Settling the Score

Chapter Twenty-Five

Remembering kissing Rosie was way worse than daydreaming about the fantasy.

My tongue swiped across my bottom lip, recalling how it'd tingled for hours after the whole surprise lip locking incident in the locker room. That's the thing about memories: once you've lived it, felt the cushion of soft thighs between your own, indulgent hands balled into your shirt and slender fingers grazing your waist, and soft and pillowy lips that tasted like bubble-gum, well, let's just say it made it hard to focus on the present.

Mae had assigned me (and by extension Izzy) to pick up Nick from his school and to babysit him for the evening. One minute, I was urging Izzy to speed up so we wouldn't be late for practice, and the next, I was lost in thought, doodling in my notebook with a magic marker that my aunt had bought me, wishing the drive would go on forever.

The wind from the truck's open windows and the cold ice cream cup between my legs did nothing to help the intense bordering on hyperthermic blaze in my chest that made me feel like I was in a blast furnace instead of Eduardo's rusty old pickup truck.

I failed to tie my shoelaces for the third time in a row. Nick made my attention span worse by laughing every time the knot came loose. Each failure made ice-cream droop from his face and onto his clothes and the seat. So, now Eduardo's truck smelled like McDonalds and vanilla ice-cream.

Izzy pulled into the school car lot while I propped my leg up on the dusty dashboard. The sudden and harsh, squeaky breaking made me tug on the end of my shoelaces, so they became loose for the fourth time.

Nick snickered and shouldered the door to get it open from the inside. I followed him out, first grabbing a squashed tissue box on the dash, and tossed it at him so he could clean himself up.

"Come on, slowpokes!" Izzy hollered, leaping with an astonishingly high skip across the school's car lot, headed towards the field at the rear of the building.

We couldn't move any faster. Nick's short legs couldn't match my pace. His box of a backpack didn't help either.

Nick tugged on my hand and said, "We can't! Kate's breathing weirdly."

"That's called wheezing, Nick," Izzy informed him, giving me a brief judgmental stare over her shoulder. She spun around, so she walked backwards and pointed at me. "That's what happens when you don't eat your vegetables."

Nick played along by widening his eyes and asking, "Is Katie going to die?"

"It's a real possibility," Izzy said while inspecting me. "You good there, champ?"

"My lack of stamina is not the reason we're late," I said, sucking in a deep breath, because no, I wasn't good. "Also, I'm not going to die. Stop freaking him out. We're so late."

"Don't blame the driver," Izzy said. "Beggars can't be choosers and all that."

"You were dropping Eduardo off at physiotherapy anyway," I said.