The Cousins(25)

“About what?” Aubrey asks, but Milly has already fastened her fingers around my wrist like a handcuff as she drags me toward the back exit. All of her earlier friendliness is gone. I’m not surprised, exactly, but I’m still thrown off by how fast she flipped the switch.

“What’s your problem?” I ask, my irritation mounting as I pull away from her grasp. “Stop yanking me. I’m already coming with you.”

“Oh, you should thank me that this is all I’m doing,” Milly says in a low, threatening voice as she leans one shoulder into the door. It opens, and we spill outside into the cool night air. I take a deep breath to clear my head, but almost gag when I’m hit with the sour stench of garbage. We’re right next to a dumpster. Milly stops, hands on her hips as she turns to face me.



“Can we move away from the trash—” I start, but that’s all I get out before Milly reaches both arms out and shoves me as hard as she can.

I stumble backward, unprepared for both the action and the force behind it. That girl packs a lot of strength into a small frame. “What the hell?” I growl. My hands are up in a gesture of surrender, but my temper spikes.

Milly pulls something small and square out of her pocket and waves it in my face. “What the hell indeed?” she says.

A light over the door behind us throws enough of a glow to illuminate what she’s holding. My stomach twists as I stare at the familiar card, and all the anger drains out of me in an instant. I reach behind me for the wallet in my back pocket. Or rather, the wallet that should’ve been in my back pocket, but isn’t.

So that’s why she was acting so friendly while we played pool. She took it. Snaked it right out of my pocket while I was showing off. I could punch myself in the face for being so stupidly focused on the game I was playing that I missed the one she was playing.

“Give me back my stuff.” I try to sound authoritative and unbothered at the same time, but sweat is already gathering at my hairline.

Shit. Shit, shit. This is bad.

Milly waves my driver’s license again, looking up at me from under those mile-long lashes. “Gladly. Just as soon as you tell me who the hell you are, Jonah North, and why you’re pretending to be my cousin.”





I don’t know whether it’s to his credit or not that he doesn’t try to deny it.

“Why did I even bring that damn license,” Other Jonah mutters. He looks furious, but I think it’s mostly at himself.

“Yeah, well, this was only confirmation,” I say. I pull Jonah’s thin black wallet from my jeans pocket and stuff the license inside. It’s served its purpose now—and I already took a picture with my phone—so I hand the wallet to him. “Your polishing off an entire plate of shrimp linguine when you have a shellfish allergy is what tipped me off.”

As soon as Jonah started eating his dinner at The Sevens, I waited for his face to swell up like it did when he ate a shrimp wrapped in bacon nine years ago at our house. I was shocked that he didn’t even turn a little red. When I went to get my drink, on the opposite side of the bar, I Googled can you grow out of a shellfish allergy and learned that while it’s not impossible, it’s highly unlikely, and there’s usually still at least some reaction. Enough that most people would avoid inhaling an entire plate of them in under five minutes.



Maybe I could’ve accepted my alleged cousin as one of the lucky few, if it weren’t for the fact that this boy has never fit as Jonah Story. From the first time I saw him on the ferry, he didn’t make sense. For one thing, he’s a lot better-looking than I remember, even allowing for the space of nine years. For another, although he made a solid early effort at copying my cousin’s obnoxious mannerisms, he hasn’t been able to keep it up. This Jonah is annoying in his own way—he has a bad attitude and a chip on his shoulder about something, clearly—but he doesn’t have the same analytical, academic tone as Jonah Story.

“Are you kidding me?” Jonah’s tense expression turns to outraged disbelief. “A shellfish allergy? Thanks, JT. That would’ve been useful information to have.”

“Who’s JT?” I ask, although I think I know.

Jonah’s jaw ticks, and he regards me in silence for a few seconds like he’s weighing how much to say. “Your cousin,” he finally admits. “We go to school together, and people call him JT so they don’t get us confused. His middle name is Theodore. But I guess you already know that.”

I don’t—or if I ever did, I’ve forgotten—but Jonah North doesn’t need to know that. I can’t help a satisfied smirk at the idea of my cousin being the secondary Jonah somewhere. I’ll bet that bugs the crap out of him. “So he knew you were doing this?”

Jonah hesitates again, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand as conflicting emotions skitter across his face. “He asked me to do this,” he says.



“He asked you to pose as him?” My voice edges upward in disbelief.

“Shhh,” Jonah says, even though we’re the only ones out here. He looks at the dumpster beside us, his mouth twisting. “Look, I can’t think straight with this stench. I’m moving. You can come with or not.”

“Oh, I’m right behind you,” I say, secretly relieved as Jonah heads for the back of the parking lot. When we reach the edge of a grassy path, I grab his arm. “This is far enough. Spill the rest. Why did Jonah—or JT, or whatever—ask you to pose as him?”