Float

Chapter 10

Florida had turned me into a delinquent. There was no other way to explain how I'd landed myself in the backseat of my aunt's borrowed (stolen) car, Isabel Hamilton in a car seat next to me, something called a baby go bag at my feet, and Blake Hamilton in the driver's seat, muttering to himself as he tried to find parking on Ethan's McMansion-lined street.

"Would you stop doing that?"

Blake's voice made me jump nearly a foot into the air. I clutched my seat belt in one hand and Isabel's tiny, pajama-clad foot in the other.

"Doing what?"

"Bouncing your leg. You're shaking the whole car. Relax. Nobody's getting in trouble."

I could already picture our mug shots.

"I promise," Blake pressed on, "this will take ten minutes, tops. All we need to do is find Alissa, get her in the car, and drive her home. Then we'll go back, put Rachel's car keys on the kitchen counter right where we found them, and you can go back to babysitting in peace."

"But what if—"

"Chloe and my dad aren't coming home for at least another two hours. And you just called your aunt. She's staying late to work on the mural down in Marlin Bay. It'll take her, what? Half an hour to clean her brushes? Twenty minutes to get a lift home from one of her assistants? She'll never even know we borrowed her car."

My leg started shaking again.

"But—" I started.

"If something happens, I'll tell Rachel the truth."

"The truth?" I repeated. The hard angle of Blake's jaw was intensified by the faint bluish glow of the light from the dashboard. He'd take the blame for me? Really?

I decided to drop the subject and focus on keeping my left leg still as Blake wove through the streets of Holden. We pulled up to a stop sign, and suddenly I could feel the road shaking. For a second, I thought that there was an earthquake. Then I realized that the rhythmic thump of the ground was perfectly in time to the bass of a Katy Perry song.

Figures. Ethan would play Katy Perry at his parties.

It was another minute or so before Blake pulled the car onto a very crowded street. I was surprised at the abnormal number of cars parked along the curb. Then, after a moment, I spotted what I could only guess was Ethan's house—a monstrous combination of vaguely Mediterranean architecture and the American proclivity to go big or go home.

"Is that it?" I asked, praying that by some miracle we had arrived at the wrong destination, and there was someone else in Holden throwing a giant party at a house that looked like it belonged to a professional basketball player.

Blake parked and quickly got out. I rolled down my window to shout at him.

"Isabel and I can just wait here!" I reached out the window to pat the outside of Rachel's car, which I could now see was illegally parked against a red curb. Fantastic. Add that to the list of rules I was breaking tonight.

"Fine," Blake said. "Do you have your phone with you?"

Oh dear God.

"Waverly?"

"I . . . don't have a phone."

Blake blinked. "You're fucking kidding me."

"I'm not. I left it in Alaska."

On purpose, of course, but we didn't have time to unpack all that.

"Then you have to come inside with me. I can't leave you with my baby sister without a phone."