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“What?” I startle. “Oh, no! It’s wonderful. I was just daydreaming, I guess.”
I smile at both of them to reassure them. If they can really read my mind, they should be able to tell just how happy and satisfied I am.
“What are you daydreaming about?” Irving asks, genuinely interested.
“Oh, being chased down by the Coast Guard, I suppose,” I joke.
Irving smirks and takes a healthy bite of his steak. Cal laughs into his sleeve.
“Oh, don’t act so innocent,” I chide him. “I bet you were not so innocent, right?”
Cal rolls his eyes and shakes his head like he doesn’t remember anything.
“Yeah, Cal,” Irving wheedles. “Why don’t you tell her aboutyourchildhood shenanigans?”
“I can’t think of anything interesting,” Cal shrugs. “I was the good kid, remember?”
“Ha! You just didn’t get caught!” Irving objects. “And if you did think you were going to get caught you made sure the evidence pointed toward me.”
“Right. Because I’m a genius,” Cal explains.
“No, because you’re a jerk!” Irving continues, but I can tell he is really amused. “We look alike, you may have noticed…”
“Oh yes, I noticed!” I confirm.
Irving’s eyes are bright with amusement. I can’t remember if I have ever seen him look like this.
“Yeah, so… We were at school in Switzerland. We had a biology teacher whose sole purpose was to try to get people to throw up.”
I shake my head, not understanding.
“It’s true,” Cal nods with his cheeks full of lobster. “He was disgusting.”
“Right. We did dissection after dissection, everything from flatworms up to fetal sharks.”
I suppress a shudder. “Ew. Gross!”
“Precisely. His philosophy was that if you had to leave class for any reason, you automatically failed. Well, eventually, we got to the end of the semester… when we were given kittens.”
“Kittens?” I ask, horrified. “Cute little kittens?”
“Cute littlelivekittens,” he continues. “And a tablespoon of cyanide.”
“That’s horrible!” I exclaim. “That’s… sick!”
“Right, that’s what I said,” Cal scoffs.
“Also at that time,” Irving says, advancing the story another chapter, “Cal had inexplicable trouble keeping track of his rugby equipment. Whenever he would lose something, he would just steal—”
“—borrow—”
“—steal without asking—my stuff. So when he came up with the genius plan to liberate those poor kittens, guess whose rugby jersey got left behind in the lab?”
My eyes widen, horrified.
“As you can see, I didn’t do it on purpose,” Cal shrugs.
“So not the point! You also didn’t make any great effort to correct them when I got suspended, did you?”
