“Get up, boys,” Mariella shouts, and bangs on the door.
Boys, I think, groggy, not comprehending. Why is she calling Lucy and me boys? The times we have both stayed over together in the past, she never wakes us up like this. She gently taps the door. She says things like, “Don’t want to waste the day, darlings,” and “I’m making pancakes especially for you both,” and “The shower is free and there’s still some hot water left.”
The door bangs again. Alex groans.
I sit bolt upright and kick him.
“Shit,” I hiss.
“What?” He speaks at normal volume, and I kick him again.
“I forgot to change beds last night.”
He opens his eyes, blinks a few times, looks at me.
“It’s fine,” he says. “You can go now. She’s gone upstairs, I think.”
“Which means I’ll run straight into her when I go upstairs.”
“Pretend you are coming out of the bathroom.”
“What if she just passed the bathroom and saw it was empty?”
“You’re overthinking this.”
“I’m not—”
I stop talking, because there are footsteps coming back down the hallway. I flop back onto the bed and pull the blanket over my head. I try to make myself as flat as possible.
The door swings open.
“I said, get up, boys. You’re on breakfast duty this morning.” Mariella likes to appoint tasks to her sons in a very military way. She has a chore wheel at their house, and she spins it each week to assign tasks for each son. Zach complained after he got the bathroom four weeks in a row and the integrity of the chore wheel was called into question.
In my house, there is no chore wheel. Dad does most of the cleaning during the week, and Mum and I usually clean together on Saturday mornings while listening to a podcast or our official Saturday Morning Cleaning playlist on Spotify. (Both of us have to approve a song before it can be added to the list, and we have to both agree to skip a song before it can be skipped.) In my worst, most friendless, most acne-prone years, cleaning the house with Mum was actually something I looked forward to every week.
I wish I were cleaning with Mum right now. I wish I were basically anywhere but in this bed.
“What’s Zach doing?” Mariella says.
I hold my breath.
“What do you mean?” Alex says, sounding disinterested and croaky and like it was any other morning. He’s a better actor than I realized. Lying to his mother might be a regular occurrence for him, though. I don’t know if this is something I should be worried about or not. Either way, now is not the time to think about it.
“Why isn’t he on the trundle?” she says.
“His back got sore,” Alex says.
“That bloody spring. I don’t know why you boys didn’t just share from the beginning.”
“Well, we are sharing now, so…”
There’s a beat of silence, and it seems like we did it, we got away with it, and everything will be fine.
“Zach, get up, please.”
“Let him sleep, Mum. I’ll do breakfast.”
Another beat, another moment when I think we’ve got away with it, but Mariella knows her sons too well. She knows Alex would never be so considerate to his brother.
“Zach, up.”
I keep lying there, my face scrunched, praying to every god or goddess I’ve ever heard of to be teleported out of here.
“He can’t get up,” Alex says. He still sounds calm. He hasn’t resorted to praying. He thinks we can wriggle out of this.
“Why not?” Her voice is closer. She’s right beside me. I try to breathe in the way I imagine a sleeping teenage boy would.
“He’s sick,” Alex says.
“Sick? In what way?”
“Feeling sick. Ill. Under the weather.”
I contemplate faking a cough, maybe a slight groan. No. Too much.
“Alex, what is going on? Is Zach drunk?” Mariella’s voice goes up an octave.
“No, he’s not drunk. It’s a rash, I think. And a sore throat. Looks contagious—”
Mariella pulls back the blanket and I open my eyes to her face peering into mine.
“Natalie!” she says, and nothing else. I think it’s the first time she’s ever been speechless.