In A Holidaze(52)

“Benny said you were looking for me.”

Miles pauses, blushing, and in an instant I know what this is about. Why didn’t I see this coming?

I sit down next to him on the swing, bumping his shoulder with mine. “What’s up?”

“I was right last night, wasn’t I?” he asks, and then looks at me. My brother got our mother’s enormous eyes and he knows how to use them. He can make them round with innocence or narrow them in mischief. Right now, he winces a little, looking mortified to be asking me this but also, I know, hoping I won’t lie to him.

“Right about what?” I ask, wanting to be sure.

“That you and Andrew are hooking up.”

“Yes,” I say simply.

“Does Theo know?”

A defensive wave sweeps briefly over me. “No. And please don’t tell him. If we decide this is going anywhere, we’ll tell everyone ourselves.”

Miles nods at this and turns his eyes out to the snow-covered front yard. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing here?”

“Not really.”

“Because you know Mom will have no chill about this.”

The thing about moving home is that I went from independent adult back into kid mode. Mom still does most of the cooking because she loves it. She does most of my laundry because she uses the activity to unwind while she’s thinking about how to fix one of her paintings. Of course, I love these perks but they mean I can’t complain that she also never thinks twice before giving me her two cents on every aspect of my life.

“Trust me,” I say, “that is reason number one why I’m not saying anything yet.”

Miles takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “I think Theo is in love with you.”

“What? No, he isn’t,” I say.

“How do you know?”

I laugh dryly. “Theo is used to everyone wanting him. I don’t. He’s the kind of guy who wants what he can’t have.”

I watch Miles absorb this information, and then he seems to understand, nodding slowly. “Okay. I just—I don’t want him to be upset.”

Kissing my brother’s temple, I tell him, “You’re a good boy.”

He pretends to be grossed out by this, pushing me away, but turns back before leaving. “Hang out with him today.”

“Why?”

“Because I think he misses you.”





chapter twenty-one


I suppose it’s fate, then, that Miles and Theo broke the bowl we always use to hold the scraps of paper for picking teams. Ricky grabs his cowboy hat instead and this time, when Theo’s name is pulled out, mine is the one that immediately follows. Andrew throws me a little womp-womp face, but I’ve got no doubt that he and Miles are going to crush the scavenger hunt; their team has the killer combination of Miles’s doe eyes and Andrew’s ability to charm a stranger into doing anything.

Which is good, because this year’s list is heavy on the video evidence, including:

? A stranger singing “Jingle Bells”

? A dog doing a trick

? Someone reciting their Christmas list

? A teammate performing an act of kindness



Theo comes over to me, holding the list and smiling shyly, and it’s disarming. How can this self-conscious turtle be the same guy who licked my face and refused to talk to me the next morning? It’s impossible to reconcile. We used to text about everything—homework and school, his soccer practice and my art projects. He’d complain about the snow and I’d send him a photo of my mom’s garden, still in bloom. We haven’t done that for a really long time. I wonder if he misses it.

I really don’t want Miles to be right about this.

“Guess you’re stuck with me,” he says.

I smack his arm, laughing. Too high, Mae. Too fake. And Theo knows me too well for it to go over his head: he pulls back in mild suspicion. But he’s also not the kind of person to ask about it in front of everyone—or ask about feelings in general—so we’re left standing in awkward silence as the rest of the teams are formed.

And then we’re off—piling into Ricky’s van. Up front, Andrew puts on Nat King Cole’s Christmas album, and we all sing along badly, perusing our lists, making fun of Ricky driving like a grandpa, and already excitedly talking about how amazing dinner will be later.

We barrel into town, finding a parking spot in a small lot and tumbling out of the van and into our teams. With instructions to meet back at the van in two hours, Ricky releases us, reminding us to be polite, get permission before taking pictures of people, and “If you want to just give up now, that’s fine. Kennedy and I are going to win anyway.”

Theo turns his back to the rest of the group, and we form a two-person huddle. The feeling of being this close to him shouldn’t be weird—I know him just as well as anyone else in my life—but I can’t shake the heavy awareness. It isn’t just about hooking up with him in a past reality, or the fact that I’m now hooking up with his brother. It’s the layers of things that Theo doesn’t know, and the truth that I feel like I got to know him even better—and not for the best— the first time I lived this week.

He holds the list, scanning it with a finger. “We should start with the quick stuff. The candy cane prop,” he says, reading further. “A picture of us both wearing Santa hats. A picture of a moose on something.” He looks up at me. “These should be pretty easy.”