Shuffle, Repeat (11 page)

Mom is on campus, finishing up some paperwork. I have already showered, eaten breakfast (who am I kidding—brunch), and unloaded the dishwasher. I throw a load of laundry into the washing machine and look around for something else to do, but the house is clean, I have no schoolwork, and there's nothing I want to watch.

I text Lily to see if she wants to go to the mall, but she's rehearsing for her studio's winter recital. I try Shaun, but of course he doesn't text back. I call Darbs, but her mom is making her watch the twins while she goes Christmas shopping. She invites me over, and I politely decline. The last time I helped Darbs with the twins, we took our eyes off them for ten minutes and they pulled all the sheets off her parents' bed. By the time we realized what was going on, they had tied the bedding into a long rope and one twin was being lowered out the upstairs bedroom window. Those kids stress me out. And it's not like I have a way to get to their house, anyway.

Crap. The first day of break and I'm already bored.

I know I should take some time to figure out what I'm going to do about Itch, but I have a full two weeks until he's back. Maybe I'll feel differently when we've been apart for a little while. Maybe I'll miss him.

My phone buzzes, and I'm basically a ninja, I grab it so fast. My brain reflexes, however, are a little slower. It takes me a moment of staring at it to realize who the text is from.

Oliver.

Apparently he was telling Marley—his mom—about our shared playlist, and there was something he didn't know how to explain.

what's the diff between punk & alt?

I flop down across my bed to message him back, but I'm not even halfway through when I realize it's complicated enough to warrant a phone call. Oliver picks up immediately. “You must miss me.”

“Not even close,” I tell him. “But I'm hardly going to type the history of music to you on a phone. It would devalue the importance of the lesson you so sorely require.”

“You're impossible,” he says, but his voice sounds like he's smiling. “What are you doing?”

“Not much,” I admit, and the phone shivers in my hand.

“Click on the link.” He hangs up.

“Wait,” I say into empty air. “I still haven't educated you.”

And he calls
me
impossible.

I pull up the new message from Oliver. It's a link to…

A game?

Oliver has sent me an invite to play a game—a really geeky one—through our phones. When I accept the invitation, I find that it's a strategy game that is (loosely) based on Greek mythology. It's peopled by little animated figures who wear winged sandals or carry lyres or wield thunderbolts. They stand around on a battlefield and make moves that the players assign them. Oliver's opening gambit involves a long-haired demigoddess eating a “Pomegranate of Power” before leaping astride a Pegasus and galloping in the direction of my little huddle of figures.

Despite this possibly being the actual dorkiest thing I've ever done, I touch the screen to deploy an “Army of Angry Muses” toward Oliver's Pegasus. He responds with a “Whirlwind Gorgon Attack” followed by a “Trident to the Face”…

And the battle is on.

“Yes!” I shout with a fist pump. It startles my mother, who drops the scissors she's using to snip mint leaves. She leans down to pick them up off the floor.

“June,” she says. “I could have taken off a toe.”

“Sorry.”

“What are you doing, anyway?”

“It's just this stupid game Oliver sent me. I finally beat him.”

My mother shakes her head. “It can't be
that
stupid if you've been playing it since yesterday.”

“Oh, you know,” I tell her. “It's something to do.”

It's a day after Christmas, a week before we go back to school. Our tree is still up in the family room and small white lights still outline the front windows. The ripped dark-dyed jeans my dad sent me from New York (all the rage among the stage actresses, he says) are folded carefully in a drawer, waiting for the perfect time to be worn. The array of books and sweaters and earrings my mother gave me are heaped on my dresser. The funky upcycled case Itch gave me is already wrapped around my phone.

Mom and I shoveled the driveway this morning. I thought it was pointless, since there's a snowstorm coming, but Mom said we should at least start with a clean slate. She's had the Weather Channel on the television since she woke up, and she keeps checking the generator in her studio.

The first fat snowflakes are falling when Cash's truck pulls up in front of the house. “Dammit, I told him not to come,” Mom says before she bolts outside. I look out the front window and watch her run down the porch steps toward Cash's pickup. Despite her words, the minute he opens his door, she flies into his arms and kisses him on the mouth.

A minute later, they're stamping their feet on the rug in the entryway, setting bags of groceries on the floor. “You don't listen,” Mom says to Cash.

“I listen to your wishes, not your words.” He grins at me. “Hey, want to give us a hand with these?”

“Sure.” I carry one of the bags to the kitchen.

“Stay here,” I hear Mom tell Cash, and then she's in the kitchen with me. “I have to talk to you. Cash and I have known each other for a long time. We have several mutual friends and…He'll sleep downstairs.”

“He doesn't have to do that.”

“Thanks, but that's the best place for him to…” Mom wraps her arms around me. “Even though we have an evolved and enlightened mother-daughter relationship, it doesn't mean you want my sex life in your face.”

“You are really making it weird,” I tell her.

“Sorry.”

“Can I have a boy spend the night, too?”

“No way.”

“It was worth a shot.”

