Page 33 of The Checklist
Dylan woke up with a start and glanced around her room, that familiar disoriented sensation creeping over her. Trying to get a grip on her surroundings, she stopped to listen to the sound of absolutely nothing. It felt wrong.
Rolling over, she squinted at the clock, its little red numbers blinking 8:14 a.m. That was about the time she usually woke up when an alarm wasn’t involved. Rubbing her face, she sat up, still marveling at the silence. Her heart rate slowed to a normal pace. It was the Saturday after the world’s longest Friday.
Gingerly setting one foot on the floor, Dylan noticed her door was cracked open. Someone had taken Milo with them. She swung her other leg onto the floor, heaved herself out of bed, and shuffled down the first flight of stairs before stopping to peek into Neale’s bedroom. It wasn’t like Neale made her bed, but as far as Dylan could tell, the sheets were in the same rumpled state as they had been in the day before, implying that Neale had crashed at a friend’s home.
When she’d padded down the second set of stairs, Dylan found the kitchen as empty as Neale’s room. She could tell her mom had been there, because she’d left half a pot of coffee in the coffee maker. This was a Bernice hallmark. Make one massive pot of coffee and drink it throughout the day. Dylan found stale coffee gross, so she gently pressedher hand to the glass. The carafe was still warm. Safe to assume this was not yesterday’s coffee. Her mother had left the house.
“Am I alone?” Dylan asked the coffee maker. It was too good to be true. The odds that anyone was ever alone in the Delacroix household were like the odds of winning the Powerball. Just shy of impossible, and just regular enough to make you believe it could happen.
Daring to hope, Dylan crept toward her father’s study. If she wasn’t alone, she certainly didn’t want anyone knowing she was up, or they would take away the blessed silence. Poking her head around the door, she found a very empty and oddly tidy room. The giddy sensation of being alone kicked in almost instantaneously. Part of her wanted to run upstairs, put on a towel, get some ice cream, and watch TV, because there was absolutely no one to see her do it. Another part of her wanted to make a new pot of coffee and read a very large book. As she stood in the hallway, Dylan realized that either of these activities required her to sit on the furniture. The dust and dog hair alone were enough to put her dreams of towels and tomes on hold. Far from discouraged, she found her joy turning to unmitigated glee. This was her shot to engage in her favorite de-stressor. Cleaning and dance hits of the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Dylan hustled back to the kitchen, dumped out Bernice’s coffee, and set on a fresh pot before catching sight of herself in the kitchen window.
“Ew.” She cringed at the sight of her pores. Blaming Jared, she ran up to the bathroom to find a pore strip to suction to her nose. Then she skipped back down to the living room, where she flipped through the family’s dated catalog of CDs until she found what she was looking for. Janet Jackson’s self-titled masterpiece,janet. Shaking the tension out of her shoulders, Dylan dance-walked to the kitchen, poured herself a cup of coffee, then grabbed a dust rag and some Endust with the other hand. After bumping the cupboard closed with her hip, she got started in the living room, crowing along with Ms.Jackson.
After seventy-five minutes and twenty-three seconds, Dylan had managed to successfully scrub the living room and work up a good sweat. Stopping only to tear the pore strip off and confirm that her skin was suffering under the stress of Technocore, she hit rewind on her favorite song, “If.” Dylan was about to start on the floorboards in the hallway when the doorbell rang.
“Neale!” Dylan shouted over the music, silently cursing her sister for forgetting the door code. When she’d pushed herself off all fours, she ambled toward the door, admiring the dust and grime that had situated itself on her college sweatshirt. Yanking open the heavy door, Dylan threw a hand on her hip and glared ... at the opposite of her sister.
“Hi. Am I interrupting?” Mike asked, looking up from their ancient door mat. Rounding his shoulders forward, he slid his hands into the pockets of his dark jeans, adding, “Sorry. I can come back.”
“Oh no. I thought you were Neale. You’re not interrupting.” Dylan casually repositioned herself behind the door, on the off chance that he hadn’t noticed the layer of dirt crusted onto her pink running shorts.
