to one of the Towhee tables behind us. It’s full of guys Efram calls the Prep Squad—they’re all tall and blond and wear stuff like whale belts unironically. Their unofficial leader is Reid Chilton, whose senator mother might be running for president in the next election. I don’t see much of the guy except when he bangs on our door to borrow toothpaste, but I already know I don’t like him.
Reid pauses midconversation to watch Aubrey lunge awkwardly across the table for the triangle, and says something that makes the Prep Squadder next to him laugh. My hand curls more tightly around my pool cue. The more I see of Reid and his friends, the more I wonder whether there was some kind of method to Mildred’s madness. Maybe she saw her kids turning into assholes and took extreme steps to stop them.
“You.” The voice at my elbow is ice cold, and when I turn, so is the look in Milly’s eyes. “Come with me. Now.” She snatches the pool cue out of my hands and leans it next to hers against the wall. “Game delay,” she says to Aubrey. “I need to talk to Jonah.”
“About what?” Aubrey asks, but Milly has already fastened her fingers around my wrist like a handcuff as she drags me toward the back exit. All of her earlier friendliness is gone. I’m not surprised, exactly, but I’m still thrown off by how fast she flipped the switch.
“What’s your problem?” I ask, my irritation mounting as I pull away from her grasp. “Stop yanking me. I’m already coming with you.”
“Oh, you should thank me that this is all I’m doing,” Milly says in a low, threatening voice as she leans one shoulder into the door. It opens, and we spill outside into the cool night air. I take a deep breath to clear my head, but almost gag when I’m hit with the sour stench of garbage. We’re right next to a dumpster. Milly stops, hands on her hips as she turns to face me.
“Can we move away from the trash—” I start, but that’s all I get out before Milly reaches both arms out and shoves me as hard as she can.
I stumble backward, unprepared for both the action and the force behind it. That girl packs a lot of strength into a small frame. “What the hell?” I growl. My hands are up in a gesture of surrender, but my temper spikes.
Milly pulls something small and square out of her pocket and waves it in my face. “What the hell indeed?” she says.
A light over the door behind us throws enough of a glow to illuminate what she’s holding. My stomach twists as I stare at the familiar card, and all the anger drains out of me in an instant. I reach behind me for the wallet in my back pocket. Or rather, the wallet that should’ve been in my back pocket, but isn’t.
So that’s why she was acting so friendly while we played pool. She took it. Snaked it right out of my pocket while I was showing off. I could punch myself in the face for being so stupidly focused on the game I was playing that I missed the one she was playing.
“Give me back my stuff.” I try to sound authoritative and unbothered at the same time, but sweat is already gathering at my hairline.
Shit. Shit, shit. This is bad.
Milly waves my driver’s license again, looking up at me from under those mile-long lashes. “Gladly. Just as soon as you tell me who the hell you are, Jonah North, and why you’re pretending to be my cousin.”
I don’t know whether it’s to his credit or not that he doesn’t try to deny it.
“Why did I even bring that damn license,” Other Jonah mutters. He looks furious, but I think it’s mostly at himself.
“Yeah, well, this was only confirmation,” I say. I pull Jonah’s thin black wallet from my jeans pocket and stuff the license inside. It’s served its purpose now—and I already took a picture with my phone—so I hand the wallet to him. “Your polishing off an entire plate of shrimp linguine when you have a shellfish allergy is what tipped me off.”
As soon as Jonah started eating his dinner at The Sevens, I waited for his face to swell up like it did when he ate a shrimp wrapped in bacon nine years ago at our house. I was shocked that he didn’t even turn