Kitty,
Happy New Year! It’s already the new year as I write this, but you, being a couple of hours behind, are still in last year. Good news: the future is epic. We all have hover cars.
I wanted to send you this for Christmas, but your email said Redpath sugar cubes and they didn’t have that brand at our supermarket and I didn’t want to somehow screw up your entire experiment, so I had to order them online and wait for them to come in. I asked your brother for the info, and he forwarded me your email. I hope that’s okay. I tried to follow your instructions to a T. If anything’s not quite right, let me know and I’ll fix it. Since you are . . . what was it? . . . the Lord High Empress of the Universe (please don’t chop off my head if I got the title wrong), your wish is my command.
Hopefully we can do a rift run again soon.
All the best,
Sythlight (aka Dan)
I slide the mouse over to the attachment, then click.
A chart—the chart I made and emailed to Luke—filled out with results. Seven of them.
And scanned, completed questionnaires. Seven of them.
Seven.
With my three, we are a third of the way there.
“Happy New Year, Syth,” I whisper into the empty room.
CHAPTER 14
LEGENDS OF THE STONE
KittyKat: your family thing is at 3 tmrw, right?
MEGAdawn: something like that
KittyKat: do you have the questionnaires packed?
MEGAdawn: of course mom :P
KittyKat: and the sugar cubes?
MEGAdawn: shoot I ate them all
KittyKat: frick, really? hang on.
MEGAdawn has entered the greenlands.
MEGAdawn has entered the waterlands.
KittyKat: OK I’ve got two extra boxes. I can bring them by first thing tomorrow. when are you leaving?
MEGAdawn: dude chill out. I was joking. I only ate a couple.
KittyKat: how many are left?
MEGAdawn has entered the barrenlands.
KittyKat: ???
MEGAdawn: tons. I ate like 5.
KittyKat: do you have enough for all 15 tests? remember you need 3 for each person.
MEGAdawn: there’s loads of them. relax. I got this.
KittyKat: OK. just remember I’m home tomorrow. call me if you need help.
MEGAdawn: stop worrying. youre gonna give yourself a brain anemia
KittyKat: aneurysm?
MEGAdawn: that 2
KAT
THE BREAD DOUGH DIDN’T RISE. IT STARES AT ME FROM THE BOTTOM OF the silver bowl, a pathetic, globby mound. A molehill instead of a mountain. Which means I forgot the yeast.
I pull the white garbage bin out from under the sink, invert the silver bowl, and smack the bottom until gravity draws the mass into the garbage bag with a thump. Right beside the who-knows-what-I-messed-up failure from yesterday.
Yesterday, when all I heard from Meg was: Awesome day. Ill come over tmrw at 2.
No answer to Tests going smoothly? Or to How many did you end up doing? Or to Don’t forget to randomize. Though to be fair, that last wasn’t a question, so I suppose it didn’t technically need an answer.
I shove the trash bin away, slam the cupboard closed, and glance at the clock. 2:15. This is typical Meg lateness, but it still makes my fingers itch. If the bread had risen, I could have used the time to split it in two, transform the mountain into logs, and stretch them out across the bread pans to rise for the second time. But again—that only works with yeast.
The doorbell rings. Finally.
When I open the door, Meg is staring off toward the road, so all I can see is her lime-green backpack instead of her face. The test results are probably in there.
“Hi,” I say.
She whirls around. “Oh, hi! Did you know that your neighbors don’t have curtains? What if they wanted to walk around their house naked? Have you ever seen them just walking around with their junk hanging out?”
“No, of course not.”
She shrugs, wanders inside. “Probably a good thing.”
“How was your party yesterday?” I ask, politeness winning out over my desire to demand that she show me the test results immediately.
“It. Was. Amaze-balls. My cousin Charlotte is so hilarious. She can do this perfect imitation of Bugs Bunny. Seriously, I practically peed myself.” Meg kicks her boot off and it topples over, snow forming piles of slush on the mat. “And my cousins that I never see came up from Lethbridge. I didn’t know they’d be there. Someone threw on some soca music and their dance moves are beyond epic. Brian—he’s the oldest—is seriously your double. Like not in looks—that’d be weird—but in interests and stuff. If you and Syth ever get divorced, you should definitely call Brian.”
