“What about your friend Elena?” asked their brother Matthew.
“She has a boyfriend now, duh-doy,” said Harper. “How do you not know that? Oliver. Prince.” She raised her eyebrows.
So did Matthew. “One of the Prince Princes? You never mentioned that. Were they together when I saw her in Florida over spring break?” Matthew lived in New York and missed out on the most salacious North Pole gossip. Whenever he came back to visit, he relished catching up on all the happenings around town.
“Yes, but it was new, and you know how Elena is about her privacy, plus you were all up your own butt about wedding planning.”
Sam tapped Matthew’s wedding binder on the table, trying to call his siblings back to order. “Yes,” he said. “Elena Chestnut is dating Oliver Prince and their families aren’t fighting anymore, and it’s all a big whoopee-dee-do. Can we drop this, please? We have bigger things to worry about.”
“Bigger than the end of the Prince-Chestnut feud?” Harper asked.
“Bigger than you bringing a date to my wedding?” Matthew smirked.
Sam groaned. “Much bigger. We’ve got, like, today to get this stuff done before you two ditch me until the rehearsal dinner.” Harper was working all summer as a camp counselor, and Matthew was going back home to New York until the wedding.
“Hakeem and I are coming back the week before,” Matthew said.
Harper grabbed the binder and flipped through. “Me, too. Besides, you’ve got Matty’s meticulous notes to keep you on course.”
“Still.” Sam snatched the binder back from his sister. “It’s not like I’m a wedding planner. I’m an eighteen-year-old guy who has never even come close to getting married.”
“Understatement.” Harper nudged Matthew.
Matthew patted Sam’s hand. “You only need to be here to answer vendor questions, collect the RSVPs…”
“Make the wedding favors,” Harper added.
“You were going to do that!” Sam said.
She shook her head. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Matthew pulled out his phone and tapped on the screen. “Other than those few things, everything else is taken care of.”
“Not true.” Sam opened the binder to the third page and pointed to the second line item. “What about tuxedos?”
“We should probably order those.” Matthew laughed at the text on his screen.
“You think? Your wedding is in a month.” Sam’s brother was getting hitched on Independence Day, ironically. Matthew and Hakeem thought that was hilarious.
“I’ve got the fireworks all squared away,” Matthew said.
“Good.” Sam checked off “fireworks” on the list. “Because that’s what’s important. If the fireworks are distracting enough, your guests might not notice that there’s no cake and you’re walking down the aisle naked.”
“We’re finalizing the cake order today.” Harper patted Sam’s hand. “Relax. It’s all going to be fine.”
“Says the girl who’s skipping town for the next three weeks.”
She sipped her drink.
Matthew put his phone away and got serious for a moment. Sam loved his brother, but they were very different, in almost every way. Matthew was conservative—fiscally, politically, sartorially. He was very neat. That was the word that always came to mind for Sam. He looked neat. His hair was always perfect, and so were his clothes. He was blond, fit, and trim.
Sam was a good three inches taller than his older brother; and his physique was more “defensive lineman” than “quarterback.” If Matthew was a greyhound, Sam was a Rottweiler.
“Sam, I don’t say it enough, or okay, ever, but thank you for taking the reins on this. I knew the wedding stuff was going to be tough…emotionally…and I’m so grateful to you for handling everything.” Matthew cleared his throat. “Mom—”
Harper waved him off, furiously. “Stop. We get it.” Harper was all about keeping things light.
“No.” Matthew shook his head. “I’m saying it. It needs to be said. It sucks that Mom’s not here for this.”
Harper stared out the front window of Santabucks, biting her lip.
It had been five years since their mom died, and Sam still thought about her usual order every time he came into the coffee shop. Earl grey with lemon. But he didn’t tell his siblings that. He never let on how much he missed her. He tamped down his emotions, as always, for his family. It was his job. He placed his hand on Harper’s forearm, which only made her bite her lip harder. Sam was shocked she didn’t draw blood.
Matthew squeezed Sam’s other hand. “You’re the one who keeps this family afloat. You’re the rock, Sammy.”
