Stealing Butterflies

Chapter Twenty-One

Quil and I tried to have a lemonade stand once.

Naturally, it was disastrous.

See, our big plan was to make enough money to buy some limited edition Hot Wheelz. We were prepared, but no one would come buy tiny plastic cups filled to the brim with cheap lemonade for $3.00.

Maybe our price was too steep.

Maybe we weren't adorable enough to attract the masses.

Maybe no one came because it was raining.

Who knows?

But Quil and I were determined businessmen anyway. We wanted those black plastic cars with streaks of purple fire painted down both sides. And thus, we shook up three pitchers of pre-made lemonade powder mixed with water into an example of chemistry's most delicious substance. We didn't actually have three pitchers, though, so a couple servings ended up in vases and flowerpots.

Clean ones, of course.

A ten-year-old's version of clean, at least.

We had a little table, too, and a couple lawn chairs. We even thought far enough ahead as to make a sign. It was just Quil's messy scrawl on a piece of red construction paper, but, at the time, it looked very official.

It wasn't raining at first. That started after about twenty minutes of the two of us sitting in our squeaky canvas chairs, mulling over Holly Teak, Quil's "love" of that time.

He was blabbering on about her "perfectly curly" hair, and the "beautiful orbs" of her eyes. I, meanwhile, was trying to make a whistle out of a floppy piece of grass whilst wondering if "orbs" was a made-up word or not.

That's when the first car drove by.

We freaked out, grass and girl forgotten, to hop around and scream and wave signs. No such luck, unfortunately, with that driver or the next five.

"Hambug!" Quil hollered.

"What does that mean?"

"I don't know. Mom told me that's a high-class English insult."

"Oh. Cool."

So I drank out of one of the pitchers when my partner wasn't looking as he built a little fort out of sticks and mud, until it started raining.

We thought about going inside, but decided we'd rather stay out and keep on with our attempts. Because Quil said water wouldn't hurt the lemonade, since that's what it was made of mostly, anyway, and the limited edition cars were much too important to abandon.

So we both ended up getting sick with the flu.

It was stupid to stay out there in a thunderstorm's temper tantrum.

So stupid.

But if we had gone inside, we would have never sold that one glass of lemonade to a random passerby who most likely felt bad for us. We wouldn't have felt that crazy sense of pride. And Quil's granddad wouldn't have felt guilty for letting us host the stand on his watch and would not have bought us those racecars.

"Embry," Katie said, spreading skid marks across my memory lane. "What'cha thinking about?"

"Racecars."

I wasn't really.

And yet, that's exactly what I was doing.

To be honest, I was thinking about the reason Katie, Sam and I were currently buckled into my truck, driving down the nearest highway on our way to Oregon. And I was trying to decide if this road trip was a good idea or not.