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“Why are you on the bathroom floor, Kenz?”
“Because it’s the only room with a lock in my aunt’s house and my cousins are eight and they have Nerf guns.”
Tessa laughs into the pillow.
She’s different with them, too. Quieter, maybe. Not quieter. Newer. She teases Paige about the doctor thing. She tells Bianca to eat the pasta out of the pot with more dignity. Kenzie asks what she got, and she holds her wrist up to the camera, and four girls scream at the same time, and Bianca drops the spoon.
“Who gave you that?”
“It’s vintage.”
“That is not an answer to my question, Tessa.”
Kylie’s quiet. Kylie, who is never quiet. She’s just smiling into her camera with her hair in a towel, with her chin on her hand. Like she knows something.
She does.
“I miss you guys,” Tessa says. “I’m serious. It’s so weird not having you down the hall.”
“Miss you too,” Kylie says. Totally normal. Totally innocent. “So much. I wish I could see you.”
She’s getting on a plane in fourteen hours.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. I look at it.
Kennebeck.
I walk to my room and close the door before I answer.
“You still getting us tomorrow?” he says.
“Yeah.”
“We land at ten-forty. Barnes is twenty-five past eleven. He changed his flight twice. Don’t ask.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“He’s going to try to make you buy him Cinnabon.”
“He can buy his own Cinnabon.”
In the background, I can hear a TV, and somebody laughing, and a dog. Kylie’s parents’ house. He’s been there since the twenty-third.
“Does Canten know Ky’s coming?”
“No.”
“Good.” Another pause. “She’s gonna lose her shit.”
Through the wall, two rooms down, Tessa laughs at something.
“Yeah,” I say.
Kennebeck’s quiet a second.
“My dad,” he says. “Fifth time today, but I’m not answering. He wants to know if I’m coming home for New Year’s.”
“Are you?”