Winter Break (Chasing Chase London #6)

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“Santa Baby”—Madonna

“Why is Mommy mad at you?” Lily asks me as we’re coloring in her princess coloring book on the way to the lake house. “Did you do something bad?”

“Yep.” It’s kind of pointless to lie to my sister at a time like this. She’s annoyingly perceptive.

“What did you do?” she asks, looking at me with wide eyes.

“I got drunk,” I whisper, secretly pleased that Mom will freak out that I told her. I’m already in the dog house—again—after Lindsey’s mom ratted me out for getting drunk in solidarity with Daria.

“What’s a drunk? ” she asks, far too interested for her own good.

“It’s when you drink a lot of alcohol and then you act stupid and loud.”

“That doesn’t sound like fun to me,” she says, trying to figure out if I’m lying.

“Well, it wasn’t that much fun, but my friends were doing it, so I did too.”

She seems satisfied by that answer. For a few minutes, she colors with her tongue wedged into the corner of her mouth. Then she starts back up. “Did Lindsey get a drunk? I like her. If she gave me a drunk, I would take it.”

“No, it’s not a drunk, it’s just drunk. Like, getting sick,” I explain, trying not to laugh. “Getting drunk.”

“Oh, well, was she getting drunk?”

“No, just me and Daria.”

“I like her too. She’s pretty.” Even six-year-olds know what’s important when it comes to being liked. “Was that boy getting drunk?”

“No, sweetie, just me and Daria.”

Lily and I are sitting together in the back of Aunt Diana’s minivan, since I’ve had about enough of Mom. She totally flipped out when Lindsey’s mom called and told her about my midnight raid on her liquor cabinet and subsequent ‘abhorrent behavior.’ I think it’s all a bit of a joke, but Mom isn’t laughing. She even insisted on driving me to and from work yesterday, since I’m apparently not responsible enough to borrow her car now. I considered pointing out that I’ve never d anything irresponsible with the car, but it would’ve been a waste of breath.

So, I chose to ride with my aunt to her lake house, where we’ll be spending a week of the holiday break. And since Lily still thinks I’m cool despite Mom’s opinion, she wanted to ride with me. It’s actually kind of fun hanging out with her, even if her head is in a bizarre princess realm most of the time. I used to hang out with her a lot more, but this year I’ve had so much going on that I haven’t spent much time with her.

“Is that boy your boyfriend?” she asks as she studiously fills in a castle with a purple crayon.

I didn’t think I had to worry about Chase while I was g, but here he is, popping up all over again. “No, he’s Lindsey’s boyfriend,” I tell my sister.

She thinks about this for a minute, concentrating on filing the castle flags—and the space around them—with gold. “You’re not very nice to him,” she says. “I bet Lindsey is nice to him.”

What the hell? Now even my little sister is on Lindsey’s side.

I think about what she said while I color a giant frog green, staying inside the lines like I always do. Maybe I wasn’t being very nice. I could have graciously accepted his gift. It just felt… I don’t know. Weird. Like I’m his mistress or something. But maybe he did just see something that reminded him of me. It’s kind of sweet, in a Chase London way. And I’m sure he doesn’t really think about my when he buys something, since he has like endless amounts of it.

I don’t know why I thought he was making fun of me. He was just being Chase. Thinking about it now, it seems like I really was acting crazy. Why would he make fun of me like that? Then again, why would he ask why I wasn’t his girlfriend? Isn’t that pretty obvious? I mean, he said he’d never break up with Lindsey, and she would never ever break up with him. She always says she’s incomplete without him, that she needs him to make her whole.

“I bet Lindsey is nice to him,” I say after a while.

“That’s good,” Lily says, scrubbing the end of her pink crayon stub up the horse’s front legs. “You should be nice to him too. He’s nice.”

“How do you know?” I ask, stealing of her crayons.

“Because I talked to him.”

“What? When?” I ask, startled at this news.

“When you made him fall down. His hand was bleeding, so I brought him a Band-Aid. He took it, even though it had princesses and he’s a boy. He said it was even better than the s he had when he was a kid. His only had robots.” She wrinkles her nose at the thought of robots. My sister is all girl.

“Does Mom know?” I ask after a while. I wonder what she’d think of Lily doctoring a stranger in our driveway. I also feel bad that I hurt Chase. He looked so startled falling backwards that I was busy trying not to laugh, not thinking about if he got scraped up on the plant pots.

I am officially a bitch.

“Mom is nice to him too,” Lily says. “And I’m nice.”

“You are nice,” I say, giving her a little hug.

She turns to the next page and selects a purple crayon. “Do you have a boyfriend?”

“Yes, actually, I do.” I realize I sound a little too proud of that fact, considering I’m talking to a kid who still thinks boys have cooties.

“I had a boyfriend last year,” she says. “But not this year.”

“You had a boyfriend?”

My six-year-old sister had a boyfriend before me. Lovely.

“His name was Emmett. He smelled like potatoes.”

“Really?” I ask, trying not to laugh. Maybe I’m not upset about her having a boyfriend first after all. “And what happened to Emmett?”

“He threw wood chips at me and wouldn’t let me play under the slide with the boys.”

That must be the Kindergarten version of, he embarrassed me in front of my friends and wouldn’t let me talk to other guys .

