EverWorld (Book 3 of the Down World Series)

Chapter Eight

Two new chapters this week, folks! Make sure you read 8 and 9!!

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Aunt Amalia, for one, was thrilled about the wedding, and insisted it be held in her backyard—a flat rectangle of snow-covered grass and bare trees that she insisted would be made up like a "winter wonderland" in time for the ceremony.

"We were just going to do it in our living room," insisted Robbie as he sat beside me on her expensive mauve-colored sofa, a full cup of tea growing cold before him. "We're only inviting a few friends."

But Piper chimed in from his other side: "Dad and Laura."

"And your cousins, right, Piper?" I could help but add.

"Mm, just two of them, though," she answered, leaning towards me over Robbie's lap like he was an unfortunately placed pillar blocking her view of a concert. "Talia's like ten months preggo and they won't let her fly."

"And Kieren," I couldn't help but mutter under my breath, which was apparently news to Piper. I assumed she hadn't seen him much since the night we all came back through the portal from Yesterday nearly three years before. The thought made me stop for a second and check my math.

Yes, three years. That's how long it had been since the world had started spinning again. Both too short and too long for me to really comprehend.

"So you'll need the bigger venue," Amalia chirped, and I could see she was putting on a bit of a character: happy and accommodating aunt. I remembered suddenly that she had been an actress briefly in New York. If the performance was a bit strained, it wasn't really her fault. None of us had been playing these roles for very long. And with Robbie's school schedule being often at odd hours, he hadn't attended very many of these Boston tea parties my aunt had been throwing.

"We really appreciate it," Piper said with one of her signature million-watt smiles, and that seemed to seal the deal: winter wonderland it was.

Piper grabbed my hand as we all headed to the backyard to check out the space, leaving our teacups for the maid to clean. I knew that my soon-to-be sister-in-law had already ordered what looked like an entire reem of light pink material from a local fabric store and had been up for the past three nights designing a dress. She had taken some design classes at a local college when she'd first arrived in Boston, but hadn't gone back in the fall.

She was the only one of the three of us who really hadn't figured out what to do with the rest of her life, an understandable development since she'd been orphaned at seventeen. Like me, she often fell into the trap of making Robbie into the sun, something she could simply orbit in order to find her place in the universe. Again, I wondered if it was too much for him, a thought that seemed doubly urgent as Aunt Amalia demonstrated where all the dangling lights could be placed in her sprawling red maple trees.

"It's perfect," Piper beamed now. "Isn't it perfect, baby?"

"It's perfect," Robbie echoed, smiling as Piper practically skipped across the light dusting of snow covering the yard, mentally measuring its square footage, apparently.

"Do you think we could fit a little dance floor over here?"

"Piper," Robbie cut in, "Aunt Amalia doesn't want her grass crushed."

But Amalia shooed the idea away. "Oh, the grass is dead for the winter anyway. If Boston snow doesn't kill it, I'm sure a dance floor won't."

Piper beamed with pleasure, and Amalia made her hands into two L shapes, forming a rectangle by which to view her own yard, like a cinematographer sizing up a big scene before filming it. "It could go in that corner," she concluded.