Emmy & Oliver - Robin Benway Page 0,9

twins,” I replied. “Oliver will be crawling out through the chimney in a day if they put him through that.”

“We need intense bonding time!” my dad said. “Pizza night on Friday!”

“I have a work thing,” my mom said.

“I have a ‘don’t want to hang out with my parents’ thing,” I added.

“You love hanging out with us!” my dad chided me. “We’re cool. Your friends love us.”

It was, unfortunately, true. Caro and Drew thought my parents were great. And they were. Most of the time. But when it came to curfews or personal freedom, my parents were dictators.

“Anyway,” my mom said, ignoring my comment, “we just have to be patient. I’m sure we’ll all have a chance to see Oliver again soon. He just needs some space.”

“Space?” Caro frowned when I told her that. We were in my bedroom the next night, doing our English homework. It was a group project and luckily we could pick our own partners. Of course I chose Caro. She organizes her Post-it notes by color and size. You can’t go wrong in a group project with someone like her.

“Space,” I replied, raising an eyebrow at her.

“It’s not really space if you’re on lockdown with your own family.” Caro seemed dubious and I saw her glance out my window toward Oliver’s, where the blinds had been permanently shut. “That sounds like the opposite of space.”

“Not all of us have five siblings like you,” I told her. “And it’s not lockdown. He’s not in prison.”

Caro raised her eyebrow right back at me. “Would you want to be holed up with Maureen, day and night?”

Caro had a point. Maureen was not an easygoing person. It seemed mean to make fun of her for it, though. “She went through a horrible trauma ten years ago,” I chided Caro. “No one would be mellow after that.”

“I know, I know,” Caro said. “She just makes me nervous.”

“This from someone whose pencils are all sharpened to equal lengths.”

Caro paused, then threw a Post-it pad at me, giggling when I ducked. “You’re lucky,” she said. “It could have been a pencil.”

“Space,” Drew said thoughtfully when I told him what my parents had said. “Didn’t he have enough space for ten years?”

“Not if he was in New York,” I said. “They tend to pack ’em in there.”

“I heard that he lived all over,” Drew said. “I read it online.”

“Yeah, I saw that,” I grumbled.

Apparently, some cousin of Maureen’s who lived one town over had leaked Maureen’s email to the press. Oliver’s news story wasn’t as exciting as it had been the week before, but new information was new information.

“They called him Colin.” Drew went on like I hadn’t said anything. We were sitting on the sand after surfing together, perched on our boards. The sun was an hour or so away from dropping into the ocean, which meant I had thirty minutes before we had to leave and get back before my parents became suspicious.

“Colin?” I repeated, and Drew nodded sagely. “Wow. Okay. Why Colin?”

“No clue. I read it online. But I don’t know what staying inside with Maureen and her husband, Ray—”

“Rick.”

“Whatever. I don’t see how that’s going to help Oliver. They can’t keep him hidden the same way his dad did and call it progress.” Drew brushed his hair out of his eyes. The wind always picked up at sunset and we were both suffering for it.

“He needs to reassimilate,” Drew continued. “Jump into the deep end of high school and get it over with.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Do you think he wants to see us, though?”

Drew glanced at me. “Why? Don’t you want to see him?”

“Well, of course I want to see him!” I scoffed. “He was gone for ten years, it’d be nice to get to know him again.”

But the truth was that I had seen Oliver. The night before, after Caro left and my parents went to bed (“Lights out soon!” my mom had said, which meant I had an hour or so before she checked on me again), I snuck into my closet, stood on a rickety old step stool, and felt around on the shelf for an old shoe box. It was shoved so far back that I could barely touch it, but as soon as my fingers grazed the top, I managed to pull it down.

I have things hidden all around my room. I don’t think I would describe myself as a sneaky person, but if I count off all of the secret hiding spaces I have,