Page 138 of Bring You Back

Julian

“Pizza night!” Banks practically screams as he makes his entrance clutching three boxes of large pizzas from the Doughy Tankard with Tommy following behind him. He drops the boxes to the kitchen table and Grumbles, who’s made the table her resting spot, jumps off and runs down the hall.

Camille, standing next to me at the island, shoots Banks a glare, and I can’t help but smile. She chuckled the time I had scared Grumbles, whereas now she looks like she wants to slice off Banks’s face with the knife in her hand.

“Go apologize,” I tell Banks in mock seriousness, pointing my own knife toward the hall. Camille shifts her glare to my building smirk, then points her knife to Banks who has actually started heading to the hall.

“No,” she scolds him and he halts. “Stay the hell away from my cat.”

“Gladly,” Banks says with a disgusted suggestive face directed toward Camille’s lower body before tending to the pizzas.

I laugh down at my half-prepared sandwich. The sandwich Camille talked me into trying for our dinner. She’s showed me the proper way to eat a grapefruit, and now she’s showing me the proper way to eat a banana. On bread, she claims, with peanut butter.

Tommy approaches the island, and I look back up, remembering he walked in with Banks like they were together. “Why are you trailing his ass?” I ask with a slight laugh.

“He’s close enough to sniff it,” Camille adds on a tease.

Tommy mocks a silent laugh, feigning amusement. “I had to make sure he got pineapple.”

“Ah,” Camille says, adding on another tease, “Reyna’s favorite boy had to get her favorite pizza.” Her eyes slide to mine, dropping the jokes as a similar thought passes through our heads with no surprise.Reyna’s coming.

Because of course she is. Reyna’s a head-on type of girl, not exactly known to avoid.

It’s going to be another long night.

“How’d the lesson go?” Tommy asks, pinning me with a hard stare that makes me remember our last exchange. The last words before these ones.You fix it.Apparently, he’s still holding on to his disappointment, and now it’s worse.Yeah, let’s just act like my not teaching Reyna to surf is the worst thing I’ve done.His stare shifts to Camille for the answer, his subtle hostility changing to curiosity.

“I lost my toenail,” she announces with a sense of pride that makes me chuckle.

Tommy’s curiosity now changes to concern as Banks gags on a mouthful of pizza. “I’m trying to eat,” he protests at the same time Tommy says, “What? How’d that happen? Are you okay?”

Camille laughs at his questioning, while I laugh at Banks. “It was just my toenail,” she says. “I’m all bandaged up and fine.”

My father had a different reaction, pretty much guaranteeing I won’t conduct another lesson until I’ve had the courses, which is for the best, for personalandlegal reasons. He stuck his neck out for me, and I returned the favor with a detached toenail. But the experience confirmed that teaching surfing is definitely the next step in my career here.

“It was very bloody, though,” Camille continues, raising her voice with a stare on Banks. “Oozy, thick blood that looked liketomato sauce.”

The three of us laugh now as Banks gags again, harder this time, the slice of pizza he’s eating for his head-start slipping from his hands back to the box.

“Nowthat’sa T.M.I.,” Tommy says with another laugh at Camille.

“Yeah, well, F him,” she says with a gesture at Banks who hollers, “This is not how pizza night is supposed to go!”

“Because it’s notpizza night. It’s sandwich night.” At this, Camille pops a spare slice of banana into her mouth, and I’m quick to reprimand her.

“That’s not the proper way to eat a banana.”

Her chewing slows as she drags a pointed look my way, and I hold steady with my serious stare, my brows raised in waiting when our eyes connect.

“You’ve broken the rules before,” she reminds me, as if eating a banana the way most people do is somehow taboo before popping in a second spare slice.

“There are no rules to eating a banana,” Tommy chimes in. “Only ways.”

I point at him in agreement and he laughs. Camille rolls her eyes.

“Hello,” Banks hollers for our attention, his half-eaten pizza back in his hand that he waves at us when we look at him. “Pizza night! Remember those? I wanna do things we used to do,” he says before his building excitement tones down to melancholy. “It’s thelastsummer. High school is over. Real life is about to begin!”

I laugh as Tommy deadpans, “You should put that on a shirt.”

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