The Checklist by Addie Woolridge (color ebook reader TXT) 📗

“No, I don’t have to admit it.”

“Come on—” She elbowed Dylan’s side.

“It wasn’t his finest hour. Don’t repeat that.”

“Besides, I figure once Tim finds out about it, Marissa is doomed anyway, so I may as well give her a like before Charlie has to march her out the door.”

“Tim wouldn’t really sic Charlie on her, would he?” Dylan asked, hoping for something better than she expected. Deep raised a perfectly manicured eyebrow but didn’t answer.

CHAPTER NINE

Dylan woke up with a start and glanced around her room, that familiar disoriented sensation creeping over her. Trying to get a grip on her surroundings, she stopped to listen to the sound of absolutely nothing. It felt wrong.

Rolling over, she squinted at the clock, its little red numbers blinking 8:14 a.m. That was about the time she usually woke up when an alarm wasn’t involved. Rubbing her face, she sat up, still marveling at the silence. Her heart rate slowed to a normal pace. It was the Saturday after the world’s longest Friday.

Gingerly setting one foot on the floor, Dylan noticed her door was cracked open. Someone had taken Milo with them. She swung her other leg onto the floor, heaved herself out of bed, and shuffled down the first flight of stairs before stopping to peek into Neale’s bedroom. It wasn’t like Neale made her bed, but as far as Dylan could tell, the sheets were in the same rumpled state as they had been in the day before, implying that Neale had crashed at a friend’s home.

When she’d padded down the second set of stairs, Dylan found the kitchen as empty as Neale’s room. She could tell her mom had been there, because she’d left half a pot of coffee in the coffee maker. This was a Bernice hallmark. Make one massive pot of coffee and drink it throughout the day. Dylan found stale coffee gross, so she gently pressed her hand to the glass. The carafe was still warm. Safe to assume this was not yesterday’s coffee. Her mother had left the house.

“Am I alone?” Dylan asked the coffee maker. It was too good to be true. The odds that anyone was ever alone in the Delacroix household were like the odds of winning the Powerball. Just shy of impossible, and just regular enough to make you believe it could happen.

Daring to hope, Dylan crept toward her father’s study. If she wasn’t alone, she certainly didn’t want anyone knowing she was up, or they would take away the blessed silence. Poking her head around the door, she found a very empty and oddly tidy room. The giddy sensation of being alone kicked in almost instantaneously. Part of her wanted to run upstairs, put on a towel, get some ice cream, and watch TV, because there was absolutely no one to see her do it. Another part of her wanted to make a new pot of coffee and read a very large book. As she stood in the hallway, Dylan realized that either of these activities required her to sit on the furniture. The dust and dog hair alone were enough to put her dreams of towels and tomes on hold. Far from discouraged, she found her joy turning to unmitigated glee. This was her shot to engage in her favorite de-stressor. Cleaning and dance hits of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Dylan hustled back to the kitchen, dumped out Bernice’s coffee, and set on a fresh pot before catching sight of herself in the kitchen window.

“Ew.” She cringed at the sight of her pores. Blaming Jared, she ran up to the bathroom to find a pore strip to suction to her nose. Then she skipped back down to the living room, where she flipped through the family’s dated catalog of CDs until she found what she was looking for. Janet Jackson’s self-titled masterpiece, janet. Shaking the tension out of her shoulders, Dylan dance-walked to the kitchen, poured herself a cup of coffee, then grabbed a dust rag and some Endust with the other hand. After bumping the cupboard closed with her hip, she got started in the living room, crowing along with Ms. Jackson.

After seventy-five minutes and twenty-three seconds, Dylan had managed to successfully scrub the living room and work up a good sweat. Stopping only to tear the pore strip off and confirm that her skin was suffering under the stress of Technocore, she hit rewind on her favorite song, “If.” Dylan was about to start on the floorboards in the hallway when the doorbell rang.

“Neale!” Dylan shouted over the music, silently cursing her sister for forgetting the door code. When she’d pushed herself off all fours, she ambled toward the door, admiring the dust and grime that had situated itself on her college sweatshirt. Yanking open the heavy door, Dylan threw a hand on her hip and glared . . . at the opposite of her sister.

“Hi. Am I interrupting?” Mike asked, looking up from their ancient door mat. Rounding his shoulders forward, he slid his hands into the pockets of his dark jeans, adding, “Sorry. I can come back.”

“Oh no. I thought you were Neale. You’re not interrupting.” Dylan casually repositioned herself behind the door, on the off chance that he hadn’t noticed the layer of dirt crusted onto her pink running shorts.

In a moment of horror, she realized that the dirt wasn’t her most pressing problem. Her father had left the outside speakers on again, so the entire neighborhood had been listening to Ms. Jackson’s sexy alto for nearly two hours. She felt heat creep up her neck and flood her face, which she was pretty sure matched the Pepto-Bismol color of her shorts despite the melanin in her skin. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize that the outside speakers were on. I’ll turn it off right now. Please tell Linda and Patricia it was not intentional.”

“I think they actually prefer