Shuffle, Repeat(34)

“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?”