Page 181 of Call the Shots
“Ooo, is that June?” a new voice asked, and I glanced at his laptop to see a woman with auburn hair, peering with interest.
“That’s my Aunt Holly,” Bear explained. “Hey, Auntie.”
Bear’s aunt was his mom’s sister-in-law, his uncle had passed away a couple of years ago. She was so excited to hear from us, and I filled her in on the little things Bear forgot to mention. There was so much teasing and love between them, it was clear how close they were.
I thought about the stories Bear’s dad used to tell me about how he ‘rescued’ Bear.
I wondered how many of those were actually true.
An hour passed—anhour already?—and we had ten minutes until his cousins had to call it a night. I checked my phone and spotted the new email.
My test results.
I snuck a look at Bear, his eyebrows furrowed in concentration while he washed the whale tank with his cousins.
If I had my results… “Hey, can you check your email?”
“Uh-huh, yeah.” Bear held his phone out to me. “Sergeant AJ, you’re going to fall in the shark tank.”
“No, I won’t!”
I gazed at his phone, surprised. “No, I meant…um…?”
“Oh, sorry. Passcode’s zero-zero-four-zero,” Bear said, distracted. “AJ, if you jump like that, they’ll bite you—dude, what did I just say?”
“No, they won’t—they got my leg!”
“Oh, man,” Bear muttered, clicking a thousand buttons. “Now there’s blood in the water —"
“Can you die quieter?!” Jillian demanded. “I’m making a beautiful underwater sculpture! I need to concentrate!”
Bear…gave me his phone. Just like that. Surprise flickered through me as I typed in the passcode, waiting for it to decline. It didn’t. I stared at his phone, thinking of all the times Xavier snatched his out of my hand when I wanted to check the weather or ping a picture to him. And Bear just gave it to me. Just like that.
A blush colored my cheeks as the realization sank in. Bear’s passcode was forty.
Oh my god, this man.
“No way.” Bear motioned for me to look at the screen. “We’re in consideration for another okapi—it’s a minigame, you have to help me.”
I quickly screenshot his email and changed it to his phone’s lock screen. “Like it wouldn’t be only me in the exhibit?”
“Uh-huh. If we do it with a high score, we get to pick the name and gender.”
“Ooo…high score? You should get one of the kids to help you?—”
“Nope, you’re doing it with me!”
Despite my objections, Bear showed me the two-button combination I had to press while he went through the rest of the sequences, his thumbs flying across his controller. If I slowed, the lefthand bar went down.
“Bear, I’m not good at this?—”
“Keep going, June!”
My fingers were cramping but I hopped up on my knees, focusing to keep up with him.
“Almost there!” he shouted.
“This is why I don’t play video games! If we lose the okapi, it’ll emotionally destroy me!”
