At 6:30, my phone rings, and I knock it onto the floor in my eagerness to answer it.
“You’re still coming, right?” Levi asks.
“Of course,” I tell him.
“Well, you don’t seem to be here,” he says, his voice low and slow and lazy.
“You said evening.”
“Half past six is evening by my measure,” he says. “Sun’s going down. Moon’s coming up. Get over here already.”
I can’t help but smile at the wall of my bedroom.
“All right, I’m leaving now,” I tell him, shoving my laptop into my bag so I can work on Twelve Owl Reaction GIFs etc. over there tomorrow morning.
“You haven’t left yet?” he says in mock-annoyance.
“I forgot we were on country time,” I tease, laughing.
“We’ll get you right soon enough,” Levi says, that smile in his voice. “Hurry up, I’m making dinner.”
“What is it?”
“You’ll find out when you get here,” he says, and I’m still smiling when I hang up the phone. I’m smiling as I find my largest purse and shove a change of clothes into it, then rearrange the lump until from the outside it looks like normal purse contents, not I’m spending the night somewhere else contents.
I skip out of my room. I float down the stairs, and on the landing, I take a deep breath and prep myself.
I don’t like lying to my parents, because I don’t really feel justified doing it. I’m almost thirty, and to be honest, they’re pretty cool parents.
I just can’t quite handle the hey so I’m gonna go have sex discussion, and even if I could handle some form of that, the next question would be who with and I think it’s best to just avoid the whole thing all together.
“Hi!” I say brightly to my mom in the living room, reading, and my dad making dinner in the kitchen, both visible from the stairs even though they’re on different sides of a wall.
“Hi, sweetie,” they chorus back, Sprucevale’s classic rock radio station drifting toward me from my dad’s ancient kitchen radio.
“You’re going out?”
“I’m making my special spicy eggplant,” my dad says. “You’re gonna miss out.”
“Sorry,” I tell him. “Yeah, I’m meeting Mandy Hargrove for dinner, figured we’d do some catching up and we’ll probably stay out late so I’m sure you’ll be in bed when I get back, and since this morning was so great I’m going to get up again and go hiking really early so I might not even be back until mid-morning or so. Don’t wait breakfast on me!”
I smile. I smile hard. I might smile a bit too hard as I clamp down a giggle that threatens to rise from my throat and give me away completely.
My dad just whistles, still stirring his eggplant creation.
“Knock ‘em dead, sweetheart,” he says. “Have fun, see you tomorrow!”
“Thanks!” I say and walk through the living room.
“You’re getting dinner with Mandy?” my mom asks from the couch, her book in her lap.
Oh no.
I stop in my tracks, and I don’t even know how or why, but I know I’m busted.
“Yep!” I say brightly. “I haven’t really seen or talked to her since high school but then I ran into her the other day and we decided to catch up.”
In the back of my mind, I’m running through all the criteria that made Mandy Hargrove a good alibi: my parents barely know her or her parents, she’s still in town, and we did hang out sometimes during high school.
“Well, that sounds fun,” she says. “And tell Levi we say hello.”
I stare at her for at least three very long seconds. It’s moments like this that I’m convinced my mother is a psychic, or a witch, or a psychic witch or an alien with the ability to see through time and space or something.
Finally, I clear my throat.
“Who?” I ask.
It’s a dumb response, because while I wouldn’t have been shocked if she gave me some pushback on where exactly I was going, I didn’t think she would know precisely what I’m up to.
She looks up again, amused this time.
“Junebug, did you forget that land lines have caller ID?” she asks.
I open my mouth, then close it. Then I clear my throat.
“Yes,” I admit, feeling very, very dumb.
I’m also feeling very lucky that Silas didn’t answer my parents’ phone this morning, because then he’d have seen where I was calling from and I’d have fucked this up almost before it started.
Now my mom is laughing as she puts her bookmark in her book and walks over to me, one hand on my shoulder. Classic rock radio is still coming from the kitchen, and I can hear little snippets of my dad singing along.
“Levi has always been a lovely young man,” she says, giving me a hug.
“You can’t tell Silas,” I say.
“Who do you think I am?” my mom says lightly.
I just sigh.
“Your brother is your problem,” she says gently, patting me on the back. “But we did always like Levi. Unless you ever want me to rip his heart bodily from his chest with my bare hands. In that case, just say the word, sweetheart.”