Page 64 of Time to Bounce

Though it’d arrived, we’d given it to a neighborhood kid who’d ridden by on his bike. Neither Gable nor I had been hungry at the time.

“Where?” I asked.

Because I wasn’t going to say yes if it was fish.

I hated fish.

I also hated anything overly spicy, so a lot of the Thai places were out.

“How about Rocky Roads?” Maven suggested, her eyes lighting up. “Food sounds really, really good.”

“You just want the chili cheese fries,” I laughed. “Yeah, Rocky Roads sounds good.”

Rocky Roads was good for me in multiple ways.

It had a plethora of food to choose from, but it also had a very extensive dessert menu, which actually sounded way better than actual food.

I needed to eat my feelings in calories.

And Rocky Roads was the perfect place to do it.

So I may not even be close to a 10 at the beach, but I’m a solid 8 at Walmart.

—Athena’s secret thoughts

ATHENA

You know what I loved about all the Carters?

They didn’t care if I asked a lot of questions.

I’d had a boyfriend once who liked to give me shit about all the questions I asked.

At a dinner with his family, one of many I’d gone to with him, I’d overheard his mother and sister talking about me when I got back from the restroom. And my boyfriend at the time had done nothing to stop them from making fun of me.

I couldn’t help the questions I needed to ask.

That was just my brain.

It ran a million miles an hour.

Quaid, Quincy, and Quinn—the triplets—were laughing at my previous question and discussing it amongst themselves now.

Their wives were chiming in, and I loved that my need for knowledge fueled their own, too.

I’m not sure how we’d gotten onto the next subject, though, just that we were now on it, and I had questions.

“Why is it that people will swim in an ocean, or a lake that has a ton of dead bodies in it, yet they won’t swim in a swimming pool with a dead body in it?” I asked Atlas, who’d been talking about the lake he wanted to go fishing at that his parents owned a house on.

My mind was firing, though, and I didn’t realize that no one had answered it at first.

“Do people have a corpse to body of water ratio?” I asked.

Silence.

I looked up from the blanket I was crocheting—yes, at the dinner table, it helped me unwind, and I carried it everywhere in my purse with me— to see the Carters staring at me like I was crazy.

They usually didn’t have any problems with my odd line of questions. Perhaps, this one was a little too weird?

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