“Yeah, well, you know I hate it when you say stupid things just ‘cause you hate my brother.”
“Whatever,” I muttered. “But just for the record, he hated me first. I just followed suit.”
Lucas shook his head. “You’d think after all this time you two would have learned to tolerate one another.”
Horrified at the prospect, I shook my head violently. “Never. We’re too different.”
Lucas looked at me intently, a wry smile curving his lips. “I think it’s because you’re too similar.”
I gasped, clutching my chest in mock outrage. “How dare you?” I said, swatting at him. “How fucking dare you say that to me? I thought you loved me!”
Laughing, Lucas rolled away, quickly jumping to his feet.
“Get back here and apologize,” I said, scrambling to stand.
Running from the room, he glanced over his shoulder and grinned. “Never!” he shouted.
“Where are you going?” I demanded from the doorway as he disappeared down the hall. “I thought we were going to lie around naked and eat grapes?”
Lucas skidded to a stop, his boots squeaking audibly across the hardwood floor. Heavy footsteps echoed through the otherwise empty hall as he quickly retraced his steps back to me. Blue eyes smiled at me. “That sounds…sticky.”
By early afternoon Lucas and I had exhausted the contents of the farmhouse, amassing a decent pile of odds and ends—nothing we needed or could take with us when we left, but things that would serve as entertainment while we were here.
“So many pictures,” Lucas mused, flipping idly through the pages of a family photo album. “We didn’t do photo albums in my house. Logan had a baby book, but that was about it.”
Digging through the contents of an antique steamer trunk, I grumbled, “No need to brag.”
Lucas began to chuckle. “Yeah, your mom was nuts. All your school photos hanging in the stairwell were my personal fav—a step-by-step progression of a happy kid turned emo teen with a homemade septum piercing.”
I touched the tip of my finger to the tiny gold hoop in my nose, recalling the day I’d pushed a sewing needle through my septum. “God, that hurt,” I murmured. “Also, how dare you call me emo.”
“If your hallway was an art piece, it would’ve been called,The Decline of the Smile.”
“If you were an art piece,” I retorted. “You would be called,What Not to Wear.”
Currently, I was wrapped in the rainbow boa I’d discovered yesterday, while Lucas donned several moth-eaten neckties he’d found; he’d fashioned one around his forehead while the others hung loosely from his neck.
Lucas straightened, squaring his shoulders and studiously tightening one of the ties at his neck. “You wish you had my fashion sense.”
“You wish I wished that,Lucario.”
“You wished that I wished that you wished that,Willoughby.”
“You wished that I wished that you wished that I…” Trailing off, I shoved up from the floor. The humidity had thickened and the wind had picked up, whistling softly through the broken corners of the house. But there was something else, too.
“Rain,” I breathed, drinking in the sickly sweet scent that always preceded a summer shower.
I ran from the room with Lucas hot on my heels. Together we raced to the stairs, leaping down the broken steps two and three at a time, just barely managing not to lose a foot in the process. Lightning flashed, briefly lighting the dim halls. A clap of thunder boomed overhead, reverberating through the floor beneath our feet, vibrating the walls around us.
“It’s a storm!” Lucas shouted, and we both whooped as loud as we could, the thunder shielding us from any nearby Creeper ears. Thunderstorms were the only time that Logan allowed us the freedom to be as loud as we wanted and we always took full advantage.
We collided with Logan in the downstairs hall, causing him to drop the stack of plastic tubs he was carrying. Recognizing them as the storage containers from the garage, I quickly realized his intentions—if it rained long enough to fill them, we’d have enough water for several weeks’ worth of drinking, bathing, and maybe even laundry. The thought of cleaning my clothes with something other than creek water inspired another joyful shout.
Inside the office, we hurried to undress, each of us stripping down to our underwear. Lucas and I made a mad dash for the window, toppling over one another as we fell into the grass below in a heap. Jumping to my feet, I tilted my face to the sky, the first drop of rain hitting me square in the forehead. The second hit my nose, the third, fourth, and fifth hit my cheeks in a chorus of small splashes.
The whole world had turned gray—thick clouds were gathered overhead with bursts of light breaking through their heavy veil in rapid, jagged flashes. Thunder continued to crash—a symphony of clangs and bangs that exploded through the air and vibrated the rapidly forming puddles at our feet. Holding my arms out wide, I spun in drunken circles until I was drenched with rain and dizzy with delirium.
“It hasn’t rained like this in forever!” Lucas shouted happily. Stomping and sloshing through the high grass, he was moving farther across the lawn.
