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“And I take it Kristen’s parents won’t be chaperoning?” I cocked my head to the left, asking dryly. “I’m sorry, did I unwittingly ingest the enormous portion of controlled substances it would take for me to agree to this scheme?”
Gigi huffed. “No.”
“Then you call Kristen and tell her you are declining her generous invitation, because there is no way this is happening while I’m still breathing.”
“Iris, nothing’s going to happen!” Gigi cried. “I’m not stupid.”
“I would never say you’re stupid,” I assured her. “But older boys plus a dark, unsupervised area plus the beer I know will be there—honey, you do the math.”
Gigi sighed but didn’t respond.
“It’s not that I don’t trust you,” I assured her.
“Thank you.”
“I just don’t trust anyone else,” I added, pinching her cheek.
She grumbled. “OK, so I can’t go to Kristen’s. Can I go out with Ben?”
The sudden change in conversational lanes caught me off guard. That idea came up way too quickly. Gigi never just assumed that a boy would be available to go out. Sometimes she stressed all week about not having weekend plans and then got even more agitated if the expected invitations came from the wrong boys. I shot her a speculative look. “Did you already have plans with Ben?”
She twisted her hands at her waist. “He might have mentioned going to the movies tonight. Please can I go, Iris? He’s so cute, and even you would have to admit that he’s a nice guy.”
I bit my lips to keep from snickering. “So you invented this beer-fueled forest orgy so a trip to the movies with Ben would seem reasonable and innocent. Well played, young Padawan. Very sneaky.”
“Well, I haven’t figured out how you keep track of my chemistry average, so clearly, you’re no slouch, either.”
“I will not reveal my secrets until I see midterm reports,” I told her. “Tell Ben he has to pick you up here. You know the rule. All dates must be prescreened and patted down. And willing to sign the release form for a background check.”
“No!” she hollered. “Iris, no one else’s parents make them do that!”
“Well, three of your classmates are going to have to order maternity graduation gowns, so I think we’ll stick to my archaic, unreasonable policies. Look, Gigi, I won’t ask him for a blood sample. I just want to meet him.”
“Ugh, why can’t you just be the cool parent figure who wants to be my friend?”
I shrugged apologetically as “Flight of the Bumblebee” rang from my phone. “I bring home vampires. How can you get cooler than that?”
Gigi turned on the blow-dryer, covering the crude response that I could barely make out in the bathroom mirror. I smiled sweetly and blew her a kiss as I answered my phone and took an order for three kinds of bath salts from three different boutiques for Ms. Wexler.
Then I trotted downstairs and ran smack into Cal as he walked out of the kitchen. I rammed headfirst into his chest, bouncing off him like a pinball and colliding with the countertop.
“Mother of fudge!” I yelped, cradling a hand over my aching hip. Cal grabbed my arms to stop my mad ricocheting about the kitchen. My hair flopped into my face like a dense, unmanageable veil.
“Are you all right?” he asked, pulling my hips parallel with his so he could check for bruising.
“Fine,” I ground out, pushing his hands away and shoving my hair out of my face. I turned away from him, rummaging through the spice drawer for the package of Laffy Taffy that I kept there.
Cal frowned at my bizarre choice of candy storage. “Why do you have candy there—” I lifted an eyebrow. He stepped back. “Never mind.”
Ripping into the package, I stared at the artfully faded collar of his denim work shirt, the same shirt he’d worn the night of the “incident.” Its presence wasn’t helping with my frame of mind. Somehow seeing it made me really angry for reasons that my rational mind couldn’t seem to pin down.
“Is there anything I can do to make the last day of your stay more comfortable?” I asked, my tone flinty. His sable eyebrows rose as I glared up at him. “Leave your bags by the door? Pack up your leftover blood in a doggie bag? Launch you off the front porch with a catapult timed for sunset?”
“Can we go outside for this discussion?” he asked, looking pointedly upstairs, where Gigi was singing some obnoxious bubble-gum pop song with the word “boy” in every other phrase. I nodded and followed him to the backyard. I stopped near the back door, but he continued out into the garden, between flanking beds of fragrant white and purple irises, their delicate, waxy petals fluttering slightly in the breeze.
I let him walk ahead. He would not touch me. I was out of his reach. At least, that’s what I told myself. “I understand why you’re so upset. Reading what I wrote, it … When I wrote those things about you, I hadn’t met you,” he said softly. “You were just another nameless, faceless human, so small and apparently harmless that I barely deemed it necessary to look into your background.”
I snorted. “Oh, yes, it’s so much better to make hasty, hurtful judgments about someone you don’t know.”
