The Unexpected Everything (38 page)

“And Clark stole my keys, so I might need to borrow your car.”

“He did?” my dad asked, starting to smile. I frowned at him, and his expression grew more serious. “I mean, of course he shouldn't have done that to you. But I didn't think he had it in him.”

“We need to move!” Toby said, clapping her hands together. “Let's go!”

“Okay,” I said, leaning over to look at the list, which my dad was still holding. “We need to see what we can get here before we go elsewhere,” I said, eyes scanning down it. “Cotton balls,” I said, and I pointed upstairs. “My bathroom.”

“On it!” Toby yelled as she ran for the staircase.

“I can get you a bow tie or cummerbund so you can get your article of formal wear,” my dad said, reading off the paper, and I looked at him, surprised. “If you want me to help, that is.”

“Yeah,” I said, after only the tiniest of pauses. It wasn't that I didn't—I just hadn't imagined that he'd
want
to help, or be a part of this at all. “That would be great.”

“That might be all we have here,” my dad said, pulling out a mechanical pencil from his pocket and starting to make notes on the list, using the hall table as a desk. “I can look at my change and see if I have any from before 1980.” He looked up at me and tapped his pencil twice on the paper. “Do you think that
includes
1980?”

“Probably better not to assume,” I said. My dad nodded and started making more notes. I looked down at the paper and shook my head. “I don't think I have a burnt sienna crayon,” I said. “But I can grab a book and a hat that's not a baseball cap from my room.”

“Andie!” Toby yelled from upstairs.

My dad looked at his watch. “Let's reconnoiter in five,” he said, and I nodded, then bolted up the stairs.

“What?” I asked as I walked through my room to the bathroom. After this many years, I knew she would have no compunction going through my things, so I wasn't sure what she needed. “Did you get the cotton balls?”

“Got them,” she said, pointing to the bag on the counter. “But . . . what's this?” She opened up my bathroom cabinet, which was stacked high with pretty much every feminine product you could imagine—tampons, pads, Midol, and
lots
of all of them. “What, is there like a shortage or something?” she asked, laughing. Then her expression grew more serious. “Wait, is there actually a shortage? Do I need to stockpile too?”

“No,” I said, resisting the opportunity to mess with her. “My mom bought them for me when . . . when she found out she was sick.”

“Oh,” Toby said, her expression changing immediately. She looked at me without speaking, searching my face, and I knew she was trying to see if I wanted her to talk about it, or to drop it. She'd do either one in a heartbeat. I knew that from experience.

And normally I would have left it at that. But I'd never told anyone this—maybe not surprisingly, it had never come up before. “Yeah,” I said, my throat feeling a little tighter than usual. “She was worried I wouldn't have any when I needed it. And she didn't want me to feel embarrassed about asking my dad to buy them for me.” I looked at all the stacked boxes, most of which I hadn't touched in years, once I was able to start shopping for myself. But I'd never even thought about throwing them away. My mother had bought them for me. She'd gone to
CVS and picked them out so that she could help me even when she wouldn't be here.

“That's really nice,” Toby said quietly, giving me a smile, and I nodded.

“Girls!” my dad yelled from downstairs. “It's been five minutes!”

Toby paled. “It has?” She grabbed the cotton balls and bolted for the door. Then she stopped and turned back to me. “Unless you want to talk,” she said, voice rising in a question.

I shook my head and pointed to the door. “Scavenger hunt!”

Five minutes later we were in the car—all of us, with my dad behind the wheel. “Seat belts?” he asked as he backed out of the garage.

“Check,” Toby said, from where she was sitting in the middle of the backseat, leaning forward.

I hadn't anticipated that we were formally adding a member to our team, but we'd been all set to go—having dropped all the items we were able to grab from the house into a big canvas bag—when my dad had handed me the keys to his sedan and then frowned. “Do you know how to drive a stick shift?”

I did not, and I was pretty sure learning to drive stick took more than five minutes. And since we still wanted to have a fighting shot at winning this, my dad had offered to drive us. We'd decided on the first stop, and I was trying to figure out our plan for the rest. “I think we should get the pizza toward the end,” I said, making a note with my dad's pencil as he pulled out onto the road, going a little faster than normal. “We can get the napkins, the ice, and the soda at the pizza place too.” I thought of something and looked up. “Do you think this is just Palmer's way of getting us to pick up
dinner?”

“We don't have time for speculation,” Toby snapped, frowning at her phone. “I'm trying to learn the Thriller dance here.”

“I thought we agreed to skip that one because it was time-inefficient.”

“Well, it's a mute point anyway, because my phone just died,” she said, dropping it into her bag.

“A
mute
point?” my dad asked, glancing over at me.

“I know,” I said, shaking my head at him. “Believe me, we've all tried to tell her.”

“Can I use yours?” Toby asked, leaning forward and holding out her hand.

“Sure,” I said, handing it over while still reading over the list, waiting for a sudden flash of insight that would help me figure out what item we could get that started with
Z
. The only thing I could seem to think of was “Zamboni,” even as I tried to tell my brain there had to be other words that started with that letter. “Oh, but do me a favor and text Clark? Tell him I'm mad at him about the keys and he's not going to get away with it.”

“I think he did get away with it,” my dad pointed out, as he slowed for a stop sign, but then immediately gunned the engine again. I had a feeling he was enjoying this. “You're just going to have to figure out how to get him back.”

“Okay, how's this?” Toby asked, handing my phone to me.

“What is this?” I asked, turning around to look at her.

“What?” she asked. “I said that we were mad, that we wanted the keys back, and if he didn't do it, he was dead.”

