I looked over at Justine; she looked as calm as could be. That was Justine, though. You never really knew how she was feeling. Nobody did. I think that’s how she protected herself.
Uncle Rick kept talking. “I’m so pleased with how things are going. Dennis told me you’re keeping up with ordering all the supplies and ingredients. So that makes my life so much easier.”
“Happy to help,” I said, moving toward the door. “We should probably get going. We always have lines of customers.”
Uncle Rick looked at his watch. “At nine-thirty?”
“Well, ya know, we need to, uh, set up, and be ready.” Justine jumped in quickly.
“And we told you about our breakfast snow cone, right?” I added.
“Oh. Right.” Uncle Rick high-fived us. “Great work, girls.”
“He has no idea,” I whispered to Justine once he was out of earshot. “What’s our plan, though?” I felt like I asked her this same question every other day.
“We’ll tell him when we need to tell him,” Justine said. “But it is kind of our thing.”
We got into the truck and drove over to our usual spot by the baseball fields. We set up all the ingredients and gave the blenders a good wash.
I was in the middle of washing the kale when Justine said, “You didn’t text me back last night.”
I looked off into the distance, trying to appear confused. “I didn’t?”
“No. You thought you did?”
I couldn’t tell Justine about the Dennis phone call for a million reasons. Okay, maybe not a million, but a few really big reasons. One was that Dennis was Justine’s stepcousin, so that made the whole thing weird. Also, I worried that if I told her, she’d be all like, Mia doesn’t care about Seth anymore, she got over him, finally, so we don’t need to do the Katie thing.
I mean, she was mega-invested in it, and it was her idea, and she seemed so determined to make something happen.
But I always worried she’d change her mind. Get bored of it. Realize it was a pretty nutty and cruel thing to do.
I knew it was wrong. But as much as I enjoyed talking to Dennis, I still loved Seth.
I needed the Katie thing. I had to see what was going to happen.
And probably most importantly, I had to get over him.
“I fell asleep really early.” I looked up at her, and her eyes were squinty and I could tell she didn’t believe me. I didn’t even remember she had texted. I was so focused on my conversation with Dennis.
“Really?”
“Really.” I started to dry the blenders. “How was your night?”
“Fine,” she said.
Did she talk as Katie on her own? I needed to know. But I also felt like I needed to pretend that Seth wasn’t on my mind all the time.
We were quiet for a few minutes. My mind bounced back and forth between the Dennis call and wondering about any more Katie/Seth interactions.
I felt like I was getting deeper and deeper into lies I didn’t even want to tell, and lies I didn’t even know why I was telling.
“I Katied it up last night,” Justine said finally.
“Is that what we’re calling it now?” I asked, laughing.
“It’s good, right?” She rinsed off some spinach and put it on a paper towel on the counter.
“Yeah, so what happened?” I asked her.
“He was sick. Some kind of sinus infection.”
She was so skimpy with the details, making me pull this out of her, strand by strand like spaghetti stuck at the bottom of the pot.
“Oh.” My heart hurt a little bit right then. It’s weird how when you’re in a relationship with someone you know every little detail about their day. And then one day you’re just not anymore, and you don’t know the little details or the big details. It’s cut off like a power outage.
“Don’t look so sad.” Justine cleared her throat. “He’s fine.”
I sat down across from her. “Just tell me everything. Please. We’re in this together, right? We’re both Katie. I deserve to know all the details.”
She bulged out her eyes. “Okay, well, he wanted to know why girls are so, um, ya know, crazy.”
I nodded, hoping she’d continue.
“He kept saying how weird it was that he was opening up to me. And maybe it was his antibiotics messing with his head. But he found me so easy to talk to. And he wasn’t sure why. And then he was wondering if we’d ever meet. And why we’re both so lazy about going to events and stuff.”
“Interesting.” I wanted her to continue but I also wanted her to stop. I was jealous. I was jealous because it seemed like Seth liked Justine. Like maybe he’d discover Katie was really Justine, and then he’d fall in love with her.
