"Sounds like fun. Does that mean you're going to fly in a helicopter?"
“Probably helicopter and drone."
He began running his fingers through my hair at the base of my neck. I rested my head against his shoulder, the tingles reaching all the way to my toes. My eyes slowly closed as he continued to massage my head.
“What was that?” he asked.
“Where werz waaat?”
He shifted, upsetting my pillow situation. “Are you drooling on me?”
“I’ll never tell.”
“Shh.” He sat up straight. “I heard it again.”
We sat quietly as we listened for whatever it might have been. We didn’t have to wait long.
A mouse with an extraordinarily long tail came walking into the living room. Walking. Not running. Not scurrying like one expects a mouse to do. No. This mouse was walking. Sashaying his hips. I watched in horror, waiting to see him do the bend and snap.
He didn’t, but Nate did.
“Mouse!” he yelled, leaping up and dragging me after him down the hall. He jerked me into his bedroom and slammed the door shut.
He didn’t realize the door had such a wide gap on the bottom that the mouse could walk right under it.
Nate pushed me onto the bed and clambered on after me. “Okay, what are we going to do?”
We were not—neither one of us—large mouse fans. In fact, we hated mice. Especially thanks to the pet mouse Nola had rescued from sure death. I would never forgive her.
“What are we going to do?” Nate asked again as he frantically searched the room for something to defend himself with.
“I’ll call Wren.”
I pulled my phone out and clicked on Wren’s name. It rang three times before she answered.
“We’re fine, Riley; quit worrying,” she answered in an annoyed tone.
“But I’m not! We need—“ My words were drowned out by Nate yelling and pointing at the mouse that waltzed into the room, the bottom gap in the door so large that the little squirt didn’t even have to duck. Nate started grabbing pillows off the bed and tossing them at the intruder as it stared at us. It was no ordinary mouse.
Nate yelled and threw another pillow at her. It was definitely a her; she had a big personality. It was probably Nola’s pet mouse come back to haunt us.
That mouse had bitten Nate when he was fifteen. His hand became infected, and he had to sit out the baseball game against our rival school. He’d been scared of mice ever since.
“Stop throwing things!” I latched onto his arm. “We have to figure out how to get rid of it.”
“I have an idea,” Nate said as he stared at the mouse. “Let’s climb out the window.”
With a laugh, I tugged him back by his shirt. “That window is probably rusted shut.”
Nate looked at me, then the window, then the mouse. “I’ll break the glass.”
“Isn’t it weird that it’s not running from us? Shouldn’t it be scared of us?”
“It’s probably a demon.”
“If you start praying in tongues, I’m going to leave you here to deal with it yourself.”
A door slammed somewhere in the house.
The mouse—duplicitous little rat that it was—scurried toward a vent in the wall and disappeared inside.
“Where are you?” Wren’s voice carried through the house.
“In the bedroom!”
“Oh, please no. There are some things I can’t unsee!” she whined as she opened the door. “Oh good. You have clothes on.”
“What kinds of TV have you been watching?” I gasped. “Of course we have clothes on!”
“Hmm, yes. Also, the stork dropped me off on Mom’s doorstep.”
“Why do you have a tire iron?”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “You called me, screaming bloody murder. What else were we going to do?”
She leaned to the side so that I could see Macy standing behind her, holding our only frying pan. “Looking very Rapunzel-y, Macy.”
She grinned. “Thanks. I have been trying to grow my hair out...”
“What is going on in here?” another voice called from the front door.
I hopped off the bed. Nate slowly stepped off. “Just a mouse. It was chasing us around the house.”
“What?” Wren laughed. “You two were screaming like that over a mouse?”
The four of us shuffled into the living room. Eldon stood there with a wrench in one hand. “Eldon, what are you doing here?”
“I heard the screaming. I came over to see if I could help.”
“It’s just a mouse. There isn’t much to help with, unfortunately.”
“You catch the feller?”
“The fellow,” I said, “is still running around the house.”
“I’ll catch him.”
And that was how Eldon ended up going on a witch hunt in Nate’s single-wide. No stone was left unturned. No warped laminate floor was left untouched.
The doorbell rang, interrupting our entertainment of watching Eldon chase after a phantom. I noticed that Nate wasn’t about to help look. He was only too happy to stay away.
Nate opened the door, and Sam and Elise burst in, Sam carrying a six-pack of beer. “What’s going on?” Elise demanded.
“Mouse hunt,” Nate informed them.
“We brought drinks.” They brushed past the pizza girl and into the house, hurrying down the hall after Eldon.
Nate tipped for the pizza then took a big sniff as he carried it into the kitchen. “Perfect. I’m starved.”
“Me too!” Macey said as she set down the frying pan on the counter. “What kind did you get?”
“You already ate dinner,” Wren reminded her.
“But I’m hungry again.” They both shrugged, grabbed the pizza box from Nate, then took it into the living room. I grabbed a plate and threw a piece of pizza on it.
“This is what our future is going to be like, isn’t it?” Nate quietly asked, as if any of the other crazy people would overhear him.
“This is what our life is like now. We don’t even have to wait for that future.” I laughed.
“I’m just glad you’re a part of that future.”
How could he get away with being so romantic?
Chapter Twenty-FourNate
I stepped outside to make the phone
