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I put a hopeful shine on my words: “Fixing locks?”
But Benny’s not having it. “Is that what the kids are calling it these days?”
“Making out,” Andrew says with a shrug. “But you are sworn to secrecy.”
“I feel like I’m carrying a lot of secrets lately.” Benny eyes me sideways.
Andrew notices and looks back and forth between the two of us. “What’s going on?”
I shrug like, Benny said it, not me.
“Mae’s going through some stuff.”
“Good or bad?” Andrew asks, turning to me, immediately concerned that I’m hiding something from him.
“Oh . . . I’d wager good,” Benny says, raising his eyebrows meaningfully at me.
Over Andrew’s shoulder, I give Benny the thumbs-up. Behind Andrew’s back, Benny does a dorky little dance of celebration. He stops abruptly when Andrew turns back to him. “But I was coming to warn you guys that Miles is looking for Mae.”
“And you knew to find us in the curtains?” I ask him.
Benny turns to leave and grins at us over his shoulder. “It was pretty easy to follow the giggles.”
• • •
I find my brother on the porch, sitting on the swing, scrolling through his phone. He looks up when he hears my footsteps and drops it into his jacket pocket, tucking his hands between his knees. “Hey.”
“Hey.”
It’s freezing out here, and fresh out of the shower, I feel like I’ve just stepped into a walk-in freezer. Teeth chattering, I cup one hand around my warm mug of coffee and use the other to zip my parka up to my chin.
“Benny said you were looking for me.”
Miles pauses, blushing, and in an instant I know what this is about. Why didn’t I see this coming?
I sit down next to him on the swing, bumping his shoulder with mine. “What’s up?”
“I was right last night, wasn’t I?” he asks, and then looks at me. My brother got our mother’s enormous eyes and he knows how to use them. He can make them round with innocence or narrow them in mischief. Right now, he winces a little, looking mortified to be asking me this but also, I know, hoping I won’t lie to him.
“Right about what?” I ask, wanting to be sure.
“That you and Andrew are hooking up.”
“Yes,” I say simply.
“Does Theo know?”
A defensive wave sweeps briefly over me. “No. And please don’t tell him. If we decide this is going anywhere, we’ll tell everyone ourselves.”
Miles nods at this and turns his eyes out to the snow-covered front yard. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing here?”
“Not really.”
“Because you know Mom will have no chill about this.”
The thing about moving home is that I went from independent adult back into kid mode. Mom still does most of the cooking because she loves it. She does most of my laundry because she uses the activity to unwind while she’s thinking about how to fix one of her paintings. Of course, I love these perks but they mean I can’t complain that she also never thinks twice before giving me her two cents on every aspect of my life.
“Trust me,” I say, “that is reason number one why I’m not saying anything yet.”
Miles takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “I think Theo is in love with you.”
“What? No, he isn’t,” I say.
“How do you know?”
I laugh dryly. “Theo is used to everyone wanting him. I don’t. He’s the kind of guy who wants what he can’t have.”
I watch Miles absorb this information, and then he seems to understand, nodding slowly. “Okay. I just—I don’t want him to be upset.”
Kissing my brother’s temple, I tell him, “You’re a good boy.”
He pretends to be grossed out by this, pushing me away, but turns back before leaving. “Hang out with him today.”
“Why?”
“Because I think he misses you.”
chapter twenty-one
I suppose it’s fate, then, that Miles and Theo broke the bowl we always use to hold the scraps of paper for picking teams. Ricky grabs his cowboy hat instead and this time, when Theo’s name is pulled out, mine is the one that immediately follows. Andrew throws me a little womp-womp face, but I’ve got no doubt that he and Miles are going to crush the scavenger hunt; their team has the killer combination of Miles’s doe eyes and Andrew’s ability to charm a stranger into doing anything.
Which is good, because this year’s list is heavy on the video evidence, including:
• A stranger singing “Jingle Bells”
• A dog doing a trick
• Someone reciting their Christmas list
• A teammate performing an act of kindness
Theo comes over to me, holding the list and smiling shyly, and it’s disarming. How can this self-conscious turtle be the same guy who licked my face and refused to talk to me the next morning? It’s impossible to reconcile. We used to text about everything—homework and school, his soccer practice and my art projects. He’d complain about the snow and I’d send him a photo of my mom’s garden, still in bloom. We haven’t done that for a really long time. I wonder if he misses it.