“But what's with the sneaker?”

“Toby,” she explained in a patient voice. “Toe-bee. Come on, Andie, think about it.”

“But this is my phone,” I pointed out. “You're texting as me. I think you could use actual words and still win the bet.”

“Oh,” Toby said, suddenly looking nervous. “I . . . I'm not so sure about that.”

“Why can't you text with actual words?” my dad asked as he sped through a yellow.

“Palmer's betting Toby she can't go the whole summer only using emojis,” I said, shaking my head. “We tried to talk her out of it.”

My dad glanced down at my phone, then threw Toby a sympathetic look in the rearview mirror. “Well, I think that's very clever,” he said to her, and Toby smiled as she took my phone back from me. “Maybe you should have tried harder,” he said to me in an undertone.

I fought back a smile as I looked down at the list. “Well, if we win this, she's in the clear again,” I said. I glanced into the backseat. “Tobes, how are we on time?”

“Hour and a half. We're going to need to move.”

“On it,” my dad said, grinning as he sped up. We screeched to a stop in front of the diner five minutes later, and I turned to Toby.

“Ready?” I asked, and Toby yelled, “Break!” and bolted from the car, not waiting for me to follow.

“Be right back,” I said to my dad as I unbuckled my seat belt.

“I'll keep the car running.”

I ran full-out toward the diner, taking the steps two at a time. Most of the other items on the list could be acquired at a variety of places—or at least more than one—but for Diner Menu, I was pretty sure Palmer meant one of the actual, fake-leather-bound menus, not the paper ones for to-go orders. We'd also discussed that this might be our best chance to pick up a Blue Gum Ball from the candy machines in the waiting area. As I pulled the door open, I saw Toby was already feeding coins into the candy machine and cranking the knob. “Just check the dates,” I reminded her as I continued in to the restaurant. “Anything before 1980, don't waste on the gum ball!” Toby gave me a withering
I know
look, but I noticed that she started checking her coins.

I approached the hostess stand, which was deserted as usual, even though the restaurant was pretty full, mostly of families crammed into the booths. I glanced under the hostess stand, where I'd seen extra stacks of menus in the past. But was I actually going to be able to just steal one? This immediately became a mute point, though, since the podium was empty. I looked around the restaurant, and spotted Carly sitting at the nearly-empty counter, with a stack of menus and a bottle of Windex in front of her.

I headed straight over, grateful that she was working and not one of the waitresses who hated us. I knew we would have had no luck at all with them.

“Hi there!” I said in my friendliest voice, as Carly looked up from where she was cleaning the menus—Windexing and then wiping off with a towel.

“It's self-seating right now,” she said, giving the appetizer page a wipe-down. “Anything that's open.”

“No, it's not that,” I said, taking a breath. I needed to be charming and ingratiating, or we didn't have a chance. I realized that I hadn't had to do this in a while, since I hadn't had to go to any fund-raisers or meet with potential donors. It was like trying to flex a muscle I hadn't used in a long time. “I was just wondering if possibly we could just borrow one of these menus for an hour or two? We'll bring it right back. And you can even give me one of the ones you haven't gotten to yet, and I can clean it for you!” I smiled brightly at Carly, who just looked at me and gave the menu another spray.

“This about the scavenger hunt?” she asked, nodding before I'd had a chance to answer. “They already beat you in here. Clark and . . .” Carly frowned, and there was a long pause—a much longer pause than was normally needed to come up with someone's name. “Phil?” she finally asked, sounding very unsure of her answer.

I tried to keep my face steady, and resolved not to tell Tom that Carly thought his name was Phil. It would probably just add insult to injury that she knew Clark's name, even though he'd been going there for six weeks, but not Tom's, who'd been going there for three years. “Right,” I said, nodding. “Guess they beat us here. But . . . do you think we could have one too?”

“Sorry,” Carly said, snapping a menu shut and adding it to the stack. “I made a promise.”

“But . . .” It wasn't like the diner, as far as I knew, had a one-menu-per–scavenger hunt policy. If she could give Clark and Tom one, why not one to us?

“Also, they gave me forty bucks
not
to give you one,” Carly said, raising an eyebrow at me. “So no can do.”

I silently cursed Tom, since I was pretty sure this had been his idea—learned, no doubt, from Palmer's sister Ivy, who had won numerous Alden family scavenger hunts with only one item, having spent the whole scavenging time shutting down other people's chances. I took a breath to try and persuade Carly, but she'd just spun her stool so that her back was to me. Clearly, I wasn't going to get anywhere with her—not unless I could somehow find eighty dollars to bribe her with.

I walked out to the candy machines, where Toby was fuming. “No luck?” She just pointed down, where I could see her purse was half-filled with gum balls—none of them blue.

“I've gotten like eight yellows and four reds,” Toby said as she checked the date on her quarter and dropped it in the slot. “Usually all you can get are these stupid blue gum balls!”

“Well, maybe Tom and Clark got to all of them first too,” I said, shaking my head. Toby opened up the little metal flap and pulled out a green gum ball, then frowned at me.

“What do you mean?” she asked, throwing the green one into her purse. “Where's the menu?”

“The guys gave Carly forty dollars not to give us one.”

“What!” Toby straightened up to face me. “That's just unfair. Your stupid boyfriend with his stupid dragon money!”

The outside door swung open and my dad stepped in, looking between me and Toby. “You ladies doing okay?” he asked, glancing down at his watch. “Because we should probably get going.”

“Clark's bribing people not to give us menus,” Toby said, looking at me like this was somehow my fault.