“How about every morning?” He looks at me blankly and I grab a piece of hair between my fingers. “‘Your hair looks really pretty today.’” I do my best impression of his mocking, singsong voice, and roll my eyes.
“I do think your hair looks pretty.”
“Whatever.”
“Okay, I did say it to annoy you. But that’s because I know you don’t like it. I think it’s really pretty.” He shrugs, like this is a totally normal thing to say to me. “I’m glad you’re not flattening it anymore.”
I can’t help but smile. “Straightening it.”
“Whatever.”
I don’t say anything, because life makes no sense anymore. My brain might be broken by how little sense it all makes. But while I’m contemplating the weirdness that is now my life as Asher’s ally, he continues to pull me across the room, until we hit a carpeted stairwell leading to a basement. He lets go of me and we make our way down, single-file, barely squeezing past people making their way up.
The basement is one big long room with light green walls and a floor full of retro brown tiles. At the bottom of the stairs there’s a cluster of chairs and couches to our left. And beyond that, there’s a big round table in the corner. It’s a game table, the kind that has a wooden lid, and usually hides a poker board inside. As we approach I can make out a guy and two girls sitting in metal folding chairs around it. Three more chairs sit empty, and Asher tugs me by the hand until we’re standing behind two of them.
“Hey,” Asher says, and the guy nods. The girl to his right smiles, and the girl on his left is … Nadine’s daughter, Lindsay. A little wave of guilt washes over me when I think about the fact that we were lurking around in her yard not too long ago. She’s smiling especially wide at Asher until her eyes meet mine, and then travel down to our hands. I free my hand of Asher’s, having forgotten it was still there. I suppose being dragged from room to room will do that to you. Like Stockholm syndrome for your hands.
I wave my previously captive hand at the group in front of us, trying to prove that I am not, in fact, a hermit.
“This is Sidney,” Asher says as he pulls a chair out for me. I look at him, shocked by the gesture, and he winks at me. “Pancakes,” he whispers, before turning back to the table. “This is Trevor, Hannah, and you know Lindsay.”
“Hi.” I sit down in the chair Asher still has a hand on, and he sits down next to me.
Asher looks past me to Lindsay. “I thought you were up at school for the summer.”
Lindsay sets a handful of cards on the table in front of her. “I am, but I’m home most weekends. Not many freshmen stay for the summer, so it’s pretty dead.”
I take another sip of my drink and remind myself that being at a table full of strangers and Lindsay is still better than wandering around in the house or sitting alone at the bonfire until Kara gets here. I take another big gulp of my punch.
In front of us, the table isn’t covered in the cards or other cliché drinking games I was expecting. It’s a giant game board. An intricate map with mountains and lakes and rivers. Little dotted lines to show borders. There are silver, gold, black, and bronze pieces scattered around the board, but I don’t know what any of them are. I have no idea what game they’re playing, but anyone could tell what kind of game this is. It’s a war game. I look at Asher and smile. Game on.
Asher
“Is it cool if we play as a team, since she’s new?” I ask, knowing no one is going to argue. Everyone at the table has played before, and also everyone is drinking, so it’s not the best time to introduce a virgin to the mix.
Sidney’s elbow pokes me in the side. Her voice is soft. “We’re going to start in the middle of the game? It looks like they already started.”
“Last weekend,” Trevor says, beating me to it. “We probably could have finished if this one”—he jabs a finger at me—“hadn’t decided to get trashed.”
“One time.” I shake my head at him. “I said I was sorry.”
He smiles. Trevor loves giving me crap. “I know, I know, you were having a rough night. You were having g—” I cough and pull Trevor out of his drunken ramble. He looks at Sidney and then me and finishes clumsily with, “We forgive you.”
I met Trevor two summers ago at a party, and that’s mostly where we hang out. Once in a while his folks take us out on the big lake in their boat, so we can wakeboard. He knows just enough about me to be awkward around someone like Sidney, who would kill for incriminating information about me.