But Seth was mine.
And if I couldn’t have him, I didn’t want anyone else to, either. Especially not my best friend. She hated him now, after what he’d done, but what if her feelings changed one day?
Justine looked up. “That was pretty much it.”
We heard a knock on the window. Our first customer. “How many Epic Kales can you make?”
“Right now?” I asked.
“Yup. My book club is having an early-morning meeting, and I’m in charge of the refreshments.”
“We’ll get started,” Justine said.
We blended the ingredients and poured. Cup after cup after cup. And it felt great to be busy doing something.
It was nice to shut off your thoughts sometimes.
MIA
“I think we had a breakin! An intruder!” Dennis said as soon as we showed up at the shop a few days later. “We have to tell Rick. Right away!”
“Huh?” I looked around. Everything looked intact. Nothing was broken. I’d never seen Dennis so worked up.
“Come here,” he said. Justine and I followed him over to the laptop on the counter. “Look.”
“Um, it’s Facebook,” Justine said, not looking closely at the screen. “So what?”
“Did you look at the name?” He made the font bigger. “Who is Katie McCormick and why was she in our shop?”
Dennis sat down to look closer at the profile.
Justine grabbed my hand and talked through her teeth. “Say something.”
I elbowed her. “You.”
“It was just logged in to her when I went to update our page,” Dennis continued. “I admit, I’ve been lax on updating because people don’t really even use Facebook anymore, but…who is she? And why was she in here? On our computer?” He spun around and stared at us. “Is this some kind of hack? I don’t understand. I can call customer service….”
“Oh, um, that’s so weird,” I started. “I don’t get that at—”
“Dennis, calm down,” Justine said, patting his shoulder awkwardly. “Katie McCormick is our friend from school. She got in major trouble and her parents won’t let her use social media anymore, so she asked us to check her page.”
“Really?” Dennis asked, turning around to look at the screen again. “She looks like a perfectly nice, normal girl. What did she do that was so bad?”
I glanced at Justine. She tilted her head in my direction, saying it was my turn to take over. “Oh, really crazy stuff,” I said. “You don’t even want to know. I actually unfriended her because my dad is, like, super strict, and he doesn’t even want me hanging out with her anymore. She’s going to boarding school next year. Doesn’t even have a choice.”
“Yeah,” Justine added. “We’re not even really friends. We just checked her page, as, like, one last nice thing to do before she left.”
He curved his eyebrows like he wasn’t totally sure what was happening, but then he signed out. “Okay, well, phew. I’m glad we haven’t been robbed.”
“Yeah, robbing a snow cone shop…” Justine laughed. “Not the smartest idea. What would the person even take?”
He shook his head. “We have a lot of money here. I don’t take it to the bank every night, but I probably should. We’re very popular with th
e over-seventy set. Go figure.”
“Maybe because they all have dentures and can’t chew that well?” Justine suggested. “The snow cones are soft….”
“They’re not that old!” I scoffed. “Maybe they’re reliving their youth?”
“Maybe!” Dennis said. “Nostalgia! I didn’t think of that.”
“Okay, I’m going to get an iced coffee….All this talk of a breakin so early in the morning has made me really tired,” Justine announced. “I’ll be back.”
I plopped back down in my chair, exhausted too, and planned to take a three-minute power nap.
“So did you tell Justine my idea?” Dennis asked me.
“What idea?” I answered. I was so mad at myself for leaving Katie signed in. What other dumb mistakes was I about to make?
“The socks thing…” He wheeled his chair closer to mine so our knees touched. It got me to look up. “You told me Justine’s getting sick of you talking about Seth.”
“Yeah…I should tell her, um, about the socks.”
We stayed like that, knees touching, and stared at each other for a few seconds. Like, really stared. Or more like gazed, I guess. We were just gazing into each other’s eyes and it was creepy and hot all at the same time. I didn’t know what was happening. Those eyes. Those gigantic ocean eyes. They sucked me in so much I had to look away.
