Gemini Bites by Patrick Ryan

Author:Patrick Ryan [ Ryan, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-545-33250-7
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2011-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

One afternoon a few days later, Dexter came home from school and said he was going to make a mall run, and I asked him if I could come along. I’d tried on all of my dresses and couldn’t stand the way I looked in them — one made me look slutty, one made me look frumpy, one made me look fat; none of them was the look I was aiming for: sexy, yet respectable; hot, yet…holier-than-Tina.

“Sure,” Dexter said, “come along. But I’m leaving, like, five minutes ago.”

We were standing in the kitchen. Garret was within earshot, in the laundry room folding his clothes. To my amazement, he leaned out into the open doorway and asked if he could join us. I’d already gotten pretty used to his staying hidden away in the attic.

“The more the mallier,” Dexter said, reaching for his keys.

The mall had been built a few years ago, smack in the middle of what used to be farmland. It looked superimposed in the middle of a giant field, surrounded by a moat of parking lot. As we walked in through the food court, Dexter said he wanted to go to Radio Shack and Athletic Mongoose (where Mac Prentice had offered him the job that was tempting him away from college). He also had a thing for Beth Garland, a girl who worked at Athletic Mongoose — which, now that I thought about it, may have been part of his motivation for wanting to take the job. Those stores were all on the first level, and the dress shops I wanted to look at were on the second. “Want to meet back here in an hour?” I asked him.

“Sounds good,” he said. “Later.” He rounded the corner of the Goody-Goody yogurt shop and was gone.

I turned and looked at Garret. “What about you? Got some shopping to do?”

“Actually, no.”

“Why’d you want to come, then?”

He shrugged and tucked his narrow hands into the pockets of his tight, ratty jeans. “It’s fun to observe the mortals now and again.”

“You didn’t bring your sketch pad,” I observed.

“I can sketch in my mind, if I feel like it.”

I glanced around the food court, lined with potted trees, some of which had tiny birds flitting around the branches (did the poor things live their entire lives in a mall?) and then looked back at Garret, who seemed content just to stare at me.

“So…do you want to come with me?” I asked.

“I’d be delighted.”

“Delighted? I’m shopping for dresses, you know.”

“I’ll be glad to assist in any way I can.”

“Do you talk like that on purpose?” I asked as we were walking toward the escalator.

“Like what?”

“Like some lord of the manor.”

“I wasn’t aware I sounded like a lord of anything, but I’ll take it as a compliment.”

We stood side by side as the escalator carried us up the middle of one wing of the mall. Down below, an old man sat on a bench, dropping and catching a red rubber ball over and over again.

I took us into one of the small boutique shops first.

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