“Syth and I aren’t—”
“Do you have apple juice?” She waltzes past me toward the kitchen, backpack still slung over her shoulder. “I’ve got a super-loud craving for it, which probably means I’m PMSing or something.”
I scurry after her and pull a glass from the cupboard while she pokes around in the fridge. She emerges with the jug of strawberry-kiwi juice Mom just bought yesterday, twists off the lid, and tips it forward over the glass in my hand.
“That’s not apple,” I warn her.
“It’s a fruit. Same difference.” She caps the jug, then twirls around to stick it back in the fridge, which she’s holding open with her foot. “Do you think that’s a thing?”
“What? Strawberry and apples being the same?” I want to snatch the backpack right off her shoulder.
“No, having cravings while PMSing. Like with pregnancy.”
The backpack has slid down to the crook of her elbow. It sways back and forth as she raises the glass and sips.
“I don’t know,” I say. “You’re not, though . . . right?”
She laughs, spewing her mouthful of pink liquid across the floor. “Pregnant? Dude, you have to have sex first. Did they not have sex ed in Ontario?”
I grab a roll of paper towels from under the sink. “Well, you might have done it and just not told me.” It is a thing teens our age are doing, right? I assume based on health class and movies that they are, but I’ve never thought to ask. I have a bajillion other things on my mind. Like science.
“As if I could keep something like that to myself. No way, José!”
I start scrubbing at the floor, harder than I need to. This is not the first time Meg’s laugh has had a juice-spewing side effect, and even when she kneels down to help, my annoyance doesn’t abate. It weighs down my shoulders like a backpack that’s supposed to be full of test results but instead is full of rocks. Why are we kneeling on the floor talking about something stupid like sex when our entire science project hangs in the balance?
“How many did you do?” I spit out.
“What, guys? Only LumberLegs, and only in my dreams. You know that.”
“No, not—I mean test results! How many tests did you do?”
She stares at me, face blank, eyes blinking stupidly. “Tests for what?”
It’s a peculiar sensation, the blood draining out of my face, down my body and legs, and out through my toes to pool with the splatters of pink liquid on the floor.
MEG
KAT’S FACE IS WHITE, LIKE PURE WHITE, LIKE WEARING-A-BLEACHED-SHEET-as-a-ghost-costume white.
“I’m kidding,” I tell her. “Holy cheese balls, you’re so gullible.” I expect relief, or at least color, to flood back into her face, but it remains motionless and colorless. Seriously, she’s whiter than a mutant rabbit.
Her silence is unnerving. I reach for my backpack. Maybe I should have sorted the papers before coming. Too late now. “Look, stop worrying,” I say. “I did a ton. Do you really think I could forget with you reminding me like every ten seconds? You’re worse than my mom.” I mean it as a joke, but she just scowls at me. At least the scowl brings a bit of color back. “Okay,” I say. “Don’t joke about our science p
roject unless I want a stare of death. Got it.”
She gives her head a shake, as if dispelling those creatures the weird, awesome girl in Harry Potter thinks make brains go fuzzy. “Sorry. Good. You have them with you?”
“You betcha.” I unzip my backpack and plunge my hand into the jumbled mass of paper. Last night, when Mom decided out of the blue that it was time to go home, I had to dart about like I was playing tag, gathering up questionnaires from under coffee mugs and off the bed upstairs and stuffing them into my bag. But I ran through the house three times, and I’m confident I found them all. I deserve a pat on the back for that, or maybe even a shiny gold medal. “Okay, here’s . . . my aunt Hilda’s. No, never mind. She had to leave early and never did her speed runs, so we can just throw that one away.”
I crumple the paper and toss it across the room. My house just has a kitchen, with a marker-scribbled plastic table. Kat’s kitchen opens into a proper dining room, with a long, fancy, mahogany table that they use every day, not just for special occasions. The paper ball skips across the ground toward the table, coming to rest under one of its carved wooden chairs.
