Another sister pulled outDecorations, leaving just Katie and her parents to draw, and if he remembered correctly, that meant there was one for entertainment and one for dinner remaining. And, of course, she drew out the paper that readDinner. And, of course, everyone groaned.
He watched Katie as she narrowed her eyes at the little strip of paper like she was challenging it. Then, when her dad said, “You’ve got five minutes to discuss with your team, and then we’ll start the timer. Go!” Katie grabbed hold of his hand and pulled him to a small room off the kitchen with a washer and dryer.
She closed the door and met his eyes with her very fierce ones. She was standing close in the small space, so he got a good look at those eyes. They were blue at the outer rim with gold around the pupil, and her eyes were framed by dark eyelashes. As far as eyes went, they were rather mesmerizing. He could imagine himself getting very easily pulled in by those eyes.But he wasn’t going to be in Colorado long enough for that to happen.
Besides, he didn’t want to be with someone who knew him as who he used to be. It hadn’t been easy for him to become who he was now, and he expected it was just as difficult for anyone who knew him back then to think of him any differently.
“Okay, here’s the deal,” she said. “We have a budget and thirty minutes to shop for food and get back here to meet the other team. They’ll take the food we bought and we take theirs. Then we each have thirty minutes to make something out of those ingredients. The team who makes the best meal wins.”
“Oof. That doesn’t sound easy.”
“It’s not. But wehaveto win this,” she said. “It’s really important.”
He didn’t know if she was always this competitive, but he liked it. He found himself nodding and getting pumped up for the challenge. “So what’s the best strategy?”
“We buy about ten items for them and they buy ten for us. The trick is to buy foods that aren’t gross. Unlike the year when Julianne’s team bought anchovies, wasabi peas, sprouted wheat cinnamon raisin bread, and a cheese that smelled like feet, and Becca’s team made grilled cheese out of it. Because we are all going to eat what the other team makes, so we want it edible. But we also want to win, so we want to pick things that don’t naturally go well together.”
A smile was spreading across his face as he imagined it. They only had thirty minutes, so they’d have to race through the grocery store, but he was sure they’d be able to pick some things that would give the other team the bigger challenge. “This is going to be fun.”
“Thirty seconds,” they heard Mr. Allred’s muffled voice call out from the kitchen.
Katie side-eyed him. “Okay, you’re looking a little too excited right now. You aren’t going to start throwing any punches, are you?”
He winked. “Nah. I save that for high school dances.”
Once Mr. Allred called out that the competition had begun, he and Katie raced outside and they both got into her car. She said it had been too long since he had practiced driving on snow-packed roads— even though he’d driven to the Allred’s house fine— and probably didn’t remember where the grocery store was. For the record: he did. But he would’ve been fine letting her drive if she’d simply said she wanted to.
The seven-minute drive to the grocery store was great because they spent the time brainstorming which items to get. They decided on hot dogs (after debating whether they should be considered “gross,” and he thought about how they would affect his hockey performance), quinoa, spaghetti noodles, root beer, creamed corn, a can of cranberry sauce, radishes, and Greek yogurt.
Once they got there, they raced through the store to grab everything while he added up the prices on his phone. They still had a few dollars left after grabbing the final item and since they hadn’t made it to ten items yet, they threw in some pretzels and gummy worms. The checkout line ate five precious minutes, but they managed to hop into the car with a full eight minutes left.
The drive back to the Allred’s house was less great. No brainstorming was needed since they wouldn’t know what foods they had to work with until they returned, so the awkwardness of realizing he was in a room with people who had experienced the high school version of himself returned.
And for some reason, Connor wanted to win Katie over. Why? He wasn’t sure. He knew it wasn’t because she would be videoing him, and it wasn’t because he normally had a need to win people over. But it was there, and he decided that the onlyway to get past it was to address the elephant in the room— the school dance.
“Can I explain about the dance?”
“Connor, you don’t need to explain about the dance.”
“I know. But can I anyway?” He wasn’t the same person that he was in high school, and he was pretty sure that she was still seeing him as that guy. She nodded, and he suddenly wished he would’ve thought through what, exactly, he wanted to share. But since he hadn’t, he just started talking and hoped for the best.
“My parents’ marriage started going downhill my sophomore year of high school, and I really struggled with it. But not as much as I did at the beginning of my junior year when my dad left. Just before he did, he pulled me and my sister aside and said that his leaving didn’t have anything to do with us and that he still wanted to see us all the time. Typical divorce stuff, I guess. But it didn’t take long before he was off, living his best life, forgetting about us completely. I didn’t handle that so well and kind of became a hotheaded idiot.”
That was an understatement. He’d been so bitter and angry about not only not having his dad around, but also seeing what it was doing to his mom. He was hurting and showed it by acting out a lot, catching so many people in the crossfire.
Why was he telling this to Katie? The fact that there were circumstances that led to the state of mind he was in at the time didn’t change the fact that he did what he did. Maybe he was telling her so that he was more than the memory of a kid who made bad choices. So she got that there was more to him. And for some reason, he really wanted her to see the real him.
Katie kept her eyes on the road, but she nodded slightly, and he could tell that she was paying very close attention to his words so he continued. “I was in a club hockey league with other high school players in our county. Trav Donovan was in the same league, but we were on different teams. We were both captainsand didn’t like each other much. But I especially didn’t like him when he asked my little sister, Laura, to the Christmas dance.”
Katie glanced at him for a second before her eyes were back on the road. “The fight started with the two of you?”
“Yep. He came over and made a hurtful, if not clever or unique, comment about how he’d heard that my mom didn’t have a big, strong man at the house anymore and asked if he needed to step in. Given the state I was in at the time, that alone probably would’ve been enough to provoke a fight with me. But then he said something crude about what he was going to show my sister later that night.
“Not that it was any excuse— there are plenty of kids who experience the same things with their parents that I did, and then have someone talk crap about their mom or sister, but theydon’tget their school’s dance privileges taken away for four months.
“And I don’t know if he was just trying to bait me or not. In his defense, I was easy to bait back then. So, I threw the first punch. Everyone kind of assumed that we were fighting as captains of two different hockey teams, so anyone at the dance who was also on one of our teams joined in and turned it into an all-out brawl.”
“That was why so many people joined in so quickly?”
