“Just taste it,” Hannah whispered in my ear. I glanced back down at the spoon before popping it into my mouth. My eyes slipped shut, and my heart stopped … whatever Hannah’s mother had given me was delicious.
“And?”
I kept nodding, the spoon still in my mouth. “Mmm-hmmmm …”
“I think he likes it.” Hannah laughed.
Her mother grinned. “I’m so happy. I changed this recipe I found online. I hope the flavors were balanced well and—”
“It’s delicious,” I told her, pulling the spoon from my mouth. I extended a hand. “Um, I’m Will O’Connor … like Hannah said.”
“He’s a new friend of mine.”
“A friend?” Hannah’s mother asked, winking at her daughter.
“Just a friend.”
“Just a friend?”
“Just a friend.”
“Well, it’s very nice to meet you,” her mother said and smiled at me. “I’m Rose.”
“It’s nice to meet you too,” I told her. “Your house is really nice.”
“Your ‘just friend’ is very polite, Hannah,” Rose said. “I keep telling Hannah that a beautiful girl like her should have no problem finding a nice boy. Don’t you agree, Will?”
“I—”
“Mom, seriously?” Hannah groaned.
“What about Blake’s brother, Michael?” Rose asked, nudging her daughter jokingly. “You know he’s had a crush on you forever.”
“So not interested.”
“Okay, but—”
“Discussion over, Mom. Time to move on. Can Will stay for dinner? He called his aunt and she said it’s fine.”
That was an understatement. Aunt Nellie had been thrilled that I’d found a friend already. Also, I think she was secretly glad that she didn’t have to worry about preparing dinner.
“Of course,” Rose said. Then she turned to me with a friendly smile. “Feel free to come on over whenever you like.”
“Thanks,” I told her.
Hannah then grabbed me by the hand and pulled me from the room, muttering to herself about Michael with a furious blush coloring her cheeks.
Chapter 10
Cuddles
Hannah’s mother had made a roast for dinner, with mashed potatoes, a mixed salad, and some toasted garlic bread. It filled the whole house with the scent of a home-cooked meal. I thought that Aunt Nellie could learn a thing or two from Rose about cooking.
Coming into the dining room, I met Hannah’s father. Rubbing at the stubble on his squared jaw with one hand, he shook my hand with the other. “Arthur Clark.”
“Nice to meet you, sir,” I said. “I’m Will O’Connor.”
And so we sat down to dinner.
It was strange … and doubly strange for the fact of its strangeness. A mother and a father at the heads of the table, the children to the sides; it was the epitome of “normal”. And yet, when I sat down to dinner, it was just Aunt Nellie and myself—and the table certainly wasn’t decorated with food almost too gorgeous to eat.
And I do admit that in that moment I felt a pang of envy for Hannah. A pang of envy, though, that left me feeling gross inside. Because why couldn’t I be perfectly content with having Aunt Nellie? I loved her and enjoyed living with her. I almost couldn’t remember life with my parents.
Thankfully, I had the lucky distraction of the great feast before me to get my head out of those bad places.
“Everything looks delicious,” I praised, smiling at Rose.
She grinned proudly. “Thank you, Will.”
“Mom owns a catering business. It’s pretty awesome,” Hannah boasted, winking at her mother.
“Well, we can sit here looking at the food all night or we can actually get to eating it,” Rose prompted, and there was a flurry of motion as our hands whipped out to start filling our plates.
“Your brother better get here soon,” Arthur said with a chuckle. “Otherwise all this stuff is fair game.”
“He should be finished with work by now,” Hannah mumbled around a mouthful of potato, eyeing the clock that was ticking on the wall.
Seeing as my hosts had already started eating, I picked up my fork and laid my napkin across my lap. I stabbed a piece of roast beef and brought it to my lips and …
“Oh my God,” I whispered quietly to myself, chewing slowly. I opened my eyes and realized that the Clark family was looking at me curiously. My face grew burning hot. “I’m sorry.”
Rose just looked at her daughter. “Honey, you picked a good one.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“Will,” she told me, “any friend of Hannah’s who’s also a friend of my cooking is a friend of mine.”
“I appreciate it, Mrs. Clark,” I told her, starting on another bite. I pondered in that moment if there was anything better than good food, and I can’t say I thought of anything. Being in food heaven is one of the best places to be.
Shaking me lazily from my calorie-fueled stupor was the noise of the front door opening and closing. The sound was muted; my ears filled with mashed potato.
“Sorry I’m late,” came a boy’s frantic voice from the entrance hall. “I got held up.”
“I’ll bet she had you held up!” Hannah shouted tauntingly.
The eye-roll could be heard in her brother’s voice as he yelled back, “Remind me to laugh after dinner.”
And then he stumbled into the dining room, struggling to pull an apron over his head. He had it halfway off, and I noticed the way his white T-shirt rose over the waist of his jeans and exposed the pale, smooth skin of his taut stomach and hipbones. And as Hannah’s brother squirmed around and bent over to pull the apron the rest of the way off … sweet Mary, mother of Jesus! I knew that lovely bottom!
