“Is this what people do for fun in the country?” I ask. I grew up a lot of different places, but I don’t think any of the houses we lived in had unfettered access to frogs and/or snakes. “You bringwild animals into your home and let them loose? Did none of you have video games?”
“I didn’t let them loose,” Gideon says. “Don’t lump us all in with Silas.”
“I didn’t bring wild animals home,” Wyatt offers. “Though I did once find a bird skeleton, so I took the skull and put it over one of Georgia’s Barbies’ heads while she was asleep and then posed it on her bedside table. She screamed really loud.”
I have never in my life felt so civilized.
“I brought home a rabbit with a broken leg once, but I got in a lot of trouble and then my father took it away,” Gideon adds.
“My pointis, if Clara Loveless can put me in time out, I can invite you to her Christmas Eve open house, which is pretty much an open invitation anyway,” Silas says. “Bring the whole family. Is your stepsister coming? I forget her name.”
“Madeline,” I say. Then I clear my throat because I feel like all three of them just went from casually looking at me to staring with the intensity of a thousand suns, even though that’s ridiculous. “Yeah, I think she’s coming. She said something about wanting to see Sprucevale? And she had Thanksgiving with her mom and her mom’s family, and she said she’s excited to see mountains besides Mount Trashmore. That’s the old city dump in Virginia Beach,” I over-explain. I manage to keep myself from also offering the information that her favorite Christmas cookies are raspberry jam thumbprint cookies and she’s one of those people who actually likes Christmas carols, which is generally unforgivable but cute on her, that she lovesElfand hatesIt’s a Wonderful Lifeand never believed in Santa because Ben—yeah,thatBen—was her next-door neighbor and he’s Jewish so he knew the truth all along and told her.
Next-door neighbors, all the way until they graduated high school. The Hallmark movie just writes itself, doesn’t it?
“Sounds fun,” Wyatt says, and then he and Silas start comparing the weird shit they found in the woods as children.
CHAPTER TWENTY
MADELINE
“But then,Hendricks ended up having to sell that land for some ridiculous price after his scheme to rig the duck race got blown up,” the man in front of me says. His name is Eli, and he’s spent the last twenty minutes telling me fascinating small-town gossip. “Which he was doing in the first place to try and pay off his gambling debts, which no one knew about.”
“And that’s also why they renamed Hendricks Road to Lookaway Road,” I say, trying to keep up. “Because it was named after his family and he brought shame on them? With a duck race.”
“You got it.”
I take a long sip of my beer, a delicious wintry stout that’s got notes of, I don’t know, winter. It tastes like a cinnamon-dusted pine tree, but in a good way? Who cares—my dad’s driving.
“So is this duck race like the Kentucky Derby, but for ducks?” I ask. “Please say yes. Please tell me people wear exciting hats and drink mint juleps and the ducks have names likeMenace to Society the Fourth.”
“That would be incredible,” he says, very seriously. “I should suggest that. But no, it’s rubber ducks on a river. You buy one,and a bunch of businesses offer prizes, and if you have the fastest rubber duck you win. And also get to be a Sprucevale celebrity.”
Before I can ask what that entails, a woman with light brown hair walks up and rests one elbow on his shoulder, leaning in.
“Eli, did you teach the children how to sharpen candy canes?” she asks, taking a long swig from a beer bottle.
He grins at her. “Of course not.”
“So you’ve got nothing to do with the fact that Daniel is currently running triage in the downstairs bathroom for candy cane wounds?”
“Okay,firstof all, when he was seven he jammed one of those little round lollipops up my nose and my dad had to use Vaseline to get it back out, so he knows all about using candy as a weapon,” Eli says. “And second, I told themnotto stab each other. This is Madeline, by the way.”
“Hi, I’m Violet,” she says, and we clink beer bottles together. “Sorry about him.”
“Don’t apologize for me—I’m perfect.”
She rolls her eyes and doesn’t otherwise acknowledge that. “Are you new in town?”
I’m currently at an event that I can only call ashindig. Maybe ahootenanny. A barn burner, though there’s no barn and the only fire is in the fireplace, so maybe not. Whatever it’s called, I’m pretty sure that most of Sprucevale is here in the middle of nowhere, packed into an old farmhouse that I’m afraid might literally burst apart at the seams any minute now.
It’s Christmas Eve, I’m three beers in, and I’m talking to Thalia’s boyfriend’s older brother about small-town scandals and desperately trying to ignore Javier’s presence, even though he’s wearing a plaid flannel button-down with the sleeves rolled up and his hair pulled back and, like,leaningon things. It’s obscene, the leaning.
“She’s Caleb and Javier’s people,” Eli explains, and I guess that’s a good enough explanation because Violet makes anoh!noise and grabs his shoulder.
“Wait, is Javi here?” she asks. “He completely saved my ass last week with flowers for our fundraising event. I gotta go thank him.”
I, unfortunately, know exactly where Javier is—leaning against a wall near the Christmas tree, laughing at something, can of seltzer in hand—so I point him out.
