by Nikki Godwin
“Alright, Ms. Branson,” he says from his doorway. “Looks like I’m headed out. You care to see me off?”
He walks across the room, picks up his duffel bag, and reaches out for me with his other hand. I let him pull me up from the bed. He drops the bag and wraps me up in a hug that’s warmer than freshly baked cookies.
“Two days,” he says. “And then I’m yours again. Technically, I’ll still be yours even when I’m sleeping with Benji.”
He smiles then gives me the quickest of all quick kisses, just to be on the safe side. He grabs his bag, and I follow him to the door. I reach for the light switch, and that’s when I notice the one thing he left behind.
“You’re not taking your guitar?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “Nah, doubt I’ll have a chance to even play it.”
We trudge slowly down the staircase to deliver him to his captors, and I feel like I did walking into the pizza parlor to meet up with Lauren and Paige. I never thought I’d compare Dad and Godfrey to Lauren and Paige. Eww.
Everyone else is downstairs surrounded by bags and fishing poles. Dad holds a cell phone to his ear and says something about an ETA. Their transportation must be close by. Godfrey strolls through the room in a polo shirt, old man golfer shorts like Noah wore in their new video, and a fishing cap. He has a plastic bag in his hand.
“Mr. Kingsley,” he says. “Your request.”
Tate’s face lights up like a creepy jack-o-lantern.
“G-man, you are the best!” Tate shouts.
He digs around in the bag and pulls out a package of gummy worms. He doesn’t say a word as he tears through the plastic and pulls a red and orange worm out. He tilts his head back and feeds it to himself like a mother bird would feed a baby bird.
“Dude, really?” Jules says, walking over to Tate. “You know you can’t catch fish with gummy worms, right?”
Tate laughs as he gnaws on the candy.
“I know,” he says. “But I was looking at the bait earlier, and they were all sparkly and gummy, and all I could think of was how good they’d taste if they were candy.”
Seriously? Tate wants to eat fishing bait, and he still has eight million Twitter followers who probably want to date him. I’ll never understand what Aralie sees in him.
Dad walks back toward us, finally off of the phone, with a tackle box in hand. He’s dressed like a civilian. He’ll probably be back in his government voice before they even get to the cabin. That’s an hour’s drive.
“Alright,” Dad says. “I have one more surprise for you guys before we go.”
Jules looks up. “We don’t have to come back here?”
“Sorry Mr. Rossi, but no, that’s not it,” Dad says. “I had to pull a lot of strings just to get permission to let you guys leave the house, and it took a lot of clearance to get this approved, but someone else will be accompanying us to the cabin.”
Dad ventures toward the front door and peeks outside. He doesn’t say anything until the sound of engines purr in our driveway. Two black SUVs and one little black car sit in front of the house – super-tinted windows, just as I imagined.
We all file onto the front porch, and the guys haul their bags along. Two agents emerge from the car and move toward the back of the SUVs. They each open the doors and motion for the guys to bring their bags. The back door of one of the SUVs opens, and Benji drops everything.
“Tank!” he screams, diving into the muscle man. “Wait, are you hooked up?”
Benji motions to his own chest, referring back to the day that Tank brought Milo’s guitar and was wearing a wire.
“Nah, bro,” Tank says. “They let me off the ball and chain for the next two days.”
He helps Benji load stuff into the back of the SUV, and then the bromance of Jenji hurry into the SUV with their favorite bodyguard. Emery pouts because she didn’t get a goodbye hug, and Aralie steals a few of Tate’s gummy worms.
“Shoot,” Milo says. He turns to my dad. “I’m really sorry. I forgot my guitar. I can’t go two days without it. I’ll be right back.”
He turns and makes a mad dash back up the front steps. Five minutes ago, he said he wouldn’t have a chance to play it. Now he can’t live without it?
Noah smirks from behind a small carton of strawberry milk before he disappears into the second SUV with Tate and Godfrey. I’d love to be a fly on the wall at the cabin. Tate’s friendship with “G-man” would be enough to humor me for two days.
