“Silvia.” My father motions for my mother, completely ignoring me. “Silvia, I need you to go inside and tell Reginald that Penelope is sick. We’ll go ahead and have dinner. He’ll be disappointed to miss out on the mock interview, but at least his dinner won’t be spoiled.”
“Hey, what if we pull a Freaky Friday and have Phoebe pretend to be me?” I ask. “Then your old pal Reginald won’t be disappointed.”
“He’s already met your sister,” my mother snips. “She had the decency to wear the dress she picked out and not get drunk with her boyfriend.”
“Smith’s here? I’ll kill him,” my father growls. “The only thing worse than that boy is his damn hippie-dippie parents.”
“He’s puked all over the tree house,” my mother says. “We’ll have to have the place condemned before we bulldoze it to the ground.” She grabs my hood and pulls me toward the back door. “When we get inside, I want you to go directly to your bedroom. Do you understand? The last thing we need is for Reginald to see you like this and ruin any chance you have to make it into Princeton.”
The ground starts to spin beneath my legs. I can’t tell if I’m walking or floating. My girl Vermouth is taking turns between beating on my head like a bongo and whacking my belly like a pi?ata. “But I don’t want to go to Princeton, Mom.”
“You don’t know what you want, Penelope.”
She opens the door. A rush of Thanksgiving scents torpedoes my sense of smell, and a wave of nausea hits me like a brick to the face. My mouth turns on the waterworks, which means it’s only a matter of seconds before my girl Vermouth makes her comeback.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” I grumble. “Mom.”
“Oh, Reginald.” My mother jerks my hood like a puppeteer trying to stand a dummy to attention. “Reginald, I’m so sorry for the delay.”
“Ah, this must be the famous Penelope.” The man my mother called Reginald has one of those big, booming voices that would make a sports announcer jealous. “It’s great to meet you. How are you?”
“Drunk.” I turn my head just in time to miss covering Reginald Yates’s shoes with vomit. My mother’s caftan is less fortunate.
The last thing I remember before falling asleep is Phoebe gently keeping my hair out of my face while I dry heaved over the toilet. God, it would be so easy to hate Phoebe if she wasn’t such a damn good sister. It’s not her fault that she’s naturally perfect. It’s even less her fault that she got saddled with a twin who somehow ended up with all the worst traits in the family gene pool.
We don’t have that twin thing where we can read each other’s thoughts or anything, but Phoebe does know how to comfort me when nobody else in our family can.
“Everything will work out, Pen,” Phoebe whispers as I drift to sleep. “Dad’s friends with Mr. Yates. This will all get swept under the rug and forgotten in a few days. It always does.”
She’s right. If there’s one thing my family does consistently well, it’s pretending that everything is OK. Give it a few days, and things will be back to business as usual. Because Bankses are always business first and family second.
Chapter 6
The van is finally silent, minus the white noise of the rain drizzling on top of the van and Aidan’s snoring. Harriet and Ozzie have migrated to the back seat and are curled up next to him, which is kind of adorable if you don’t think about the fact that a semibuzzed complete stranger is spooning our dogs.
“I’m working on my review for Barkie’s,” I say. “Do you think I should take a picture of Aidan to include in it?”
“Not unless you want to be personally banned from their store.”
“Good point.” I slip my phone into my purse.
Smith drums his fingers on the steering wheel. “Now what do we do?”
“What do you mean, What do we do?”
“I mean now that Aidan’s asleep and traffic isn’t moving, what do we do?”
“Why do we need to do anything?”
“Because this.” He motions to me and then him. “It’s weird. Isn’t it? I mean, I never come home. Never. And the one time I do, you’re here. Don’t you think that means something?”
I don’t like where this is going. I just got Smith refiled in my system, and now here he goes trying to muck it all up again. “Uh. I don’t know. I think it means we both use Dryver because it’s cheap, and we both like to travel with our dogs. It’s a coincidence. That’s it.”