“I’ll get that later,” I say, then dig my hand into my bag to pull out another. I smooth out the paper on the kitchen floor, then slide it across the tile toward Kat. “There you go.”
She snatches it up and stares at it in silence. I watch her face, waiting for more of its color to flood back, but it doesn’t. She bites her lip. “This is empty.”
“What? No, it’s not.” I stretch forward and grab it out of her hand, but she’s holding it so tightly that a corner of the page tears off and remains behind, snared between her thumb and pointer finger. Her nail polish is pink, no surprise there. I scan the page. “This isn’t empty.”
“Well, it isn’t full either.”
I look back down. The first two questions are dutifully filled out in red pen. After that, nothing.
“Okay, you’re right, bad example. But I have like a gajillion papers. I haven’t had time to sort them yet.”
Kat doesn’t say anything, just sits there on the floor in her favorite pink polo shirt, one foot tucked under her, paper towel still balled up in her hand, staring blankly at me like a mannequin. A spooky about-to-come-to-life mannequin from a horror movie.
“You’re kind of creepy sometimes,” I mumble, as I grab my backpack again.
“What?” she asks, but I ignore it. One thing I have learned about Kat is that when she’s cranky like this, my jokes to lighten the mood are rarely—if ever—successful.
A pencil-scrawled name jumps out at me. “Aha,” I say. “My cousin Leah’s.” This one I know we got right. Leah had never played LotS before, and every death resulted in gut-splitting, infectious giggles. I shove the paper into Kat’s hands.
She looks it over. “Where are the test results?”
“Bottom corner.”
“There’s only two.”
“No, there’s three.”
“Definitely only two.” She scrunches her face like she’s trying not to cry. Like it’s a letter advising that her aunt died instead of just a boring science questionnaire. I snatch the paper from her and glance at the corner where, sure enough, only two times have been recorded in my signature green pen.
“Lizard balls!” Yesterday was a frenzied blur of LotS runs between charades rounds, questionnaires lost in wrapping paper, and trying to time sugar cubes around chocolate cake. There were definitely a few, like Aunt Hilda’s, that never got finished, but this isn’t one of them. “We did all three tests for sure,” I say. “I’ll text Leah. She’ll remember what her third time was.”
“Just—can I look through them, please?” Kat gestures toward my backpack, and I toss it over. She pulls out paper after paper, smoothing each one on her leg, studying it, then placing it onto a pile on either her left or her right, using a sorting system that I can’t make sense of until she puts two blank ones in a row on the pile to her right.
“I took more than fifteen questionnaires with me,” I explain. “In case we needed them.” She doesn’t reply, just smacks another questionnaire down on the pile to her right. I lean over to look at it. I can’t see anything wrong with it, aside from the streak of chocolate down the middle. “I told everyone not to eat cake until after doing their speed runs,” I tell her. “If they didn’t listen, that’s not our fault.”
She’s apparently so lost in the riveting task of sorting that she doesn’t hear me, but before I can grab the chocolate-smeared one and move it to the other pile, she holds up another questionnaire. “What’s this number?” she asks, jabbing at the corner.
I lean in to study my green scrawl. “Five, I think. Or maybe eight.”
Her eyes bulge as if they might pop out of her head. “We need an exact number.”
“Okay, it’s a five.” I look at it again without really seeing. “Yep, definitely a five.”
She hesitates, then slowly lowers it onto the left pile, grimacing like it physically hurts her to admit that it’s okay. Which means tossing the next two on top of the chocolate-smeared one on the right should give her relief, but she keeps scowling as if smiling might kill her.
When she gets to the end, she sticks her arm all the way into the bottom of my backpack, as if she expects it to extend past the floor, like a Mary Poppins bag. “Is this it?”
I stop myself from rolling my eyes. “Guess so.”
She picks up the left pile—the much smaller pile—of smoothed-out papers off the floor, licks her finger, and counts them. “There’s only five,” she moans.
I point toward the other pile. “Plenty of those are perfectly fine. You’re just being too picky.”
