“This is Ryan,” Gabby announced. “He brought chips.”
“Well, that’s very nice,” said a tall woman coming in from the kitchen. She looked like an older version of Gabby, in a crisp Oxford shirt and glasses that took up the whole top half of her face. “Hi, Ryan,” she said. “Welcome.”
“Hi, ma’am,” he said, reaching out to shake her hand.
Gabby rolled her eyes. “Come on,” she said, gesturingfor him to sit down on the carpet. “The only piece left is the iron.”
The second thing Ryan registered about Gabby’s house, now that he had the chance to look around in a non-party context, was how nice it was in here. Not fancy, exactly—not like his friend Anil’s house, which was one of the new fake colonials in the golf course development on the other side of town—but definitelydecoratedin a way that his own house wasn’t. There were built-in bookcases housing an expensive-looking stereo system, brightly colored paintings studding the light gray walls. A giant stag’s head made of papier-mâché hung over the fireplace, a stack of newspapers in a mesh basket off to one side. It seemed immediately clear to Ryan that this was a house where people ate their sandwiches on whole wheat bread.
“Is this your friend, Gabby?” asked a tall, heavyset man coming into the living room carrying a big plate heaped with some kind of fancy-looking hors d’oeuvre. To Ryan: “I have to say, it’s rare there’s another man in this house. I’m glad for the reinforcements.”
“Oh my god,” Gabby said, dealing out the money from the bank. “Please stop. What are we eating?”
“Devils on horseback!” Mr. Hart said. “Dates stuffed with blue cheese and wrapped in bacon.”
“He makes something different every week,” Gabby explained, reaching up to pick one off the plate as her dad set it down on the coffee table. “He has a book.”
“1,001 Crowd-Pleasing Party Appetizers,” Mr. Hart crowed. “The girls got it for me for Christmas last year.”
“He only cooks from it on Fridays,” Gabby said. “Which means we’ve got about twenty years before he gets through all of it.”
“People with long-term goals and projects live longer,” her father informed her. “Let’s play.”
It was a quicker-moving game than Ryan usually thought of Monopoly as being, all of them playing with the ruthless efficiency of people who did this a lot. Gabby trounced them all from the outset, buying up all the railroads and utilities and building hotels on all three green properties. “Do you have, like, a strategy for Monopoly?” Ryan asked finally.
“Gabby has a strategy for most things,” the little sister piped up. She’d been watching him carefully, Ryan noticed, all big eyes and intelligent expression behind her giant glasses. All five Harts had that look, actually, like when they weren’t playing board games maybe they sat around the living room discussing the themes of the various works of literature they were reading. It made Ryan, who could not remember the last time he’d read a book that wasn’t for school, feel a little nervous.
“So Ryan,” Mr. Hart said as he scooped the Free Parking money off the board and set about organizing it into neat piles in front of him, “how are you liking high school so far?”
Gabby groaned. “Please don’t interrogate him.”
“It’s okay,” Ryan said, reaching for another devil on horseback. He’d never eaten a date before; they tasted kindof like fruit snacks, but better. “I like it a lot, actually. It’s a lot bigger than my old school, so I’ve met a lot of new people so far.”
“Did you go to Colson Middle?” Mrs. Hart asked.
“No ma’am,” Ryan said without explaining the reason, which was that his dad thought the hockey coach at Colson Middle was a buffoon so his parents had sent him to a Catholic school they 100 percent couldn’t afford, TUITION PAST DUE notices stacking up on the kitchen table. It had been a relief to get out of there. “I went to Saint Thomas Aquinas.”
Mrs. Hart nodded. “I have some clients who send their kids there,” she told him. “But they were a bit younger than you.”
“My wife owns an interior design business,” Mr. Hart explained, smiling at her over the coffee table. Ryan could tell that the Harts were the kind of parents who kissed each other in public. “She did this whole house, actually.”
“Not my room,” Kristina piped up. “I did my own room, really. The color is Lavender Secrets.”
“And there you have it,” Gabby said, voice dripping with faux-brightness. “Now you know everything about us.”
“Well, not everything,” Mr. Hart pointed out, not missing a beat. “He hasn’t seen your baby pictures. I could whip those out, if you’re so inclined, or—”
“Oh, you people are hilarious,” Gabby said, but she was smiling. Ryan liked her around her family, he realized; shewas more relaxed than she’d been outside school earlier, cross-legged on the rug and leaning against the arm of the sofa, tilting her head back a bit while Celia played idly with her hair.
“Do you guys have any classes together?” Mrs. Hart asked, reaching for her wineglass. Ryan and Gabby didn’t, but he and Michelle shared fifth-period Algebra I, which led to a long discussion of Mr. DiBenedetto’s chronic, audible flatulence.
“It was like that when I had him too,” Celia said, leaning forward to roll the dice. Kristina moved the Scottie dog around the board on her behalf. “Like a freaking foghorn every time he went up to the whiteboard.”
“Honestly, Celia,” Mrs. Hart said, clearly trying not to laugh and mostly failing. “That’s terrible.”
“Itwasterrible!” Celia agreed as Kristina reached one hand inside her sweatshirt, letting out a noisy armpit fart that Ryan found truly impressive.
“Nice work,” he told her admiringly. Kristina beamed.