“I’m sorry,” I say. “Boys suck.”

“Mom says not to say that,” she reminds me. “But we can say boys stink.”

“Like potatoes,” I say, and then we’re both giggling, and I know she’s on my side after all.

*

Christmas at Firefly Lake is always fun—or it was.

Dad, Diana, and their brother were left the lakefront property with the lake house on it when my grandparents passed away, and instead of selling it and divvying up the proceeds, they decided to keep it the way it was when they were growing up. The big wooden house has a ton of windows with a great view of the sunset over the water and a huge wraparound deck where the dads would always smoke meat and do dad stuff. Down at the shore, there’s enough beach to hang out on when the weather is nice. We never came in the summer, since it’s a sauna here, and back home we could just pack up and drive a few hours to the ocean.

That is, until this summer, during which a certain party occurred that will remain buried in the depths of my memory and never thought of again.

This year, as soon as we pull up, I know it’s a mistake to come back here. It was thing to let Meghan drag me to a beach party across the lake. First off, I could get drunk. Second, the party was at some else’s house, so we only came back here to sleep. And since I was drunk, I barely thought about Dad. It was nothing like this, where as soon as all the relatives gather, it’s clear that Dad left a gaping chasm right down the center of the family, so big I’m surprised some doesn’t plummet to their death in it. Especially since every seems steadfastly determined to pretend it isn’t there, like they’re all from Connecticut and not just Mom and us.

I escape as soon as I can but stop to eavesdrop on the stairs when I hear my name. I hold my breath and listen to Mom telling the relatives that I’m “out of control” and she doesn’t know what to do with me. Even though she can’t see me, I roll my eyes before heading upstairs to join Meghan, who left me to snap green beans with Aunt Diana like a traitor.

I flop down on her bed. “What is my mom’s deal?” I say with a groan. “You’d think I was snorting cocaine off toilet seats and hooking for my on the side. I’m not out of control at all.”

“Wow, that’s a far cry from not being able to say the word ‘fingering’,” she says, then shakes her head in mock regret. “They grow up so fast.”

“I’m serious,” I insist. “I’m the tamest of all my friends, and n of them ever get in trouble. I never do anything bad.”

“Maybe you should try it, my dude.”

“She’d probably put an ankle monitor on me,” I grumble. “I’m seriously the best kid, Meghan. I go along with my friends, but I’m like, the uptight in the group. But somehow I’m the who gets punished for drinking a fourth of what they drink, or sleeping fully clothed on a couch with a boy when every of them is off hooking up and never getting grounded for a day. Where’s the justice?”

“Have you talked to her?” Meghan asks, sinking onto the bed with her foot folder under her. “She’s probably just worried about you. Parents kinda do that, you know.”

I glower at her for a second. “Whose side are you on?”

She shrugs. “I’m just saying.”

“You don’t understand,” I say with a sigh. “Your parents are the coolest people on earth. Lindsey’s right. I just don’t know how to deal with my parents. Her parents worship the ground she walks on, and she’s just as bad as the rest of them when it comes to partying.”

“You expect the Darlings to be your example?”

“What’s wrong with the Darlings?” I ask, sitting up.

“I told you, they’re, like, old my bluebloods,” she says. “They’re probably inbred. If you believe the rumors, their family has been into all kinds of shit through the generations, and they always get away with it because they’re royalty in this town.”

“Maybe her family,” I say, a chill creeping over me when I think about her dad. “But Lindsey’s different. She’s really nice. You’d like her if you met.”

Meghan snorts and shakes her head, leaning over to pull a pouch of tobacco from her knitted bag. “Yeah, right. You see me sipping Dom Perignon out of a crystal goblet and gossiping with the ladies who lunch? They’d pick me apart and leave nothing but bs, which they’d toss to their little dogs and go on talking about who’s banging the gardener this week like nothing happened.”

“Come on, it’s not like that,” I insist, feeling an instinctive need to defend Lindsey. “At least… She’s not.”

Meghan packs tobacco into a rolling paper with her thumbs. “If you say so. I guess I can see the appeal for you.”

I bristle, scowling at her. “What does that mean?”

“Nothing bad,” she assures me. “You’re just… You know. More uptight and concerned with what the neighbors will think and all that.”

“You think I’m like my mother?” I ask indignantly.

I always looked up to Meghan. We never fight. I can’t believe she sees me like that. I’m not friends with Lindsey to gain social status, and I don’t try to fit in just because she’ll think badly of me. At least not in the way Meghan’s implying. I don’t want to lose her friendship. That’s different.

“Nah, dude,” Meghan says, finishing rolling her cigarette. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to piss you off. I guess I did get lucky. My parents let me go to parties, and they’d always come get me if I needed a ride, no questions asked. They just didn’t want me to drive if I’d had even a drop of alcohol or smoked weed, but they didn’t care if I did those things. They said that’s how kids learn. And they put me on birth control the second I got a boyfriend, so I didn’t have to awkwardly ask when I was ready to have sex and get a big talk.”

“God, I have the lamest mother ever. Why couldn’t Dad have married a hippie like your mom?”

“A hippie?” Meghan asks, heading for the sliding glass door that exits onto the tiny private balcony where she can smoke. “You mean a shrink?”

I shudder before standing to follow. “Never mind. My mom’s perfect.”