Day 21
Asher
I don’t get pancakes every morning, because—as Sidney keeps telling me—she isn’t my personal chef.
But I do get a smile. This morning, I also get a bottle of water and a protein bar.
They go along with the note I scrawled on the mirror this morning—our primary means of communication—asking her to go on a morning run.
We both run every other day, so it just seemed logical that we could do it together.
But it also means that we now spend every single morning together, swimming or running.
Swimming is easier, though—one of us always has our head in the water.
There isn’t any expectation for small talk other than the few minutes we spend getting in and out of the boat.
Our very first run was silent, and for two miles I was pretty convinced that I had made a horrible mistake.
At every turn we veered in different directions, finding that our normal running routes—and apparently our instincts—were completely opposite.
Sidney likes to keep to the street—the busy ones where cars are blasting past us—and I have a tendency to veer off-road whenever I have the chance.
Our second run, I let Sidney lead. That morning we ran a mixture of her usual road route, and a few adventures onto trails and dirt side roads.
On our half-mile cool down, we decided we’d take our first real crack at Nadine soon.
I asked Sidney about Edith the elephant, who I now know is living on her dresser.
So now, as we run, we plot.
“Have you ever heard of potato-ing someone’s yard?” I ask her, my voice far too normal for the strangeness of the words. We’re a mile into our run, turning off of the main road and onto a long dirt road that curves into a stretch of national forest.
“Um. No.” She looks at me like maybe I’m just teasing her.
“Basically you spread powdered mashed potatoes all over someone’s yard. You know, the kind that come in the cardboard boxes?”
“Okay…”
“So the next time it rains, the yard fills with mashed potatoes.”
Sidney laughs so hard she has to stop running. “Wow, that’s … that’s sort of disgusting.”
“And I was thinking … maybe we could write out some sort of message, or weird picture, with the potatoes?” She’s giving me the strangest look. “What?”
“That’s just … it’s awesome.”
We take off running again. “Thanks.”
“Only one problem.”
I groan, long and loud and dramatic, because Sidney has been a total buzzkill about all of my ideas so far.
Yes, we have to be careful, but we’re not throwing bottle bombs into her yard or something.
So while I’ve been coming up with all of the devious ideas, Sidney has been considering all of the possible repercussions.
“Do you think mashed potatoes could kill the grass?” she asks.
“It’s not like they’re acid. They’re potatoes.
They come out of the ground, right?” The thing about Sidney is that she doesn’t just come up with some pretty weird and elaborate ideas—she can also think through every little detail.
She needs an answer to every tiny question that comes up.
It makes me wonder how long she spent thinking about all of the pranks she pulled on me before she actually went through with them.
And what provoked her to go off-script with the fish?
She clearly hadn’t thought that one through, even a little.
“True, I guess potatoes are vegetables,” she says, her voice so thoughtful it makes me laugh.
“You guess?”
She smacks my arm as we run, and I speed up so she has to push herself harder to do it again. “We’d have to spend a lot of time in the yard to put the potatoes on the grass. It’s not exactly sneaky.”
“We can go in the middle of the night. Like really late. Three a.m. or something?” I slow down so we’re side by side again.
“I bet it wouldn’t take that long … we can get all of the potatoes ready beforehand, so all we have to do is spread them.
Even if we do something cool, we could probably be in and out in twenty minutes?
” I ram my shoulder into her like we’re bumper cars.
“We’d have to buy a million boxes of potatoes, though. ”
“And hope that it rains sometime soon, before the dog eats them all,” she says.
“Damn dog.” We run another ten feet before she speaks again.
“We could buy the potatoes this afternoon … might need to hit a few stores to get enough. Maybe go to Nadine’s tomorrow night or the night after, once we can think through all the details? ”
Crap. This is the perfect time to ask Sidney what I’ve been trying to work myself up to for days now.
Even though we’re acting like normal people who don’t hate each other anymore, it’s still hard to talk to her in person.
We’re doing things together now, but only because of the lipstick notes.
When we’re together, we mostly talk about our plans for Nadine.
Or how weird it is that our parents are experiencing a second-coming of their college years.
I’m not sure how to break us out of that.
Sometimes I’m not sure why I still want to. But I do.
We’re running on a side road that stretches into the woods when I clear my throat and come to a stop along the side of the road.
It’s a service road of some kind, and it’s unpaved.
But it’s also shaded, which makes it perfect for running, despite having to sporadically dodge a tree root cutting through our path.
Something rustles in the undergrowth beside me, and Sidney’s eyes snap past me.
“I was going to go to the drive-in tomorrow night. They’re showing that new movie, the one with the woman who disappears on the train. ”
She nods with a smile and lets out a long breath. “Yeah, that looks really good.” She shakes her head. “That’s cool, we can do it another night.”
“Yeah.” I stub my toe into the ground. “I was just thinking, if you wanted to go with me, we could check it out.” The regret is heavy as the words hang between us. This was such a horrible idea. “Just … it’s kind of pathetic to go to the movies by yourself, you know?”
I can see her entire jaw tense as she swallows. “Um.”
“Don’t feel like you have to. I just wanted to see it, but seriously, no pressure.
” Crap, this is awkward. If we were on the main road at least I could wish that a car would accidentally swipe me and make this end.
But no, I decided the dead quiet of the woods was the best place to do this. I’m a genius.
Sidney bites her lip and doesn’t smile, but her face looks even now. Not interested, but not disgusted. “Yeah. No. I mean, you’re right. It looks really good.” She bites her lip again. “I’ll go.”
She starts running again without a word, and I follow a step behind, then pull up alongside her. I feel like we’re running in a weird bubble of awkward tension, and I have to pop it before we both suffocate in here. “You know what the perfect movie snack is?” I say, my voice teasing.
“Popcorn?” Her voice drips with sarcasm.
“I mean, popcorn is great, but…”
“Gummy bears.”
“Yuck.”
“What?” She sounds personally offended. “No, gummies are the best, come on.”
“Try again.”
She laughs. “I’m not making you pancakes.”
I let out a huff. “Oh, come on.”
“Nope.” Sidney shakes her head as we make a U-turn at the end of the dirt path.
“You’re all strung out on the ’cakes, Marin.
” She’s right. I’ve managed to talk her into making them twice this week.
The first time by mentioning them to my dad, who asked her, and the second time by agreeing to do two of our dinner dish shifts solo.
The only thing Sidney wants to be less than my personal chef is the post-dinner dishwasher.
“Puh-leasssse?” I clap my hands together as if I’m praying to the goddess that is Sidney, Queen of the Pancakes.
“We’re not taking pancakes to a movie.” She’s shaking her head at me like I’m an idiot, but she’s smiling. And the nervous energy is long gone. “I’ll make us chocolate-chip muffins.”
“Yes!” I throw my fist up into the air. “Deal!”
“But you’re buying my ticket,” she says.
“For muffins? Obviously.”
“I need to save my money for mashed potatoes.” She laughs and rolls her eyes—at herself, which is a nice change from them being directed at me. “As one does.”
I laugh. “As one does.”
We don’t talk the rest of the way home, but it’s a different kind of silence from what has become our normal the last few years. Let’s hope spending four hours in a car together doesn’t ruin it.