“Lina! IAN, GET AWAY FROM ME.” There was some muffled yelling and then what sounded like a Mexican knife fight going on between her and her brother. Addie had three older brothers, and rather than baby her, it seemed they’d unanimously agreed to treat her as one of the guys. It explained a lot about her personality.
“Sorry,” she said when she was finally back on the phone. “Ian’s an idiot. Someone ran over his phone, and now my parents say I have to share mine. I don’t care what happened. I am not giving his caveman friends my phone number.”
“Oh, come on, they’re not that bad.”
“Stop it. You know they are. This morning I walked in on one of them eating our cereal. He’d poured an entire box into a mixing bowl and was eating it with a soup ladle. I don’t think Ian was even home.”
I smiled and shut my eyes for a moment. If Addie were a superhero, her power would be Ability to Make Your Best Friend Feel Normal. Those first dark weeks after the funeral, she’d been the one to get me out of the house on runs and insist I do things like eat and shower. She was the kind of friend you knew you couldn’t possibly deserve.
“Hold up. Why are we wasting time talking about Ian’s friends? I’m assuming you’ve met Howard.”
I opened my eyes. “You mean my father?”
“I refuse to call him that. We didn’t even know he was your father until like two months ago.”
“Less,” I said.
“Lina, you’re killing me. What’s he like?”
I glanced at my bedroom door. Music was still playing downstairs, but I lowered my voice anyway. “Let’s just say I need to get out of here. Right away.”
“What do you mean? Is he a creep?”
“No. He’s actually kind of okay. And he’s like NBA tall, which is surprising. But that’s not the bad part.” I took in a deep breath. She needed the full dramatic effect. “He’s the caretaker of a cemetery. Which means I have to live in a cemetery.”
“WHAT?”
I was ready for her outburst, holding the phone a good three inches from my ear.
“You have to live in a cemetery? Is he like a gravedigger or something?” She whispered the last part.
“I don’t think they do burials here anymore. All the graves are from World War II.”
“Like that’s any better! Lina, we have to get you out of there. It isn’t fair. First you lose your mom, and then you have to move halfway across the world to live with some guy who suddenly claims to be your father? And he lives in a cemetery? Come on, that’s too much.”
I sat down at the desk, scooting the chair around until my back was to the window. “Believe me, if I’d had any idea of what I was getting into, I would have pushed back even harder. This place is weird. There are headstones all over the place, and it feels like we’re really far from civilization. I saw some houses on the road coming in, but besides that it looks like there’s just forest surrounding the cemetery.”
“Shut up. I’m coming to get you. How much does a plane ticket cost? More than three hundred dollars? Because that’s all I have after our little run-in with the fire hydrant.”
“You didn’t even hit it that hard!”
“Tell that to the mechanic. Apparently the whole bumper had to be replaced. And I blame it on you entirely. If you hadn’t been jamming out, I probably wouldn’t have had to join in.”
I grinned, pulling up my feet to sit cross-legged. “It is so not my fault that you can’t control yourself when old-school Britney Spears comes on the radio. But do you need help paying for it? My grandparents are in charge of my finances, but I get a monthly allowance.”
“No, of course not. You’re going to need your money to get home from Italy. And I really do think my parents will be on board with you living here again. My mom thinks you’re a good influence. It took her like a month to get over the fact that you put your dishes in the dishwasher.”
“Well, I am pretty remarkable.”
“Tell me about it. Okay, I’ll talk to them soon. I just have to wait until my mom chills out. She’s in charge of this big football fund-raiser for Ian, and you’d think she was throwing a debutante ball. Seriously, she is stressing out way too much. She totally lost it last night when none of us ate her noodle casserole.”
“I like her noodle casserole. The one with tuna, right?”
“Ew, you do not like it. You were probably just starving because you’d gone on a nine-hundred-mile run. Also, you eat everything.”
“True,” I admitted. “But, Addie, remember, it’s my grandma we need to worry about convincing. She’s super on board with me living here.”
“Which makes absolutely no sense. Why would she send you halfway across the world to be with a stranger? She doesn’t even know him.”
“I don’t think she knew what else to do. On the drive to the airport she told me she’s thinking about moving with my grandpa into an assisted care center. Taking care of him is getting to be too much.”