Meet Me at Midnight - Jessica Pennington Page 0,56

slot a few times before she gets it in. “But my rocks are awesome. Don’t forget that.”

I put the car in drive and try to keep my voice as casual and uninterested as possible. “What do you do with them all anyway?”

Sidney rests her head back, turns to look at me, and whispers, “Don’t you wish you knew.”

She’s onto me, because I don’t know why, but I do. I really, really do.

DAY 21

Asher

I don’t get pancakes every morning, because—as Sidney keeps telling me—she isn’t my personal chef. But I do get a smile. This morning, I also get a bottle of water and a protein bar. They go along with the note I scrawled on the mirror this morning—our primary means of communication—asking her to go on a morning run. We both run every other day, so it just seemed logical that we could do it together. But it also means that we now spend every single morning together, swimming or running. Swimming is easier, though—one of us always has our head in the water. There isn’t any expectation for small talk other than the few minutes we spend getting in and out of the boat.

Our very first run was silent, and for two miles I was pretty convinced that I had made a horrible mistake. At every turn we veered in different directions, finding that our normal running routes—and apparently our instincts—were completely opposite. Sidney likes to keep to the street—the busy ones where cars are blasting past us—and I have a tendency to veer off-road whenever I have the chance.

Our second run, I let Sidney lead. That morning we ran a mixture of her usual road route, and a few adventures onto trails and dirt side roads. On our half-mile cool down, we decided we’d take our first real crack at Nadine soon. I asked Sidney about Edith the elephant, who I now know is living on her dresser.

So now, as we run, we plot.

“Have you ever heard of potato-ing someone’s yard?” I ask her, my voice far too normal for the strangeness of the words. We’re a mile into our run, turning off of the main road and onto a long dirt road that curves into a stretch of national forest.

“Um. No.” She looks at me like maybe I’m just teasing her.

“Basically you spread powdered mashed potatoes all over someone’s yard. You know, the kind that come in the cardboard boxes?”

“Okay…”

“So the next time it rains, the yard fills with mashed potatoes.”

Sidney laughs so hard she has to stop running. “Wow, that’s … that’s sort of disgusting.”

“And I was thinking … maybe we could write out some sort of message, or weird picture, with the potatoes?” She’s giving me the strangest look. “What?”

“That’s just … it’s awesome.”

We take off running again. “Thanks.”

“Only one problem.”

I groan, long and loud and dramatic, because Sidney has been a total buzzkill about all of my ideas so far. Yes, we have to be careful, but we’re not throwing bottle bombs into her yard or something. So while I’ve been coming up with all of the devious ideas, Sidney has been considering all of the possible repercussions.

“Do you think mashed potatoes could kill the grass?” she asks.

“It’s not like they’re acid. They’re potatoes. They come out of the ground, right?” The thing about Sidney is that she doesn’t just come up with some pretty weird and elaborate ideas—she can also think through every little detail. She needs an answer to every tiny question that comes up. It makes me wonder how long she spent thinking about all of the pranks she pulled on me before she actually went through with them. And what provoked her to go off-script with the fish? She clearly hadn’t thought that one through, even a little.

“True, I guess potatoes are vegetables,” she says, her voice so thoughtful it makes me laugh.

“You guess?”

She smacks my arm as we run, and I speed up so she has to push herself harder to do it again. “We’d have to spend a lot of time in the yard to put the potatoes on the grass. It’s not exactly sneaky.”

“We can go in the middle of the night. Like really late. Three a.m. or something?” I slow down so we’re side by side again. “I bet it wouldn’t take that long … we can get all of the potatoes ready beforehand, so all we have to do is spread them. Even if we do something cool, we could probably be in and