Page 68 of Houston, We Have a Problem
I love the way she instantly gives her own pumpkin more attention. “What sort of contest? Most intricate? Most realistic?”
“Yeah, we need details,” Jordan adds. “You’ve never let me join in on this before.”
“It’s a people’s choice award,” Micah says. “We all put in our vote for whichever we think is our favorite.”
Fischer frowns, already elbow deep in pumpkin guts. He seemed eager to carve until I mentioned the contest. “Won’t we all just vote for ourselves?”
“You would think so,” Brook replies, “but someone always comes out the winner.”
“It’s because Chad never votes for himself,” Micah says as if it should be obvious.
But that can’t be right because, “I never vote for myself either,” I say, pausing with my hand inside my pumpkin. “But I’ve still won a couple of times.” Even when my pumpkins come out horrible every year. I turn my gaze to Brooklyn, who flushes bright red and focuses a little too hard on picking pumpkin string off her pinky. “Brook. You always do the final tally.”
Micah gasps. “Brooklyn! Have you beencheating the system all this time?”
Jordan busts up again, planting a kiss on Brook’s cheek as she mumbles, “I didn’t want anyone to feel left out.”
“My entire life is a lie,” I say dramatically and throw a handful of slimy pumpkin seeds at her.
She screams but retaliates quickly, only her aim is way off and she pelts Darcy right in the face, leaving sticky orange strings stretched across Darcy’s face. “Oh my goodness, Darcy! I’m so—”
A handful of guts flies out of Darcy’s hand and lands in Brook’s hair.
“Nice shot!” I say, offering Darcy a pumpkiny high five right before Jordan defends his girlfriend by grabbing a leftover chicken wing and thwacking me in the side of the head with it. “Oh, you’re going down,” I growl, and in two seconds flat we’re all throwing food and pumpkin guts like there’s no tomorrow.
“Stay behind me!” I tell Darcy, choosing to be the dashing hero.
Instead, she hops up onto a chair like Micah and flings her seeds with impressive coverage. Then she leaps onto my back and ducks, letting me take the brunt of the return fire. “I need more ammo!” she orders, and I comply, hurrying into the kitchen and ducking behind the counter to give her access to the food while attempting to protect myself.
Duke comes barreling in from the yard amidst our shouts and screams, barking like crazy but looking like he’s having the time of his life as he starts chowing down on our fallen offerings.
“Stand!” Darcy shouts, and I do, receiving a face full of spinach dip from Micah at the same time Darcy squirts whipped cream directly into Jordan’s hair while he scoops from his pumpkin.
He’s just about to unleash his gloppy handful directly down my leotard when a whistle pierces the air. Duke isn’t the only one who freezes, though no one else flops to the floor like he does.
Chad stands just inside the dining room, murder in his eyes as he takes in the scene of carnage. The woman at his side—who clings to his hand, I should add—looks a lot more entertained than he does.
“I don’t want to ask,” Chad grumbles and then turns and walks right back out the front door with his lady in tow, slamming the door behind him.
“Oops,” Jordan says, which sends us all into fits of laughter again.
It feels good to laugh like this, and it’s been a long time since all of my siblings were this happy. Though this cleanup is going to be a beast, I can’t stop thinking about how Darcy fits right in with our chaos as she hangs on my back with her cream canister still at the ready.
Hopefully she wants to stay.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Darcy
I always wanted to bein a food fight. Movies make them look so fun, but my parents would have killed Carissa and me if we’d ever tried something like that. Now that I’m sitting on Houston’s shoulders, scraping semi-dried pumpkin strings from the top of the cabinet, I can see why it is such a forbidden game. We’ve spent the last hour trying to make Chad’s kitchen shine, but I’m pretty sure he’s going to be finding stray pumpkin seeds until next Halloween.
“How?” Fischer asks in exasperation when he finds yet another seed inside the closed Tupperware drawer. He’d only opened it to grab some containers to pack up any food that didn’t get decimated, but that turned into a deep clean because somehow there is pumpkineverywhere.
No one in the movies ever talks about how food fights are ten seconds of fun followed by a hundred times that in cleanup time.
Houston laughs and adjusts his hold on my legs, sending a shock through me just like he has every time he reminds me he’s there. Not that I could have forgotten. I am impossibly tall up here, and he’s been holding me long enough that I know he has to be getting tired. That hasn’t stopped me from running my hands through his thick hair multiple times under the pretext of removing pumpkin strings and other food items.
This may not be how I pictured Halloween going, but I’m not complaining.
