Page 78 of The Blairville Legacies

Larissa looked after her sympathetically.

When Mady was gone, Grace exhaled audibly. “Finally.”

Larissa turned to her. “Did you have to scare her off like that? She’s super nice.”

Grace rolled her eyes. “Nice is the little sister of...”

“Grace!” it escaped Julie, but Grace paid no attention to her cousin, instead looking at us urgently.

“She was dating Nash Copeland.”

Larissa shook her head. “And you don’t like these Copelands because they probably do drugs? That’s no reason to exclude her like that...”

The cousins fell silent again.

I decided to change the subject, because this was not how I wanted to communicate with my roommates in the long run.

“And who are the other two girls?”

“You mean Vivienna Westcode and her blasphemy sisters?” inquired Grace as she stirred a wooden spoon in a pan. The smell of garlic and tomato sauce rose to me. “They’re a thing of their own. Just don’t get triggered by their allusions, and you’ll be fine.”

That sounded very promising.

That’s when the front door opened again, and a blonde girl with excessive makeup, a pink miniskirt, a crop top of the same color, and sunglasses entered the first floor. A pinkLouis Vuittonhandbag dangled from her arm.

The third and final girl from the parking lot. The embodiment ofBarbie.

With a mocking look, she glanced at me, then at Larissa, and finally at the cousins. Then she turned outside and called out in her squeaky voice, “Mr. Hendricks, take the bags up to my room!”

Then she walked down the hall with her head held high as if we were thin air and disappeared up the stairs in her killer high heels. As she did so, I wondered how she had even made it here in those shoes without breaking at least one of her legs on the wooden walkway.

“Oh my god, Vi, Amber! I missed you so much!” we suddenly heard her shout from above, at which point another girl startedshrieking excitedly. This must have been the girl with the nail file.Amber.

This was followed by the clacking of a lock, and all we could hear were a few muffled snatches of conversation and loud laughter.

Then, hearing nothing more, Larissa and Grace started laughing at the same time.

I couldn’t help but laugh along, and even Julie grinned slightly.

“Oh my gosh! I missed you guys soooo much!” Grace mimicked the girl, and Larissa and I grinned even wider.

“Yet I just met the three of them a few days ago while shopping!”

My words finally released the tension in the room, and we couldn’t help but laugh loudly until the door opened for the fourth time, and we all abruptly fell silent.

A slightly chubbier man in his mid-fifties was struggling with two pink suitcases. He dragged them through the first floor toward the stairs. Poor guy.

Quietly, but still with a smirk on my lips, I turned back to the email.

“I can’t find anything,” I finally snorted, and Larissa came over to me. She looked at the laptop as if she knew her way around it but came to the same conclusion.

“Mh, maybe try the secretary’s office?”

“Now?” I asked, turning to her.

“What are you looking for?”

Julie had joined in our little conversation. She seemed genuinely interested, so I didn’t hesitate for long.

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