Sidney sets down the little figurine she was examining in front of her and looks at me curiously. “Why were you having a rough night?” It’s such a normal question, but it sounds utterly foreign coming out of her mouth. It makes me glance down at her cup to see how far gone she is. It’s still half full.
“I don’t think I actually said that.”
“Oh, you did,” Trevor says, taking another sip from his cup.
I take the gold piece from in front of Sidney and put it back in its spot. “You can’t move these, everything is in play right now.” I pick up her hands from the table and set them in her lap, suddenly aware of the fact that I just touched her thigh. “No touching,” I say, pretending to scold her, but also reminding myself.
She gets quiet, and maybe we’re done talking about my drunken night. “This isn’t what I imagined you doing at parties,” Sidney says. She starts to pick up her hands, then sets them back down, as if she suddenly remembered she wasn’t allowed to move them. I want to laugh but I don’t, because if Sidney thinks she can “out nice” me, she’s so wrong. Instead, I look at the small stack of cards Trevor has placed in front of me.
“But you were thinking about me at parties, huh?” I hold the cards between us.
Sidney looks at me, and I can tell she’s biting her cheeks, the way they pull in on the sides, making her cheekbones look sharper. Her hands flinch in her lap and she makes a disgusted little growl deep in her throat. “Mostly I was imagining you being drunk and obnoxious,” she says, raising an eyebrow. “From what I saw at the last party, I wasn’t too far off.” She smirks at me, then flicks one of the cards with her finger. “Tell me what these mean.”
While everyone takes their turns I explain the story cards to Sidney, and show her which pieces are mine and how to move around the map. It takes me longer than it should, because she’s super into it and starts suggesting moves while I’m still explaining the different territories.
“So everything with the blue coin is currently mine.”
“Ours,” she corrects, taking a sip from her cup. It’s close to empty, and I wonder how much that has to do with her willingness to be teammates. Or the way she’s smiling at me right now, as Trevor makes a bad move into one of our neighboring territories.
I pick up our cards and she leans into me, her hand cupping my ear. “We should start moving toward the river,” she says, but she’s waving her finger toward an entirely different area of the board. Even tipsy, she’s thinking two steps ahead. “The lower half of that territory to the north is basically wide open. We could take that smaller one and then work north. We’d have him surrounded before he can finish his beer.”
“What are you majoring in?” I interrupt her, and she looks confused.
“English, I think. Why? What are you majoring in?”
“Finance.” I shake my head. “You have the brain of a criminal mastermind.”
She looks at me blankly. “Um. Thanks? I think.” Her finger pulls a card toward us on the table. “I don’t think they have majors for that, though.”
“Seriously. I suddenly feel like I should be thankful you haven’t done much worse things to me over the years.” I tap a finger on the edge of the table. “You didn’t put some sort of slow-metabolizing poison in those pancakes, did you?”
She smiles and shakes her head. “I do take it easy on you, Marin. I appreciate you acknowledging that, finally.”
“Consider it acknowledged.”
There’s a
long stretch of silence before she says, “Finance? Really?”
“Really.”
“Hm.”
“What did you think I’d major in?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know. I just have a hard time imagining you working at a desk. I could see you as a teacher, or something like that, though. You’re good with people.”
“You work with people in finance, too.”
She shrugs. “I guess so.”
“Maybe your true calling is as a guidance counselor.”
Sidney tips her head to the side and smiles devilishly. “I shouldn’t be counseling anyone on how to make good life choices.” Her eyes dart to where Lindsay sits and then back to me. “My track record has been less than stellar lately.” She turns toward me, her nose grazing my shoulder, and I still. She makes the tiniest noise, and when she lifts her head I can feel her breath against my cheek. “I’m surprised you don’t still smell like fish.” She smiles and turns back to the board.
* * *
When Kara finally arrives, Sidney’s second cup of punch is almost empty. We’ve already taken most of Hannah’s treasure, and we’re deep in an invasion of Trevor’s northern territories.
