“Ruthie is from good, loving family,” he informed me in a dead-eyed Russian monotone. “They will give P.M. the best home and take excellent care of her.”
So, Artyom’s girlfriend was ethereal, smart, and had a loving family willing to adopt a pittie.
I thought of my mother, who’d responded with an “Absolutely not, and don’t you even think of bothering your father with this!”when I texted her about the idea of maybe driving P.M. down to our Minneapolis mansion. What would that even be like, I bitterly wondered, to have a family who wasn’t annoyed with you all the time and actually supported your endeavors?
But I pushed down my intense burst of jealousy to ask the same questions I would if Ruthie had walked into the shelter off the street, looking to adopt. “So, you live in Chicago with your parents? In a house or an apartment?”
“Indiana, actually,” Ruthie said, wrinkling her nose. “At least until I bounce in September.”
She grinned and gave her purple hoodie a proud tug. “I just got accepted early decision to Northwestern.”
“So, you’re a senior… in high school.” I looked between her and Artyom, alarm bells going off in my head. “And you and Artyom are dating?”
“Eww, no!” Ruthie made a disgusted face.
Artyom furrowed his heavy brow at me.
“Yommie’s my cousin!” she said at the same time he said, “Rusha is my cousin!”
“Also, Rusha is much too young for a boyfriend,” Artyom added with a downright offended look, as if I should’ve known that the vision of perfection he hadn’t bothered to introduce was yet another relative of his who could easily double as a supermodel.
Ruthie glared at him. “If by ‘too young’ you mean only a couple of months away from being a consenting adult, I agree. Besides…”
She glanced between me and her apparent cousin. “I thought the two of you were dating. Are you, like, in an open relationship or something?”
“Nyet,” Artyom answered. Just that one word.
So it was on me to finish explaining. “We’re not dating. We’re just…”
I struggled for the right label. “Sworn enemies” wouldn’t make sense to someone who hadn’t seen how he’d treated me since the start of winter semester. But “friends” would be way too much of a stretch. In the end, I went with, “…acquaintances. Artyom is an acquaintance who happened to be in the right place at the right time to help me with P.M.”
Ruthie narrowed her eyes at me this time. “So, Yommie made us drop everything to fly out here with a side quest to get your car from the mechanics because you’re—let me check my notes.” Ruthie pantomimed a pad with her hands. “Just acquaintances.”
She didn’t put the last two words in air quotes, but her tone made them clear.
I opened my mouth to defend myself, but then the rest of her words caught up with me. “Wait, you got my car?”
I glanced toward the carport on the other side of the bushes. Sure enough, there was my sunny-side yellow Mini Cooper—not Artyom’s truck. And it looked way shinier than when I’d parked it in front of Tommy Hanson’s house, which made me ask, “Why did you have to take it to a mechanic?”
Ruthie’s eyes became slits, and she looked up at Artyom to ask, “Seriously?”
Artyom shifted from foot to foot, looking more uncomfortable than I’d ever seen him.
Before he could answer, another car appeared—Artyom’s big black truck, rolling to a stop beside my much smaller Mini Cooper.
He must have had those two guards of his—or whatever they were—drive his truck while he brought my car back himself.
But instead of one of his college-aged goons, two middle-aged adults stepped out: a curvy Black woman and a muscular White man wearing nothing but a t-shirt, even though it couldn’t have been more than 25 degrees outside.
The gray in their hair suggested they were at least in their late-40s, but they looked much younger. Both were attractive ina way that was clearly genetic—not the result of biweekly Botox appointments and annual plastic surgeries, like my adopted mother.
I didn’t know the woman, but, even as the worst hockey fan ever, I instantly recognized Nikolai “Mount Nik” Rustanov, the former star hockey player who’d bought the Indiana Polar a couple of decades ago.
It wasn’t hard to guess that these were the two adults whose DNA had combined to create the perfect girl standing in front of me—Ruthie’s mom and dad.
“Is that her?” Ruthie’s mom ran around the bush divider even faster than her daughter, and she fell to her knees in front of P.M. even more dramatically. “Oh, baby. What did those terrible people do to you?”
P.M. just licked her face in response.
