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“What?” I asked my friends, a bad idea since I didn’t know what they were going to say, but their looks made me think it wasn’t good.
“Nothing,” Fiona said. “Our mom just texted. We actually do have to get home.”
My eyes shot to the windows and the line of cars out there, pouring into our neighborhood at a snail’s pace.
“I’ll drive you,” I said.
“Why would you do that when Nova has a car here?” Fiona hooked her arm through her sister’s. “You’ll be here until it clears, right, Ryan?”
It took me a second, but I realized what they were doing now. “Fiona,” I said in a low voice.
“What?” She waved her phone at me as if to prove that she wasn’t lying, but she didn’t actually stop its movement for me to be able to read any sort of message on its screen, which I was sure didn’t exist. “I’ll see you at school tomorrow?”
I sighed. It was obvious she was abandoning me with the person I had just recommitted to not speaking to. Ryan was at least pretending not to know what was going on, taking a drink of his Coke and lifting his other hand in a wave as Fiona and Nova shuffled off despite my dirty look.
Chapter 13
“They’re fun,” Ryan said as Fiona and Nova left the Taco Bell.
“We shouldn’t be talking,” I replied.
He didn’t answer. He just ate in silence. I started to wonder if I’d said it in my head or too quietly for him to hear. Or maybe he was taking my words and applying them immediately. That seemed more like him. We were both facing the table, the seats across from us now empty. My right shoulder nearly touched his left.
Finally, after taking a bite of a burrito and washing it down with some Coke, he said, “Why?”
I gathered up the trash Fiona and her sister had left, along with my own, and put it all onto the tray. “Because we already established that our parents wouldn’t like it.”
“It’s our parents’ fight, isn’t it?” he asked.
My heart thudded heavily in my chest. He wasn’t wrong. Our parents had issues with each other. But I had problems with the Morenos too, I just couldn’t remember what those were with him so close. “That’s not how it works in families,” I said, because that was true too. We shared problems in our family.
His elbows were on the table, his eyes on his food. But he turned his head toward me and in a soft voice, eyes on me, said, “Do you want to stop talking to me?”
All the organs inside my body seemed to switch places with each other, and I couldn’t speak for several longer-than-normal seconds as I looked at his deep-brown eyes. His lashes were so dark, making his stare seem even more intense. “I … I don’t think so.” An image of our parents screaming at each other across the side yard flashed through my mind, jolting me back to reality. “But I can’t tell my moms. This would have to be between us.”
“Deal,” he said.
Why did that one word make my heart double its speed?
“Deal,” I said. It took me a moment to realize his hand, the one not closest to me, was reaching under his other arm, in a palm-up invitation. Was I supposed to high-five it? Shake it? Some sort of contact to seal the deal?
I gave his palm a light tap, but when I went to pull away, his fingers curled around my hand. I waited for him to shake it and then let go, but our eyes locked again. His hand was warm and so was his expression.
“Did you find out anything about Scrooge?” I asked.
“Scrooge?” He released my hand and turned his attention back to the final food item on the table—a bag of cinnamon twists.
“The lawsuit,” I whispered.
“Oh, no. I didn’t. My dad didn’t know anything else.” He held out the bag of cinnamon twists to me, and I took one.
I crunched into the twist, cinnamon and sugar sticking to my lips and also dropping onto my chin and into my lap. His eyes flicked to my lips as he handed me a napkin with a smile. I wiped up the mess. The jingle of the door behind us sounded, followed quickly by Ryan turning his face away and positioning it behind his hand.
“What?” I asked, not risking a look back. “Who is it?”
“Mrs. O’Leary.”
No, this wasn’t good. If she saw us together, Ryan’s mom would be the first to hear about it.
