Someone.
She reached out, trying to find him.Sully.
Her hand swept air. Her body rocked forward, and her eyes snapped open.Shit!She rolled back just in time to stop from tumbling off the couch. Alanna lifted her head from the throw pillow and looked around in confusion.
Where the hell was she? Her gaze fell on a bronze floor lamp, its chord oddly secured to the ground with black electrical tape, then on a bright red bookshelf filled with model airplanes.
Oh. Right.She’d canceled her Uber last night in favor of demolishing a bottle of wine with Tess while pouring out her sorrows. Just to check that she hadn’t imagined the whole thing, Alanna glanced down at herself. She wore a white tank top plastered with a giraffe’s face above the wordsSleepy Giraffe. The tank rode high, revealing her midriff, as it had possibly been purchased from the children’s section of a clothing store. Matching giraffe-print sleep shorts completed the look.
Yep, last night hadn’t been a dream.
The outfit wasn’t exactly her usual look, but the pajamas had been dry, and Alanna wasn’t one to look a gift giraffe in the mouth. Grabbing her phone from the coffee table next to the defeated bottle of wine, she was relieved to see a sliver of battery remaining. Pulling up her messenger app, she quickly messaged her mother.
She’d been careless to leave her mom home alone all night.
Sorry I didn’t come home last night. I’m fine.She texted her mother.I’ll be home soon. R U OK?
What if the poor woman was having another flare-up with her hands? Maybe she hadn’t been able to get down the stairs or make breakfast for herself.
Alanna’s phone pinged almost immediately with a response.
I’m fine. Hands feel good. Refilled all the bird feeders. How was your night? [smiley face emoji, eggplant emoji]?
Alanna was appalled. How dare her mother know what the eggplant emoji meant! Honestly, it was heartbreaking how quickly the older generation was getting corrupted these days.
She bit the inside of her cheek, struggling to respond to her mother. How to tell your mom that the guy you’ve been swooning over for the past weeks has been secretly holding your cat prisoner? Alanna didn’t get the chance to make a decision. She sniffed the air and the hairs on the back of her neck rose.
Smoke.Something was burning in the kitchen.
That something, as it turned out, was their breakfast. In the kitchen, Tess stood in front of the stove and unhappily watched a column of black smoke rise from a pan. Alanna immediately took over. Not-so-gently bumping the smaller woman aside, she grabbed the pan filled with an unidentifiable black mass and shoved it in the sink. With her other hand, she slapped on the faucet. Water cascaded into the pan just as the smoke alarm started to wail.
It took a few minutes of Tess frantically waving a grocery store coupon weekly under the alarm for it to finally shut off. After the sound abated, Tess dropped into a kitchen chair, her bun of auburn hair hanging off the side of her head, and her shoulders slumped in defeat.
Alanna glanced at the now-carbonized black mass practically melted into the pan.
“And what were we trying to make?”
Tess smoothed her unicorn pajama top. “Scrambled eggs,” she muttered.
“Let me guess, you grew up in a ridiculously stable household. Two parents who loved each other? White picket fence?”
“Our fence was brown.”
“Yup.” Alanna strolled to Tess’s pantry and started to catalog. “The well-adjusted kids never know how to cook. Now, us single-parent kids, we’re the best cooks in the world. You give us a can of beans, an almost-empty jar of peanut butter, and three-day-old Chinese takeout, and we’ll make a feast.”
Alanna pulled a box of pancake mix from the pantry. After opening a few cabinets, she found a mixing bowl that would do the trick.
“Jay always did the cooking,” Tess admitted. Then, after a pause, added, “His parents were divorced.”
“Exactly.” Without measuring, Alanna shook the powdered mix into a bowl, cracked an egg, then poured a bit of milk into the mix. Tess didn’t seem to own a whisk, but no matter. A fork would suffice. On the countertop, a tablet in a stand broadcast the local news.
“And how many students did the charter school actually have?” a curious anchorwoman asked. A familiar, smug face filled the screen.
“As far as I could verify, Polaris Academy only has 24 students enrolled,” Rico Torres answered.
“But they’ve been receiving state funding for 160 enrolled students,” the anchor replied, obviously teeing up Rico.
The reporter flashed his stupidly handsome smile. “Seems this charter school flunked basic math. Let’s hope they offer business law 101, because the state attorney general just announced—”
