“Thomas, I’m really not in the mood for this.”
She lifted her hands toward the blindfold, but Thomas gently grabbed them away, holding them both down in front of her as he faced her.
“Exactly. If we’re stuck together until the weather lets up, I’m gonna need you to snap out of this mood. You’re bringing me down, Osgood.” His tone was light, but Ariana heard something strained in his voice.
“Fine,” she reluctantly agreed.
“Good.” He slipped behind her and clamped his hands on her shoulders, coaxing her slowly across the room. “Door,” he announced, steering her carefully into the hallway.
Ariana opened her eyes and tried to make out shapes through the flimsy fabric. Everything was muddled and distorted. Her heart started to pound. She didn’t like this one bit. Didn’t like the total lack of control.
“I don’t know why I have to be the one who’s blindfolded,” Ariana said in a clipped tone.
“Because I’m the one who knows where we’re going, Einstein.”
As he guided her through the dark hallway, he softly hummed the James Bond theme song in Ariana’s ear. The reverberations of his
voice sent pleasant shivers down her neck and over her shoulders, and somehow, she started to relax. She was in good hands. Thomas’s hands.
“Stairs!” he sang.
Ariana smiled in spite of herself. Together they started down the stairs, Thomas’s grip on her shoulders tightening to keep her from falling if she missed a step. But Ariana was nothing if not meticulous. She noted exactly how her feet were supposed to fall to keep her on track, making sure she stepped exactly the right distance each time.
“Here we are.” Ariana heard him fumbling with a lock, then heard the slow creak of an opening door. He rested his hand on the small of her back. “Go ahead.”
The whole blindfold game had been totally pointless. Billings was a small house, and Ariana knew exactly where they were.
“Thomas. You didn’t,” she said, yanking the tank top from over her eyes.
“What?” Thomas asked, smiling triumphantly. “You don’t like?”
Ariana looked around the small, neat living area. A love seat littered with embroidered pillows sat perpendicular to the doorway, flanked on either side by mahogany side tables. A brown wing chair, matching ottoman, and low coffee table piled with neatly arranged books—
Miss Manners’ Guide to Domestic Tranquility
and
The Little Book of Etiquette
—were the only other pieces of furniture that could fit in the room. Every surface in sight was covered with crocheted lace doilies, and half the throw pillows featured Siamese cats.
She tossed Noelle’s tank top over an ugly needlepoint pillow stitched with the words
WHAT PART OF “MEOW” DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND?
“Mrs. Lattimer is going to murder us,” she said. The Billings housemother was notoriously private about her apartment. Before today, Ariana had only caught the briefest glimpses inside it, and only when she happened to be walking by as Mrs. Lattimer was stepping in or out.
“Only if she finds out we were here,” Thomas replied. He swiped a doily from the back of the couch and draped it over his arm. “Welcome to Chez Lattimer, Billings House’s fine dining experience.”
“Seriously, Thomas. Maybe we should try someplace else.”
Breaking into Billings was one thing. Breaking into the housemother’s locked apartment upped their misdemeanor to a felony.
“Where else are we going to go?” Thomas asked, crossing his arms over his chest.
Ariana bit her lip. For a moment she considered just calling Headmaster Cox, telling him they were here. But then she thought about the assembly of the day before—how he’d said there’d be no exceptions. She realized with a heavy sigh that she and Thomas had already broken too many rules. Thomas was right. There was nowhere. The other remaining students were using the cafeteria, so pilfering food from the kitchen was not an option.
“Before you answer, allow me to show you one of Chez Lattimer’s most tempting features.” He reached for the thermostat dial on the wall and turned. “Wait for it. . . .” The sound of the ancient pipes screeching in the wall made Ariana jump.
“Heat!” she said happily. She felt as if her bones had been frozen for days.
“Heat,” Thomas confirmed.
“This Chez Lattimer is growing on me.” Ariana walked over to the tiny kitchen area and sat down on one of stools at the counter. “So, what are your specials?”
Thomas shrugged as he stepped onto the white linoleum floor. “Your guess is as good as mine.” He opened a few cabinets. “Let’s see. On the menu today, we have brown rice, pancake mix, or Metamucil.”
“Wow. Everything sounds so good,” Ariana deadpanned. “Surprise me.”