In a moment of horror, she realized that the dirt wasn’t her most pressing problem. Her father had left the outside speakers on again, so the entire neighborhood had been listening to Ms.Jackson’s sexy alto for nearly two hours. She felt heat creep up her neck and flood her face, which she was pretty sure matched the Pepto-Bismol color of her shorts despite the melanin in her skin. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize that the outside speakers were on. I’ll turn it off right now. Please tell Linda and Patricia it was not intentional.”
“I think they actually prefer Janet Jackson to choral reproductions of indigenous chants.” Mike’s face split into an easy smile. “Oddly enough, that is not why I’m here. I wanted to see if you were around to go look at a couple of museums. If you aren’t busy,” he added, gracefully nodding at the dust rag she was clutching.
In the background, Janet filled Dylan’s panicked silence by describing exactly what she would do if she was someone’s girlfriend. Somehow, she had imagined a lot less spontaneity and messy topknots when she had offered to do this with Mike.And a lot less sex music.
“Yes. Sure. Let me get changed,” Dylan croaked, doing her best to casually speed walk toward the stereo as Janet let everyone on the block know whose name would be called out in bed.
Dylan smashed her index finger against the power button with so much force that it hurt. Her yellow ankle socks slid on the newly Pine-Soled floor as she dashed back to the hallway. Mike stood motionless by the wide-open door, wearing a bemused expression.
“Sorry. You can come in,” Dylan said, motioning him into the house with one hand and trying to wipe off the dust with the other. “Wait.” Dylan threw out the hand she had been using as an emergency lint brush. Mike stopped midmovement, his hand on the door handle, like they were playing Red Light, Green Light. “Did you mean we should leave now? Or sometime later?”
“You’re in charge. Whenever works best for you. If you need some time, I can go.” He used his thumb to gesture over his shoulder at the door.
“Oh no. Now is fine. I just didn’t want you to be sitting here waiting when really you meant later but were too polite to say. Then I’d be holding you hostage when you had somewhere else to be.” Dylan started with her favorite circular hand gesture as if it would make her rambling more eloquent. Mike began shaking his head, the polite smile shifting to outright amusement.
“Nope. I’m all yours.”
He turned to shut the front door, and she noticed the criminal fit of his jeans. Not obviously tight but fitted enough to give a girl some idea of what she was working with. Not that she was looking. This was Janet’s fault.
“Okay, then.” Dylan pulled her mind off his backside as he rotated around. Gesturing to the only truly clean room in the house, she added, “I’m gonna get changed. Make yourself at home.”
She dashed up the stairs as fast as her brightly colored socks would carry her and ripped the dingy sweatshirt off her body. Shedding the rest of her clothes into a pile on the floor, she wondered how she’d managed to find a wearable rainbow to clean in. Hadn’t Neale recently pointed out that she owned no color? Obviously she hadn’t looked at her workout gear.
Silently thanking the sisters of Alpha Zeta Delta for their patented five-minute-ready routine, she grabbed a pair of jeans, a gray cashmere sweater, and the blue scarf that matched her ballet flats. Hustling into her favorite all-purpose casual outfit in two minutes, she thought,Still got it.
Next, she made her way to the bathroom, preparing for the phase involving tinted moisturizer, mascara, and blush and mentally committing any extra time to a quick swipe of lipstick, when she got a good look at her face and stopped cold. A ring of lovely white pore-strip gunk encircled her nose, which was a stunning shade of red from where she had removed a layer of skin and blackheads before Mike had arrived.
“Sexy, Dylan. Very sexy.”
Throwing some water on her face, she hoped Mike thought the slime was part of the general dirt she was wearing and not her pores giving up on life. To be safe, she gave herself an extra thirty seconds to add some lipstick—better to draw attention to some other part of her face—before moving down the stairs, conscious of how anxious her steps sounded.
Dylan hit the bottom stair and rounded the corner to find Mike settled in a chair, scowling at Kierkegaard.
“Ready?”