“What are you weirdos doing?”
We jolted up and saw Justine standing in front of us.
“Having a staring contest?” She eyed me suspiciously and completely ignored Dennis.
“Yeah, exactly.” I laughed. “We were bored.”
“Mia.” She came over to me and sat down on my lap. “You get weirder and weirder with each passing day. Do you know that?”
“I kind of had a feeling it was happening.” I looked at Dennis and covered my mouth so I wouldn’t crack up. “But I don’t know how to stop it.”
“Maybe take it easy on the kale,” Justine suggested, and stood up. “I think it’s going to your head or something. Come on. Ready to go?”
I grabbed my bag. “Have a great day, Dennis.”
“Yes indeedy, I will.”
“Yes indeedy, I will,” Justine mocked him.
I elbowed her. “Hey. Leave him alone.”
She rolled her eyes and walked ahead of me to the car.
Something was happening with Dennis. Little by little. I wasn’t sure what it was exactly. I had no idea where it was going.
But I think that was the part I liked the best.
JUSTINE
“You’re crushing it,” Emmett said as I walked into the bank a few days later.
“Huh?” I laughed. “What exactly am I crushing?”
“You’re crushing whatever job you do. You’re always here depositing money.” He looked at me sideways. “Are you sure what you’re doing is legal?”
“Ummmm.” I glanced around. “Is this being recorded? Are you undercover?”
Then he really cracked up. There was no better feeling in the entire world than making another person laugh. It was the ultimate sense of accomplishment, of purpose, of success. It was like this small thing that didn’t even really take that much effort made the world so much happier.
“Who are you?” he asked. “You’re not like anyone else I’ve ever met. Are you some kind of immigrant from another galaxy?”
I shifted my messenger bag to the other shoulder. “You figured me out, Emmett.” I started walking toward the tellers. “But I could say the same thing about you,” I called back to him.
After I deposited the snow cone money, I decided to open another account, under my name, for all the smoothie money. It was too much to keep in a shoe box, and that wasn’t really very safe.
We were crushing it. We needed to keep it separate and keep track of how much we were making.
On my way out of the bank, Emmett stopped me. “Hey, can I show you something?”
“I know about ATMs. They’ve been around awhile….”
“Are you ever not sarcastic?” he asked me.
“I’m pretty much sarcastic all the time,” I admitted. “Do you still want to show me something?”
He looked around and then grabbed my hand.
We were holding hands. Emmett and me. In the bank.
We walked silently down this long hallway, and my stomach tightened. It suddenly seemed like we were in a horror film, and I wondered if he was going to kill me or something. But there were security cameras everywhere, I reasoned, and his dad was like a senior vice-president….And why would he kill me? That didn’t even make sense. Unless he was some kind of psycho or something, but he really seemed normal and, like, well adjusted.
He took a key chain out of his pocket and unlocked the door.
“Oh my God,” I said. “I used to come here with my mom all the time, as a little kid. I liked it because I got to sit in those comfy chairs, and I always got lollipops. I think my mom still keeps important stuff in a safe-deposit box.”
He nodded. “Cool.”
Okay, so he didn’t get as excited about my safe-deposit box story as I’d hoped. “So what do you want to show me?”
“Just this.” He smiled and made sure the door was locked.
I gulped and looked around. There were cameras in here, too….
“Um.” This was definitely the stuff of horror films. I could see the headlines: Local girl murdered in bank safe-deposit box room. Body undiscovered for two weeks….Actually, Mia would look for me pretty much right away, so it wouldn’t be two weeks. “Cool.”
“So when I told my friends I was working at a bank for the summer, they made fun of me nonstop, like it was the lamest job ever. They know my dad is like a super-scary bank guy, and I try to be the opposite, so they were like, Dude. What?”
“Okay…” I needed him to get to the point. I was completely and totally freaking out. We were locked in a windowless room together, and it was probably soundproof, too. My knee-pits were sweating and the air conditioning was on full blast.
