Relying On Ben and Jerry (Waltham #1)

Chapter Seventeen: Three Little Words

“How did I not remember that Quinton had a brother?” Kline demanded, looking horrified. “I nearly stalk the kid and I didn’t even remember that he had an equally as attractive sibling. Who goes to Harvard. I might not ever get over the trauma that this shock has given me.”

“You’re havin’ trouble?” Colonel replied, nodding with his chin in my direction. “Poor Tomatoes is lookin’ like she’s goin’ to die or somethin’.”

Norma sighed, shaking her head. “Come on, guys, why are we still talking about this? It happened, like, six hours ago.”

“And Tomatoes still hasn’t been consumin’ enough ice cream since,” Colonel remarked before leaning in closer to her to whisper in his too-loud Colonel style: “Norma, she’s had at least three pints. This is kinda scarin’ me. Next thing you know, she’s gonna be runnin’ ’round the house with her head doin’ three-sixties.”

“I resent that,” I told him, scowling over at him as I shoveled another spoonful into my mouth, chewing frantically. “I’m not stress eating,” I explained through a full mouth. “I’m just really hungry.”

“I’ll believe that like I’d believe you if you said Dick Clark died,” Peter snorted.

“He actually did,” Kline told him. “I saw it on the news the other day.”

“It’s 2012?” he asked, then shook his head and looked upward. “Well played, Mayans. Well played.”

I rolled my eyes and leaned back into the headboard of Norma’s bed, tuning them out. I barely even noticed as they all began to go into separate directions after a mutual decision that I was too spaced out to take a part in, too absorbed in my own flabbergasted thoughts to notice that there was probably plenty other things to do that was more interesting than staring into a pint of ice cream like it was going to give you the meaning of life if you stared hard enough, but then I figured that it was ice cream, albeit plain chocolate Haagan-Dasz, which might have been total sacrilege but this was a definite emergency. I sighed, stabbing my spoon into the ice cream, my smallish brain trying to sort out everything that had happened today into something that made sense and what was entirely insane. Needless to say, that wasn’t working the way I thought it would.

Well, in the end, accidentally meeting Mathieu Lancaster and asking him what the capital of Djibouti was didn’t even turn out to be the craziest part of my day. I learned that Cheers was actually a restaurant, Peter rolls down hills faster than Kline, Colonel was the one that suggested we go to Build-A-Bear, and Norma lived in a house large enough to comfortably house a small African village. 

As the thought crossed my mind, I unconsciously realized that Norma was crossing the room to sit next to where I was curled up on the floor holding the ice cream desperately to my chest, staring into space thoughtfully, us being the only two left in the room. She settled down on the floor beside me and snapped her fingers in front of my face casually, waking me up from dreamland like this happened every day. Probably since it did, but whatever.

I jumped, turning my attention to her completely. She was smiling, amused.

“You doing alright over there, Lena?” she teased, raising her eyebrows at the marks my spoon assault had left in the ice cream. “From across the room, you looked to be a little shell-shocked.”

“And from close up?” I questioned.

“Now you just look crazy,” she told me, and we both giggled like the mentally-sound people that we were.

Our hyena-like laughter was interrupted by the sudden screaming of a war cry, and before we could even fashion on a WTF? face to welcome them in, Peter and Colonel were already bursting through the door and tearing through the room, giving chase on one another as they wielded a pair of Nerf guns like they were snipers. Or machetes.