“I’ll go get him. You assholes finish your fucking Halloween costumes and stop dicking around.”
“Lovely use of a pun,” Tobias remarks before Ranger flips him off and heads out to find his friend. It takes about two seconds for Spencer and the twins to devolve into raucous laughter. But me, I can’t stop thinking about the way Church’s eyes met mine when he said the word love.I haven’t needed much tutoring since school started, seeing as Church’s help last year made a huge difference in the way I study and tackle problems. He was right: I had no foundation, and without that foundation, it was impossible for me to build anything new. But he gave that to me, and since then, I’ve had no trouble putting things together on my own.
“Do you really think I could get into college?” I ask Church as I set my books aside and look over at him, bathed in the dim light from the lamp next to his bed. We each have wall-mounted electric fireplaces on the walls at the end of our beds, burning cheerily to ward off the cold weather outside.
While I work on Mr. Murphy’s stupid English assignment, Church has blown through his homework and moved onto Jenica’s journal pages. He tackles them like he does everything else in life: like he’s on a life or death mission. In this case, however, it’s pretty damn literal.
“Name the college, and I’ll see that you get in,” he murmurs, circling things on the screen of his iPad. He’s scanned all the pages in, so he can play around with them and make notes. The real ones are tucked back in Jenica’s journal and stored in a small safe in Ranger and Spencer’s room. Church pauses briefly to look up at me, sitting on my bed in my glasses and paint-spattered sweats. The boys keep trying to buy me new pajamas, but what they don’t understand is that I like these ones. They’re comfy, and they’re lived-in. When I put them on, I think about my aunt Elisa, and how she lured me over to her house with pizza and light beer to get me to help paint her living room wall purple. Money can buy new pj’s, but it can’t give me a flood of happy memories the way these sweatpants can. “Provided, of course, that you keep your grades up.”
“I don’t want to buy my way in,” I say, wondering what his plans are for graduation, wondering how it’s going to feel to give back this ring and disappoint his parents, his sisters … myself. I exhale and stand up, moving over to sit down on the end of his bed. “Let me guess? You’re going to Harvard or Stanford or Oxford or something. Old money, fancy school.”
Church doesn’t bother answering. Instead, he just gives me another one of those blinding smiles, the ones he learned from his family.
“Maybe. Why? Is that where you want to go? As husband and wife, we should probably attend the same university.”
I grab one of his discarded, fancy-pants pillows, and smack him with it.
“You’re impossible, you know that?” I sigh and tuck the pillow close to my chest, eyeing the Jenica notes and wondering if there’s anything new there that he hasn’t told us. Sometimes, I get the idea that he tries to do a lot of things alone. “When are you going to tell them?”
“Tell who, and what? Do we need to talk about clarifying subjects, my darling?”
My eye twitches, but I’m not going to be phased by a little verbal whiplash.
“The boys. Your fellow Student Council members.” At least, Student Council members for now, maybe not at the end of the quarter, and after the stupid elections. “When are you going to tell them about being adopted?”
“I wasn’t planning on telling them at all,” Church says, circling a name on the screen. Libby. Who the hell is Libby? I mean, besides the awful girl that carried around a stone with a cult symbol on it, and bullied poor Jenica. “You’re the only one I want to tell. I love the boys, but there are just some things a man should share with his wife and no one else, don’t you think?”
My cheeks flush, but in that small room, with the roaring fireplaces, and the storm outside, it feels awfully cozy and intimate; if I give into my embarrassment, I may very well shrivel up and die. So I try humor as a deflection technique.
“If we’re really going to be husband and wife, then why haven’t you put the moves on me yet? I mean, we are sharing a room and all. The opportunities for seduction are ample.”
Church sets his iPad aside for a moment and looks me over, studying me with such careful precision that I’m surprised he didn’t figure my secret out sooner. He doesn’t miss a damn thing.
