She joined me on the dock and picked up the other bag, and we walked together toward the house. “Did you get in trouble the other night?” she asked, lowering her voice even though it was clearly just us in the backyard. “I didn’t think I woke anybody up when I left, but you never know.”
“You were fine,” I assured her. I had spent a somewhat anxious morning, worrying that someone had heard us, and that I would have some tricky explaining to do, but it appeared that we’d gotten away with it.
“Good,” she said, with a relieved smile. We reached the front door, and Lucy followed me inside. Warren was in the kitchen, attempting to juggle three of the popcorn balls. When he saw Lucy, his jaw dropped open, and all three of the balls fell to the ground, one right after the other.
“No way,” he said, shaking his head. “Lucinda?”
Lucy shook her head. Warren had always insisted that her name just couldn’t be “Lucy,” but had to be short for something, and as a result, had called her as many permutations of this as he could find. “Hey there, rabbit Warren,” she said, and Warren turned red before bending down and picking up the popcorn balls. I had found the expression when I’d read Watership Down in sixth grade, and told Lucy about it, so that she could have some of her own ammo against him calling her Lucifer. “Long time no see.”
“Likewise,” he said. “Taylor mentioned that you were working together, but I didn’t know you were coming over tonight.” Warren shot me a questioning look, mostly, I suspected, because he didn’t want to have sole responsibility for the preteens.
“Lucy’s here for the slumber party,” I told him as I headed down the hallway, Lucy following behind. “You better not eat all the cookie dough!”
Two hours later, the slumber party had been salvaged. Gelsey’s hair had been teased out until it was twice its normal size and accessorized with glittery clips, and Nora’s was in two elaborate French braids. My hair had been worked on by both girls simultaneously, and so I had a row of three ponytails on Nora’s side and a head full of mini-braids on Gelsey’s. And we were all sporting dramatic new makeup, thanks to Lucy. When she’d arrived, she’d pulled out a professional-grade tackle box that Fred would have most likely envied. But instead of lures and fishing line, it contained the largest assortment of makeup I had ever seen. Gelsey was now wearing so much makeup that I was already planning the explanation to my mother if she came home before I could get it off her. Nora’s eyes had been done in a cat-eye style. She’d shrugged it off as “okay,” but I couldn’t help notice that she was peeking into Lucy’s hand mirror every chance she got, looking at her reflection with a tiny smile on her face.
We’d turned Gelsey’s bedroom into a proper slumber party room—blankets on the floor, pillows arranged in a circle, the food, magazines, and makeup in the center. We’d eaten our way through an entire tin of the kettlecorn, had made Sprite floats with vanilla ice cream I’d uncovered in the freezer, and had devoured the entire bag of tortilla chips Lucy had brought. We’d read through the advice section of Seventeen (I’d hidden Lucy’s Cosmo when I saw Nora looking at it a bit too interestedly) and had taken all the quizzes. We’d had a very unsuccessful round of Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board—Lucy conceded that you really needed six people to do it properly—and now, we were playing Truth or Dare.
“Okay,” Nora said, crossing her legs, leaning forward, and looking among the three of us. “Lucy,” she said, after a dramatic pause. “Truth or dare?”
Most of the dares so far that night had been pretty tame, and the majority of them had involved tormenting Warren. And so—maybe figuring that there was safety in numbers—Warren had taken the dog with him to the family room where, last I checked, he’d been sitting on the couch, back to the wall, book in his lap, protected against any further sneak attacks.
“Truth,” Lucy said. I shot her a slightly admonishing look, and she gave me one back that said, Don’t worry about it. It was surprising that after all the time apart, I could still read her. Almost as surprising as finding out that she could still read me. And she had picked up that I was nervous about just how truthful she was planning to be. Gelsey had always liked her—Lucy, an only child, had been willing to spend hours playing with my sister, and what’s more, seemed to enjoy it. But after seeing her makeup collection, and finding out she was captain of her gymnastics team back in New Jersey—something that had been news to me as well—I could see the girls moving into full-on idolization mode, and I didn’t want them hearing the full truth about Lucy’s exploits. After seeing her flirt with practically every guy who came to the snack bar, I had a feeling that she’d had a number of them.
“Okay,” Nora said. Gelsey motioned her over, and they had a whispered conference before Nora returned to her seat and fixed Lucy with her direct gaze. “When did you have your first kiss? And who was it with?”