I patted his arm. “I’ll have to live vicariously through you.”
Oliver reached for Caro’s drink and took a sip. I could see why she had gotten the jumbo-sized one. “What about you, Drew? What happened after last night?”
“Oh, shit!” I said. “Drew, I’m so sorry! I didn’t even ask about you and Kevin.”
Drew shrugged. “Oh, you know. It’s okay. He understands. Kane’s really pissed at my parents, though. Like, he’s mad.” Drew widened his eyes a little and I could understand why. Kane was over six feet tall and built of solid muscle. I had never seen Kane get upset, which made the prospect all the more intimidating. “He says that I should bring Kevin, anyway, and if anyone has a problem with it, he’ll take care of it. And I don’t want my brother to hulk out at my grandma’s birthday party, soooo yeah.” Drew squirted some red sauce onto his burrito. “Parents, man.”
Oliver cleared his throat a little. “Well, my mom wants me to do an interview for Crime Watch so they can find my dad,” he said. “So I get to be on TV and help get my dad arrested.”
Caro’s eyes flicked back down to her lunch and I knew what she was thinking. Oliver’s dad deserves to be arrested. But she just said, “That sucks, dude. I’m sorry.”
“Thanks,” Oliver said. “Should be fun. Can’t wait.”
“To summarize!” Drew said, sitting up straight. “Emmy’s parents have grounded her and are possibly plotting her death as we speak because she got into a four-year university and became an excellent surfer behind their backs.”
“Accurate,” I said.
“And Oliver’s dad kidnapped him for ten years, scaring everyone to pieces, before he finally came home and now his mom is using him to arrest his dad, which will now add tens of thousands of dollars to the therapy bills he’s already going to accrue.”
Oliver laughed, low and sharp and genuine. “Pretty much, yeah.”
“And my parents don’t want me to tell my grandmother—who, let’s be honest, is already in the bottom of the ninth inning, age-wise—that I’m gay and dating the most beautiful man in the free world—no offense, Oliver—”
“None taken,” he said. “Kevin’s a handsome guy.”
“—because if I do, she’ll cut us off and my parents would rather I live a lie than have to move themselves into a two-bedroom condo and drive a Ford Focus. And Caro’s parents . . .”
“Caro’s parents should have stopped at five kids,” Caro said, reaching for the soda again. “Because they have no idea what she does all day and don’t really care, either.”
“Can we please have a moment of silence for Caro’s decrepit family life, especially her sister Heather?” Drew said, solemnly placing his hand over his heart.
“Especially Heather,” Caro said darkly, but let Drew give her a one-armed hug, anyway.
“Well, that’s that,” Drew said brightly. “The four of us are fucked.”
Oliver raised his burrito into the air. “To us!” he said dramatically, sounding like one of the newscasters that had reported on him time and time again. “And to the future!”
We all cracked up at that, clinking our half-eaten burritos in the air as we laughed. “To us and our terrible futures!” Caro echoed. “Now who’s hogging all the red sauce? Seriously, you guys, stop doing that.”
I grinned up at Oliver, who kissed my forehead and then tossed Caro one of his own packets. This is perfect, I thought to myself.
And that afternoon, for one glorious hour, it was.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
I drove Oliver home as slowly as possible, trying to spend as much time with him as I could before I had to go back to the makeshift cell that was my bedroom. At the red light, we kissed until the car behind us started honking, and even then it took a few extra seconds before we were able to untangle ourselves from each other. “How much longer is this going to go on?” Oliver asked as we sailed through the intersection, still holding hands over the front console. “Did your parents say how long you’d be grounded?”
“Nope,” I said. “That’s part of the fun, the wondering without asking.”
“And you’re not going to ask.” Oliver sounded dubious.
“No way!” I said. “What if that makes them ground me for even longer?” I pulled into our driveway and put the van into PARK very, very slowly. “Want to get the mail together?”
Oliver started to laugh as he gathered up his backpack. “I do, actually,” he said. “We are so pathetic.”
“The worst,” I agreed. I wanted to keep holding his hand as we walked, but I knew my mom was home and I wasn’t willing to risk her seeing us. It hadn’t even been twenty-four hours and I was already missing the ocean like crazy. Any more time added to my sentence and I’d probably start to go into shock from lack of salt water.
The mail was boring, like it always was: bills for my parents, flyers from grocery stores, a couple of envelopes addressed to CURRENT RESIDENT. “I wish people still wrote letters,” I said to Oliver as we both emptied the boxes. “Wouldn’t that be cool? Like, you’d go to the mailbox and there’d be a letter just waiting for you?”
“I’ll write you a letter,” he said.
“That might be the only way you’ll be allowed to talk to me,” I said, and he smiled as he pulled a large envelope out of the box. “What the—oh, wow.”