“Pancakes it is.”
Thomas rooted around the kitchen until he found the requisite ingredients, plus measuring cups, a griddle, and a bowl. He laid it all out on the counter and got to work.
“You know how to cook?” Ariana smiled. She liked the idea that she was learning something new about him.
“How hard is it to follow directions?” he replied.
Ariana watched as he measured the mix in a dry measuring cup and the oil and milk in a liquid measuring cup. A boy would only know the difference if he’d cooked before—Thomas was trying to hide the fact that he knew what he was doing.
“So you’ve never made these before,” she challenged.
His back to her, Thomas paused in his stirring. “Okay, fine. You caught me,” he said over his shoulder. “I can do pancakes and grilled cheese.”
“Interesting specialties,” Ariana said.
“Yeah, well, when I was a kid we didn’t really do dinners together as a family and the maid was always making, like, fish with mango chutney, so I used to sneak back into the kitchen and make what I wanted.”
“Pancakes and grilled cheese,” Ariana said with a smile.
“Exactly.”
Ariana understood. It was just like her twelfth birthday when she’d had to plan and throw herself a party because her dad was away and her mother was in one of her states. Sometimes you just had to learn to do these things for yourself. She wondered what had broken Thomas’s family. Had it been anything like what happened to hers? A philandering father and a mother who wasn’t all there even
before
he broke her heart?
“You never mentioned why you’re not going home for Christmas,” Ariana said. She watched as Thomas concentrated on the mixing bowl.
“City’s too crowded over the holidays,” he said quickly. Defensively.
“Thomas,” Ariana said.
He glanced up, and their eyes locked. The vulnerability, the pain that she had seen in passing flashes, was there, written in his expression. But this time, it didn’t disappear. It only intensified the longer she held his gaze. Only sharpened the deeper she looked.
A lump rose in the back of her throat, and she bit the inside of her cheek. She’d seen that kind of pain before. Staring at her reflection in the mirror of a hospital bathroom. Wondering what unforgivable
thing she’d done in life to deserve a family like hers. Instantly hating herself for the thought.
He was silent for a while. “Let’s just say Christmas Eve is not fun at the Pearson home. Unless you’re big on drunken parental throwdowns.”
“Oh,” Ariana said. “Has it always been like that?”
“Pretty much since birth,” Thomas said with a grim smile. “What about you? Why would you rather spend Christmas with the Sticks-Up-Their-Asses?”
Ariana smirked. “Kind of a long nickname for ‘the Ryans.’”
“I’m working on it,” Thomas replied. He ran some water over his fingers, then flicked them toward the heated griddle. Water droplets popped and sizzled across the surface. He even knew how to test for the right temperature. “Your parents fighters, too?”
“No.” Ariana took a deep breath and sighed, letting the familiar heaviness of family thoughts settle around her. “Worse. They don’t speak. Ever. Even when they’re in the same room. She just looks at him with this pathetic longing and he completely ignores her presence.”
“Well, silence is good,” Thomas offered.
“Not this kind of silence,” Ariana said sadly, looking down at her hands.
Thomas turned away for a moment and stirred the pancake batter. Ariana let the rhythmic sound of the whisk lull her.
“I never really thought about it as a kid,” Thomas said finally.
“Thought about what?”
“The way things were. How they screamed at each other if they
were ever around each other for more than twenty minutes. How at the end of every meal, they ended up passed out in different rooms. And then, one Christmas Eve when we were really young, they were out of town on business. Tokyo or some shit. And so my brother and I—”
“Blake?”
He nodded. “We went over to a friend’s house for dinner. And it was like something was off. The dad wasn’t screaming. The mom wasn’t crying.”
Thomas poured the batter onto the hot griddle and a frantic sizzling sound filled the room.
“Now you know why I like the Sticks-Up-Their-Asses,” Ariana said.
“
They’re
normal?” Thomas asked skeptically. He put the bowl down on the counter. “I find that hard to believe.”
“Way more normal than I’m used to.”
Thomas finished up with the pancakes in silence, then flipped them onto two separate plates and slid them onto the countertop. He sat down on the stool next to Ariana’s, his elbow grazing hers. Neither of them pulled away.
“Syrup?” Ariana said with a smile.