Daniel Clark turned back around, holding the apron up victoriously, his hair disheveled from the hard-fought battle. And then I saw Hannah’s brother for the third time.
He frowned confusedly when he saw me, tiny furrows creasing his brow. Then he ran a quick hand through his messy hair, fixing it, almost without noticing what he was doing.
“Allergic-to-cat-guy?” he asked after a long silence.
“Ice-cream-guy?”
“It’s frozen yogurt …”
“Wait a second,” Hannah interjected. “Do you guys know each other?”
“Uh, yeah,” I replied.
“Kinda,” Daniel said.
“Well, is it a yes or a no?” Hannah demanded, narrowing her eyes at me as if it were my fault that she wasn’t aware of the fact that I had met someone I didn’t know was her twin brother.
“What does it matter, honey?” Rose cut in, smiling. “Now there’s one less introduction to do, so maybe your brother will actually have time to grab some food before your father devours everything in sight.”
Daniel nevertheless walked over to me, and I stood up. He smiled in a friendly way. “It’s nice to officially meet you. I’m Daniel Clark, Hannah’s big brother.”
“By like six seconds!” Hannah protested.
Rose took a sip from her drink. “Six minutes, honey.”
“Whatever,” she muttered, sticking out her tongue at Daniel.
I laughed, and we shook hands. “I’m Will O’Connor.”
“Cool,” he said, and then he took his seat.
Arthur Clark looked like a hungry lion ready to pounce on his own kin to get the gazelle for himself, but Daniel acted swiftly and filled his plate with some of the vegetables and potatoes and, kindly, left the meat to his father.
“So how was work today, kids?” Rose asked.
“Well—” I said.
“It—” Daniel said at the same time.
We looked at each other and laughed timidly. I gestured toward him and said, “Go ahead.”
“Well, there was this old
lady today,” Daniel told us. “She had me go through the whole menu with her … like, literally everything on the menu. And then she started asking about the ingredients and if we used real cream. So I had to explain to her the difference between ice cream and frozen yogurt, but she refused to accept what I was telling her. Then she asked to speak with my manager, and when she finally decided on what to get, she decided to tell me how much the service industry wasn’t what it used to be.”
“So what did you do?” Hannah asked, grinning at her brother.
“Nothing, because—”
Hannah laughed. “Of course you didn’t do anything! You never talk back to anyone. I need to give you sass lessons.”
“If you would have let me finish what I was saying,” Daniel countered, “you would know that I didn’t have to say anything. Because as she was leaving, a seagull dive-bombed her, and she got frozen yogurt all over her clothes. In her hair too!”
“No way!” Hannah squealed.
Rose tried not to laugh. “Daniel, that’s not funny. She could have gotten hurt or … something.”
“Come on, Mom, she was being a total bitch!”
“Hannah,” Arthur warned.
“Sorry, Dad.”
I listened to the conversation with a sense of detachment. I laughed along with everyone, but inside I was oddly upset. I had met this really attractive guy, and he was this private little thing that I could have to myself. I didn’t have to feel bad about it because who was he really except for the surfer on the beach and the guy at the frozen-yogurt place? But that had been taken away from me because he just had to be Hannah’s brother … and not just her brother, but her twin brother.
Of course then I had to tell myself that there was no way in the world that he would ever go for me. Why would he? I was utterly ordinary, nothing special whatsoever. And besides, one must be prudent and work under the code that really cute guys are considered straight until proven otherwise.
“Will was really something today,” Hannah said, her voice far off as though broadcast through an old radio. “He picked up the job really quickly.”
“What?” I asked, and then I noticed everyone looking at me. Hannah was looking at me with narrowed eyes. “Oh, yeah.”
“So,” Daniel asked me conversationally, “what’s it like working under the rule of my sister?”
“She certainly knows her stuff,” I said. “And she wields the master’s whip with honor and integrity.”
Daniel thought that was incredibly funny. “Those are the kindest words I’ve ever heard said about her, Will!”
“I mean them,” I replied, snickering.
Hannah shrugged, unbothered. “I have made peace with myself for my teaching methods. Words will never hurt me.”
“And that’s very admirable, honey,” Rose said.
“I agree,” Arthur added, scraping his plate clean.
“I win,” Hannah told us.
I shrugged. “Not so sure about that.”
“Don’t worry, Will,” Daniel said, “I’ve got your back on this one.”
“Geez,” Hannah muttered, “I just try to have a nice dinner with my family, and it turns into a mutiny.”
“Right, well, before you kids make her walk the plank, I want your plates in the sink, and you may go on your way,” Rose said.
The three of us cleared our stuff and rinsed our dishes in the sink, and then Hannah led the way out onto the back porch.
The sun was starting to get low in the sky. It was a little bit chilly out, and the air smelled of barbequed meat and freshly-mowed grass. Some children rode past the Clark family’s backyard on their bikes, and some people were just returning from the beach, lugging all their junk with them.
Hannah and Daniel plopped down into the deck swing, Hannah crossing her legs, and Daniel leaving one foot on the ground to gently rock them.
