Chapter 17
seventeen
The waffle iron screamed like it was being murdered, which felt dramatic but typical for our kitchen at ten a.m. on a Sunday morning.
Mum stood at the counter in her slippers and yesterday’s hoodie, wielding a whisk like a weapon.
Batter dotted her sleeves, the counter, and somehow the fridge door.
She was moving fast, flipping waffles, checking the toaster, reaching for plates, muttering to herself like she was diffusing a bomb.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. We’re fine. No one touch anything.”
Sebastian, naturally, took that chance to sprint through the kitchen with a soccer ball at his feet.
He didn’t even look at us. He just weaved around the table, tapped the ball off the cabinet, caught it with his foot, and laughed to himself like he was already on the field with a crowd chanting his name.
“Sebastian!” Mum yelled. “I told you to keep that outside!”
“It’s freezing out there!” he argued. The ball smacked into the doorframe. Sebastian winced, then shrugged like walls were easily replaceable.
Across the table, Lavender sat with her legs tucked neatly under her, flipping through a magazine like she was on a deadline. She kept glancing between the pages and her phone, brow furrowed, lips pursed in concentration.
“No,” she murmured. Flip. “No.” Flip. “Oh, wait.”
“What are you even looking for?” Mum asked, sliding a waffle onto a plate and pushing it toward me. I grabbed it immediately. Survival instinct.
“I need a new dress for the party. Dean’s seen me in everything already.”
Ainsley, who was also searching for a dress at breakfast, leaned halfway across the table and into my space, shoving her phone in my face before I could take a bite.
“Okay, but this dress,” Ainsley said. “Tell me this isn’t perfect!”
She’d woken up this morning in a complete panic over the fact that we didn’t have our dresses for our birthday party next week. I understood the concern but I also wouldn’t have minded talking about it when my hands weren’t covered in maple syrup.
I squinted at the screen. Pink. Short. Sparkly. It was too summery for my taste since our birthday was at the beginning of December, but right now, I couldn’t care less about what dress I was going to wear when I felt like my stomach was trying to eat itself.
I pushed the phone away. “I’m trying to eat here.”
Ainsley rolled her eyes. “Multitask.”
As I ate, she leaned even further forward so she could see the screen while it was facing me. She started swiping through her Pinterest board. “Okay, but what about this one? This one is more me, but this one”—swipe—“is more us.”
Sebastian sprinted past again, ball bouncing dangerously close to Mum’s ankles.
“Sebastian,” Mum said in her calm voice, which meant she was five seconds away from snapping. “If that ball touches my waffle iron—”
“It won’t!” Sebastian said, attempting a fancy spin move. The ball flew off his foot, clipped a chair, and shot straight toward the counter.
Time slowed. Mum gasped. Lavender jumped up, magazine flying. Ainsley screamed. I ducked instinctively, still holding my waffle.
The ball hit the cabinet instead, then bounced harmlessly to the floor. Everyone froze.
Sebastian grinned. “See?”
Mum stared at him. He stopped smiling.
“Paper towels,” she said, pointing. “Now. And then the ball goes outside.”
Sebastian saluted and jogged away, scooping up the ball like it was a baby. Lavender crouched to pick up her magazine, pages splayed everywhere. “This is why I can’t focus. I need calm.”
Ainsley was back to Pinterest, undeterred. “Okay, shoes,” she said. “Heels or boots?”
“Heels,” I said immediately.
Mum turned, nearly colliding with Sebastian as he re-entered, ball gone, arms full of paper towels. Batter overflowed down the waffle iron again.
“Oh, come on,” she groaned. “Why today?”
Sebastian dumped the paper towels on the counter and immediately started shadow-dribbling an invisible ball, feet tapping against the tile.
“Do you ever stop?” Lavender asked.
“No,” Sebastian said cheerfully. “It’s a gift.”
Ainsley leaned in again, phone inches from my nose. “Okay, last one. I swear. Burgundy or purple?”
I swallowed my bite. “Burgundy.”
She beamed. “I knew it.”
Mum finally sat down, pressing her fingers to her temples. The kitchen was a mess—plates stacked crookedly, batter everywhere, chairs pushed out at weird angles. Everyone was talking over everyone else. The waffle iron hissed again, demanding attention.
