“Or we can get him one of those training aids.” Kris smirks. “The bar contraption that slides around. But he’ll have to squat down to use it since they only come in children’s—”
Kris’s words end in a garbled cough as I pulse my hand at his mouth and fill it with holly.
He hacks and spits it into his lap. “This stuff is poisonous!”
“Well, don’t eat it.”
He tosses it at me and I flick it over the side of the sleigh.
Hex grins, a soft amusement, like he’s shocked we’rethis,irreverent teasing morons.
“I’d love to say you’ll eventually get used to their antics,” Iris says to him, “but it’s been more than a decade and I still find them both obnoxious.”
“Hey.” My eyes narrow in mock threat. “I’ll holly you too, just try me.”
“You have all known each other long?” Hex asks.
“Long enough that I’dalsolove to say that surely they’ll grow out of this phase, but they’ve both had the combined maturity level of a thirteen-year-old for the past eleven years.”
“So we’re twenty-four, at least,” Kris says.
Iris squints. “What?”
“Thirteen and eleven. Twenty-four. So we’reolderthan either of us—”
“That is not what I said.”
“Sure it was. A combined maturity level of thirteen for eleven years. Math.”
Iris cocks her head towards Hex and says, exasperated, “That guy got himself into Cambridge.”
“Cambridge?” Hex’s brows go up. “Really?”
Kris sobers. “Is that surprising?”
Bart guides the sleigh through a covered bridge, the clop of the reindeer hooves echoing off the aged wood. If he can hear our conversation over the noise of the sleigh, he doesn’t react.
“Not at all,” Hex says. “I had wondered which colleges your Holidays tended to prefer. You mentioned Yale too?”
“I’m at Cambridge with Kris.” Iris points at me. “Coal’s the only one who had his path predestined.”
Hex frowns.
I splay my hands. “My father shipped me off to his alma mater toreshape my imagefrom the various humiliations in what I now refer to as my errant youth.”
Kris snorts. “That would imply that that time of your life is done?”
“I have been scandal-free for quite a while, thank you. But that’s not the point: the point is that I had it coming when Dad nixed my original college plans. But where do you go?”
Hex’s eyes flit over me. I don’t see any pity, more a considering, narrow concern, like he knows I’m downplaying it for his benefit.
But then his face relaxes. “There’s a reformatory in northern Ohio where they filmedThe Shawshank Redemption.”
Iris, Kris, and I share a look. Then turn that look on Hex.
At our confusion, he says, like it should be obvious, “It’s one of the most haunted buildings in America.”
“And you—” I clear my throat. “Study there? Like, classes? At a… haunted reformatory?”
