“Okay, you’re right, bad example. But I have like a gajillion papers. I haven’t had time to sort them yet.”
Kat doesn’t say anything, just sits there on the floor in her favorite pink polo shirt, one foot tucked under her, paper towel still balled up in her hand, staring blankly at me like a mannequin. A spooky about-to-come-to-life mannequin from a horror movie.
“You’re kind of creepy sometimes,” I mumble, as I grab my backpack again.
“What?” she asks, but I ignore it. One thing I have learned about Kat is that when she’s cranky like this, my jokes to lighten the mood are rarely—if ever—successful.
A pencil-scrawled name jumps out at me. “Aha,” I say. “My cousin Leah’s.” This one I know we got right. Leah had never played LotS before, and every death resulted in gut-splitting, infectious giggles. I shove the paper into Kat’s hands.
She looks it over. “Where are the test results?”
“Bottom corner.”
“There’s only two.”
“No, there’s three.”
“Definitely only two.” She scrunches her face like she’s trying not to cry. Like it’s a letter advising that her aunt died instead of just a boring science questionnaire. I snatch the paper from her and glance at the corner where, sure enough, only two times have been recorded in my signature green pen.
“Lizard balls!” Yesterday was a frenzied blur of LotS runs between charades rounds, questionnaires lost in wrapping paper, and trying to time sugar cubes around chocolate cake. There were definitely a few, like Aunt Hilda’s, that never got finished, but this isn’t one of them. “We did all three tests for sure,” I say. “I’ll text Leah. She’ll remember what her third time was.”
“Just—can I look through them, please?” Kat gestures toward my backpack, and I toss it over. She pulls out paper after paper, smoothing each one on her leg, studying it, then placing it onto a pile on either her left or her right, using a sorting system that I can’t make sense of until she puts two blank ones in a row on the pile to her right.
“I took more than fifteen questionnaires with me,” I explain. “In case we needed them.” She doesn’t reply, just smacks another questionnaire down on the pile to her right. I lean over to look at it. I can’t see anything wrong with it, aside from the streak of chocolate down the middle. “I told everyone not to eat cake until after doing their speed runs,” I tell her. “If they didn’t listen, that’s not our fault.”
She’s apparently so lost in the riveting task of sorting that she doesn’t hear me, but before I can grab the chocolate-smeared one and move it to the other pile, she holds up another questionnaire. “What’s this number?” she asks, jabbing at the corner.
I lean in to study my green scrawl. “Five, I think. Or maybe eight.”
Her eyes bulge as if they might pop out of her head. “We need an exact number.”
“Okay, it’s a five.” I look at it again without really seeing. “Yep, definitely a five.”
She hesitates, then slowly lowers it onto the left pile, grimacing like it physically hurts her to admit that it’s okay. Which means tossing the next two on top of the chocolate-smeared one on the right should give her relief, but she keeps scowling as if smiling might kill her.
When she gets to the end, she sticks her arm all the way into the bottom of my backpack, as if she expects it to extend past the floor, like a Mary Poppins bag. “Is this it?”
I stop myself from rolling my eyes. “Guess so.”
She picks up the left pile—the much smaller pile—of smoothed-out papers off the floor, licks her finger, and counts them. “There’s only five,” she moans.
I point toward the other pile. “Plenty of those are perfectly fine. You’re just being too picky.”
“Meg, this is a science project, not a finger painting. The results need to be accurate.” She sets the papers back down on the floor. “We’re doomed,” she breathes, leaning backward against the cupboard with a thud. She closes her eyes and presses her lips into a thin line.
“Dude, stop being so overdramatic or melodramatic or whatever. We’re not doomed. We’ve still got—what?—two months?”
Her eyes fly open. “Two weeks! The next check-in’s in two and a half weeks, and we’re supposed to have finished twenty tests by then!”
Well, that’s news to me, but I still think she’s overreacting. “Stop worrying. I bet I could finish another fifteen tests in like a week.”
“You were supposed to do that already! And you completely screwed it up. You are the people person and you were supposed to get lots of tests done, and you didn’t. I did twice as many as you!” She glances at the big pile on her right as if it’s stacked with her oh-so-perfect ones instead of with my apparently-not-good-enough hard work.
“You didn’t actually do more, though! You did a whopping three. Your whipped boy toy did the rest. I did five—more than that if you weren’t so picky—and Grayson had nothing to do with it.” I give the failure pile a shove, and the top questionnaires fly off, revealing that stupid chocolate-smeared one that she refused to move. “Maybe I didn’t finish that many to your perfect standards, but at least I wasn’t too scared to try in the first place!”
I stand, grab my now-empty backpack, and storm out of the room. I wore my chunky slip-on boots today instead of my zip-up hooker boots, and they slide on like my feet are sticks of butter.
Kat appears in the hallway as I yank open the front door. “Where are you going?”
“Somewhere people don’t think I’m a failure,” I snap, then stalk out the door and slam it behind me with a not-quite-satisfying bang.
CHAPTER 15
MEG
SOMEWHERE PEOPLE DON’T THINK I’M A FAILURE. THAT’S THE PROBLEM.
I failed my math test. I failed to keep Stephen-the-Leaver from leaving.
And now I’ve failed to live up to Kat’s ridiculous standards. Even in her eyes, I’m a failure. A screwup.
The bus is taking forever to arrive, so I run the however many blocks to catch the 7 instead. It stops five blocks past Grayson’s, so by the time I run up to Grayson’s front step, I’m gasping like a slimy trout at a fisherman’s rubber-booted feet.
“Grayson!” I half shout, half wheeze as I pound on his door. “Grayson, open up!”
The door swings open as if he was waiting for me, though he couldn’t have been, since I was too busy jogging myself to death to text him. Maybe we’re developing a psychic connection. Maybe every time I kiss him, it makes it stronger.
“We have a doorbell, you know,” he says, hooking his thumbs into his pockets instead of throwing his arms around me.
“That’s some greeting,” I say, pushing past him. “Aren’t you happy to see me?” I push my bottom lip out in my saltiest pout—no, that can’t be right. Sultanest? Is that a word?
His face softens. “Of course. Sorry. I just—I’m about to head to the range.” He steps back to close the front door, wobbling like a peg-leg pirate. He only has one boot on. As usual, he’s laced it halfway up, tying it in a loose, single knot at ankle height.