“Dad’s sugar cookies are the best,” Ella said, laughing. “We still use his grandma’s recipe. And I think there might be some waiting for you when we get home.”
“Oh, that’s what I like to hear,” Dalton said with a smile.
“Do you want to hear my favorite Andy story?” she asked suddenly.
“Definitely,” he told her.
He missed his best friend every day and he loved to hear Ella and her family mention him, even in passing.
“Well, this was back in high school,” Ella said. “I had finally gotten my braces off, but I had a really hard time with my retainers.”
“You had braces?” Dalton asked, trying to picture it.
“Oh yes,” she said, laughing a little. “And really bad bangs too. I was the total package.”
“I can’t picture it,” Dalton said firmly.
“Well, you don’t have to,” she told him. “My parents have plenty of photos around. Anyway, I was so happy to have the braces off, but I kept losing my retainers. And they were expensive. I still don’t know how Mom and Dad could even afford the braces back then, but within a few months of getting them off, they’d already had to buy me new onestwice.”
“Oh, wow,” Dalton said sympathetically.
“Anyway,” she went on, “the day I got the second replacement pair, one of the girls at my table got dumped by her boyfriend and everything was really chaotic. And of course, I didn’t get to the bathroom in time to brush my teeth and put my retainers back in. So I left them in my locker instead.”
“Oh boy,” Dalton said.
“It was a Friday,” she continued. “And I forgot to grab them on the way out of school. When I realized what I’ddone, I completely panicked. I was supposed to wear them all the time, and if I didn’t wear them all weekend I was afraid I’d have to get braces all over again and Mom and Dad would be really upset.”
Dalton nodded. It was easy to picture a young Ella worrying about her parents. She still worried about them now.
“Well, Andy found me out in the barn that evening, crying my eyes out,” she said, shaking her head. “He asked me why I didn’t just ask for a ride back to school as soon as I realized, and I felt really dumb about it. The teachers always stay an extra hour or two. But by the time I told Andy what was going on, the school was locked up already.”
Dalton shook his head, totally relating. When you were a kid, your sense of fear sometimes stopped you from thinking sensibly.
“Anyway,” she went on. “Andy drove me back to school late that night. He told me that there was this little window over one of the bathrooms on the hilly side that got left open all the time. Though how he knew about that I do not want to know.”
“That’s probably for the best,” Dalton said, chuckling.
“I climbed in the window and dropped down onto the floor,” she said. “It was pitch dark inside the school, but I had a flashlight. I went right to my locker, got my retainers, and headed back out. But I couldn’t get back up to the window again, and I started to panic.”
“Oh boy,” Dalton said.
“I ended up using the exit in the back of the cafeteria,” she said. “It opened right up, but the alarm startedgoing off. I just panicked and ran for it. I made it to Andy’s car and he drove off like we were in a heist movie.”
“The great retainer heist,” Dalton chuckled, trying to picture a panicked Ella, clutching her retainer case in her hand and sprinting across the parking lot to her brother.
“Oh, it gets better,” Ella said, shaking her head. “We found out the next day that the police and the Trinity Falls volunteer firefighters came out to the school to check on the alarm. And the video had caught someone in a pink coat running toward Andy’s car in the parking lot.”
“Busted,” Dalton said, shaking his head.
“That’s what I thought,” Ella said. “I was ready to turn myself in. I was going to tell them that Andy had given me a ride and that we’d hoped maybe the janitor would still be there and open up for me, and that he couldn’t have known I would get desperate and climb in a window. But before I could, Andy had already gone to the principal and said the whole thing was him. That he’d done it on a dare.”
“No,” Dalton said.
“Of course, the principal didn’t believe him because of the pink coat,” Ella said. “So Andy told him it was his, and then hewore my pink jacket to school every day for the rest of the year.”
“Holy cow,” Dalton said, laughing and feeling a wave of loss all at the same time. “Your brother was a class act.”
“Yeah,” Ella said fondly. “He took a week of detention for that and he was lucky it wasn’t a suspension. I think the principal knew the truth and felt bad for him for doing something so nice for his little sister. And since thepolice and the fire department didn’t charge for the false alarm, Andy got off easy.”
