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One of the women standing with the children in the carpool line walked over. She had perfect, salon blonde hair and makeup that could have been applied by a professional. I rolled down the window as she approached, wondering if I needed some sort of signed permission slip.
“Hi,” she said. “You’re Quinn Collins, right?”
“Yes. I am.” I felt my face shift automatically into a sunny grin. It was my default expression for fans. The woman wasn’t smiling back though. She looked a couple years older than me. Vaguely familiar in a way that put a sour taste in my mouth. If I’d known her in high school, I hadn’t liked her much. The sunny grin stayed fixed in place though. Years of training. But as she continued to stand in my window, arms crossed, I let it slip from my face. “I’m a close friend of the family. Callum Evans asked me to pick him up.”
Her mouth turned down. “We know. You were added to the permission pick up list.”
“Oh, okay.” Bewildered, I stared up at her, wondering what the hell she wanted if not a permission slip, but not knowing how to ask. At this point, I was convinced it wasn’t an autograph.
Then she made a funny, judgmental sound in the back of her throat, turned on the heel of her sensible flat, and walked back to the other women.
I drove off, feeling like I’d just narrowly avoided getting detention. “What wasthatabout?” I muttered to myself.
I wasn’t asking Noah, but he chimed in matter-of-factly, “She likes my dad.”
I looked at him in the mirror to see what he made of that, but he didn’t seem bothered by it. He was staring out the window, kicking his feet in an idle, contented sort of way.
Iwas bothered though. “Does your dad like her?”
Noah shook his blonde head cheerfully. He met my eyes in the mirror, and we grinned at each other.
“Doyoulike her?” I asked, guiltily wondering if I was getting in the way of a perfectly good stepmother for Noah.
Noah shrugged. “She’sreallynice to me, but I’m not in her class. And she’s mean to my friend who is in her class.” He tugged at his lower lip judiciously as if he was weighing those two pieces of evidence. Then he saw that we were pulling into the guitar center parking lot again, and it all went out of his head.
First, excitement filled his face.
Then trepidation.
“Does my dad know?” he asked nervously as I pulled into a parking spot and turned off the car.
“He sure does.” I unbuckled my seatbelt and turned around in the seat to look at him. “And get this, Noah. My only rule is that I can’t buy you a guitar.”
Noah laughed in pure, six-year-old delight. “Doesn’t he know they sell things beside guitars?”
“He does not.”
Like two co-conspirators about to pull off the easiest heist in human history, we bounded toward the guitar center. My heart lifted, as it always did, when I walked into a place dedicated to music. Jevon was behind the counter again, and I went to him first while Noah went to the back of the shop where they had a small drum kit set up.
I told Jevon the one rule we had, and then began perusing the shop for what I might be able to buy Noah. The thing was, while he enjoyed chopping away at the drums with the sticks, his heart was clearly with the guitars. As I circulated past Jevon’s desk again, he said casually, “You know, we sell guitarlessons.”
“Yeah, but he can’t really take lessons without a guitar,” I started to say, but then I noticed how Jevon was leaning over the counter. One elbow was resting on it, his arm bent up to hold his chin. The other arm was stretched full across it, his wrist bent over the side in a way that looked uncomfortable until I realized he was pointing at something. A yellow, 9 x 11 sheet of paper with just a few lines scrawled across it and a clipart picture of a guitar.
Don’t want to commit?
Try renting!
“He never said–” Jevon began.
“–I couldn’trenthim a guitar,” I finished, and grinned.
CHAPTER 18
CALLUM
Noah was waiting for me in the foyer when I got home that evening. His eyes were wide, and a funny grin was trying its best to sneak across his face. He kept biting it back, and for some reason, he had his hands tucked behind his back. I could see in the hallway mirror they weren’t holding anything–the fingers were just interlaced. He looked like the definition of a kid who wasn’t sure if he’d done something wrong and wasn’t sure if he was going to get away with it if he had, but it had been damn fun.
There was a sound like a golden retriever coming down the stairs. All noise and excitement. I looked up, half expecting to see one, but it was only Quinn. She was wearing a stack of bracelets that jangled against the banister as she hurried down. Her eyes were bright and her face was flushed, like she’d been laughing a lot. She jumped down the last two steps and landed beside Noah. They looked at each other, and now they both wore that sneaky grin.