Mom pulls back and gazes at me. She pushes a strand of hair away from my face. “You are still the most important person in the whole world,” she says. “He's just a guy with a bag of groceries.”

“I'm not calling him Dad,” I say, and she flicks me in the head.

“Now who's making it weird?”

It snowed hard—big, fluffy flakes—for hours. It was still coming down when I went to bed last night after an evening of games with Mom and Cash. If they get married, I wonder if Dad will be invited to their wedding.

Now that it's Wednesday afternoon and it stopped snowing hours ago, I'm well into the realm of stir-crazy. It's not only that I'm stuck in our house; it's that I'm stuck with a pair of lovebirds. They're not all over each other or anything—in fact, I feel like they're going out of their way
not
to touch each other—but I can tell. There's an energy in the air.

My mom wants to be alone with her new boyfriend, and I'm the cock blocker.

Gross.

I'm on the couch, huddled under a blanket with my phone, and have just sent a “Fiery Chariot of Doom” at Oliver when a tiny star pops up in the corner of my screen: a notice of an in-game message. I click on it.

snowed in?

Oliver's obviously in the same boat as me…well, minus the thing where the two adults in his house are dying to get in each other's pants.

Or maybe they are; what do I know about the Flagg family?

I send Oliver a message in return:

y. sux.

A nanosecond later, my phone rings. I pick it up. “I think you're the one who misses me,” I tell Oliver.

“All I'm saying is you've played a
lot
of Mythteries.”

“Which you only know because
you've
been playing. Hold on.” I squiggle out of the blanket and off the couch. “Going upstairs!” I call to Mom and Cash.

I get a muffled “Okay” in return and opt not to go see what they're doing. Once in my room, I leap onto my bed and set the phone against my ear again. “You still there?”

“I'm housebound. Where else would I be?”

“This snowstorm is
killing
me,” I confide. “Cash stayed over last night—”

“What?”

“—and now he's stuck here. I'm the world's most awkward third wheel.”

Oliver's amusement comes through the phone and makes me smile. “Are they actively doing it?” he asks through laughter.

“They
want
to and that's even worse!”

Silence. Just when I think maybe Oliver has hung up, I hear his voice again. “Do you want to come over here?”

I'm startled. No, more than startled. I'm shocked. And also…pleased.

I'm inordinately
pleased
that Oliver has extended an invitation to his house. Except: “I'm snowed in, remember? We're all snowed in.”

“Hold on.” I hear some bustling around and then Oliver's voice again. “The snowplow's been by. Walk over.”

“Walk? Seriously?”

“It's less than a mile. I'll meet you in the middle.”

I hesitate.

And then I assess my reason for hesitating.

It's not that I
don't
want to hang out with Oliver. It's that I
do
want to, which is exactly why I'm not sure if I should do it. We finally have this friendship thing down. It's easy. It's not awkward anymore. I get him and I think he gets me. Yes, his music and philosophy are still cheesy, but they're not unbearable.

All that being said, it's a friendship that lies squarely within a set of very specific parameters. We are friends in the car. We are friends in school hallways. Occasionally, we're friends at lunch. Yes, there was that one time Oliver had dinner at my house, but Mom and Cash were right there, which meant that it was safe.

“Hello? Did you hang up?” Oliver asks into my ear.

“No, I'm here. I'm just…” I stop, because I don't know what I'm doing. I'm inexplicably nervous about being alone with Oliver, which is silly, which is crazy, which is—

“My parents are here,” he says, like he can hear my thoughts. It works, because I feel myself nodding even though he can't see me.

“Okay. I'll come over.”

“Give me half an hour before you leave.”

Exactly thirty minutes later, after trying on several combos of clothing and settling on faded jeans with a slouchy cable-knit sweater, I assure Mom I will be careful and step outside. I pause on the porch to look around, and I realize that maybe I didn't need
quite
as much bundling up as I thought. The day is cold, but not bitterly so. In fact, it feels refreshing after having been stuck in the house for so long (with lovebirds). The sky is bright blue, scattered with big, fluffy clouds, and sunlight bounces off the white ground.

Floundering down off the porch and across the driveway takes a while, because the snow comes up to my knees, but once I've struggled over the big drift to reach the road, it's smooth sailing. The plow has packed the snow hard and my boots have good treads, so walking is easy. I peer down Callaway Lane, trying to guess where I will meet up with Oliver.

But Oliver is already in sight. Only a few houses away, he's trudging in my direction, and when he sees me, he waves an arm in greeting. He's wearing a twill hooded jacket, plus dark cherry mittens and a scarf that stand out against the white of the road. My heart swells in my chest and I cannot deny that I am happy to see him.

Really happy.

“How'd you get here so fast?” I ask him. “Did you run?”

He grins down at me, and his teeth are the same white as the snow. I want to touch them with the tip of my finger, to stroke their shiny surface, but of course that would be shockingly strange and I do not. “I left when we hung up.”

“But you told me—”

“I may have bent the truth. I didn't think your mom would like it if you walked all that way alone.”