‘None of your business.’ I straightened up and folded my arms, but this only caused his smile to grow.
He raised his brows up and down at me, so I raised mine back, because I wasn’t totally sure what he meant. He chuckled softly.
‘I’m going to get back to the party, but you can stay here and send more secret messages if you want.’
I looked down at my phone and then slipped it into my bag. ‘No, it’s okay. I think I’ve sent all the secret messages I need to for now.’ I walked past him, but as I did, he moved left and my body brushed against his. I stopped moving. I let my arm dangle like that, touching his.
‘Are the secret messages about me?’ he whispered.
‘You’re very presumptuous.’ I turned my neck and looked at him. His asymmetrical eyes seemed to be glinting now with his own secret.
CHAPTER38
‘OH MY GOD!’ Grace screamed from inside the house, and we all ran. It was one of those screams that you couldn’t ignore; it had an urgency to it that made your hairs stand on end. We all burst into the house.
‘The turkey. It’s burning!’ She opened the oven and a massive plume of smoke billowed into the room. I coughed several times and then saw, to my horror, that the turkey was engulfed in flames. Hysteria broke out. Children were pulled back and people started screaming.
‘Who the hell put it on three hundred degrees?’ Grace shouted.
‘You said three hundred degrees, Mom,’ Shaleen barked.
‘I said two hundred. Two!’
‘No, you didn’t. You said three hundred degrees for two hours.’
‘I said three hours on two hundred degrees!’
‘Can we stop arguing about who said what?’ Linda shouted over everyone. ‘The whole house is catching fire!’
‘Crap!’ Becca rushed forward, grabbed a dishcloth and started hitting the turkey. She beat the turkey over and over until Emma’s ear-piercing scream brought her to a stop.
‘Mom, the dishcloth is on fire!’
Becca looked at it. We all did. For a second, the entire audience, including her, went still. And then she snapped back to life and tossed it at the sink. It missed and hit the curtain, which also caught on fire.
Andrew pushed past me and ran out of the house. He returned seconds later, pulling the garden hose with him.
‘Stand back, everyone,’ he said, aiming the hose at the oven. ‘Turn it on, Leroy,’ he shouted into the garden. The sound of the water rushing up the hose made us all turn and look. The anticipation of the moment when the water would gush out made everyone hold their breath. The hose stiffened in Andrew’s hands, it spluttered, a drop came out, and then it exploded. Water raced out of the hose, soaking everyone in the kitchen. Andrew moved the hose from left to right, soaking the curtains and then the dishcloth, and swinging it back to the oven. The whole kitchen made sizzling sounds, until, finally, it didn’t.
‘You can turn it off, Leroy!’ Andrew shouted again, and then the hose went limp in his hands. We all stood there in shell-shocked silence, surveying the damage. Emma was soaked, Linda was soaked, Shaleen was hiding behind an open cupboard door and Grace and Becca were soaked. Water gushed out of the oven, and the burnt turkey lay on the floor, legs in the air, marinating in a blackened pool of water.
‘Shit!’ It slipped out of my mouth, and everyone looked at me, including the kids. I searched the children’s faces. They were all trying to hold back smiles.
‘Kids, don’t swear.’ I wagged a finger at them. ‘Swearing is very bad. It’s rude and crass and very offensive . . . well, unless you have Tourette’s syndrome, in which case it can’t be helped and no one would judge you if you swore. So, if you have Tourette’s syndrome, please, go ahead and swear, but if you don’t, then you shouldn’t say things like “shit!” ’ I threw my hands over my mouth and shook my head. I looked at the adults in the room this time. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to say it again, and I don’t have Tourette’s.’
‘Shit!’ one of the kids whispered, which caused an almost fall-to-the-floor fit of giggles to erupt.
‘No, no!’ I moved towards them. ‘There are plenty of other synonyms one can use, likedamn, oh dear, dammit, poop—’ I stopped talking when I realized I was making the situation worse by saying the word ‘poop’ to a bunch of children. They giggled louder. I looked at the adults again, expecting displeased faces, but that’s not what met me.
Becca smiled at me and then threw her hands in the air. ‘Well, shit!’ she exclaimed.
‘I second that,’ Grace said. ‘Double shit.’
And then we were all laughing. Not just the kids.
We sat outside on a giant picnic blanket that we’d made by carting out at least six blankets from the house. There was silence. The sun was setting, and it was casting a warm glow over everyone and everything. I looked up at the sky, bright orange and red. The rest of the day had been spent inside the house, trying to rectify the mess in the kitchen. We’d all mopped and wiped until there was no trace of the disaster.
‘I’m sorry that we’re eating toasted cheese sandwiches for Christmas dinner,’ Grace announced.