Dad lingers around for a moment, waiting for Milo, but the All-American Non-American boy hasn’t returned.
“Can someone go see where he is?” Dad asks, motioning back to the house.
Noah’s head pops out of the SUV. “Yeah Chloe, go tell Milo to hurry up.”
I am so dumb. I nod to my dad and run up the front porch’s steps, inside the house, and up the staircase to our hallway. Milo knew he’d be coming back for his guitar. Why didn’t I get the hint?
“Milo,” I say, rushing into his room. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you were–”
He grabs me and pulls me into a kiss before I can get the rest of my words out. It’s a panicked kiss, rushed and ravenous and crazed. His fingers twist into my hair, and he pulls away just long enough to inhale and dive back in.
I manage to push him back. “My dad’s waiting on you.”
“I know,” he says. “I just needed a really awesome goodbye-for-now kiss.”
“That’s why you left the guitar,” I reason aloud.
He laughs. “Yeah, I figured you’d catch the hint and follow me back upstairs.”
My brain was clouded with worry that I’d never see him again. Catching hints was the furthest thing from my mind. Milo grabs his guitar and leads the way back downstairs. He hugs me quickly in the foyer and steals a kiss before we go outside. Then it’s as if “we” don’t exist.
“Sorry about that, Mr. Branson,” he says, rushing past my dad and into the SUV with Tate and Noah. He never even looks back.
Dad gives Mom last minute instructions and phone numbers while I wait on the steps with Aralie and Emery. Aralie chews on a gummy worm, and Emery’s face quivers as she fights tears. If it hurts this much to let the guys go for two days, there’s no way we’ll keep our sanity once they’re back on tour or in other countries. I don’t even want to let them cross the border back into Canada. Emery is going to be a disaster when lockdown is over. I feel her pain already.
Two hours later, across the dining room table, Emery furiously colors a picture of an elephant in her coloring book. The room would be silent if not for the scratching of her crayons. She glares at the paper, like she’s trying to burn holes into the elephant.
Mom sits at the end of the table, sipping from a cup of tea and pretending to read a crafting magazine. Her eyes focus on nothing too often for her to actually be reading.
Aralie stomps down the stairs too loudly – or maybe it’s just the silence – and bounds into the dining room.
“Is our house always this damn quiet?” she asks, hands on her hips.
“Aralie, language,” Mom reminds her. “We’re just used to having company.”
“Mom,” Aralie says in that ‘who are you kidding’ tone. “The house was never this quiet before lockdown. Emery isn’t even talking. It’s like someone died. Do you know how much our lives are going to suck after lockdown ends?”
Emery stabs the elephant with her gray crayon, over and over, like she’s murdering the paper. It rips, and the crayon marks on the table.
“My life sucks right now!” Emery screams, throwing her crayon against the wall.
“Whoa, Emery. Calm down, sweetheart,” Mom says, abandoning her tea and magazine to gather the broken pieces of the gray crayon. “They’ll be back Thursday.”
Aralie scoffs. “Yeah but for how long? Lockdown won’t last forever.”
Mom places the waxy pieces onto the table and uses her fingernail to scrape off the gray mark on the table. She looks exhausted, just from pick
ing up a broken crayon. She looks up at the three of us, and she sighs one of those heavy, defeated breaths before sitting back down at the end of the table.
“I never thought we’d be here,” Mom says. “I knew Emery would throw a fit after lockdown ended, but I never expected you, of all people, to even care about Spaceships Around Saturn.”
Aralie crosses her arms and doesn’t say a word. What has gotten into her? No defensive arguments…no explanations. She just stands there.
Emery gasps. “Aralie is a Saturnite? Like me and Chloe?”
“Chloe?” Mom and Aralie say my name simultaneously.
All eyes descend on me, and I want to crawl under the table. I could deny it, but what good would that do? That’d just make me look like a Saturnite-in-denial. So I counterattack with the only weapon in my arsenal.
“Thanks a lot, Harry Styles,” I say to my traitor of a baby sister.
“Chloe!” she yells. “You weren’t supposed to tell them that I like Harry Styles!”
