On the bottom she’d added,Aggie is welcome!Lorna peered at her dog, who had trotted back to see if the envelope might be bearing treats. “I guess your name really is Aggie now,” she said.
Aggie’s butt swished back and forth in her tailless version of a wag. “Hey, Bean... didn’t you say Mrs. Foster had a cat?” Lorna called into the kitchen.
“Yes. His name is Garfield.”
Of course. “Let me guess—he’s fat, orange, and stupid.”
Bean was startled enough to come back into the living area. “Garfield isn’t stupid. He and Aggie are friends.”
“Friends! How do you know that?”
“Because sometimes Miss Liz brings Garfield to the backyard, and they play.”
“No way.” Lorna thought Aggie hated cats. She barked at them on their walks. Then again, she barked at bushes and bicycles lying in yards and kids bouncing basketballs.
Bean nodded. “They’re best friends. Even Miss Liz thinks so. Diego’s my best friend. But he’s moving to California.”
“That sucks.” Lorna opened her pantry door. “When?”
“I don’t know. My dad says he can come for a sleepover before he moves. And that maybe we can go visit him in California.”
“California is not all it’s cracked up to be,” Lorna said. She didn’t have any cookies or cereal bars, but she spotted a box of brownie mix from the time she was going to bring brownies to the office for Deb’s birthday. But then she’d found out the team was treating Deb to lunch. Without her.
“Have you been there?” Bean asked. “Diego said you can see the ocean from California.”
“Yes, I’ve been there, and you can definitely see the ocean from California.” One of the treatment centers Kristen flamed out of was in California, and Lorna and her mom had spent a week searching for her in downtown Los Angeles. “Want to make brownies?”
Bean gasped. “Canwe?”
She slapped the box down on the bar so he could see it. “We can.” She sent Bean to leave a note on his door so his father would know where he was, and while he was gone, she found one apron for him and one large dish towel. When he returned, she tied the apron around his chest and then tucked the dish towel in the neck of her blouse and into her pants, effectively covering her front.
She set Bean up with a bowl and had him turn on the ovento preheat, which, he informed her, he did at home all the time. As she gathered the ingredients, Bean began to talk. He told her how Diego had an ovenjust for pizzaon his porch and he also had a pool. He informed her he’d spent the night once at Diego’s birthday party and Trey Wheeler had vomited into the bushes. “It was yellow,” he said.
“Thanks for the details,” Lorna said.
He talked about all the badges he had, which included skating, coin collecting, first aid, camping, astronomy, weather, rocks, art, canoeing, and some others he couldn’t remember and not necessarily in that order. And then he listed all the badges he was eager to get, including inventing, cooking, baking, fishing, fire starting, helping, and Texas lore. Diego didn’t have as many badges as he did, but he was working on them, and Bean shared his badges with Diego. Lorna failed to understand how that could possibly work, but okay. Bean said he was going to get a blue vest like the other Rangers and put his badges on it.
When they had the ingredients in a bowl, he paused in his running monologue and looked at Lorna as she greased a pan for the brownies. “Do you have a best friend?”
He might as well have shot that question at her from a cannon, because it hit her just as hard. People needed to warn her before they asked personal questions. At least give her time to suit up in her personal armor. “Well... not right now.”
“Why not?” he asked, still stirring.
She put down the pan and studied the kid. She didn’t know how to describe the agony of having a sister as a best friend, only to have her continually lie and let you down. Or explain how, when you had the good luck to find a new best friend, you could screw it up royally. She decided to stick to the basics. “It’s hard for me to make friends.”
“Why?”
Oh, because she was afraid of trusting people. And she was afraid of what they might think if they knew about Kristen. She was afraid of so many things, really. Being used. Being lied to. Being tricked. Being generally unlikable. And continuing to grow more awkward the longer she lived. “I’m kind of weird,” Lorna admitted.
“Like when you said Garfield was stupid?” Bean asked helpfully.
“Exactly.” She paused. “Seriously, I thought everyone knew that orange cats are stupid.”
Bean didn’t look convinced. “Dad says you never know how smart or dumb someone is just by looking at them.”
Well, good for Seth and his ability to be nonjudgmental. Except when it came to sugar, obviously. “The bottom line is that I find it really hard to trust people.” She shrugged.
“What doestrustmean?”
