Riley rolled her eyes. “Spit it out. What do you want?”
“Can I borrow your Hudson sweatshirt?”
“So you can ride up to Hudson without me, wearing my Hudson sweatshirt, without me?”
“Forget I said anything.”
“No, no.” Riley sighed as she pushed herself off the bed. “I’m going to die in this room anyway. Someone might as well get some use out of my clothes. The sweatshirt is probably still packed in one of the moving boxes.” She jutted a thumb over her shoulder at the haphazard spread of torn-open cardboard boxes spread around the room.
“I can’t believe you guys moved all the way out here.” Shelby shuddered like the Blackwood Hills Estates, with its empty model homes and landscaping of mud and excess construction materials, was a hideous other planet. Which it kind of was.
“Thanks for coming all the way to outer Mongolia to visit me.” Riley narrowed her eyes. “Unless it was all a ploy just to borrow my sweatshirt.”
“I would never scam you that way, Ry. Not without getting some matching shoes or something too.”
Riley poked through one of the boxes on her bedroom floor. “Oh, actually, it’s probably in my parent’s room.”
Shelby followed Riley across the hall. “Why is it with their stuff?”
“Because technically, it’s my dad’s. It was my dad’s. He got it when he was at Hudson. Never wears it anymore, so it’s mine now.”
“Whenever you sneak it out of their room.”
Riley put her hands on her hips. “Do you want it or not?”
“Lead the way.”
Riley put her hand on her parents’ bedroom doorknob and turned to Shelby. “By the way, if anyone asks, we were never here. Ever.”
Shelby looked around. “Your parents always let me come over.”
“Not here, here! In my parents’ room.” Even as she said it, her heart skipped a little—but she smashed the niggling, rule-breaking guilt way down and piled her tethered-to-Crescent City annoyance on top of it. “We’re not exactly supposed to be”—she made air quotes—“in there.”
“Oh, Riley’s breaking the rules!”
Riley narrowed her eyes and Shelby rolled hers. “Oh my God, Ry, your parents are, like, the nicest people on the planet. They’re going to beat you if they find out you were in their room?”
“No! But they flip out over the weirdest things. When we were packing up the other house, I was trying to find some room for my shoes so I went through one of my dad’s den boxes and he fully spazzed out.”
“Awesome. We’re going through the boxes of an unbalanced dude who can snap when people go through his boxes.”
“He’s not unbalanced. Just…wildly protective of office supplies?”
“Yep, that’s logical.”
Shelby let out a low whistle when Riley pushed her through the door to her parents’ bedroom. “This is amazing. If you have to spend your whole life in the house anyway, you should have chosen this room.”
“Would if I could. Here.” Riley pushed open the closet and lugged out three enormous cardboard boxes. “It’s in one of these. But other than the stuff in there, don’t touch anything.”
As if on cue, Riley’s cell phone went off, a classic telephone ring that made her eyes roll. “It’s like they know we’re here.” A hot stripe shot up the back of her neck, and she faked a cheerful voice. “Hi, Dad.”
“Hey ya, turnip.”
“Please, Dad—stop with the turnip stuff already.”
“But you know how much I love turnips!”
Riley watched Shelby pacing the room, picking things up off her mother’s dresser. She covered the phone and waved frantically at Shelby, mouthing, don’t touch anything!
Shelby held her hands up and Riley had a fleeting thought that her father was just outside the bedroom door, ready to catch them both and sentence her to a lifetime grounding. She jumped when her father cleared his throat on his end of the phone.
“So, I guess you don’t even want to know why I was calling.”
Riley took a deep breath. “Hey, Dad, why are you calling?”
He chuckled. “Better. Anyway, your mother was here for lunch and we talked.”
Riley held her breath, the edges of her stomach starting to quiver. “And?”
“And we’ve decided you can go on your school trip.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
Riley blinked, mouth open. Shelby just stared. “Wait,” Riley said into the phone. “What’s the catch?”
“There is no catch.”
“There has to be. Like, you’re chaperoning, or Mom slipped a GPS tracker into my Cheerios.”
Her father chuckled again. “Nothing like that. But there are rules. We’ll talk about them tonight over dinner.”
“OK.” Riley’s grin was so big it hurt her cheeks. “Thanks, Dad.”
Shelby rushed up to her, grabbing both wrists. “You’re going. They’re letting you go!”