Meet Me at Midnight - Jessica Pennington Page 0,103

laundry room into a second master bathroom.

Asher isn’t saying anything, he’s just eating his burger and sneaking glances at me. And it’s like I can see right through him. To the fears that finally have a concrete location in my mind. These are the rooms that it will happen in—when it’s all over, this is where Asher and I will be forced to coexist. It won’t be a dinner here and there shared at each other’s house, it will be all of this. The couch where we crossed out of enemy territory, the bed where he kissed me, the kitchen where I made him pancakes. Someday I won’t just have to see him, I’ll have to marinate in these memories. And how many new memories—bigger memories—will there be by then? Asher smiles at me, and I push it all away. I look at the happy faces that surround the table, and I let mine join in.

Asher

I like to think I couldn’t have made it through the last five years without knowing how to read Sidney, but she’s not giving anything away tonight. When we leave the dinner table I’m braced for the meltdown. The announcement that our parents are buying this house together seems like the ultimate fuel for Sidney’s particular brand of panic. But dinner ends and dishes are washed, and I don’t get one. As the silence stretches on into the evening, I can’t help but wonder if this is worse than a freakout. If all of this silence means she’s thinking up scenarios worse than I could ever imagine. What we need is a distraction. Something to take our minds off of this wonderful—but also horrifying—new development.

“Let’s go to Nadine’s tonight.”

Sidney’s face is pressed against my arm, and she pushes herself up off the couch. Last night we were in my bed, but tonight we’re back to the couch. “Tonight?”

“We bought everything already. And trash day isn’t for two more days, so Dad’s got frozen fish guts in the freezer.” Sidney’s nose scrunches up and I wonder if she’s as traumatized by fish as I am. “Let’s just do it.” It feels like I have to do something, and this is the only thing I can think of. Our war on Nadine is what brought us together. Maybe it can keep us from falling apart.

Sid looks a little groggy, like maybe she had fallen asleep against me. It’s hard to tell when she hasn’t really talked to me all evening. “I guess.” She rubs her eye with her palm and smooths her hand over her hair as she sits up. “We have everything?”

Sidney

An hour later, close to 2 a.m., we’re pulling into the driveway a few houses down from Nadine, where Kara’s grandmother lives. I like to think we have a standing invitation to park here, since it’s too late for me to call Kara so she can give her grandma a heads-up. But it’s so late there’s no way she’s going to even notice us here, unless we’re loud. And that’s the opposite of what we’ll be.

I open the back trunk and start tearing open the white cardboard containers filled with plastic forks. Five boxes later, I dump them into a brown paper bag, and then get to work on the next five. Asher thinks we’re going to need at least twenty boxes to finish. Tonight’s prank is our last, our pièce de résistance. While I fork the yard, Asher will Saran Wrap Nadine’s car with enough layers that it will take her hours to untangle it all. And between the layers, he’ll wrap in frozen fish guts, courtesy of our dads’ fishing trips. They won’t be frozen by the time she has to unwrap it. I can’t help thinking—again—how much I wish we had a camera out here, so we could see her reactions. Our imaginations will have to be enough of a reward for this one, though.

With a brown bag of ammo in each of our arms, Asher and I cross through the two yards that separate us from Nadine’s.

“I forgot the Saran Wrap.” Asher stops where he is and looks back toward the car. “You start, and I’ll be right back.”

I nod—not wanting to talk any more than we have to—and lay the bags of plastic along the driveway, taking a handful with me onto the grass. I shake the can of orange spray paint—the special kind of bottle used to mark lawns with—and point it down at the ground, spraying it over