RIOT HOUSE (Crooked Sinners #1) - Callie Hart Page 0,59

beautiful, and bouncy. “That’s the thing, though, isn’t it? Everyone likes vanilla ice cream. You could be into pistachio, or licorice, or…I don’t know,” she laughs, “fucking wasabi flavored ice cream, but when a to-die-for vanilla ice cream comes along, you’re still gonna want to give it a try. Because vanilla ice cream looks so good, and it tastes so good, and you think you know what you’re getting. But then you realize that the milk’s actually turned and you’ve been poisoned, and…” She runs out of steam, shaking her head. “I don’t know. Vanilla ice cream turned out to be disgusting.”

“What kind of ice cream do you think Andre is?” I ask, watching her as she applies some lip balm.

“Easy. He’s a cilantro-lime ice cream sandwich.” She grins, biting down on her tongue playfully. “A little off-beat. A little kooky. A little strange. But all of his weird parts somehow all work together. I like that about him.”

It’s nice that she’s this excited about a guy. I thought after her tears at the diner last weekend that it’d be a long time before she found anyone she might like to swoon over. And yet here she is, swooning away.

“What kind of ice cream do you think Wren is?” she asks, fluttering her eyelashes at me.

“That’s a messed-up question to ask. Why would I be thinking about what kind of ice cream that boy is?”

“I don’t know. You tell me…” She sounds airy and unaffected, but I’m looking right at her face in the mirror. I can see the cautious expression she’s trying to stave off. “You look at him a lot. He looks at you a lot. I figured, what with all the negative tension floating around in the air, that something might be going on…”

“Wren Jacobi is not ice cream. He’s a lump of stale cheese smothered in rat poison, and I have absolutely no interest in sampling him.”

Carina laughs good-naturedly, clicking the lid onto her lip balm and dropping it back into her purse. “All right. I’ll believe you, girl. But just so you know…millions wouldn’t.”

Oscar looks like a linebacker. He’s six foot three and almost as wide, and when he moves, everyone at the party moves with him, gravitating toward him like they’re trapped in his orbit. You can hear him laugh—a rich, warm, booming sound—over the driving beat of the music, which he changes every minute or so, unable to commit to one song without having to switch it over to something else.

I’m introduced to him on four separate occasions, and he doesn’t remember me once—an impoliteness that’s tempered by how happy he is when he learns my name all over again and hugs me like he means it.

In between my run-ins with Oscar, Carina feeds me beer after beer like the party’s about to run out of booze any second. I’m no stranger to alcohol. I’ve tried every drink known to man, but admittedly it’s been a while; I’m buzzed by beer number three, and drunk by the time I hit the bottom of cup number five.

At around eleven, Carina turns bright pink and points out a guy across the living room that really does look like a young Andy Samberg. He beams at her the moment he sees her, and then that’s it. My friend has eyes for no one but Andre. I don’t begrudge her the time spent with her new cilantro-lime ice cream sandwich; when you find your yum, you gotta enjoy every second of it while you can.

And anyways. I have Presley to keep me company.

“People tend to overlook the one with the skinhead,” she says, rocking beside me on her chair. She’s drunk, but still making sense. I think. Maybe we’ve hit that perfect equilibrium where she’s so drunk that she’s not making sense, and I’m so drunk that her mumbled words and fuzzy statements actually sound like real words.

“People think he’s stupid because he’s a model, but I had to work with him on a science po—prop—project last year, and he was really smart. Really, really, really smart.”

I pass her the beer we’re sharing. “Really, really, really smart?”

“Yes!” she says, snickering. “Really, really, really…really, really…” She forgets what she was going to say. “Anyway, his name is Pax. That means peace in Latin. Did you know that?”

“I did know that.”

“Oooh, look at you. Clever little Elodie. I like your name. What does Elodie mean?”

I hiccup loudly, trying to focus on Presley’s pretty, freckled face, but there are currently