Sam smiled. “I’m the rock? Who keeps us afloat? Talk about a mixed metaphor.”
Harper snorted. “Besides, Matty, Sam’s not The Rock. He’s not Dwayne Johnson. He’s more like the Pillsbury Dough Boy. Or The Rock’s before picture.”
“Ha-ha.” Sam didn’t remind her that he’d lost ten pounds over the past few months and had started to tone up, thanks to helping out with the landscaping at home. Facts never mattered to his siblings. He’d always be the fat one to them. Besides, Sam had done his duty. He’d let himself be the butt of the joke. Again. Reliably, his physique had rescued his family from their funk.
Harper checked the time on her phone. “Shall we?” She grabbed her cup and stood up.
Sam and Matthew did the same. On the way out the door, Matthew nudged Sam in the ribs. “You know what would’ve made Mom really happy? If you could somehow manage to find yourself a date for this wedding.”
Sam groaned, and his brother and sister spent the entire walk down the block to Sugarplum Sweets naming a litany of North Pole girls Sam could ask to Matthew’s wedding.
The words “Old Mrs. Page” had just crossed Harper’s lips when she pulled open the door to the bakery and the girl behind the counter greeted the trio of Andersons. “Hi, Sam. Harper,” she added with a slight sneer.
Sam didn’t recognize her. She was a bit younger than him, but definitely in high school. Maybe a sophomore or something. She had big glasses that made her eyes bug out like an insect, and she was wearing her dyed, electric blue hair up in two tight buns on top of her head.
“What’s up, Dottie?” Harper leaned against the counter.
“Oh, Dottie.” Now Sam remembered. “You changed your hair.”
She touched her buns. “As one does from time to time.” Her voice was inflection-free, bored, almost robotic.
Matthew reached across the counter and shook Dottie’s hand. “I’m Matthew Anderson. We’re here to test cakes for my wedding.” He handed her a paper shopping bag. “We want the cake to look like my fiancé’s parents’ from the 1970s.”
“Fountain and all,” Harper said.
“Yes, fountain and all.” Matthew pointed to the bag. “There’s a photo in the bag for reference, along with all the decorations for the cake—the groom figures, the plastic stairs, et cetera.”
Rolling her eyes, Dottie wrote “Anderson wedding” on the front of the bag before shoving it under the counter.
“Dottie’s going to be a junior next year,” Harper said. “She’s super smart. We had what class together last year? Science?”
“Biology.” Dottie pushed her glasses back up to the bridge of her nose as she stood from her crouch and narrowed her eyes at Harper.
“Oh yeah,” Harper said. “You really got a kick out of dissecting stuff.”
Dottie, with a curl of the lip and a curtsey, said pointedly to Harper, “My aunt left some samples for you. I’ll get them, my liege.”
When Dottie was safely behind the door leading toward the back of the store, Harper jabbed Sam in the side. “Maybe you should ask Dottie to the wedding.”
“Shut up,” he said.
“I think you should,” Matthew said. “She seems like tons of fun with all the sneering and sarcasm. You two could perform experiments on the calamari.”
“D
ude,” Harper hissed at Matthew. “You have no idea. She got pissed at her lab partner and left a dissected worm in his locker. I’m not even kidding.”
Their cattiness irked Sam. It was one thing to make fun of him—he was family. Sam couldn’t deny that Dottie seemed a bit strange and surly, but still. She could be the girl in the movie who was hiding a stellar personality behind the brightly patterned clothing and the sarcasm. As far as Sam knew, she really hadn’t done anything to either Harper or Matthew that warranted an attack.
Her lab partner, on the other hand. He might have a beef.
Dottie came out carrying a tray with four different kinds of cake on it. She pointed to each one, reading the crib notes her aunt had pasted on the tray in what was, presumably, her normal flat voice, like each word out of her mouth exhausted her to no end. “This is almond cake with a cherry filling and amaretto buttercream. Here’s chocolate cake with a chocolate Italian buttercream. There’s a carrot cake with cream cheese frosting. And caramel cake with caramel icing.”
