Page 7 of Caught in a Bad Fauxmance
Those assholes.
“We don’t accept gifts from the enemy.” Grabbing the bottle, Maya heads straight for the kitchen.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Isabel abandons my half-bandaged wound to slide in front of Maya, grabbing the bottle back. “This stuff is worth fifty dollars.”
“Of course it is,” Maya sneers with narrowed eyes.
“All right, what’s going on?” Isabel crosses her arms, keeping the champagne close to her chest. “Did we walk into a cult town or something?”
“Apparently, the neighbors are evil,” Andy explains for us, pushing past his mom to grab a bag of Doritos from the kitchen cabinet.
Isabel eyes me and Maya warily, pulling a small gold card off the champagne bottle. “ ‘A little welcome back gift for our favorite neighbors,’ ” she reads aloud, the ornate Seo-Cooke monogram embossed on the back of the card.
Maya yanks the card out of Isabel’s hand, scrutinizing it before tossing it aside. “They must be spying on us. How else would they know we’re here?”
“They probably heard me pull up when I got here,” Isabel replies. “This place is so deserted, they could hear us sneeze if they tried hard enough.”
Maya isn’t swayed, crossing the room to close the blinds.
Isabel reexamines the champagne, running a finger along the glossy label with a pleased grin. “Doesn’t seem very evil to me.”
It’s easy to fall for a Seo-Cooke trap. That was our biggest mistake, our first trip here. The Seo-Cookes showed up on our doorstep hours after we’d arrived with two bottles of Merlot and the good juice boxes to welcome us to the neighborhood. Dad and Mami let them in without hesitation, grateful that there was another family with kids around the same age as us. We slotted easily into each other’s lives. Playdates in the afternoon at our place and wine (for the parents) and cheese (for the kids) on the Seo-Cookes’ backdeck in the evening. Maya and I fell hard for Stella, Henry, and Julian. It was impossible not to when they came bearing fancy monster trucks, special edition Barbies, and an endless supply of marshmallow-filled chocolate snack cakes.
“What’s so bad about these guys?” Isabel tucks the champagne under her arm and returns to the couch to finish bandaging my wound. “Did they toilet paper the house or something?”
They have. Twice. Though we did the same thing to them. Also twice.
Maya’s preoccupied with closing all the curtains, so Dad taps in to help catch Isabel up to speed. “Do you remember that man I told you about? The one who invented Spill-e?”
Isabel nods slowly. “And?”
With a disgruntled frown, Dad jabs his thumb in the direction of the Seo-Cookes’ cabin. “That’s him.”
Her jaw drops in silent shock. Yeah, that was the reaction we were looking for.
Long before Maya and I came along, Dad was the family creative. He may have traded his middle-school dream of becoming a comic book artist for an engineering degree and a stable paycheck, but that didn’t stop him from exploring other outlets. Rigging the coffee machine to turn itself off, saving Mami from dozens of burnt cups of coffee. Combining his alarm clock with a motion sensor so it wouldn’t stop blaring until he was up and out of bed. A wired basket contraption that brought our mail straight from the slot to the kitchen table. Just because he wasn’t creating art on a page anymore didn’t mean he couldn’t at all.
Our first year at the lake, Dad spent weeks workingon a Christmas gift for Mami. Having twin five-year-olds meant our house was in a perpetual state of disaster. It was a miracle Maya and I never managed to wreck Suck-o, the Roomba he modified to be able to both vacuum and mop messes—a feat Roomba’s actual makers hadn’t figured out yet. Giving us the naming rights on the machine meant we were willing to avoid it in our path of destruction. We’d even given Suck-o our own Devin and Maya touch, adding a pair of googly eyes before we officially gave it to Mami on Christmas morning.
Mr. Cooke was intrigued by Suck-o the minute he saw it mop up the beer he’d spilled in our kitchen. Dad happily answered all of Mr. Cooke’s questions, going on for hours about how Suck-o worked, how he’d come up with the design, and how he planned to perfect it—reduce noise, increase battery life, upgrade the cleaning tech until it was able to mop up messes the OG Roomba wouldn’t dare try to tackle.
“Wanna make a bet?” Mr. Cooke asked after Suck-o slurped up a graham cracker I’d dropped.
It seemed innocent enough. Dad and Mami were still waffling about whether to enter the games. Sign-ups had long passed, but Old Bob had offered to make an exception for us if we decided to join. Mr. Cooke proposed an offer they couldn’t refuse. If we won, he’d give Mami the high-end espresso machine she’d been eyeing since our first playdate at the Seo-Cookes’. If we lost, he’d get Suck-o. At the time, it seemed like a no-brainer. Appliance for appliance, fair and square.
In the end, it came down to an egg toss. After ten perfect passes, the egg I’d gingerly tossed to Mami shattered in herhands. We were disappointed, but not enough to be sore losers. So we handed off Suck-o without complaint.
Six months later, Spill-e hit the market.
“That’sthe robot guy?” Isabel chokes out, glancing down at the champagne in betrayal.
We nod solemnly. The wound of the Spill-e incident formed into a scab we’ve been picking at for years. Mr. Cooke planted a seed that would grow over the years into fully bloomed hatred. We watched bitterly as the Seo-Cookes’ cabin expanded along with their wallets. Spill-e was the big break Mr. Cooke needed, the cash grab that catapulted him and Cooke Corp from a struggling startup to a Forbes-worthy empire. It was impossible to escape him—the shiny new success story in Florida’s Latino community. For months, all we’d hear about on the local Spanish-language news station was how Paul Cooke, a half-Cuban businessman from Miami, had catapulted to stardom.
All because of what he took from us.
Dad confronted him about Spill-e the following year, but there was nothing we could do. He’d insisted that the version on the market was far beyond what Dad had created—improved and upgraded past what Dad could do. The model we handed over wasn’t patented, and you can’t sue someone over a stolen idea. Not unless you want to drown in legal fees to get an official “Sorry, sucks for you.” There were no loopholes or smoking guns we could use to our advantage. He’d won that bet. Fair and square.
So we found new games to play.
