Page 15 of The Library of Borrowed Hearts

“It gets worse,” he informed me.

I didn’t see how things could be much worse than a near-death experience and all the costs associated with it, but I didn’t say so.

“Whatever it is, whatever’s wrong, we’ll get through it together,” I said as I slipped my hand in his. His fingers lay limply in my own. I squeezed gently. “It’s okay, Noodle. It was just an accident.”

“No, it wasn’t,” he said. He lifted his hand away, leaving only its warm impression behind. “I was running away from school. I hit a boy so hard they suspended me. They said I can’t go back for a month.”

6

CHLOE

“Do you want the good news or the bad news?”

As soon as I swung open my half-faded, half-painted front door, Pepper brushed past me and joined me inside the house. My relief at seeing her was so strong that I almost started crying.

Almost.The last thing this place needed right now was more tears. Ever since Trixie had come home from school to find me tucking Noodle into bed, she’d been in and out of hysterics. In true Trixie fashion, she’d gnashed her teeth and wrung her hands and otherwise acted out the most melodramatic response humanly possible, but that was only to be expected. In all honesty, I wouldn’t have minded a little teeth gnashing of my own.

Fortunately for the household, Theohadn’tcried, but he did demand every gory detail of Noodle’s mishap, which was almost as bad. Mostly because Noodle had told him. There were some things an eldest sister was never meant to hear. A fifty-foot fall into a ravine and the tumbling rocks that had pinned him into place at the bottom of it were at the top of the list.

“I don’t want news of any kind,” I said as I ushered Pepper into theliving room. The house was even messier now than it had been before, but Pepper was one of the few people I trusted not to judge me for it. “I want a stiff drink and a good night’s sleep, in that order.”

“I thought you couldn’t keep any hard liquor in the house,” she said. “The last time you bought a bottle of vodka, Theo swiped it from the freezer and used it to make a Molotov cocktail.”

“I didn’t.” Theo didn’t look up from the computer screen where he sat in intense concentration. He’d been building the same castle fortress in hisMinecraftgame for the past three years and showed no signs of flagging. “I was making an ethanol rocket. It’s different.”

Pepper reached over and ruffled his hair. “I hate to break it to you, kid, but flames are flames, no matter what you call them.”

He turned to her with a grin. “Itwaspretty cool. The fire burned in midair, even though you couldn’t actually see the fuel. Wanna watch me build my underground lava tubes?”

“Absolutely not,” she said good-naturedly. “The only thing worse than playingMinecraftis watching other people play it. Where’s our invalid?”

I hooked a thumb over my shoulder. “Trixie’s in the boys’ room reading himThe Lord of the Ringsout loud. I can’t decide whether she means it as a special treat or a punishment.”

“That twelve-hundred-page monstrosity?” Pepper asked with a shudder. “Punishment, no doubt. Do you really not want to hear any news? Not even the good part?”

I glanced over at Theo, the tip of his tongue sticking out from between his lips in an effort of concentration. To all outward appearances, he was absorbed in his game, but I knew better. That boy could easily juggle twelve tasks at once, all of it processing through his energetic brain at once.

Lifting a pair of cushioned headphones, I slipped them over his ears before leading Pepper to the couch. “He can read lips, but onlyif he’s paying attention,” I said. Then, because bad news and I were long-standing friends, I forestalled her before she could speak. “There’s no need to tell me the bad news, by the way. I checked my work email about an hour ago. Gunderson already told me how disappointed he is that I walked out in the middle of a shift.”

Pepper winced. “You know how he gets about following protocol.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Only it gets worse. His wife offered to take Noodle for the next few weeks while he rides out his suspension.”

“Oh.”

I nodded and relaxed into the couch cushion. One of the nicest things about having a friend as long as I’d had Pepper was that I rarely had to speak the words between the lines. Like the hasty notes scrawled in the margins of a beloved book, she and I had our own way of communicating. As kids, we’d even had a set of military-grade walkie-talkies that we’d found at the abandoned radar base. The mile between our houses was nothing compared to the range on those things, which meant our late-night conversations about which Hardy Boy we were destined to marry sometimes got interrupted by the people discussing hunting locations or what hour was best to get up and hit the fishing boat.

“What are you going to do?” Pepper asked. She cast a glance at the shut door to the boys’ bedroom, where Trixie could be heard reading aloud in her deepest Gandalf voice. “About the suspension, I mean?”

I splayed my hands helplessly. The thing we weren’t saying—the thing that didn’t need to be said—was that Noodle would rather stand up in front of a crowd of three hundred people and recite “Jabberwocky” from memory than spend his days with Gunderson’s wife. Babs was a lovely woman, and their three elementary-aged kids even lovelier, but no matter how many times I tried explaining that Noodle was just reserved, she insisted on speaking to him in an overly enunciated, painfully slow voice that left little room for doubt about how she viewed him.

“He insists he can stay home and take care of himself, but he can’teven hobble to the bathroom without help,” I said. “Both Trixie and Theo offered to stay home, of course, but Trixie has debate practice and Theo…”

We both glanced over at where my brother was slaughtering pixelated cows with shouts of bloodthirsty glee.

Pepper laughed. “Theo would burn the house and all its contents down before you made it to the end of the driveway?”

I ignored the knot of anxiety that had been lodged in my stomach all evening and focused on Pepper’s laugh instead. As long as she could find something amusing in all this, I felt sure I could, too.