“My friend Nick was like, I dare you to make out with someone in the safe-deposit box room….”
“Are you kidding?” I gasped, stepping back from him. My skin tingled—I was horrified and excited at the same time. “I am not being part of a dare.”
“How do you know I didn’t already make out with Olga, the teller who’s been here since 1972?” He cracked up and drummed his fingers on his chin.
“Um, this is just getting weirder,” I said, laughing too. “I don’t know an Olga….”
“Okay, so I didn’t make out with Olga.” He walked closer to me, personal-space-level close. “Here’s the thing—it started out as a dare, but now I really do want to kiss you. Honestly.”
“Honestly?”
He nodded. “And I know this seems really bizarre, but to be fair to my buddy Nick—I dare you to make out with me?” He lifted his shoulders.
I tried to say yes but no words came out, so I just shook my head up and down.
“I don’t know what that means.” He looked at me sideways. “Are you nodding yes to the dare? Or the really bizarre part?”
I covered my mouth, laughing. “Both, I guess.” I rolled my lips together.
And then he kissed me. Just like that. Like he was a professional kisser and knew exactly what he was doing, and he didn’t second-guess himself or feel nervous or insecure or anything.
Could he tell that I’d only kissed one boy in my whole life? When I was eleven, and it wasn’t a make-out kind of kiss. It was only a quick peck, the kind of kiss that’s over before it starts.
It probably didn’t even really count as a real kiss, but it counted when you played Truth or Dare at parties in middle school. And it counted when the whole how many guys have you kissed conversation came up, though that came up less and less throughout high school. Because by the time you’re a junior in high school, most people have moved on from kissing, and no one is keeping score anymore.
So in that s
ense, it kind of got easier.
But it got harder, too—because the longer you go without kissing people, and the older you get without kissing people, the more scared you get.
Like last spring when I kind of had a chance to make out with Elliott Chaffler on the Outdoor Ed trip. It was the last night and we were all around the campfire, and he was sitting next to me. We were closer than two average people at a campfire, and it’s not like Elliott and I were best friends or anything.
Everyone wanted to make out with someone that trip; I guess he figured I would do. We were talking about boring stuff like the fact that the chem labs had gotten harder, and that everyone knew the tennis team tryouts were rigged, and then suddenly he was like, Wanna go for a walk?
And then I freaked out completely. I figured he’d be able to tell I’d never really kissed anyone, and our kiss would be the worst kiss in the history of people kissing, and then the whole grade would find out that I didn’t know how to kiss, and I’d never kiss anyone again. So I answered, “Actually, I’m really tired,” like the lamest person in the world.
I left the campfire and never came back.
Emmett pulled away finally, and I felt a little guilty that I’d spent most of our kissing session thinking how I totally ditched Elliott Chaffler.
“Let’s do that again, okay?” Emmett asked.
“You have more dares to complete?”
“Maybe…” He half-smiled. “Just kidding. I’m just saying let’s pick a place where we’re not being recorded.”
“What?” I shrieked.
“Don’t worry.” He put an arm around me. “I know how to erase the footage.”
“Okay. Do it. Do it now, before we end up going viral.” I picked my bag up off the floor. “I better, um, go. My friend probably thinks I’ve been kidnapped.”
He reached over to hug me and it felt like he swallowed me up, but in a good way, like when you’re bundled in a blanket on the couch and the whole world feels cozy. “I’ll walk you out.”
We were at the doorway of the bank when he said, “Coming back to deposit tomorrow?”
I smiled. “Hopefully.”
JUSTINE
We were seated in our favorite booth at the diner, and all I wanted to do was tell Mia about the hot make-out session in the safe-deposit box room. I was pretty sure that was illegal according to all kinds of banking rules, but honestly, no one except my mom really used safe-deposit boxes anymore.
Kale, My Ex, and Other Things to Toss in a Blender Page 9