Total pages in book: 145
Estimated words: 138775 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 694(@200wpm)___ 555(@250wpm)___ 463(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 138775 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 694(@200wpm)___ 555(@250wpm)___ 463(@300wpm)
“Do you want these old tablecloths?” I poked at the pile of old folded fabric on rusted metal shelves.
“Pitch them,” Lucas said. “Probably any kind of cloth should go.”
“Yeah, I think moths got to this.” I tossed the whole pile into the gray trashcan Jayden slid over for me.
Jayden moved the trashcan back and then scanned the dingy basement. “Are you sure you don’t want some of Great-Aunt Mabel’s unraveling sweaters?” He stopped and frowned. “What’s the opposite of that? Are some sweaters raveled?”
I giggled. That was a question I’d never considered before.
“I’ll pass,” Lucas said, disappearing into the backroom again. “Although save—”
“We know,” Jayden said. “Anything your mom might like.”
Until this evening, I hadn’t realized that the house used to belong to Lucas’s great-aunt. I thought his mother and stepdad had bought a random place, but his mom had actually inherited a share of this one. Then she and Kyle’s dad pooled their money and bought out his mom’s siblings so that Lucas and Kyle could live here while they went to Langley.
Though, from what I’d gathered, Kyle hadn’t spent much time here last year. That wasn’t too surprising, given how much he and Lucas seemed to dislike each other, but apparently he was here to stay now. After bursting in on me two mornings ago, he showed up after class with clothes, sporting equipment, and a few duffel bags in his black pickup truck.
“Do you get the feeling we may be sorting through this stuff until we graduate?” Jayden said quietly, with a quick glance at the doorway to the backroom where Lucas had disappeared to.
“We’ll get there.” I looked around at the boxes, crates, piles of musty old books, old furniture covered in drop cloths—it was a lot. Apparently, Lucas and Jayden hadn’t ventured much farther than the washer and dryer. “We have to.”
After Kyle reclaimed his bedroom, Lucas had insisted on giving me his room and wouldn’t take no for an answer. I felt awful about it, but it wasn’t like I was going to be here for long. I still needed to find a permanent place for this school year. Then he could have his room back, because right now he and Jayden were sharing the living room, one on the couch and one on a sleeping bag on the floor.
So now we were trying to make enough space down here for a bed. The only problem was that Great-Aunt Mabel’s basement held about three basements’ worth of stuff. We’d been working for over an hour and had barely made a dent. It was a hell of a way to spend a Friday night, but Jayden, at least, was in a good mood, and I enjoyed talking and joking with him while we worked. Lucas had been a bit more subdued.
A door slammed above us, and Jayden and I exchanged glances. That meant Kyle was back. He’d had a baseball game tonight. Not part of the regular season, but just a postseason exhibition game against a similarly sized university, I’d been told.
I held my breath, straining for the sound of footsteps on the stairs. Every time Lucas and Kyle were in the same room together, the temperature seemed to drop ten degrees. And then the kind, mild-mannered guy from my study group became someone else. Someone seething with anger—and I still didn’t know why.
I breathed a sigh of relief as it became evident that Kyle wasn’t heading down here. Good. The two stepbrothers did not get along.
Lucas reappeared, carting some boxes out of the back storage room, which he set by the stairs. Each time he emerged from that room, he looked more and more like he’d just returned from a war zone.
“Hey, why don’t you take a break?” I picked up his water bottle and brought it over to him.
“Thanks.” He gulped it down, and I reached up and flicked my fingers against his shoulder.
He turned his tired green eyes on me, one eyebrow raised.
“There was a cobweb.”
He nodded. “That entire storage room back there is covered in them.”
That was an unpleasant thought. “Maybe we should just focus on the area by the stairs?”
Lucas shook his head. “If I can just clear a little more space, I think we can move a lot of this crap back there just to get it out of the way.”
Hmm… I didn’t know how to put this delicately. “Should we move it at all, though? Isn’t most of it sort of… unsalvageable?”
His mouth twitched upward on one side, as if he knew I’d been trying to avoid calling it junk and it almost seemed like he was biting back a laugh. “Probably, but I don’t have time to sort through it all now, and I really don’t want to throw out anything my mom might want. Aunt Mabel has—had—stuff from her parents, my mom’s grandparents. I know she’d want to see that.” His eyes lost their focus as he stared past me. “I know it doesn’t look like much now, but I have good memories of playing down here with my cousins when we’d come to visit.”