“Hey sweetie. Everything okay?”
“Yep. I’m playing poker with Jude and Brody.”
“Stakes are high,” Jude said, watching my face as I checked my cards. Ugh. It was the worst hand ever. I laid it on the picnic table, face down. I was going to lose. Again. “Lila’s about to lose her nuts.”
“Too bad she doesn’t have any. Now me… I’ve got nuts to spare,” Brody said, making himself and Jude crack up and me roll my eyes at their stupid, dirty jokes.
We were using monkey nuts for currency. Last week, we tried using M&M’s but we kept eating them and didn’t have anything to bet with after the second hand.
“That’ll be enough from you boys. Mind your manners,” Kate said, shaking her head as she walked back inside the house. She was always telling them to mind their manners. Not that they listened.
“We’re playing for peanuts,” I told my mom before she got the wrong idea. Nobody needed to hear another one of her talks on puberty. Lately, she’d taken it upon herself to give us sex education talks which were beyond embarrassing. “Are you having fun?”
“We are,” she said, her voice hesitant. “Derek and I were talking about his teenage years.”
Oh no. I’d heard a few stories about Derek’s teenage years and his early twenties. He’d been a biker and a bad boy with no real direction in life until he’d met an angel who had helped him turn his life around. Those were his words.
“When I get home, we need to discuss safe sex practices.”
My cheeks flushed and I squeezed my eyes shut, not wanting to see the look on Brody and Jude’s faces. One of the pitfalls of having a mother in the medical profession meant that no topic was off-limits.
“Mom, you’re on speaker,” I hissed, jabbing a finger at the button that took her off it. Jude grabbed the phone from my hand and held it up to his ear, smirking at me. “Hey Caroline. It’s Jude. Mind if I sit in on that discussion?”
Brody hooted with laughter. “Me too. I could use some tips.”
My cheeks were flaming. Could my mom get any more embarrassing?
Jude handed the phone back to me as Jesse and Gideon ran up to the porch, slip-sliding on the tiled floor, leaving puddles in their wake from the sprinklers they’d been running through. Thankfully, they’d missed the reason Jude and Brody were still laughing.
“Bye Mom. We’re in the middle of a card game so yeah, gotta run.”
“Okay, honey. Be good and we’ll see you tomorrow. Love you.”
“Love you too,” I mumbled, cutting the call and walking the phone back into the house. I set it in the cradle on the kitchen counter and turned as Jude came inside. I watched him reach for a mason jar from a high shelf in the oak cupboard. The hem of his green T-shirt rode up and exposed a strip of suntanned skin.
“Hey,” I said, tucking my hair behind my ears, trying to act cool and casual.
He grinned. “Looking forward to the sex talk with your mom. Not sure how she’s going to top the teenage hormones talk though. How’s puberty been treating you, Rebel?”
His eyes lowered to my boobs. Which weren’t really boobs at all. I still looked like a ten-year-old boy and hadn’t even gotten my period yet. Unlike Ashleigh Monroe who got hers last year and had boobs.
“Better than it’s treating you. At least I don’t smell bad.”
“I don’t smell bad,” he said, offended. “Come on. Smell me, Rebel.”
“I don’t want to smell you.”
“Yeah, you do.” He moved closer, crowding me. My back hit the edge of the counter, his arms caging me in so I had no choice but to smell him. He didn’t smell bad. He smelled like freshly cut grass and the woodsy scented shower gel he used. He smelled like summertime and boy. Not bad at all. But it made me a little dizzy being so close to him, and I didn’t like that or understand why it was happening.
This was Jude, the most annoying boy in the world. So why did it suddenly feel like I couldn’t breathe with him standing so close to me?
“Rebel.”
“Yeah?” My voice sounded all breathy.
“Unless you want to lose your nuts, you’re gonna have to work on that poker face of yours.” He scrunched up his whole face, a pathetic attempt to mimic my expression.
Like I said. Annoying.
I ducked under his arm and returned to the porch, his laughter following me as I threw myself into a wicker chair and tipped my face up to catch the breeze from the ceiling fans. It was baking hot out here in the August heat.
Brody was eating sunflower seeds and spitting the shells over the railing. He had that sullen, moody look on his face that he got sometimes.
It had been two weeks since Patrick got custody of Brody and he hadn’t said one single word about it. I wanted to ask how he was doing, and what he thought about it, but I wasn’t sure how to do that.
Wrapping a string from my cut-offs around my finger, I pulled it so tight it cut off the circulation as my eyes bored a hole in Jude’s back. He was sitting on the top porch step, poking holes in the lid of a mason jar with the Swiss Army knife he’d gotten for his birthday last week.
“Here you go,” Jude said, handing the jar to Jesse. “Your very own firefly catcher.”
“Cool.” Jesse grinned at his big brother, a look of adoration on his face like Jude had just handed him the sun, the moon and all the stars in the sky. At eight, Jesse was still the most adorable and lovable McCallister. “Thanks, Jude.”
“Anytime.”
“You gotta set them free though,” Brody said, his voice brusque. “After you’re done looking at them, you need to open the lid and let them fly away.”
“Why?” Gideon asked, pointing his remote at the Formula One car he got for his tenth birthday. It raced across the porch and he hit stop before it flew down the steps.
“Because no living creature should ever be put in a cage or a jar. It ain’t right. How would you like it?”
“That would have to be a really big jar,” Jesse said, snorting laughter and slapping his thigh like that was hilarious.
“You keep your horses in a stall.” Gideon pointed out as his remote-control race car crashed into the railing, its wheels spinning.
“Yeah, and I don’t like that either. Someday I’m gonna have wild horses and a lot of land for them to roam free.”
Gideon wandered into the house, the screen door slamming behind him which had Kate hollering from inside the house, “How many times have I told you not to slam that screen door? Sometimes I feel like I’m talking to a brick wall.”
Clutching the jar like a football, Jesse jumped off the top railing of the back porch and landed on his butt.
“How many times have I told you not to jump off the top railing,” Kate said from the other side of the screen door. “Use the stairs.”
Jesse grinned and waved at his mom then raced across the back yard in search of lightning bugs even though it was too early for them to come out. The sun was just setting over the field, the late summer sky streaked pink and orange. The air was already starting to smell different. Like freshly sharpened pencils and apples from the orchard. We only had one more week of freedom before school started and I was already feeling sad to see it end.