“Meg, this is a science project, not a finger painting. The results need to be accurate.” She sets the papers back down on the floor. “We’re doomed,” she breathes, leaning backward against the cupboard with a thud. She closes her eyes and presses her lips into a thin line.
“Dude, stop being so overdramatic or melodramatic or whatever. We’re not doomed. We’ve still got—what?—two months?”
Her eyes fly open. “Two weeks! The next check-in’s in two and a half weeks, and we’re supposed to have finished twenty tests by then!”
Well, that’s news to me, but I still think she’s overreacting. “Stop worrying. I bet I could finish another fifteen tests in like a week.”
“You were supposed to do that already! And you completely screwed it up. You are the people person and you were supposed to get lots of tests done, and you didn’t. I did twice as many as you!” She glances at the big pile on her right as if it’s stacked with her oh-so-perfect ones instead of with my apparently-not-good-enough hard work.
“You didn’t actually do more, though! You did a whopping three. Your whipped boy toy did the rest. I did five—more than that if you weren’t so picky—and Grayson had nothing to do with it.” I give the failure pile a shove, and the top questionnaires fly off, revealing that stupid chocolate-smeared one that she refused to move. “Maybe I didn’t finish that many to your perfect standards, but at least I wasn’t too scared to try in the first place!”
I stand, grab my now-empty backpack, and storm out of the room. I wore my chunky slip-on boots today instead of my zip-up hooker boots, and they slide on like my feet are sticks of butter.
Kat appears in the hallway as I yank open the front door. “Where are you going?”
“Somewhere people don’t think I’m a failure,” I snap, then stalk out the door and slam it behind me with a not-quite-satisfying bang.
CHAPTER 15
MEG
SOMEWHERE PEOPLE DON’T THINK I’M A FAILURE. THAT’S THE PROBLEM.
I failed my math test. I failed to keep Stephen-the-Leaver from leaving.
And now I’ve failed to live up to Kat’s ridiculous standards. Even in her eyes, I’m a failure. A screwup.
The bus is taking forever to arrive, so I run the however many blocks to catch the 7 instead. It stops five blocks past Gra
yson’s, so by the time I run up to Grayson’s front step, I’m gasping like a slimy trout at a fisherman’s rubber-booted feet.
“Grayson!” I half shout, half wheeze as I pound on his door. “Grayson, open up!”
The door swings open as if he was waiting for me, though he couldn’t have been, since I was too busy jogging myself to death to text him. Maybe we’re developing a psychic connection. Maybe every time I kiss him, it makes it stronger.
“We have a doorbell, you know,” he says, hooking his thumbs into his pockets instead of throwing his arms around me.
“That’s some greeting,” I say, pushing past him. “Aren’t you happy to see me?” I push my bottom lip out in my saltiest pout—no, that can’t be right. Sultanest? Is that a word?
His face softens. “Of course. Sorry. I just—I’m about to head to the range.” He steps back to close the front door, wobbling like a peg-leg pirate. He only has one boot on. As usual, he’s laced it halfway up, tying it in a loose, single knot at ankle height.
“Guess I got here just in time, then.” I lean down and yank at the pathetic knot, unraveling it.
“Meg!” He pulls his foot away and frowns at me again. “I have a competition in two weeks, remember? I have to practice.” He leans over and snatches up his other boot, wiggling the tongue back and forth to loosen it. He doesn’t even look at me.
I’m losing him. Maybe I’ve already lost him. Maybe “archery” is slang for “some blond-haired, white-skinned preppy chick who’s smarter than you.” On the way over here, I’d thought of asking him to do the LotS speed runs like Kat and I had planned before I got the idea to do all of mine at my family thing, but when he’s grumpy like this, I’m not about to ask. He doesn’t love LotS like I do.
I step closer to him. I’m not failing at this too. Am not. Will not.
I place my hand lightly on his boot-holding one and pull out my sultriest voice. (That’s the word—sultry.) “But your parents aren’t home.”
He sucks in a breath. I draw even closer, slip my hand into his back pocket. Am not, will not, cannot fail.
Kat and Meg Conquer the World Page 16
