I’m pleasantly surprised when I’m greeted by Owen’s back, his feet propped atop the footrest on the stool by the counter, my mom’s coffee mug cradled in his hand. Everything pleasant turns to anxiety, though, when my mom makes an obvious detour in the conversation, coughing to announce my entrance into the room.
“Ohhhh, you’re up early. Good morning, Kens. You want some bacon? I made some for Owen, and there’s some left; it’s still warm.” She’s already putting it on a plate and pushing buttons on the microwave. Owen smiles at me, leans forward, and presses his lips to my cheek while my mom’s back is to us.
She made him…bacon?
“Why are you here?” I whisper, my voice quiet but not quiet enough to keep my mom from craning her neck slightly at my question. She’s spying.
“I was awake early; Mom left for work, and I couldn’t get back to sleep. Didn’t want to wake Andrew up yet, so I was waiting on your porch,” he says.
“I found him out there,” my mom says, topping off Owen’s coffee cup—her coffee cup, which she gave to him. This is all so….
“Thanks,” he nods, taking another drink. The two of them hold each other’s eyes, something strange passing between them, but I can’t tell if it feels like bad news.
“Have you heard from your brother?” I ask as soon as my mom is out of earshot. Owen only shakes his head no.
“I’ve gotta get Andrew moving,” he says, sliding his half-filled mug over to me to finish. I smell it, and can tell it’s strong—I drink my coffee with more milk than coffee. I stand to pour it in the sink, then turn to walk Owen to the door, but my mom is already showing him out, thanking him for something.
When she comes back in, she’s humming—humming.
“What’s going on?” I ask, that uneasy feeling too much to ignore.
“Well, I’m dog tired, and I have forty-eight hours off, so I’m planning on napping until about noon, then I’m in for a marathon of HGTV to see if I can turn this kitchen reno into something other than a condemned piece of property,” she says, laughing at her mildly funny joke.
“I meant with Owen. What’s going on…with Owen?” I ask, and she purses her lips, tilting her head in that way she does when she’s trying to buy herself time. My mother has a hard time being anything but honest, and when I think back on it, I realize she tilted her head when she told me we were moving, when she said she was excited about it, and when she told me I’d love my new school just as much as Bryce.
“You know what, never mind. I don’t want to know,” I decide. If whatever she’s keeping to herself is anything like the crap that’s unraveled on me over the last six weeks, then I don’t want to know; I’m better off not knowing. She can go back to humming.
What’s weird though is how quickly she lets me off the hook, how quickly she actually does go back to humming.
I pull my science book out and spend the next twenty minutes cramming for my test, keeping with my theme of only doing lucky things for the rest of the morning. Studying has to be lucky.
Willow’s early; I thank my karma for being able to leave the house of weirdness behind. I kick myself though when I realize I’m only getting into a car with a person who’s going to interrogate me for the next ten minutes.
“So, how was practice and dinner with the Harpers? You never called, and I was up all night waiting for that phone to buzz, you bitch,” Willow says, pushing her glasses tighter to her face with the tip of her finger.
“You’re so bad at playing tough,” I say, fighting off laughter at the way she said the word bitch.
“Am not! Now, don’t disrespect me, or I’ll cut you, bitch,” she says, unable to say it with a straight face a second time.
“Yeah, you’re one scary-ass mother,” I say, my words dripping with sarcasm. “I think it’s the rhinestones on the wings of your designer glasses. Yeah, uhm…I’m pretty sure that’s it, the mark of a true bad-ass.”
“Shut up, my contact ripped, and these are all I have,” she says. “Now, how was dinner?”
“We never really made it to dinner,” I say, my throat closing at the memory of the night before. I can tell by the look Willow’s making that she thinks we detoured from dinner for a different reason—and as nervous as I am about being intimate with Owen, I would have given anything for that to have been the reason we didn’t make it to dinner last night.
“Owen’s mom was home,” I say, clearing her innuendo out of the way quickly. “And James showed up.”