“I’msureit’s so they can play Monopoly,” I say. “Or Uno. Or Clue!”
“Think they’ve landed on Park Place yet?”
“I wantedonenice outing with my siblings,” Thalia says from the back seat. “One. I wanted to go out, see my brothers, bond with my future stepsister, escape the chaos maelstrom of Clara’s house. But no.”
It’s a few days after Christmas, and my dad and Paloma handed Bastien and me a hundred bucks and told us to do something fun with Thalia and Javier. They’re staying in the vacation rental they rented for the four of us for the week, a faux-rustic cabin outside town that’s got three bedrooms, two hot tubs, and an enormous stone fireplace. My dad was already uncorking a bottle of wine as we left.
“I think this is very nice,” Bastien says.
“It was nicer before you made sex jokes about Park Place,” I tell him, and Bastien turns to me, both eyebrows raised.
“If you interpreted that as a sex joke?—”
“No!” Thalia says, and suddenly her face is there, between us. “Don’t you even. Madeline, you’re correct—that was an uncalled-for sex joke.”
“Wow, so you’re both perverts,” Bastien says.
“Is this sibling bonding?” I ask, and sayingsiblingfeels considerably more normal when Javier’s not here. “I don’t really have any. Is this how you bond? You call each other sex perverts?”
“No, most siblings arenormal,” Thalia says pointedly at Bastien. “Caleb and his brothers are a loving, supportive sibling group with strong and appropriate emotional bonds, for example.”
I turn onto the four-lane road that runs into the middle of Sprucevale and think for a moment.
“Didn’t one of them catapult another one’s shoe into the woods? Like, last week?” I ask. I’m pretty sure I heard this story at Christmas Eve.
Bastien starts laughing. “I’ve never catapulted one of your shoes,” he points out.
“You’ve never had a catapult,” Thalia says.
“Why does Caleb have a catapult?”
“Caleb catapulted the shoe?” I ask.
“No, Seth catapulted Eli’s shoe and Caleb got involved because…” Thalia makes a gesture that clearly meanswho fucking knows.
“They have strong and appropriate emotional bonds?” Bastien asks, and now Thalia laughs. I would like them to stop saying that phrase, but I’d also rather jump out of this moving vehicle than tell them why.
“I’m just saying, I’ve never heard them call each other sex perverts,” she says.
“They probably behave around you, since you’re the girlfriend,” Bastien says. “Meanwhile, you can never get rid of me.”
“I know where there’s a catapult,” she points out, and then we turn into the parking lot of the Blue Ridge Bowl-o-Rama, which is cheesy and worn down in all the right ways.
“Can we please go bowling first?” I ask.
“Ooh, look who’s getting the hang of it,” Bastien says, and I shoot him a questioning look. “The bossy older sibling thing.”
“I’m not being bossy. I just want to go bowling before catapults!”
“I didn’t know we invited the fun police,” Thalia says.
My headlights sweep over Javier’s car as I park, and my stomach tightens. Shit, are these two going to realize how weird we’re acting? I shouldn’t have come. I should have read a book in my room with my noise-canceling headphones cranked all the way up.
“You’re not gonna tell my mom if I have too much candy, right?” Bastien asks, grinning.
“Get out of my car,” I say, and both of them cackle.
When I agreedto go bowling, I didn’t remember that it was Friday night, and I also didn’t realize I was agreeing tocosmicbowling, which is apparently the hot date-night activity for every teenager in the Blue Ridge region.