“Mom’s favorite.” Matthew took the teensiest bite of that one. He mostly ate Paleo, so that one nibble was probably torture for him.
Sam, the foodie of the group, dug his fork into the almond cake. He wrinkled his nose. A little too much almond. “Can we put a vanilla buttercream on that layer? The almond is oppressive.”
Dottie made the note on her pad of paper.
He tried the caramel. “This is a little too sweet. And burnt.”
“Hey, Dottie.” Harper dipped her finger in the chocolate frosting. “What are you doing on the Fourth of July?”
Dottie folded her arms and cocked her jaw. “Uh…let me check my calendar. Nothing.”
“That’s when Matthew’s wedding is, but you knew that.” Harper licked her finger. “Sam doesn’t have a date.”
Dottie blushed to her electric blue hairline. It was the first time she’d shown any emotion beyond ennui. “And? So?”
Sam stomped on his sister’s foot.
“Ow!” she squealed, hopping around. “That’s my bad foot, you jerk.” She had broken her ankle back in February, and she’d been using it as an excuse to get out of…well, basically everything.
Sam kept his eyes down on the tray as he gave Dottie their final order. The cake was his domain, and the only part of wedding planning he was actually excited about. “Top layer, carrot cake. Then the almond, the caramel, and the chocolate. Does that work?” Now he looked at her. She was staring at him with the big bug eyes. He focused on the cakes again.
“I’ll tell my aunt,” said Dottie. “And I’ll give her your notes.”
Matthew leaned closer to Dottie, resting his elbows on the counter and his chin in his hands. “Hey, Dottie, can we get your phone number, just in case we—and by ‘we’ I mean ‘Sam,’ because he’s the one handling my wedding details—need to contact you with any questions or concerns?”
Dottie’s face got even redder, like it could burst into flames at any moment. She wrote her number on the notepad and handed Sam the paper.
He glanced down and ripped it in half, giving Dottie back the part with the notes for her aunt on it. “You’re going to need these.”
Before the door closed behind the trio of Andersons, Sam heard Dottie yell from inside the shop, “Call me, Sam! Anytime!”
“I’m going to murder you two,” he muttered. “That was really rude.”
“Oh, she’s fine.” Harper skipped down the street. “You just made her day.”
“And when I don’t call her?”
“Why wouldn’t you call her? She likes you.” Harper stopped and turned to face him. “Besides, what other options do you have?”
…
Sam’s brother and sister kept teasing him all day; and when they returned home, they even got their eight-year-old sister, Maddie, in on it. She kept bouncing around the family room, screeching, “Dottie Go-old. Dottie Go-old.”
The truth hurt. Sam didn’t have options. He’d always been the doughy, goofy, friendly guy. He wasn’t someone girls fawned over and dreamed about. In a movie, he’d be the best friend character, the comic relief. Losing some weight and getting fit was supposed to have been his silver bullet, his ticket to romance, but that hadn’t panned out yet.
Maybe it wasn’t how he looked. Maybe it was him.
By the end of the night, during a heated—they were always heated—family game of Trivial Pursuit, Sam reached his final straw. It started when their dad asked how wedding planning had gone that day. “Did you get everything you needed done?” He rolled the die and moved his pie to an orange space.
“We did.” Harper pulled a question out of the box and asked their dad something about the 1986 Boston Red Sox, which he answered correctly. “Sammy may have found a date for the wedding.”
Sam stared at the condensation on his lemonade. She was teasing him, which was nothing new. But her words were hitting him extra hard today.
“Who’s the girl, Sam?” Mr. Anderson looked like the other kids, not Sam—or, well, they looked like him—blond and trim. Sam was the outlier.
“She’s no one,” he said. “There’s no girl. I don’t want to take anyone to the wedding. I just want to have fun with my family. Is that so hard to comprehend?”
After his dad finished his run by giving the wrong answer to a question about some random 1990s TV show, it was Sam’s turn. He picked up the die and shook it.
“Come on, Sam,” said Matthew. “Roll a big one for Dottie.”
Instead, Sam chucked the die right at Matthew’s chest. “You do it.”
