“Hmm,” Zeke said, like she’d asked him a philosophical question.
“Did you guys do a blood oath or something?” my mom asked, like she’d heard about this from Phil Donahue.
“No!” I said, too loud. “God, Mom, we didn’t do any kind of blood oath.”
“It’s unsanitary,” my mom offered very gently.
“I sliced my finger cutting up some apples for a healthy snack,” I finally told her. Zeke nodded, though he looked a little pained, like he wished he’d thought of that.
“And this,” Zeke said, holding up his finger for my mom to inspect, “was, like, a previous accident. I came here today wearing this Band-Aid.”
“Oh,” my mom said, “okay, then.” She was smiling like, what did it really matter? She’d already seen us making out. She knew something was going on. “Boys!” she shouted to my brothers, which made Zeke flinch. And they rambled into the room. I don’t think they had realized that Zeke was in the house yet. It wasn’t until we were all seated, eating our pizza, and my mom asked Zeke a question that my brothers all looked up in wonder at this strange name, this strange boy in our house. Then they went back to wolfing down pizza.
“So,” my mom asked Zeke. “What brings you to Coalfield?”
“Well,” Zeke began, looking at me as if we’d rehearsed an answer earlier today, “we’re here just, like, visiting my grandmother. My mom grew up in Coalfield.”
“Oh, really?” my mom replied, getting somewhere. “What’s her name?”
“Cydney,” Zeke replied. “Cydney Hudson when she lived in Coalfield.”
“Oh!” my mom shouted, her eyes so big. “I know Cydney! She was a few years behind me in school. She was, what’s the word, like some kind of kid genius.”
“A prodigy?” Zeke offered.
“Exactly. A musical prodigy.”
“That’s right,” Zeke said. “Or, I mean, that’s what my mom tells me.” He turned to me and just said, “Violin.”
“She got this fancy scholarship to Juilliard, I remember,” my mom continued. “I haven’t seen her since.”
“That’s her,” Zeke replied.
“Is she famous?” my mom asked him, seeming a little starstruck. “I mean, in classical music circles?”
“No,” Zeke said. “I don’t think so.”
“Oh,” my mom said, looking so disappointed. “It was such a big deal when she got that scholarship. I remember the paper wrote a big article about it. And she was a prodigy. I haven’t thought of her a lot, but when I did, I figured she was in New York, playing concerts for, like, the prime minister of Japan or something.”
“Well, no,” Zeke said, taking his mother’s artistic failures very well, I have to say. “My mom said everyone at Juilliard was a prodigy. She got a job at the Memphis Symphony Orchestra and then she met my dad and they got married and, I guess, I mean, you know, she had me.”
“Well . . . that’s great,” my mom said. “Tell her that Carrie Neal says hello.”
“Are you guys boyfriend and girlfriend?” Andrew interrupted, pointing the tip of his slice of pizza at Zeke in a way that only my brothers could make look threatening.
“No!” I interjected, reaching my hand out ineffectually toward Zeke, like we’d stopped short in the car and I was protecting him.
“No?” my mom asked, looking a little amused. “Is that right?”
“Well,” Zeke said, looking down at his empty plate, “I mean, it’s complicated, right?”
I wanted him to shut up, not to give my brothers anything that they could use against me, but he kept going. “I’m just here for the summer, so that’s . . . you know, a temporary . . . kind of a nonpermanent situation.”
“Nonpermanent does not sound encouraging,” my mother offered.
“We’re friends,” I finally said. “We’re FRIENDS.”
“Good friends,” Zeke offered, and I nodded to him like, Yeah, duh, but also like, Shut up, my brothers will try to ruin me.
“Well, I for one think it’s great that Frankie has found such a good friend for the summer.”
“Frankie has no friends,” Brian told Zeke, like maybe he was stupid and didn’t understand how weird I was.
“Well,” Zeke said, now reaching across the table for another slice of pizza, “I feel, like, honored, then,” and I blushed so hard that the triplets all made the same satisfied expression, their job done, before they went back to destroying the rest of the pizza.