Aralie laughs. “She didn’t. You just did.”
“Chloe…tricked…me.” Emery says the words through clenched teeth.
Mom buries her face into her hands, much like how Benji does when Emery bugs the hell out of him at breakfast.
Emery’s entire face shakes, and although I know she’s doing it on purpose to portray her anger, she still looks freakishly scary. She jumps down from her chair and stomps across the room toward me.
“Well, you know what?” she asks me with an attitude that reminds me of Aralie. She looks around the room. “Chloe said Milo was the best singer in Spaceships Around Saturn, and she wears the same colors as him, so…”
Then she looks back at me. “You’re gonna be stuck with him foreverrrr, and you’ll have to marry him, and that sucks for you because he’s boring!”
She bolts around me and up the stairs before I can say a word. I just stand here, somewhat in shock and somewhat in amusement. Being stuck with Milo forever? Sorry, Emery, but that absolutely does not suck for me.
I bet she’s up in her bedroom daydreaming about our future weddings – mine to Milo and hers to Benji – and laughing at my misfortune.
“See?” Mom asks. “It won’t take her long to get back to typical Emery once lockdown is over. The guys have only been gone for a few hours, and she seems like herself again.”
Aralie groans. “Don’t remind me,” she says. “Chloe, why’d you have to provoke her?”
I shrug. It’s not like I meant to.
“Because,” I say, thinking of a good comeback. “We don’t give Benji Bikini enough respect for giving us an Emery-vacation.”
Chapter Eighteen
Mom hauls one last garbage bag outside. I open the lid, and she slams the bag into the trash can. That was the last of the pizza boxes. We’ve spent our entire morning hiding any trace of Spaceships Around Saturn in our house. Emery was far from pleased when Mom asked her to take down the A7 poster of Benji from her wall. There were too many “Dear Emery” messages handwritten on it. Emery is already counting down the hours until Thursday morning when the guys return so Benji can look down on her from her bedside once again.
I stand over the kitchen sink and scrub my hands with Mango Mandarin soap. Call me spoiled, but I really don’t remember the last time I helped take the garbage out.
“Days like this make me appreciate Godfrey,” I say to Mom.
She laughs. “Godfrey’s had a nice vacation with the guys here. Milo always helps out with stuff, so Godfrey has caught some slack.”
I think I’ve reached a new record. I hadn’t thought about Milo from the time I walked out to the trash can until now. That’s was what, two minutes? Maybe I can go for three minutes next time.
“He’s a really nice boy, don’t you think?” Mom asks.
Apparently she doesn’t want me to achieve three minutes. Oh screw it. I’m a lost cause for the next hour now that she’s got him on my mind.
I turn off the water and dry my hands, half-nodding to Mom because I don’t want to have this conversation.
“He asks a lot about you,” Mom says. “If you wanted to continue to have a…friendship with him once this lockdown is over, I wouldn’t mind, just for the record.”
Ugh. That pause before ‘friendship.’ She knows. She so totally knows.
“He’ll follow me on Twitter,” I say. “And that’ll be the most of it. They’re famous, Mom. We’ll just be a memory.”
She crosses her arms and leans back against the countertop. I busy myself with reading Benji’s updated note card Twitter feed on our fridge. Apparently he has taken a new liking to sweet tea, can’t wait to get more ink once lockdown is over, and swears on his life that he’ll update the real Twitter about his new BFF Emery as soon as he gets his phone back.
I pick up a pink card and debate what to ‘tweet’ back to Benji. I give this card every ounce of my attention, even though I see Mom still watching me in my peripheral vision.
“From what I gather,” she says. “You’re not ‘just a memory’ material. He said you were special.”
Mom has that voice, the sing-songy voice that Emery used when she pointed out that Milo and I were both wearing white with a touch of black. Thank God it’s not the sad-baby-bird voice.
My heart thumps like it did the night they arrived, while I panicked on the couch and wondered how fast Emery’s heart was racing. Play it cool, Chloe. Just play it cool.
“He said what?” I ask, doing my best to fake amusement or maybe even confusion.
