Page 66 of Looking for Love in All the Haunted Places
“Quite well.”
Rebel collapsed again after spinning round number two.
“Shortcake. Look.” Lucky gestured toward a group of kids, probably around Rebel’s age, playing some kind of tag game in the adjacent open field. The poor grass looked dry enough to start a fire if someone ran too quickly. “Do you want to ask if you can play with them while we wait? Make some new friends?”
Rebel, perhaps unconsciously, moved closer to Lucky’s side. “No.”
“Eh, friendship is overrated anyway,” she joked, ignoring Georgia’s sudden sharp glare.
Rebel scrunched her nose in doubt. “Really?”
She shrugged. “Sometimes, it just takes some of us a lot longer to find our people.”
“I have people. Um, person? People? Person.” Rebel nodded, finally confident in her word choice. “Riley’s my person, not my people. He’s just one person.”
Georgia said, “Little miss and little menace.”
Rebel began to smile, high beams on. “He’s ten like me. We’re exactly three months, two weeks, and one day apart. Isn’t that cool?”
“The coolest,” Lucky agreed.
“He lives in the apartment building across the pathway from mine. Our windows face each other and everything.”
“Oh, wow.”
“Where do your people live?”
Lucky hesitated. “I, uh, haven’t found my person-people yet.” Not a lie, but maybe not the entire truth.
Georgia was more than willing to correct her. She sat up, openly glaring. “You’re gonna stop insulting me to my face. I amsensitive. We’re friends now, damn it. No more of this pity party shit, got it?”
Guess that meant she was off the clock. She hadn’t said a single swear word the entire day while filming.
Rebel giggle-whispered, “I think you made her mad.”
“I think so too,” she whispered back.
Georgia continued, “And that goes for the rest of the team. You’re one of us now. Get over it because it already happened.”
Lucky said to Rebel, “I guess I missed the memo.”
“You did. I signed it and everything. My dad too. I wish he were here.” She side-eyed Lucky. “He’sreallyfun.”
Not quite having mastered the art of being surreptitious yet, Lucky sensed where Rebel was going before she got there. “There might be time for you two to spend the day here before we go.”
“No,” Rebel whined. “The three of us together. That would be the most fun.”
Georgia said, “You see what you started? Now she’s insulting me too, acting like I wasn’t even there today. I get no respect. None.” She dramatically lay back down, arms crossed and pouting.
“A group trip would be nice. Chase would come. I feel like we could all bully Xander into it. Stephen might be harder,” Lucky said. “He probably needs a day off.”
“Stephen doesn’t even know what that means,” Georgia said. “You’d catch him typing an email on a roller coaster, completely calm.”
Lucky’s phone vibrated for the sixth time that day. The unknown caller once again.
“Maybe we can go to Canada for the group trip.” Rebel stood up and resumed her spinning game. “I want to see the northern lights!”
“What made her think of that?” Georgia asked.