Sidney’s sitting with her legs tucked under her, and we’re shoulder to shoulder as she reaches for another of our battle pieces. I roll the dice, and as two sixes appear, Sidney lets out a little whoop. She marches our piece forward into the territory, knocking another piece out of the way with a little slap of her tiny bronze figurine.
“Point awarded!” she yells as she slides the blue chip into its place, stretching so far across the table, she can barely reach.
“No, no, no,” Trevor mutters, trying to find a way out of what just happened.
“Yes, yes, yes,” Sidney whispers, a strange combination of sweetness and utter annihilation.
She throws her palm into mine as she sits back down on her heels. Kara is behind her, frozen in place, like the two of us are sitting in this basement naked or something.
“What are you guys doing?” she says, her voice mirroring the confusion on her face. I watch her eyes dart from me to Lindsay, and back to Sid.
“We’re winning!” Sidney says—practically yelling—at the same time that I say, “Playing a game.”
“I can see it’s a game, Ash.” Kara rolls her eyes, and then opens them wider as she tips her head toward us. “What are you doing?”
I look at Sidney—so close she’s touching my entire right side—and back to Kara, seeing for the first time what she’s seeing. How strange this must look. Probably as strange as it felt when we sat down. But after an hour of playing together—smiling and laughing and pillaging castles—it doesn’t feel that strange anymore. Before I can say anything, Sidney’s voice—slightly higher than usual (a side effect of her second drink?)—cuts through the basement.
“We’ve called a truce,” she says, very matter-of-factly, her body twisted in her chair toward Kara, who is now standing beside her. “He wrote me a note, and we had a midnight meeting, and rules weren’t really discussed, but we’ll get to that at some point, I suppose. But either way—” She nods at Kara, like she’s confirming this. “We agreed on it. We’re not enemies,” she says, and then turns to me with a mischievous smile. “For now.”
“Why?” Kara sounds perturbed.
“Top-secret reasons,” Sidney says as she twists an imaginary key at her closed lips. Apparently drunk Sidney is even more paranoid and neurotic than sober Sidney. But she’s also a lot nicer and kind of adorable. She’s first-summer Sidney again, the one who didn’t constantly scowl at me, or assume I was mocking her. “I’ll tell you later, though,” she says in a conspiring whisper to Kara.
“Interesting,” is all that Kara says, but she looks to me like she’s expecting more information.
I shrug. “Sid pretty much covered it.”
“Sid?” Kara looks like her brain is about to explode.
“Also, we’re kicking butt,” Sidney adds, her eyes on Trevor, who is taking his turn again and moving troops closer to our most valuable piece of land. Hannah lost the last of her territories twenty minutes ago and left the table. “Trevor’s about to see just how much butt we kick if he puts a single troop in our capitol.”
Trevor mutters, “Next time, you don’t get a partner.”
Sidney’s eyes light up. “Next time?” But she looks to me, not Trevor, for an answer.
I’m not sure how I feel about Sidney becoming a permanent fixture at the game table. Especially as an opponent. As an ally—a tipsy ally—this is fun. But I don’t know that we need another way to compete. We’re just barely pulling ourselves out of the awkwardness of this fragile truce. And who knows if we’re even capable of continuing that when we’re both sober. Are there enough chocolate-chip pancakes and conquerable territories in the world to make that happen?
“What are you thinking?” Sidney asks, her brows furrowed.
“I’m thinking about your pancakes,” I say, and Sidney breaks into uncontrollable laughter.
“Sooo…” Kara’s eyes move from Sidney, to me, to the table full of cards and metal trinkets, and settle back on Sidney. “Are you coming with me, or…” Her eyes are back on me.
Sidney pulls one leg off of her chair, and then stops. She rubs the blue chip between her thumb and forefinger, and lets it roll into her palm. “Actually … do you care if I just finish here?”
