South of Sunshine by Dana Elmendorf

Author:Dana Elmendorf [Elmendorf, Dana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Albert Whitman & Company
Published: 2016-04-11T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

What I’m not going to do is panic … or chicken out. I creep up the stairs to my mother’s room and take in a deep breath. The attic air is stagnant. The low-ceiling loft takes up the entire space, but it spans the width of our house, making it the largest of the bedrooms. Red digits on her clock peep at me through the crack in her door, well past midnight.

I face the numbers away from her bed, just in case she wakes up enough to think about checking the time. “Mother.” I nudge her.

“Hmmm,” she says in a sleepy haze.

“I’m home.”

She grunts an uh-huh back to me and snuggles into her pillow more.

“I’m having a friend sleep over. Is that cool?” I cross my fingers, hoping she’s too out of it to put two and two together.

“What?” she asks, lifting her head off the pillow, bleary-eyed.

It takes me a second to gather my courage to ask again. “I said I’m having a friend sleep over. Is that cool?”

“Okay, honey. Lock the front door.” She rolls over into her covers.

As I creep back down the stairs, I am very well aware of the fact that she has no idea what she’s agreed to. Asleep or not, I will maintain my defense in the morning that she said it was okay.

Back in my room, Bren leans over my Civil War scrap metal collection, sifting through the findings. Her legs look ridiculously long—and off-the-charts sexy—in the gym shorts I gave her to sleep in.

“What? No snow angel in my sheets? I’m so offended,” I say. It gets a chuckle out of her. I join her next to the box.

“These are awesome.” She holds up a half-eroded uniform button. “Did you collect them all?”

“Mostly.” I admire the button myself. “Some of them my nana gave me after my grandpa passed away.”

“Sorry to hear it.”

“It’s okay. It was a long time ago, back when I was in eighth grade. We used to hit different farms near all the big Civil War battle grounds and search for metal with his detector. We’d come up with barbed wire and old soda cans, but every now and then we’d hit a treasure trove. The really good stuff we donated to the Shiloh museum.” I pass her back the button. She nestles it among the other trinkets and gently closes the lid.

Every molecule in my body hums with awareness from her closeness. This is a two-bedroom house, no guest room. The not-as-big-as-you-think-it-is queen bed looms behind us. Bren will be sleeping inches away from me … in my bed. I clear my throat and grab a nightshirt and shorts. “I’m … just gonna change.” I stumble as I back out of my room.

After I change in the hall bathroom, I brush my teeth twice, rinse with mouthwash, and tousle my declassified hair. It does nothing to change the wavy wildness of it.

In the mirror I look myself dead in the eyes.

“It’s a sleepover. This means nothing,” I say quietly to myself.

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