“He wore a vest and no shirt.”
“I didn’t notice,” said Kaira. “So what was it like at that camp? Was it hard?”
“Yeah.”
“What’d you do there?”
“Dug holes.”
“That all?”
“Pretty much. Every day another hole.”
Kaira nodded as if she understood, but he knew she didn’t.
“You like being a famous singer?” he asked her. It was a stupid question, and he wished he hadn’t asked it.
“It’s all right,” she said.
They sat in silence for a moment. It had been a lot easier to talk to each other when Ginny was there.
“Have you seen the view from the patio?” she asked him.
“No.”
“You need to see the view,” she said, in a voice that seemed unusually loud. “You can see the lake.”
“It’s actually a river,” he said.
“Whatever,” said Kaira.
“There’s a huge colony of bats living under a bridge right by here,” he told her.
“Bats?” Kaira said, again in an unusually loud voice. “Let’s go look at the bats.”
“You’re not going to be able to see them now,” Armpit said, but she was already out of her seat. “They only come out at night.”
“We’ll just look from the patio,” Kaira said again rather loudly.
She was talking to him, but he got the feeling that everything she said was for Fred’s benefit.
He followed her through the sliding glass doors out to the patio. A well-manicured lawn gently sloped away from the patio and down to a walkway. On the other side of the walkway the hill got much steeper and led down to the river.
“Nice view,” he said.
Kaira took off her flip-flops. “Do you want to play ditch the Doofus?”
“What?”
She stepped off the patio and raced across the lawn.
For a second he was afraid he was the doofus, but then he remembered that was what she called her bodyguard. He watched her leap over the concrete walkway and disappear down the hill.
He took off after her but lost control as he headed down the steepest part of the slope. “Look out!” he shouted at Kaira, who was now standing on a dirt path beside the river.
As he tried to put on the brakes, she grabbed hold of his arm, and together they spun around three hundred and sixty degrees.
Kaira’s face bounced hard against his shoulder.