“We’ll play all night, but you don’t have to stay if you don’t want to. I can go solo.” I don’t want her to feel like she’s stuck with me after I basically dragged her down here. Especially if Kara is going to hang around all night looking at us like we’re some sort of science experiment gone wrong.
She looks to Kara and raises an apologetic brow. “Do you care? I sort of got sucked into this.”
Kara smiles, but it looks more nervous than happy. “Sure, no big deal. I’ll be upstairs if things get to be…” She looks from Sidney to me again. “Too much, down here.”
Sidney gives her a thumbs-up, and turns back to the table. “Let’s do this, Marin.”
* * *
“Wow. You are a total nerd.” Sidney drops into the car way later than we planned and pins me with a serious (and seriously drunk) look. “You know that, right?”
She’s smiling at me, and something in my chest tightens at the idea that this could be our new normal. “Says the girl who paints rocks.”
“Point awarded,” she says, and we both laugh. She shakes her head as she fastens her seat belt, missing the slot a few times before she gets it in. “But my rocks are awesome. Don’t forget that.”
I put the car in drive and try to keep my voice as casual and uninterested as possible. “What do you do with them all anyway?”
Sidney rests her head back, turns to look at me, and whispers, “Don’t you wish you knew.”
She’s onto me, because I don’t know why, but I do. I really, really do.
DAY 21
Asher
I don’t get pancakes every morning, because—as Sidney keeps telling me—she isn’t my personal chef. But I do get a smile. This morning, I also get a bottle of water and a protein bar. They go along with the note I scrawled on the mirror this morning—our primary means of communication—asking her to go on a morning run. We both run every other day, so it just seemed logical that we could do it together. But it also means that we now spend every single morning together, swimming or running. Swimming is easier, though—one of us always has our head in the water. There isn’t any expectation for small talk other than the few minutes we spend getting in and out of the boat.
Our very first run was silent, and for two miles I was pretty convinced that I had made a horrible mistake. At every turn we veered in different directions, finding that our normal running routes—and apparently our instincts—were completely opposite. Sidney likes to keep to the street—the busy ones where cars are blasting past us—and I have a tendency to veer off-road whenever I have the chance.
>
Our second run, I let Sidney lead. That morning we ran a mixture of her usual road route, and a few adventures onto trails and dirt side roads. On our half-mile cool down, we decided we’d take our first real crack at Nadine soon. I asked Sidney about Edith the elephant, who I now know is living on her dresser.
So now, as we run, we plot.
“Have you ever heard of potato-ing someone’s yard?” I ask her, my voice far too normal for the strangeness of the words. We’re a mile into our run, turning off of the main road and onto a long dirt road that curves into a stretch of national forest.
“Um. No.” She looks at me like maybe I’m just teasing her.
“Basically you spread powdered mashed potatoes all over someone’s yard. You know, the kind that come in the cardboard boxes?”
“Okay…”
“So the next time it rains, the yard fills with mashed potatoes.”
Sidney laughs so hard she has to stop running. “Wow, that’s … that’s sort of disgusting.”
“And I was thinking … maybe we could write out some sort of message, or weird picture, with the potatoes?” She’s giving me the strangest look. “What?”
“That’s just … it’s awesome.”
We take off running again. “Thanks.”
“Only one problem.”
I groan, long and loud and dramatic, because Sidney has been a total buzzkill about all of my ideas so far. Yes, we have to be careful, but we’re not throwing bottle bombs into her yard or something. So while I’ve been coming up with all of the devious ideas, Sidney has been considering all of the possible repercussions.
“Do you think mashed potatoes could kill the grass?” she asks.
“It’s not like they’re acid. They’re potatoes. They come out of the ground, right?” The thing about Sidney is that she doesn’t just come up with some pretty weird and elaborate ideas—she can also think through every little detail. She needs an answer to every tiny question that comes up. It makes me wonder how long she spent thinking about all of the pranks she pulled on me before she actually went through with them. And what provoked her to go off-script with the fish? She clearly hadn’t thought that one through, even a little.
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