Page 41 of A Class of Her Own

Brooks was smiling in his chair again, watching as our conversation devolved completely. “My mom is a doctor,” he said. “I have a feeling she’d really like you, Ruby. My dad’s a CPA and about as squeamish as they come. Mom always loved to try to make him squirm with stories from her day.”

“Did she succeed a lot?” I asked, intrigued by any information I could get about him.

“Oh, yeah. Not to mention me and my brother. All three of us would be feeling faint and Mom would be grinning at her seat, watching us all set down our forks and take deep breaths.”

It took me a minute to realize that I was matching his smile, my eyes fixed to his face, but when the room grew quiet, I cleared my throat and got back to business.

“Okay, so it’s basically dark now,” I redirected. “Operation Rocky Retrieval is on.”

“Rocky? What a cute name,” Ruby said, leaning forward to watch the screen closer.

“I named him,” Brooks said proudly. The man looked like he’d gotten a gold star in school.

“Let’s place a bet on how long it takes for him to come out,” Aryn said. “I’m guessing he’ll be out within thirty minutes.”

“I think he’ll wait until the moon is high and then come out. So, midnight,” Ruby stated.

“I’m betting even faster than Aryn says, because I have faith in the ladder plan,” I said. “So, about fifteen short minutes.”

We looked at Brooks. He shrugged. “I say he doesn’t come out at all, and you have to call animal control to deal with it.”

“Ugh,” I said to my friends. “Do you see this?”

Ruby shocked me by throwing a pillow at Brooks and howling, “No pessimists allowed.”

That was the kind of thing you’d do with a friend, and, as far as I could tell, Brooks wasn’t in that territory yet. But he caught the pillow with a grin and held it close on his lap.

“I stand by it. What does the winner get aside from bragging rights, which is a given?” Brooks questioned.

We all looked to Aryn. It was her idea after all. “I’m not sure. I’ll have to think about it,” she replied.

“I have an idea,” Ruby wiggled in her seat. “I’ll draw a portrait of Rocky for the winner to have as a memento of this night.”

Aryn and I blinked at each other and then at Ruby. “Rubes, you don’t draw,” Aryn said.

She nodded. “Exactly.”

Exactly? What did that mean?

Brooks seemed to find everything that came out of Ruby’s mouth to be a total delight because he was wearing a wide smile.

“I wholeheartedly accept,” he said. “One portrait of Rocky, drawn by Ruby.”

Pleased, Ruby looked back at the screen. “It would help if I could get a good image of him first.”

“He’s a skunk. So, you can just draw a skunk,” I stated.

She shook her head. “You clearly don’t know much about drawing, Mer. I need to get his personality, his essence, on the page.”

“But . . . you don’t draw,” Aryn reminded her.

“I’m not drawing him; I’m capturing him in a timeless way on paper.” Ruby opened her phone and started scrolling through skunk images. “Oh, hey, did you guys know that people can domesticate skunks? You have their glands removed, and they’ll use a litter box. It says here they’re very similar to cats.”

“No,” the three of us called at the same time.

Ruby startled and then rolled her eyes at us before looking back at her phone.

“Oh my gosh!” Aryn cried two minutes later. “Look.”

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