Page 5 of Home Sweet Home

“Can you believe that?” Kayla shook her head. “The nerve on that man.”

A hollow laugh escaped Evie. Kayla’s arrival had given her a break from the mental torture she’d been putting herself through since Gloria left, but her mind kept wandering so far off, she could hardly remember where the conversation had started. “Where’d he meet her again?”

“I didn’t dare ask.” Kayla sipped her wine before returning to Josh’s hair. A freshly snipped lock floated onto the trash bag lining the floor. “Wait. He told me, but she was like a bobblehead, nodding away. It was literally all I could focus on.” After a pause, she nodded and snapped her fingers. “She brought her car into the shop. That’s how they met.”

“What happened to her car?” Evie asked.

Kayla shrugged. “Hell if I know. Probably got distracted by something shiny and ran into a tree.”

“Should you be drinking when you have a blade near my face?” Josh asked.

“I’m better this way, Joshie. Like Hemingway but with hair instead of books about dudes who could have used some serious therapy.” After one more snip, she grabbed the mirror from the kitchen table and held it up for Josh. “There.”

His hair fell just below his ears, a huge improvement over the Muppet-like mop he’d been sporting for months.At least one thing is better today than it was yesterday, Evie thought. Josh didn’t so much as glance at the mirror before unhooking the trash bag wrapped around his shoulders and bolting for his bedroom.

“Saythank you!” Evie shouted after him.

“Thanks,” he mumbled from the hallway, followed by the sound of his door shutting.

Kayla sank into a chair. “Really giving that whole moody-teenager thing his all, huh?”

“Yeah.” Evie’s eyes focused on the doorframe Josh had just sulked through. “At least it was a shut and not a slam. Does he seem different to you?”

“Well, he looks less like an overgrown Wookiee now, if that’s what you mean.”

“He’s been…” Evie searched around for the right word to describe Josh’s behavior since school had ended. “Off.”

“Slightly-sour-milk off or miles-away-from-the-dartboard off?”

Evie couldn’t put her finger on it, but since Josh had finished his junior year, something had shifted. After spending every day of his entire seventeen years of existence with him, she just knew. “He’s been shutting himself in his room.”

“Doesn’t he have like a thousand hours in Minecraft? Probably just trolling noobs.”

“Oliver hasn’t been here all summer.”

Josh and Oliver had known each other since kindergarten, which was not uncommon in Creek Water, where there was one elementary school and one high school. They’d been friends ever since. Evie loved Oliver. He always said please and thank you. He inhaled her cookies like he was suffocating and they were oxygen, and when he finished them, he brought the plate back and scrubbed it clean before placing it neatly in the drying rack.

“Huh.” Kayla considered it. “That’s a little weird. But teenagers are weird. I thank my lucky stars every fucking day that Ryleigh’s not seventeen.” She shuddered like it was the most horrifying thing she could imagine.

As Evie sipped her wine, she hoped it was normal adolescent unhappiness. “Before I forget.” She opened the cookie jar, grabbed the last crumpled twenty-dollar bill inside, and handed it to Kayla. “Thanks. For the cut.”

“Nope.” Kayla shook her head and waved her hands as if to emphasize her disagreement, but Evie tucked the bill into the back pocket of Kayla’s jeans. “You’re ridiculous.”

As Evie sank back down into her chair, the pile of bills on the counter taunted her out of the corner of her eye. She looked away as fast as she could, taking a long sip of wine and hoping that maybe it would help her forget the manila envelope filled with her impending doom, just for a little while.

Kayla’s eyes narrowed toward Evie. “What’s up with you?”

Evie tried on a smile, but it was thin. “Nothing.”

“You’re such a bad liar,” Kayla said. “You didn’t sleep last night, and you’ve been distracted, even though I’m a riveting fucking storyteller. Out with it.”

All she had to do was open her mouth and tell Kayla what had happened with Gloria. How behind she was. How she’d failed and they might lose the house. How she felt when she heard West Hawthorne’s name on the TV.

Instead, Evie focused her attention on her lap. “It’s just all this stuff with Josh.”

“Hey,” Kayla said, putting her hand over Evie’s. “He’s gonna be all right. You’re doing the best fucking job.” Kayla’s smile twisted into a smirk, a gleam in her eye that Evie recognized all too well. “I’ve got an idea. Let’s go to Mel’s. Kenny has Ryleigh. We can get some drinks, have some burgers. Meet some people.”

Evie raised an eyebrow. “We’re not going to meet anybody new at Mel’s. The same twenty people have been going there since before we were born.”

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