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“No, he’s right.” Jem nodded. “Closer to the natural color. It’s even better.”
“And let me guess,” Emery said from where he was picking an abundance of fruit snacks out of the lunchbox. “They cost sixty dollars.”
The beat lasted a moment too long.
“Yes,” Jem said. “Sixty dollars.”
Emery paused. “How much are they?”
“I’d better check on Tean.”
Jem slipped out of the room before Emery could catch him.
“John?”
“I, uh, better help.”
And then, somehow, Auggie was alone.
“How much?” Emery said with that tone like he was picking each word carefully because the sentence was going to end in a murder.
“You know,” Auggie said, “I actually didn’t see.”
Emery’s silence seemed to grow by the second until he finally said, “I am going to remember this.”
Auggie offered a smile.
“Did I mention that we charge for babysitting?”
“No,” John-Henry called from the other room, “we don’t.”
“Speaking of which,” Auggie said, and he tried to check his watch, only he wasn’t wearing one—because, well, he never did. Emery snorted. “We’d better get going, Theo.”
“Right.” Theo scratched his beard. “Let me just check on Lana—”
“She’s fine,” North said, gesturing with his beer. “She and Evie ran that way.”
Theo looked in that direction.
“They had a bunch of kitchen knives,” North said. “And they were running with scissors. Oh, and I think they were dousing each other with gasoline.”
Theo shot him a dark look, and North smirked.
“It’s ok if you have a third nipple,” Shaw was saying to Ashley, who had now gone wide eyed and looked, frankly, a little desperate. “But it’s not ok to lie about it.”
“Not ok to lie about it,” North said. “Look who’s talking. I find you tits up in the bathtub, so blitzed you keep asking if your legs are balloons—”
“Balloon animals,” Shaw said. To Ashley, who was trying to slide away again, he added, “I thought they were those little sausage dogs.”
“—and you tell me all you did was have tea with Master Hermes.”
“It was tea! It had the little mushrooms in it!”
“Those are ’shrooms, dumbfuck!”
Ashley made a break for it, his bare feet slapping the boards as he escaped.
North squinted at Auggie. “What product do you use in your hair, Short Round?”
