10 Things I Hate About Pinky - Sandhya Menon Page 0,21

a chance, I bet she’d trade places with Meera Mausi. And say what you want about being boring or predictable, but your mom sure as heck wouldn’t trade places with mine.” Pinky looked away, the smirk slipping off her face. Saying it all out loud like that hurt.

Dolly got off the tree stump and put her arms around Pinky. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I acted like a total tool because I was trying to prove something. I’m really sad our barn is gone.”

“It’s okay.” Pinky patted her back. “Maybe we can put a new one up this summer.”

Dolly sat back on her tree stump, laughing. “You’re always looking for a project.”

“So, are you going to tell Cash it’s over?” Pinky picked up a dried leaf off the ground and crumbled it to dust between her fingers.

Dolly sighed. “I already did. I texted him earlier and he just left me on read. Like you said. A total… douche canoe.”

“Jerk,” Pinky said. Then, straightening her back and taking a breath, “Oh, by the way, I invited someone here, to the lake house. He’ll be here later today.”

Dolly raised an eyebrow. “He? Who is it?”

“My boyfriend,” Pinky said, feeling a little bad about lying to her cousin after the heart-to-heart they’d just had. But Dolly was a notoriously terrible liar. Once, when they were little, Pinky had stolen two ice cream sandwiches from the deep freezer in the garage and told Dolly not to tell. They’d eaten them and gone back inside, and the first thing seven-year-old Dolly blurted out was, “We didn’t eat any ice cream sandwiches.”

“What?” Dolly said, her eyes lighting up. “Who is it? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Well, we were kind of keeping things quiet, you know, not wanting to say anything until we knew it was going somewhere.” Pinky looked over her shoulder at the woods as she spoke, hoping Dolly wouldn’t notice her inability to make eye contact. Hmm. Maybe Dolly wasn’t the only bad liar in the family. “Um, anyway, his internship in DC fell through and he didn’t want to go home yet, so I invited him here. His name’s Samir Jha.”

“Wait, wait, is this the same Samir you told me about in the spring? The one whose mom is a little overprotective?”

“A lot overprotective, yeah,” Pinky said.

“Oh,” Dolly said thoughtfully. “I got the impression you found him kind of irritating.”

Pinky felt herself begin to sweat even more, as if that were possible. “Oh yeah, no, I did. But, um, things kind of changed. We’ve only been dating, like, a month, so.”

Dolly frowned a little. Pinky’s heart thumped. If Dolly, the most trusting and innocent person in the world, wouldn’t buy this, she had no hope of making her mom buy it. But then Dolly’s face broke into a smile. “I’m happy for you,” she said, and Pinky could tell she meant it. “I can’t wait to meet your boyfriend.”

Yeah, me too, Pinky thought. She stood up, dusted off her shorts, and held out a hand to her cousin. “Let’s go home. I sweated out all the salt in my body and now I’m dangerously close to death.”

Laughing, Dolly took her hand and let herself be pulled up.

They walked back toward the house, their clothes damp and sticking to them. “Wonder what the parental units are going to be like when we get back,” Pinky said. “You think they’re going to be walking on eggshells around their strange teenage daughters?”

Dolly sighed. “Either that or my parents are going to want to find me a therapist, stat.”

Pinky snorted. “Yeah, that sounds about ri—”

Dolly let out a high-pitched shriek that rang in Pinky’s ears.

“What?” she said, half-concerned, half-annoyed.

“I almost stepped on that rat!” Dolly said, pointing to a spot just off the path. “Is it—is it dead?”

Pinky looked and saw that it wasn’t a rat at all. It was a small, furry gray opossum, probably still a baby. It lay on its side, very still, its mouth and eyes open. Everything about it was extremely limp. A greenish substance was leaking out of its mouth.

“Oh God,” Dolly said, clapping a hand over her mouth. “Do you think it got poisoned or something?”

“No obvious injuries,” Pinky said, looking it over quickly. “So maybe.”

“Where’s its mom?” Dolly looked around jumpily, like the opossum’s mom might be hiding behind a bush, waiting to charge them.

Pinky knelt next to the little thing, frowning. “It’s probably weaned. Look how big it is. Remember when I helped establish that raccoon hospital back in