“They’re letting me go.” Riley said the words slowly, and Shelby dropped her arms and stood back appraisingly.
“What is this that you’re doing? This isn’t the happy dance. This isn’t the dance of ‘we are spending an entire weekend on a college campus with no parents.’ What dance is this?”
Riley’s eyes swept her parents’ room, the torn-open boxes. They had just given her permission to go on a trip even as she pawed through all their stuff…
She worried her bottom lip. “They’re up to something.”
“What are you talking about?”
“My parents never let me go anywhere. They never let me do anything. And suddenly, poof, they listen to me and let me go to another city? No.”
“Maybe pod people ate your parents. Who cares? Your pod father gave you permission.”
Riley looked up. “Maybe I shouldn’t go.”
Shelby slung her arm over Riley’s shoulder and sat her gently on the bed. She dropped into a soothing voice as she petted Riley’s hand. “What you’re feeling is normal, Riley. There’s even a name for it. It’s called Stockholm syndrome.”
Riley shoved Shelby but laughed. “Shut up!”
“You shut up. We’re going away for the weekend! Be. Excited.”
Riley thought about she and Shelby, lounging on a big green lawn in the shadow of a huge university and several university men.
“I’m excited.”
After breaking into spontaneous happy dances and a short round of screams, Riley went back to the cardboard boxes. “OK, I feel kind of bad being in here, but now it’s even more important. The sweatshirt for you and”—she disappeared waist-deep into one of the boxes and rifled around, coming up with a faded, vintage-looking Hudson tee—“this for me.”
“We’re going to be college girls!”
“No parents, free for the weekend!”
With gusto, Shelby dug into the box in front of her. Her flailing legs immediately stilled.
Riley stood. “Shelbs? Are you all right? Did a giant clothes rat eat your head off?”
“Oh my God!” Shelby flopped out of the box, cheeks red, maniacal grin spreading across her face. She waved a thick book with a pink gingham cover, the whole thing rimmed in eyelet lace. “Is this what I think it is?”
Riley crossed her arms in front of her chest, confused. “What do you think it is?”
Shelby climbed up on Riley’s parents’ bed and flopped on her stomach, chin in hands, book in front of her. Riley did the same.
“I think it’s a tribute to the life of one cutesy-wutesy Wriley Spenca.” She pinched one of Riley’s cheeks. “Aww,” she cooed, once she lifted the cover and revealed a wrinkled picture of Riley, dwarfed by a polka-dot-patterned baby blanket and a teeny little hat.
“I was a pretty cute baby,” Riley said, grinning to herself.
“Nah, cute toddler. You were at least three in that pic.”
“How do you know how old I was?”
“Are you kidding me? I can spot a toddler at eighty paces. And then I turn around and run the other way before my mom makes me babysit it.”
Shelby went back to flipping through the pages while Riley hopped off the bed and continued shopping through her mother’s clothes.
“Ugh. How do my parents expect any guy to look at me—let alone a college guy—in stuff like this?” Riley held up a particularly unflattering shirt with buttons in the shape of miniature horse heads.
Shelby just turned a page in the baby book, not bothering to look up. “A, that’s probably their whole point and B, they probably expect you to wear your own clothes.”
Riley groaned and dove back in the box where the album came from, grumbling about her mother’s love of holiday turtlenecks.
“Ah ha!” she beamed a minute later, holding the Hudson sweatshirt up against her. She twirled, admiring herself in the mirror. “You know, now that I’m going on the trip too, maybe I should just wear this. It looks good on me, right?”
Shelby looked up. “Absolutely. You wear the sweatshirt I’m so totally borrowing, and I’ll wear a sweatshirt with this on it.” She held up the pink gingham album, open to a heinously embarrassing picture of four-year-old Riley on the toilet.
“You play dirty.”
“You’re the one on the toilet, toots. Sweatshirt, please.”
Riley balled up the shirt and tossed it at Shelby, knocking the album right out of her hands and onto the floor.
“OK,” Riley said, going back to the box. “We just need to get everything back in the box on Monday, and my parents will never notice.”
Shelby picked up the album. “Um, they might notice you broke your baby book.”
Anxiety pricked at the base of Riley’s neck. Though her parents wouldn’t let her go out for anything, they were pretty laid back when it came to just about anything else—as long as Riley followed the one cardinal rule: no going through their things.
Which inadvertently means no borrowing without asking, Riley thought. She immediately chased the thought away.
“It’s just a couple of shirts,” she muttered to herself.