Spontaneous. Aaron Starmer

it was worth it, Mara.”

      That said, the other thing about single moms is they tend to date, and when that happens, they prefer not to have their seventeen-year-old daughter and her friend who’s swatting at imaginary dragonflies show up just as they’re pulling the cork from some chardonnay. On this particular night, Paula was on a date with a guy named Paul. It couldn’t possibly work out, for obvious reasons, but she’d asked if Tess could sleep at my house anyway.

      This meant that Tess had to smuggle me past my parents. Not mission impossible, but not exactly easy. It was a good thing that Tess was charming and Mom and Dad liked her. They called her Tessy—which I guess she didn’t mind because she never objected—and they were always asking her about field hockey.

      “Heard it was a close one, Tessy.”

      “How do your playoff chances look, Tessy?”

      “Flex your goddamn muscles, Tessy! Flex!”

      Okay. Maybe not the last one, but they loved that she was an athlete, even though she wasn’t a star. Only started a few games that year. Didn’t score a single goal. Still, Mom and Dad were jocks in the days of yore and I never was, so Tess might as well have worked for ESPN. She was the one they always talked jock to.

      Most of the time, it was annoying, but now it was essential. Tess had to distract them as I tiptoed up to my room. The shrooms were wearing off, but I couldn’t risk saying something embarrassing. And I couldn’t lie. I already told you about my problem with lying.

      I know what you’re going to say. “Not telling equals lying!” Well, that’s just bad math.

      Example: Say you pleasure yourself. Not that I’m saying you do . . . Actually, yes. I am saying you do because everyone does. But even if you’re the world’s most honest person, do you run downstairs after every sweaty session and holler, “Mom! Dad! Guess what?”

      Of course not. Same thing with shrooms, though in this case it was pleasuring the mind. Okay, that’s going a bit too far, but I think you get the point.

      As we pulled into the driveway, Tess gave me a pep talk. “All you have to do is make it to the stairs. You can do it, sweetie. I know you can. It’s seven o’clock, so they’ll be watching the news. I’ll pop my head into the family room, tell them that we grabbed some Dunkin on the road and now you’ve got a stomach thing—”

      “Yeah, good. Dunkin. Stomach thing. That’s actually not a lie.”

      “Right. And then they can ask me about when practice is going to start up again and you can slip into some jammies and into bed and if they want to come check on you, you can pretend to be asleep.”

      “But I want to cuddle you.” This was partly the shrooms talking, but it was also the way we were. Neither of us had sisters, so we spent a lot of time doing what we thought sisters did. Braiding each other’s hair, cuddling, fighting. We hadn’t fought in a few weeks, but I knew a fight was coming. Maybe mid-cuddle, probably in the morning.

      “Get your shit together, kiddo,” Tess was bound to tell me in her exasperated big-sister voice. And I would nod and she would scowl and we would both know that it doesn’t matter because I always end up doing the same shit all over again.

      For now, in the driveway, we weren’t fighting. We were moving. “First things first,” Tess said as she grabbed my shoulders and pointed me to the door. “Upstairs. Eyes on the prize.”

      “Aye-aye, cap’n,” I said, and strode up the brick walkway. Though I was still noticing so much—the rustle of leaves that sounded like rain, the glint of evening sunlight on the silver knocker that reminded me of a sword—I must not have noticed some obvious stuff, such as the skateboard resting against the oak tree in the front yard. I pushed open the door without knowing what I was really walking into.

      Now, here’s something you’ve got to understand. No one ever hangs out in our living room. It’s strictly a Christmas-Eve-and- the-grandparents-are-visiting corner of the house. So when I stepped inside and saw three people sitting on the living room couch together, I was tempted to turn tail and not look back. Figured I’d stumbled into the neighbor’s place.

      Dad’s voice cast an anchor, though. “Speak of the devil!” he hollered.

      My head pivoted, and then my gaze landed on the person sitting between my parents. A boy. In a suit. On our living room couch. He stood, and I spoke. “And the devil doesn’t have a clue what the hell is going on.”

      Mom rose to her feet next and she presented the boy like he was a car for sale. “It’s Dylan …”

      “Hovemeyer, ma’am,” Dylan said as he pulled down on his jacket to straighten out the wrinkles. There were a lot of wrinkles.

      Now it was Dad who stood and remarked, “Hovemeyer? I’ve seen that name in the old cemetery by St. Francis.”

      “Our family goes back a ways,” Dylan said with a nod. “And people tend to die.”

      I knew Dylan. Well, I didn’t know him personally, but everyone at school knew him. He was the one you suspected. Of what? Well, name it.

      “Hey, it’s …” Tess had joined me in the doorway, her hand on my back.

      “Dylan Hovemeyer,” he said, stepping toward us with a hand outstretched. I wasn’t sure which one of us the hand was intended for, but Tess was quicker on the draw. As she shook Dylan’s right hand, I presented my left one and soon I was shaking his left one. A pulse of energy zipped between the three of us, back and forth, like people doing the wave at a stadium. “We all have econ together,” he went on.

      “Riiiight,” Tess and I said at the same time, as if this were something we’d never thought about before, which was total BS. We’d discussed Dylan. We had theories about him.

      Mom’s face crinkled up as she said, “I assumed you were already friends.”

      “We’re becoming friends,” Dylan said, staring at me. “Fast friends.”

      The handshake à trois was still going strong and Tess gave me that what-now? look and I gave her that um-I’m-still-pretty-high look and so she took control, like always. She pulled her hand away and placed it on top of mine. It was the fuzzy hand again, the cuddly cartoon bear paw.

      “You look great, Dylan,” Tess said. “And we’d love to catch up, talk econ and all that, but Mara is feeling crazy sick.”

      I nodded, but I didn’t pull my hand away. I liked it, sandwiched up and tangled in their fingers. It was melting like grilled cheese.

      “Vomit-all-over-the-place sick,” Tess added.

      “Oh, honey,” Dad said.

      “Pumpkin latte,” Tess informed him.

      Mom’s eyes narrowed because she knew I downed those things like they were water during months that ended in BER. So I added a key detail. “Probably something fungal too.”

      This made Mom cringe, but Dylan didn’t budge. The words vomit and fungal can usually scare away even the most dedicated panty-sniffer, but it required Tess’s field-hockey-honed arms to pry our fingers apart.

      “Straight to bed for this one,” she said, pulling me toward the stairs. “Sorry, Dylan. Again, you look . . . dashing.”

      Dylan seemed to take it in stride, shrugging as if he were called dashing all the time, which I knew for a fact he was not.

      “Mara—” Mom started to say, but soon Tess and I were at the stairs and her tone shifted from surprise to embarrassment. “I’m so sorry, Dylan. She’s . . . well, she’s got a sensitive stomach.”

      “That’s cool,” Dylan said. “I did what I came here to do.”

      “And that is?” Dad’s voice was suddenly suspicious. He wasn’t an idiot. He could see through a wrinkled suit.