“Mm-hmm.” She reaches across the counter to a mound covered by a checkered dishcloth and, with a flourish, reveals a circle of golden perfection.
“Is this one for us?” I lean forward and inhale deeply. Mom’s worst trait—worse even than her love of warbling ancient pop songs in the shower—is that she sometimes makes baked goods and then gives them away to other people. Like old folks’ homes and homeless shelters. Which makes it even worse, because I can’t feel sad about it since that would make me a horrible person.
“Depends on whether you and your dad behave yourselves.” With another flourish, she covers the pie back up.
“Mom! That’s just cruel. I should report you.”
“Good luck with that, dear.”
I can’t think of a single clever thing to say in response, so I just hoist my backpack off the floor and onto the table with a thud. A pity-me-for-all-the-work-I-have-to-do-and-give-me-some-pie thud. Sadly, after years of working in the textbook industry, Mom is immune to the textbook thud. She scurries about the kitchen, wiping down counters, without so much as a sympathetic glance in my direction.
I yank my math text out of my bag. “Hey, you didn’t write this, did you?” Her name isn’t in the front, but she ghostwrites sometimes, so that proves nothing.
“Let me see.” She leafs through a few pages at the front, then the back, before shaking her head. “Not one of mine. Why?”
“I started reading ahead into the next chapter on the bus, since there was nothing else to do.” Well, nothing but worry that I’d catch whatever was making the guy across the aisle cough and cough and cough, and then I’d pass it on to Granddad, and he’d cough so hard that his fragile bones would collapse in on themselves like a toppled house of cards. I hate public transit. “A couple of sections don’t make any sense.”
“I can look at it later, if you like. I’ve got to start chopping veggies.”
I should probably offer to help, but I need to decompress with something funny if I’m going to survive family dinner. Technically, almost every dinner of my life has been family dinner, but since we left Luke behind in Toronto for university and replaced him with Granddad, dinners have been different. Granddad eats slowly. And I can’t always tell if he’s joking. And I have to keep my elbows off the table; I don’t know if Granddad cares about that, but he might, so it’s best to be safe.
“We’ll be done by seven, right? Luke’s supposed to call.” On Friday evenings we play LotS together. That’s the way it’s always been. Except for last week, when he was too busy to play for the first time ever. “Frosh stuff,” he said.
He said he could play tonight, though. He promised.
“That’s perfect,” Mom says. “We can all chat with Luke.”
“Right. Of course.”
One rutabaga . . . two old folks’ home . . . three legendary sword . . .
“Kat?”
“Mm-hmm?” . . . four rift raid . . .
“We’ll just chat with Luke for a few minutes. Then you can politely excuse yourself and slip off to play your game with him.”
I love my mom.
MEG
OUR EMPTY HOUSE IS SO QUIET I CAN HEAR SOMETHING BANGING ABOUT IN the wind on the back porch from all the way up in my room. The stillness makes my earlobes itch. I drop my backpack on the rug and kick at my laptop on the floor, hoping it will magically turn on and blast some music into the silence, but it just groans.
When Mom and the halflings get home, the place’ll start whirring with noise, but it’ll still be boring. I’ve got to find a party or something to go to tonight. I should have asked that skinny-as-a-twig white girl who sits next to me in math class. She looks like she’d know where the good parties are at.
I flick on my phone. Lindsey is usually pretty up on party news, and she’s the last person in my call log, so I hit the call button, then put it on speakerphone and sprawl on my bed.
“Hi, Meg.” Lindsey sighs. She’s been doing that a lot lately.
“I’m so happy to talk to you, too!” I practically chirp.
“Sorry, I just—I can’t decide whether I should pack my straightener or my curling iron. What do you think?”
I lean over the side of the bed so my own mass of curls hangs to the floor. Even when Lindsey uses a curling iron, her limp red hair looks straight compared to mine. “I don’t know. Straightener.” I reach for my laptop and turn it on. LumberLegs’s gorgeous face grins out at me.
“Did you put me on speakerphone again? You know I can’t hear you when you do that.”
I swing around and grab my phone off the bed, dropping it onto the floor beside my laptop. “No.” I blow Legs a kiss. “Hey, what party are we going to tonight?”
“I can’t. I told you, I’m going to my aunt and uncle’s for the weekend. My aunt’s taking me to a fashion show.”
I’m pretty sure she told me no such thing, but she seems hangry, so I’m not correcting her. “Right, well, do you know about any parties tonight? You’re okay with me going to one without you, right?” I’m pretty sure she would be, but we haven’t been hanging out long enough for me to know for sure. One of the girls in this summer’s crowd got mad when I did that.
“Meg, no, I don’t. And I don’t care what you do this weekend, either.”
I want to spit something snarky back at her, but I know she doesn’t mean that the way it sounds. At least, I hope she doesn’t. I’m not ready for this friendship to be over yet. Not so soon.
There’s a long silence on the line, broken up only by muffled clattery noises. Probably Lindsey throwing her straightener and curler into her suitcase; she’s the type of person who would take both.
My laptop beeps at me that it needs to be plugged in soon, and I’d just switch to my tablet, but I have no idea where it is right now, so instead I rest the top of my head on the floor as I look under the bed for the cord. “Hey, did I tell you there are rumors LotSCON might be in Canada this year?” I ask as cheerily as I can.
“LotS—oh, that game you’re always rambling about? I don’t know. Probably. Look, I’ve got to go. I’ll see you around, okay?”
“Yeah, su—” The line clicks dead.
I slap my beeping laptop closed, roll over, and stare up at the ceiling, where a tiny spider happens to be skittering across the expanse of white like it’s on a mission. I grab my pillow and whip it into the air. It zooms across the room and lands with a clatter and thud in my closet, completely missing the ceiling. Probably for the best.
Maybe I shouldn’t go out this evening. Maybe I should just lie here and watch my new eight-legged roommate make himself at home.
My phone rings, and I jolt upright. It might be Lindsey calling back. I snatch my phone off the floor.
“Evil McNastypants,” reports the screen. I blink at it for a moment before remembering I renamed him that, then jab at the ignore button. The last time he called, I had him labeled just “Jerk.”