“Welllll,” Mom drags out. “Noah said something about Aralie’s name, and I said that I’d wanted to name you something unique and special, but Scott wouldn’t let me. We made a deal that he could choose your name – Chloe – and I could name our next girl.”
Okay, Mom, get to the point. I know. Dad named me because he thought you were going through a hippie phase and making up names. You got pregnant shortly after I was born, threw the compromise in Dad’s face, and the name Aralie was born.
“And?” I prompt her.
“And Milo said that you were special, even without a creative name,” she says. “Then he added that he likes your name very much.”
I glance over the note cards on the fridge. There’s one to Benji from Milo. It’s some creeper line about watching him through the window. Sometimes I wonder just how well I know Milo Grayson after all. I uncap the pen on the counter.
“And?” I ask Mom again.
“That was it,” she said. “Noah cracked up at him, while drinking milk, and he spit it all over the floor. He ran out of the room laughing, and Milo apologized and offered to mop for me.”
“So wholesome,” I say, attempting sarcasm.
I write the words “creeper alert” on my pink note card, draw an arrow pointing upward, and stick it on the fridge under Milo’s window remark.
The doorbell rings. Mom ends all talk of Spaceships Around Saturn and clears her throat.
“There’s Paige,” she says. She sounds as enthused as I feel.
“What about Benji’s Twitter feed on the fridge?” I ask.
“I’ll mop,” Mom says. “Just keep her entertained and out of the kitchen.”
Mom waves me off to the front door. I know she’s supposed to be my best friend, but lately, I’d trade Paige for the tatted brunette who spits milk on our kitchen floor any day.
“She texted me after that and said that she saw him at the movies with Sydney, so I said to hell with him,” Paige rambles on. “I can do better, right?”
I nod along, just like I have for the last thirty-five minutes while she informed me of every detail of her dating hardships since summer began. What a waste of thirty-five minutes. I could’ve been watching Darby’s Daily Dose of Drama or silly YouTube clips of the guys. I could’ve been brushing up on my SAS trivia or even stalking Benji’s real Twitter feed for new gossip. I could’ve been helping Emery make a friendship bracelet for Jules. Since when did my life orbit around a Canadian b
oyband?
“Chloe?” Paige asks. “Are you even here? You seem like you’re light years away.”
Oh, you have no idea, Paige.
“Yeah, I’m here,” I say. “I was just listening. I didn’t want to interrupt.”
“It’s cool,” she says. “So, what’s been up with you?”
She makes herself comfortable by stretching out on my bed. She props up on an elbow, and I debate what I can say that might sound halfway believable. I can’t tell her what I’ve really been up to.
And that’s when her eyes widen and she sits up, looking around herself in a panic, like she’s lost her cell phone. She grabs Milo’s dark gray T-shirt that I may or may not have slept in last night. It still smells like him.
“Chloe, seriously? Whose is this? He smells delicious,” she says in one breath. “I can’t believe you have a guy in your life and didn’t tell me. That’s why you’re always busy and why it takes you three days to answer my texts. Spill it!”
I force myself to laugh before I spill a ton of lies onto my bed.
“It’s not what you think,” I tell her, even though it’s so what she thinks.
However, due to lockdown regulations, I’m not at liberty to tell her that, yes, there is a guy in my life. He’s famous and beautiful and talented. He has caramel eyes, a great sense of maturity about him, and recreates my favorite song acoustically. He’s sort of perfect, Paige.
“My mom’s friend’s son…” I say, making it up as I go. “He’s in summer school because he failed English, and Mom volunteered me to help him with his English paper.”
She stares at me, still holding onto Milo’s shirt. I want to rip it from her hands. Every second she touches it, she contaminates it. The scent of his body wash absorbs into her hands. I’m about to flip out Emery-style.
Paige looks at the shirt. “And he just took off his shirt in your room?”
“No,” I say, reaching for it. “He spilled his water bottle on it and acted like a diva, so Mom gave him one of Dad’s shirts to wear. He forgot it when he left. Mom can return it.”