“The kid is right. Dairy, fruits, and nuts are indeed good for you. We know. Our mom is a nurse.”
The Strip was crowded, which was pretty much standard operating procedure for the summer. Tourists and locals swarmed to the only place in Lake County with anything that could pass as entertainment. I liked it well enough on rainy days and at the end of the season when the temperature dropped and everyone else had grown weary of its charm, but being there on a sun-shiny July Saturday was akin to torture, especially after the complete circus of the last three months. We had only been there for fifteen minutes and already three people had come over to either ask if I was that Scout (like there are five or six of us running around) or express their sympathies over those long months I had spent as a hostage of God’s Army of Defenders. It was the same every single time I went out in public. For some reason people thought I would want to tell them all about “my personal tragedy” (CNN’s wording) when I refused to grant an interview to every single media outlet in the world.
“Milk is good for you. Ice cream is not,” Joshua, who was living with us for the summer, countered.
“Ice cream is made of milk,” Jase added helpfully.
“So is the whipped cream,” Charlie chimed in.
“She wasn’t lying about the fruit either. Bananas, pineapple, and strawberries. It’s like a vitamin explosion.”
“And that would be the final nail in your argument’s coffin,” I said. “Talley is, as always, the deciding vote. You lose.”
“Loser, loser, loser,” Angel chanted. “Joshua is a big, fat L-O-S-E-R!” The second, third, and fourth verse were the exact same as the first.
It was good to be home.
I took a deep breath, delighting in the humidity laden air. Sure, it smelled of fish guts and sweaty children, but it was Timber air. At moments like this, when I was surrounded by the familiar, I could almost convince myself things were back to normal. It was hard to remember all the death threats (which had slowed from daily to weekly), Really Important Decisions (which I had to make with alarming frequency), or blood I had spilled when the teacher’s aide from my kindergarten class was munching on a hamburger ten feet away from where my little sister was being slung over the shoulder of an 80 year old teenager.
Okay, maybe “normal” was pushing it.
“But you said we could ride go karts,” Angel wailed, bringing my thoughts back to the here and now.
“They were full. We had to get a reservation,” Jase explained for perhaps the twentieth time.
“When’s our reserve?”
“Reservation,” I said. “And it’s at two o’clock.”
Angel pushed a stray curl out of her face. “What time is it now?”
“Fifteen minutes until two,” I said. Which means it’s 9:45 in Romania.
Not that I kept up with what time it was in Romania and thought about what a person there might be doing at any given time of the day. Nope. Not me. I wasn’t one of those crazy kind-of-not-really girlfriends. I mean, it wasn’t like I constantly thought about him and sometimes, like when I was hanging with my favorite people on earth at The Strip, swore I smelled him on the breeze or anything.
God, I was a sad, pathetic excuse for a human being.
“Fifteen minutes? It’ll take us an hour to walk there!”
Joshua, who had released Angel only when she agreed to hand over her banana split, pointed with the long, red spoon. “Those go-karts over there? It’ll take us an hour to walk across the street?”
“Yes!”
I couldn’t decide if she really didn’t have a firm grasp of time and space, or if she was being overly dramatic. Either way, it was kind of hysterical, especially since it seemed to really bug Joshua. Don’t get me wrong, I like the guy, but he’s really fun to annoy.
“We probably need to go anyway,” I said, peeling myself off the plastic picnic bench. “There will be a line--”
The world ceased to exist around me as I became entangled in a stare. He didn’t smile or give any other indication that he was happy to see me, but I knew.
You always know with your mate.
I started to cross the street, but then had a better idea. “Go on without me,” I said over my shoulder as I headed back towards the lake. There was a moment of indecision when I wasn’t sure which tree was the tree, but eventually I found it and made myself comfortable. I didn’t have to wait long.
“So, the guy sitting on the next bench down from me--”
“He smells like Play-Doh.” I threw up a hand to shield my eyes from the glaring sun.
“Why?”
“It’s one of life’s greatest mysteries. I don’t think we will ever know.”