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There weren’t any self-portraits or lopsided clay bowls. No glitter Valentines or hand-print Thanksgiving turkeys.
Nope, just a shit-ton of Heartthrob Warfare mementos piled in the center of her room like she was trying out for the Heartthrob Warfare edition of Hoarders.
This was not good.
“Wow, Aria, you’ve been busy,” she said, doing the stupid octave thing. She was going for nonchalance but sounded more like a third grader playing the dreaded recorder.
“And your pajamas are…” Landon said, looking downright gobsmacked.
That made two of them.
“They’re awesome,” the child whooped, then spun like a deranged Landon-Paige-obsessed bonbon ballerina.
She stopped spinning in front of the pile. “There are like a million pictures of you, Uncle Landy. Look,” the kid replied, then plucked a notebook from the floor. WithHarper Presley, age thirteen,scribbled across the front, she knew exactly what the kid had found.
Her heart hammered away as hope of retaining a shred of dignity evaporated.
“That’s junk. We should put it away. No, we should burn it. We could make a fire in the backyard,” she blathered as Aria turned to the page with a photograph pasted onto the lined paper.
Landon leaned in to get a better look. “That’s a picture of me and…” The man trailed off, and she could hear the amusement in his tone. He knew exactly what he was looking at.
This was worse than humiliating.
It was like having a dream where you’re walking around naked and everyone is staring and laughing. She pinched herself. This was no dream. This epic humiliation was the real deal.
She had two choices.
The first was to grab the Scrabble box, steal what was left of the pilfered bonbons, run for the hills, and never stop.
Or she could own it and move on.
A badass bitch would choose number two.
She cleared her throat. “It’s a picture of your uncle and some airhead model from a long time ago. I cut off her head and pasted mine in as an act of charity.”
There, that wasn’t so bad.
“An act of charity?” her pop star heartthrob echoed, enjoying this way too much.
This wasn’t bad. It was awful—awful to the six thousandth power.
Heat rose to her cheeks as she scowled at her thirteen-year-old self, rocking a mouthful of metal and enough rouge and emerald-green eye shadow to put a circus clown to shame. But there was a perfectly good explanation. Well, perfectly good might be pushing it. There was an explanation.
“I borrowed my grandmother’s makeup on picture day and put it on in the closet so she wouldn’t see what I was doing. It was dark in there, and I might have overdone it.”
Landon pegged her with his laughing brown eyes. “Might have?”
“You did that to your face on purpose?” Aria asked.
These two.
If they hadn’t looked so adorable sporting the same what-the-hell expression, she might have pegged them with a few bonbons.
But she couldn’t get too angry with them. They weren’t wrong.
The picture was terrifying.
She glanced at the window. Stupid two-story home. If she jumped, she was sure to bust her ankle.