I sat down in a chair across from the twins and took a moment to try picking out the similarities between them. I could see the resemblance mostly in the shape of the face, in the nose and mouth, and in the color of their eyes (they were the same, which I should have noticed earlier). But Daniel was taller than Hannah (and me, for good measure) by a few inches, and their hair colors were completely different.
“So what’s the story?” Hannah asked suddenly.
“Huh?” Daniel and I asked in unison (God, we were so cute together!)
“You guys have met before.”
I nodded and answered vaguely, “Yes.”
“We ran into each other at the beach,” Daniel told her.
“And then again at Frosty’s,” I added.
Hannah considered the information carefully. She seemed to be analyzing the situation as one would a crime, searching for the validity of alibis and crosschecking the facts.
“What’s the big deal?” Daniel asked, laughing easily.
“No big deal,” she said, shrugging. “Is it so wrong for a girl to want to know about the secret interactions between her brother and her friend?”
“Yeah,” Daniel said.
I nodded. “A little bit.”
“Anyways, let’s not dwell on the past. Instead, let us talk of the future and what it holds in store. Will, if you would be so kind as to relieve my brother of his ignorance of The Big Summer.”
“Uh, sure,” I said. “I mean … there’s not really all that much to say. I had some, uh, trouble with my friends back home. It’s not that big of a deal. I—”
“They tormented you mercilessly,” Hannah interjected, rolling her eyes. “Don’t minimize. They constantly took advantage of you and made fun of you.”
“Yeah …”
“And then they tossed you into a pool in front of everyone from your school. That’s a pretty big deal in my opinion.” She gazed at me intensely.
I clenched my hands in my lap, wishing she would stop talking. My story sounded so pathetic … it made me sound so pathetic. I didn’t want Daniel knowing how weak I was. “Yes. They did those things to me … so I left … I ran away from my problems.”
“Stop making yourself sound like a coward!” Hannah snapped. “I don’t understand why you’re being so weird about this. You had the courage to leave all that behind and come start over. That’s so brave, Will.”
I snuck a glance at Daniel. He was nodding in agreement with his sister. I shrugged and muttered, “I guess.”
“Screw them all,” Daniel told me. “You’re better than them. And the fact that you chose to take initiative in your own life is proof of that.”
“Thanks …”
“I promised Will that I would help him however I could,” Hannah told her brother.
Daniel nodded and smiled kindly. “I’ll help too.”
“Thanks,” I said again.
“That’s very kind of you, bro,” Hannah said. “But don’t you think you should be checking with Katie to make sure she’ll let you be a good person?”
“Shut up,” Daniel scowled.
Hannah laughed and planted a huge kiss on his cheek. “I’m just messing with you. You know I love you, brother dearest.”
“Yeah, I know.” He fought back a smile.
“Hey,” Hannah said, “we should start working on The Big Summer. We have a whole night ahead of us to do anything we want!”
“Yeah?” I asked.
“Yeah,” the twins replied in really scary, telekinetic, freaky twin-ish unison.
“Okay. Uh, what should we do?”
“It’s your party,” Hannah told me. “Your decision.”
I conjured up the List in my mind, scrolling through the options. I didn’t particularly feel like getting a tattoo at that moment or going night tanning or throwing a totally impromptu party. But we did have a night. A whole night. “How about we hit two birds with one stone?”
“O
oh,” Hannah grinned, “getting ambitious. I like it!”
“Will this mad scheme of yours require either fireworks or illegal substances?” Daniel asked.
I shook my head. “Though I’m sure Hannah would have no problem obtaining such objects, they are not necessary. Do you guys happen to have a working TV?”
. . .
And so it was that the three of us came to be sitting on what was probably the squishiest and comfiest couch that my rear has ever had the pleasure of resting upon.
The coffee table was buckling under the overwhelming volume of snack food. It came in as a close second to the spread Hannah’s mother had put out, but only barely. Cheetos, chips, popcorn, pretzels, gummies, chocolate, and bottles of Mountain Dew to wash it all down with.
We lounged in our pajamas, because according to Hannah, that was the only way to have a true movie marathon party, a philosophy that Daniel wholeheartedly agreed with. And since it is only very seldom that I carry a pair of pajama pants in my back pocket, Daniel loaned me some plaid drawstring pants.
And most importantly, the DVD player was loaded and ready. Hannah had worked out the rough math that we could potentially watch six movies. By a unanimous vote, we settled on the Hidden Dead Trilogy box set. Hannah and Daniel, apparently insane horror fanatics, convinced me to include The Shed, The Mistress of Fear, and O Bloody Night in the evening’s program. Though I was more of a rom-com type of guy, I wanted to prove that I had somewhat of a backbone.
“Okay, let’s do this,” I said.
Hannah shoved a handful of popcorn into her mouth and, as she pressed play on the remote control, mumbled, “Let The Big Summer Movie Marathon All-Night Extravaganza begin!”
And so it began.
By the time we had gotten through the first two movies, with their gratuitous gore and college-kid nudity, it was already getting late into the night. I was laying half on the couch and half on the floor with my head parallel to the ground in a desperate effort to accommodate the terrible bloating in my stomach. I really overdid it on the snacks.
The Big Summer Page 9