“As you wish,” Thomas replied, handing it over to her atop his forearm as if it were a bottle of wine.
Ariana poured a splash of syrup onto her stack and cut a perfect triangle out of it. Meanwhile, Thomas grabbed the bottle, doused his pancakes, and used his knife and fork to decimate them into
a thousand tiny pieces before shoveling a whole forkful into his mouth.
“So were your parents always like that?” he asked after he swallowed.
Ariana’s food turned to cement in her stomach. She had never told anyone about her mom. Not even Noelle. She had never wanted to. Never felt she could. It felt disloyal . . . and embarrassing. She lowered her fork and wiped her fingers with her napkin systematically, one by one.
“You can’t tell me anything that would shock me,” Thomas said matter-of-factly. “Trust me.”
Ariana looked over at him. He stared back, his gaze unwavering. Open. Suddenly she felt as if she could tell him the whole truth. His family was screwed up, too. Not like the Ryans. Or even the Langes, who did love each other, even if they had odd ways of showing it.
“You have to swear you won’t tell anyone,” she said.
“Who would I tell?” Thomas replied.
He had no interest in gossip. That was what he was telling her. He was above that. And she believed him. Ariana took a deep breath, clutched her arm, and let go.
“My mother has been in and out of mental hospitals since before I can remember.”
She glanced at him for his reaction. He didn’t even blink.
“So growing up, it was mostly my dad and me,” Ariana went on. “My mom was only home here and there.”
“No brothers and sisters?” he asked.
Ariana’s fingers clutched her arm more tightly, but she didn’t answer. She had no interest in going there.
“So anyway, when my mom was home, everything was always great for the first couple of days. She would cook and play games with me and just be this . . . this kind of light,” Ariana said, staring off. “Sometimes it lasted longer than others, but sooner or later she would always come back down.”
“Depression?” Thomas asked, taking a bite of his pancake mash.
“Serious depression,” Ariana confirmed. “She’d lock the bedroom door and nobody was allowed in. My dad would always try, but he got more and more frustrated. He started disappearing for days and weeks at a time. Luckily I had a nanny to take care of me. Otherwise . . .”
“What would any of us have done without our nannies?” Thomas joked, trying to lighten the mood.
“Anyway, my mother would always get him to come home with threats,” Ariana continued. She tore her paper napkin in half, then in quarters. Perfectly symmetrical little squares.
“Threats?” Thomas asked.
“She’d threaten to . . . you know. . . .” She looked at Thomas. He stared back. He was going to make her say it.
“Kill herself,” she said quietly. She tore the napkin again. Eights, then sixteenths, and on and on. The pancakes on her plate had soaked up all the syrup and were turning cold. “And then, one day when I was nine and he’d stayed away for over a month . . . she finally did it.”
“Your mother committed suicide?” Thomas blurted. Then he blushed, realizing his faux pas.
“No! No. Well, she tried,” Ariana explained.
And just like that, she saw it again. Her mother’s seemingly lifeless body, curled up in the fetal position on the bathroom rug. The stark orange pills against the white tile floor. Her blond hair spilling out in a perfect halo around her head. Ariana saw it all, and suddenly she felt numb.
“It was the last day of school before Christmas break,” she said flatly. Her voice had gone monotone. Detached. It was the only way she could get through the memory. “I’m the one who found her. Called nine-one-one. The doctor said if I’d gotten there even five minutes later . . .”
She heard herself screaming for her mother over and over again. Saw herself hysterically crying into the phone.
“How’d she do it?” Thomas asked. He’d stopped eating.
The question brought her back. “Vicodin. Washed it down with a bottle of vintage wine my dad bought her on their honeymoon,” she said, and forced a smirk. “You have to give her points for dramatic flair.”
“No shit,” Thomas said with a short laugh. “Wow. You must really hate Christmas.”
“With a passion,” Ariana said.
Her insides felt shaky, but she was glad she’d told Thomas. Her family, her past . . . it wasn’t a secret anymore. Something to feel ashamed of. She had told someone and the world hadn’t come to an end.
“Still, I wanted to go home and see my mom, but she really wanted me to be with Daniel, so—” She stopped herself.
Thomas looked down at his plate for a second. When he looked up again, his eyes seemed to be a deeper blue than they had been seconds before.