The Unexpected Everything - Morgan Matson Page 0,118
something?” she asked, laughing. Then her expression grew more serious. “Wait, is there actually a shortage? Do I need to stockpile too?”
“No,” I said, resisting the opportunity to mess with her. “My mom bought them for me when . . . when she found out she was sick.”
“Oh,” Toby said, her expression changing immediately. She looked at me without speaking, searching my face, and I knew she was trying to see if I wanted her to talk about it, or to drop it. She’d do either one in a heartbeat. I knew that from experience.
And normally I would have left it at that. But I’d never told anyone this—maybe not surprisingly, it had never come up before. “Yeah,” I said, my throat feeling a little tighter than usual. “She was worried I wouldn’t have any when I needed it. And she didn’t want me to feel embarrassed about asking my dad to buy them for me.” I looked at all the stacked boxes, most of which I hadn’t touched in years, once I was able to start shopping for myself. But I’d never even thought about throwing them away. My mother had bought them for me. She’d gone to CVS and picked them out so that she could help me even when she wouldn’t be here.
“That’s really nice,” Toby said quietly, giving me a smile, and I nodded.
“Girls!” my dad yelled from downstairs. “It’s been five minutes!”
Toby paled. “It has?” She grabbed the cotton balls and bolted for the door. Then she stopped and turned back to me. “Unless you want to talk,” she said, voice rising in a question.
I shook my head and pointed to the door. “Scavenger hunt!”
Five minutes later we were in the car—all of us, with my dad behind the wheel. “Seat belts?” he asked as he backed out of the garage.
“Check,” Toby said, from where she was sitting in the middle of the backseat, leaning forward.
I hadn’t anticipated that we were formally adding a member to our team, but we’d been all set to go—having dropped all the items we were able to grab from the house into a big canvas bag—when my dad had handed me the keys to his sedan and then frowned. “Do you know how to drive a stick shift?”
I did not, and I was pretty sure learning to drive stick took more than five minutes. And since we still wanted to have a fighting shot at winning this, my dad had offered to drive us. We’d decided on the first stop, and I was trying to figure out our plan for the rest. “I think we should get the pizza toward the end,” I said, making a note with my dad’s pencil as he pulled out onto the road, going a little faster than normal. “We can get the napkins, the ice, and the soda at the pizza place too.” I thought of something and looked up. “Do you think this is just Palmer’s way of getting us to pick up dinner?”
“We don’t have time for speculation,” Toby snapped, frowning at her phone. “I’m trying to learn the Thriller dance here.”
“I thought we agreed to skip that one because it was time-inefficient.”
“Well, it’s a mute point anyway, because my phone just died,” she said, dropping it into her bag.
“A mute point?” my dad asked, glancing over at me.
“I know,” I said, shaking my head at him. “Believe me, we’ve all tried to tell her.”
“Can I use yours?” Toby asked, leaning forward and holding out her hand.
“Sure,” I said, handing it over while still reading over the list, waiting for a sudden flash of insight that would help me figure out what item we could get that started with Z. The only thing I could seem to think of was “Zamboni,” even as I tried to tell my brain there had to be other words that started with that letter. “Oh, but do me a favor and text Clark? Tell him I’m mad at him about the keys and he’s not going to get away with it.”
“I think he did get away with it,” my dad pointed out, as he slowed for a stop sign, but then immediately gunned the engine again. I had a feeling he was enjoying this. “You’re just going to have to figure out how to get him back.”
“Okay, how’s this?” Toby asked, handing my phone to me.
“What is this?” I asked, turning around to look at her.