The Dark In-Between by Elizabeth Hrib

Author:Elizabeth Hrib
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends

TEN

CASEY’S AWOKEN THE next morning by incessant knocking on her door. She rolls out of bed and narrowly misses putting her foot down on Red’s head by toppling into a kind of unbalanced triangle above him with one foot stuck straight up in the air.

He opens his eyes and stares at her. She watches his brows go up, then down, then draw together, creating one long line of confusion.

“Stay very quiet,” she whispers—not unlike the first time she’d snuck him into the house. She pads across the room and opens her door just enough to squeeze out. Karen’s standing in the hall, so close Casey almost smacks into her before she can utter good morning.

“Oh, you are here!” Karen says. “Good.” She’s dressed in scrubs, but her feet are bare and her hair is already hanging loose around her shoulders, something that only happens after a shift. “I’ve been calling you all morning.”

“You have?” Casey says, pulling the door closed. “I … I thought you were working this morning?”

“I worked nights so I’d be around today. It’s the open house. Remember?”

“Open house?”

“Yes. That thing called high school that I force you to attend. You know, pick up your senior schedule, talk college applications, meet with your guidance counselor.”

Casey resists the urge to whack her palm against her forehead. She hasn’t exactly been keeping track of the calendar. “Yeah, yes.” She snaps her fingers. “Right. I’m just getting dressed now.”

“Hey, bestie!” Evan calls, appearing at Karen’s shoulder. He wears the widest smile she’s ever seen. It stretches his face until she’s unsure of whether it’s gotten stuck. “It’s open house day! That thing we do in the middle of summer because we have nothing better to do.”

Casey gives him a look. An are you okay? kind of look.

Karen glances between them. “You two get stranger every day.”

When she walks away, Casey yanks Evan into the room with her and closes the door. Red’s still sitting on the floor, hunched over in some kind of stretch.

Evan breezes by them both. “No call! No text! Even a letter by carrier pigeon would have been acceptable,” he proclaims dramatically, his tone completely different now that Karen’s gone. He flops down on Liddy’s favorite purple beanbag chair in the corner of the room, arms crossed. His entire face puckers into a grumpy wrinkle. “I fell asleep with my eyes open staring at my phone. I swear my home screen is burned into my corneas.”

“Good morning,” Red says to him, rubbing a hand over his face.

Evan reaches beneath him to free a stuffed heart-shaped pillow they won with Liddy at Shore Fest last year and chucks it hard at Red.

Red tilts his head just an inch and the pillow sails by him.

“Good morning my a—”

“Anyway,” Casey says loudly.

“No, not ‘anyway,’” Evan says. “You don’t get to disappear on me and then not let me know that you got back okay. I spent half the night wondering whether I was going to have to lie to Karen

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