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“I have my phone, but I don’t have a speaker set up here yet. You can use your headphones if you want.”

She was either going to have the strongest eye muscles of anyone I’d ever met, or they were just going to fall right out of her head one day at the rate she was rolling them at me. “They’re dead. Whatever. I have a speaker upstairs. I’ll get it. I need to check on Pipsqueak anyway.”

Before I could protest, she’d darted out the shop’s front door, leaving me frozen as I debated what exactly constituted keeping an eye on a fifteen-year-old. Had Art meant constantly? At her age, I’d been taking public transportation to and from school on my own, but I hadn’t been a kid in a strange town in a foreign country who’d been pulled from school because I’d been hanging out with borderline delinquents.

The door flew open, announcing her return and sparing me from having to decide. I winced as it bounced against a chair and made the glass rattle ominously.

Viv muttered a hasty “Sorry” as she slipped through the door and closed it more gently behind her.

She pulled a little square Bluetooth speaker from a messenger bag she hadn’t been wearing earlier and dropped it on the counter before tapping her phone screen a few times. A song I’d rocked out to hard when I’d been a little bit older than her poured surprisingly loudly out of her small speaker. I bopped my head in time to the music until she shot me a sideways look, and I realized she’d been testing me to see if I would protest her choice of music. I laughed to myself.

“Good choice. I saw them play live when I was in college. Someone threw a bottle at the stage, and the lead singer just opened it, took a swig, and tossed it back. Total legend,” I said, turning my attention back to the jars, mouthing the words as I went.

Watching for a reaction out of the corner of my eye, I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing as Viv’s eyes widened a smidge with grudging respect. She opened her mouth as if to ask a follow-up question but snapped it shut again when she remembered who she was talking to and let her bored-teen mask fall back into place.

“What are you working on?” I asked, stifling a grin and gesturing toward the snug, as Peggy kept referring to the back room, where Viv had been sitting, typing morosely—one finger at a time—on her laptop all morning.

“Nothing. It’s dumb. It’s all dumb.”

“Really?” I replied. “My high school memories are a little fuzzy, but I remember some of it being cool.”

Viv grunted in reply, which I took to either mean “cool must have meant something different in the dark ages” or “grown-ups are too dumb for words.” Either way, I let it slide.

“Is remote school lectures and stuff?” I asked, unsure how someone could do school a whole ocean away from their classmates.

The full-body shudder and horror on Viv’s face answered that question.

“Not lectures. I have to do a big project for each subject and reading and stuff. It’s boring and dumb, and I hate it. I just want to be back at school with my friends. I don’t know why we’re here. It’s so dumb. Dad’s making such a big deal out of nothing. Ugh!” She kicked the shop counter and let out a frustrated grunt when she discovered it was made of solid wood. I winced sympathetically.

“I’m sorry you miss your friends. That can’t be easy.”

Viv side-eyed me for a moment with a quizzical expression that she’d perfectly lifted from her father. Not that I was going to be the one to tell her. I shrugged.

Mac and I had been the weird kids at our school because of our overly eccentric mom and aunts, so I hadn’t had too many friends aside from him, but I could see how being yanked away from a support network, no matter how flawed, and flown to the other side of the world, then told to sit quietly in your father’s surprise girlfriend’s shop would be upsetting.

Girlfriend.

I kept my face turned away from Viv until I thought I had some control over the goofy grin trying to break free. There was no taming the butterflies dancing tangos in my belly.

“Projects could be kind of cool. No? Better than sitting in boring classes anyway,” I added.

She gaped at me for a moment, and I quickly replayed what I’d said.

Cursing under my breath, I winced. Then I winced again as her eyes widened further. “Ah. Sorry. Grown-ups aren’t supposed to say school is boring, right?”

Viv shook her head slowly.

“And we’re not supposed to swear either?”

She shook her head again, and I thought I saw the faintest hint of a smile when I simply shrugged.

“Eh, it is what it is. So, projects? Cool? No?”

The muttered answer I got after a beat of silence sounded suspiciously like “I dunno. It’s dumb.” With a sigh, I gave up trying to force the conversation, and we went back to washing the jars and putting them up in their cubbies.

Every so often, I caught her slipping her phone out of her pocket, but whenever I glanced over to see what she was up to, she glared at me as she put it away before getting back to work.

Eventually, the silence must have started to wear on her as well, because she asked, “What are you going to put in these, anyway?” after hoisting one up to a higher shelf.