To a chorus of “Come on, Sam!” and “We were just messing with you,” Sam stormed out to the back deck, where he ran his hands along the slick, varnished railing and stared up at the stars in the cloudless sky. If this were a movie, now would be the part where Sam met the gorgeous girl next door. She’d see right through Sam’s physique to his big heart and better-than-average sense of humor.
He glanced over at the Fosters’ house, his new neighbors’ place. It was dark, as usual. Life wasn’t a movie. Life was life.
Sam sighed and checked his phone. He opened up his contacts and found the name Harper had entered earlier today—Dottie Gold, heart emoji.
“You texting Dottie?” came a voice from behind him.
Sam turned toward Harper, hiding his phone behind his back. His sister was either a wizard or she had X-ray vision. “Nope.”
“You should.” She stood next to him and placed her hands on the deck railing, facing the Fosters’. “You’re going to college soon, Sam. Get some experience before you leave.”
“I have experience.” He did. Ish.
“Kissing a random sophomore during a school play is not ‘experience.’”
She had him there. “I don’t want to start anything now. I’m leaving in a few weeks, and it’ll be hard enough leaving this town and you assholes.” He nudged his sister in the ribs.
“You’ll have no problem leaving Dottie, believe me.” She held out her hand. “Give me your phone.”
He hid it behind his back. “No.” Bringing Dottie into this wouldn’t solve anything.
“Suit yourself, but think about it.” Harper turned to leave, but stopped. “Make sure you’re honest, though, about what you want. Hooking up is fine, great even, as long as everyone’s on the same page. Don’t give her the wrong idea. I speak from experience.” Harper had run into a similar situation a few months ago with her friend Regina.
Alone again on the deck, Sam flicked on his phone and turned toward his neighbors’ house. He rested his elbows on the railing and stared at the screen. Hi, Dottie, he typed.
And he was stuck. He lifted his eyes to the Fosters’ second floor balcony again and was so lost in composing his message to Dottie that he almost didn’t notice the person standing there, a girl, resting her hands on the railing. Her long, blond hair curled around her shoulders, and it seemed like she was doing the same thing Sam had been—breathing, escaping.
&n
bsp; The girl peered over at him, and he tentatively raised his hand in greeting. She, the actual girl next door, did the same for one brief second, then scurried into the house and slid the door shut.
Sam stared at the balcony for a moment, waiting for her to reappear. He put his hand to his chest, where his heart hammered against his sternum.
This right here was his problem, always had been. He was too caught up in the movie version of his life. That girl showing up on the balcony was a coincidence, nothing more. There was no deeper meaning. They weren’t destined to be together. There was a very strong likelihood they’d never even speak to each other. Sam couldn’t keep putting his life on hold, waiting for something amazing to happen.
Without another thought, he finished his message to Dottie and pressed send.
Chapter Two
“You girls are going to love Mark and Trish,” Tinka’s mom said as the family loaded itself into the car.
Tinka wasn’t so sure about that. She couldn’t shake the sense of dread she’d had since her mom had announced during lunch that the Fosters (and Jane) had been invited for dinner at their new friends’ house. There was something sinister going on. Tinka could tell by the way her mom had ordered her to borrow fresh clothes from Jane when Tinka’d come upstairs wearing a wrinkled maxi dress she’d found at the bottom of her suitcase.
The only positive was that going out meant leaving her parents’ new house for a few hours. The place was a disaster. It was like that movie, The Money Pit, but times a million.
First of all, the house wasn’t on a regular street in a neighborhood or anything. It was inside a golf resort, very secluded. The place was a horror movie setting. The house itself currently had only one fully functioning bathroom (which was in the basement and hadn’t been updated since 1979; both the sink and toilet were avocado green), no air conditioning, and no appliances in the kitchen—the fridge, the stove, and the dishwasher had all been removed. There was no TV and no internet. Tinka and Jane had to share a leaky air mattress on the dusty shag carpeting in the basement. Tinka didn’t even want to think about what kinds of bugs were living and breeding within those fibers.
Artificial Sweethearts (North Pole, Minnesota) Page 2