Emmy & Oliver - Robin Benway Page 0,79

us hanging. Caro and I are joining the circus? Caro and I have decided to become neurosurgeons? Caro and I have decided to reimburse our parents for the eighteen years’ worth of room and board that they’ve so lovingly provided us?”

“Honey, she and Caro are fighting,” my mom said. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“How did you know we were fighting?” I asked.

“Because you’re only sending a million texts a day, rather than two million,” my mom said, but I could tell that she was trying to be nice about it. “What happened?”

She was clearly dying for more information. I wonder if she and Maureen had discussed this at all. “We just had a stupid fight,” I said. “She said some things and I said some things, that’s all. No biggie.”

“You and Caro have never fought before,” my dad said.

“We argued over that My Little Pony doll when we were four,” I pointed out. She won. I was still bitter.

“Well, I’m sure you’ll make up,” my mom said. “You and Caro have been friends forever.”

“Can I be excused?” I asked, wiping my mouth with my napkin in preparation to flee. “Oliver and I wanted to do some homework together.”

My mom raised an eyebrow at me. “Where? Here or there?”

“There,” I said. Our house didn’t have any squeaky floorboards.

“Two more bites,” she said, and I swallowed them in one, relieved to be off the hot seat.

For now.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

The high school had an open house on Wednesday night, one of those things where all the parents and their kids can come to the school and show off their work and talk to the teachers about how great/wonderful/abysmal their little darlings are. It’s a big community to-do, and my parents, of course, haven’t missed one ever. Even when my mom had bronchitis, she managed to make a miraculous recovery and show up to discuss my B-plus grade with my eighth-grade history teacher. (My mother thought it should have been an A-minus. She thought wrong.)

Oliver’s mom, on the other hand, hadn’t been able to attend one for ten years, so she was over the moon. “Come on, we’re going to be late!” I heard her yelling that evening as she herded everyone into their cars. I heard this because I was being herded by my parents into our car.

“Emmy, step on it,” my mom said. “If we don’t get there soon, there’s always a line to talk to your AP Bio teacher.” Mr. Hernandez was thirty years old and very, um, in demand by most of the moms in our school. Not that my mom wanted to hit on Mr. Hernandez. She was probably the only mom who actually wanted to discuss my participation in class with him.

“Aren’t you tired of talking to my teachers?” I asked them as I fastened my seat belt. “I can just reenact the conversation for you.”

“You’re a poor man’s Mr. Hernandez,” my dad told me.

“Oh my God. Dad.”

“Fasten your seat belt,” my mom said.

“It’s fastened.” Like it always was every single time she asked.

Oliver and I both looked at each other as our respective cars backed out of the driveways. I was about to wave when he suddenly crossed his eyes and stuck out his tongue at me.

I had to laugh. That’s what I had done to him back on his first day of school, back when I could barely imagine talking to him, much less sitting on his lap or wrapping my arms around his neck or sprawling on the warm sand, my head resting against his shoulder as he ran his fingers up and down my back. He had been a friend, then a stranger, and now something more.

And going to UCSD meant that this time, I would be leaving him.

School always seemed so weird on open house nights, lit up in the dark and suddenly filled with parents. It was even weirder hearing your parents refer to your teachers as Mr. or Mrs. So-and-So, like they were students, too. My parents were pretty much on a first-name basis with every other parent there, and my mom shouted “Oh, hell-lo!” at five other families even before we got inside.

I managed to hang in there for about thirty minutes, showing my parents where I sat in French class (“Why are you so far back?” my mom wondered), introduced them to my calculus teacher and let her talk about what a great math student I was, and waited with them in line for the famed Mr. Hernandez. “Emmy is an excellent