo in each of our arms, Asher and I cross through the two yards that separate us from Nadine’s.
“I forgot the Saran Wrap.” Asher stops where he is and looks back toward the car. “You start, and I’ll be right back.”
I nod—not wanting to talk any more than we have to—and lay the bags of plastic along the driveway, taking a handful with me onto the grass. I shake the can of orange spray paint—the special kind of bottle used to mark lawns with—and point it down at the ground, spraying it over the grass in long sweeping motions as I walk. Thankfully I remembered to wear my crappy old shoes, because even though I can’t see it in the dark, I’m sure a fine spray of paint is dusting the edge of my right foot.
As I shove forks into the lawn, tracing the lines of spray paint first, and then filling in the gaping middle with hundreds of forks, I lose track of time. I’m sticking the forks into the grass with surprising speed, but it still feels like it’s taking forever. We should have done a test section at the house, timed it, and figured out how long the entire hand would take us.
My fourth bag of forks is almost gone, and we have a few more in the car, but I haven’t even started on the top half of the hand or the finger yet. I’m really glad we didn’t attemptsomething this intricate with potatoes. What a train wreck that would have been.
I’m filling in the lower half of the middle finger when I hear the jangling of metal and the yip of a dog. Before I can react, Nadine’s tiny little terrier is at my feet, nipping and barking, and jumping at my knees. I drop the paper bag in my arms and turn toward the house. Nothing. I didn’t hear a door, don’t hear anything now, but I can’t risk it. And I can’t risk going back the way I came, along the driveway, where the side door is, so I take off for the lake.