“Oh my—why?” she cried, spinning around. Batter had overflowed again, creeping toward the edge of the counter like it was making a break for freedom. She grabbed the spatula, scraped wildly, and accidentally flung a drop onto the floor. Sebastian stepped directly in it.
“Cool,” he said, lifting his foot and grimacing.
“That’s it,” Mum said. “Everyone out of the kitchen. I need space.”
“No,” Ainsley said automatically, still scrolling. “I need your opinion on sequins.”
She shoved the phone at me again. I leaned back in my chair to avoid it, nearly tipping over.
“I already said burgundy,” I said. “Burgundy is done. We’ve locked it in.”
“But look at the neckline,” Ainsley insisted. “Look at it.”
“I am looking,” I said, even though I wasn’t.
I took another bite of waffle and immediately dropped half of it onto my plate when Sebastian jogged past again, apparently incapable of moving at a normal speed.
Lavender had abandoned the table entirely and was now standing by the fridge, magazine tucked under her arm, staring into the shelves like answers might be hiding behind the milk.
Our voices overlapped as Ainsley started talking about earrings and I started arguing about shoes, both of us talking louder to be heard over the waffle iron and Mum and Sebastian and Lavender slamming the fridge door shut.
My phone buzzed on the table, vibrating dangerously close to my plate.
“Don’t you dare answer that,” Ainsley said without looking up.
“I wasn’t going to,” I said, already reaching for it.
“Imogen.”
“I said I wasn’t—”
Mum clapped her hands once, sharp and loud. “Okay. Breakfast is over. Grab food. Move. I am done negotiating with this kitchen.”
We all knew better than to mess with that tone.
Chairs scraped as we all got up. Lavender bumped into Sebastian as she left the room and he went to grab an apple from the bowl on the counter.
Ainsley yanked me up by my sleeve and it was all I could to stuff the rest of the waffle in my mouth before she was tugging me out of the room, already mid-sentence about stores and time and how we had to go right after her dance practice today if we wanted anything good.
The kitchen noise followed us all the way out.
And even though I often wished for peace and quiet in this house to focus, I still loved the chaos of my family.
Ainsley dragged me from store to store, talking about dresses and accessories over the holiday music blasting and the people ringing bells throughout the mall.
Now that it was getting to the Christmas season, the mall was insanely busy, so Ainsley and I shared a dressing room at the store, running in and out whenever we needed to find new dresses to try on.
Within fifteen minutes, the place was overrun with discarded dresses that looked good on Pinterest but neither of us could make work on ourselves.
Unlike the chaos of the corridor, the store was filled with soft music and low chatter and hangers whispering against metal.
We’d been here long enough that the sales associate had stopped checking on us and started pretending not to watch.
A small pile of rejected dresses had formed on the chair between the mirrors—too tight, too shiny, weird neckline, suspiciously itchy.
“Why is this so hard?” I muttered as I stared at myself in the mirror. Normally, I was good at fashion. I liked choosing outfits for whenever we went out, especially since I spent the whole day in a school uniform. It was fun and easy. But this was impossible.
I tugged on the hem of the velvet dress I was wearing now, staring at myself in the mirror, and thought about the conversation I’d had with Sebastian in the car last week. I hope it’s not going to be weird… your first birthday without Dad. Maybe the dress wasn’t the problem. Maybe it was the party.
I looked at Ainsley in the mirror as she finished pulling on a new dark and fitted dress. It was the last thing I would have picked out for her on a hanger, but seeing it on her, it was perfect.
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s you.”
She caught my eye in the mirror. “That one’s fine.”
“Fine isn’t the goal,” I said, tugging the dress back off and dropping it again. We’d been in the store long enough that the bench between the mirrors was unusable. Dresses were folded over it, slid underneath it, half-hung from the hook on the door like casualties.
She shrugged. “It fits. It’s flattering. You won’t hate it in photos.”
“That’s a terrible pitch.” I started pulling on my regular clothes again. “Whatever, I’m over this. I’ll come back after school one day and try again. Get changed and I’ll meet you out front, okay?”
Ainsley nodded, but seemed like she was in no hurry to take the dress off as she spun around in it again, looking at herself from all angles. At least one of us was enjoying this.