Page 22 of The Snuggle Is Real

I don't know why I do it. I've never once participated in the dunk tank, because it’s essentially fraud. Good fraud, because the money goes to charity, but fraud nonetheless.

Besides, I like to win and there is no winning when the game is rigged.

But I step up behind her now, and I adjust her elbow, and angle her shoulders about four degrees to the right. Her breath catches, almost imperceptibly when I touch her, which makes me go very still. The bakery bag crinkles against her arm.

“Aim for the bottom-left quadrant of the target, not the bullseye, because the weld is pulling the plate off-center.”

My hands are on her arms. Her back is against my chest. She smells like cinnamon and cold air.

"Bottom left," she repeats, quieter than she needs to.

"Bottom left."

She throws.

The plate clangs. The seat drops. Fred Callahan goes into the water with his hands folded over his chest like he's lying in state.

The splash is epic.

The crowd loses its mind. Somebody rings a cowbell. A kid in a Wanted Wildcats sweatshirt screams, "He’s down!” like it's a KO in a Las Vegas boxing match.

Fred surfaces, wipes his face, and looks directly at me. "Malcolm," he says solemnly. "I'll remember this."

It sounds so ominous I decide immediately that upon my death I will be buried in Nashville, not Wanted.

"Emily threw the ball, Fred."

"Mm-hmm."

Emily turns and throws her arms around my neck. "No, sir. You are not escaping responsibility. I couldn’t have done it without you. Together we killed the funeral guy."

"Please never say that sentence in public again."

She's laughing into my collar. I let my free hand settle on her waist, just for a second, and I tell myself it's for the benefit of the half of Wanted currently staring at us.

It isn't. I know it isn't.

She lets go first. She always does.

We work our way down the row of booths as she finishes her coffee and tosses it in the garbage. Emily loses at the duck pond, which should be mathematically impossible, and I win the ring toss on the second try, because the FFA kids stacked the bottles on a slope and nobody seems to have noticed. The prize table is a tragedy of fall-themed plush. There's a stuffed apple with a smiling face and a little felt leaf. There's a stuffed pumpkin with googly eyes, one of which is noticeably larger than the other.

"You can pick," the teenager running the booth tells me.

I know which one I want. It's the apple. It's a well-constructed apple. The seams are straight.

Emily isn't looking at the prizes. She's looking at me, like she's waiting to see what I'll do.

"The pumpkin," I say. Because of course I’ll get the pumpkin. It has the very googly eyes she was coveting earlier.

She gives me a sly smile. "Malcolm Lennox."

"Don't make it a thing."

"You chose pumpkin for me. That’s pretty dang sweet."

"I chose the one with googly eyes. You specified googly eyes. I was meeting the stated requirements."

She hugs the lopsided pumpkin to her chest. "I'm naming him Spice."