Page 7 of Call My Bluff
Lexie clapped her hands in delight. “So, you admit I’m right?”
“I admit you have a promising list,” Olivia conceded as she ran a brush through her hair. “But he’s also the class clown, he knows how good-looking he is, and he’d bat his eyes at anything in a skirt just to get a reaction,” she said. “Maybe he does check the boxes, but I’m not interested. In a few years, after grad school... maybe. But right now, I have things to do.”
“You can do more than one thing at a time, you know,” Lexie pointed out. “What is it you told me recently? ‘Don’t punish yourself for finding something good?’”
“I’m not punishing myself; I’m just being practical,” Olivia countered. She climbed onto her bed and reached for the TV remote.
“Maybe you should be a little less practical...Pixie.”
“Shut up,” Olivia muttered, though it was without conviction. She settled herself more comfortably against her headboard and tried not to think about the way Noah’s gaze had kept dropping to her mouth and how that fact had made her chest tighten. A warm flush crept up the back of her neck, and she hoped with all her might that Lexie wouldn’t notice. Nothing her friend couldsay would change the fact that Olivia was right: Noah Campbell was a distraction she didn’t need.
Exhibit A? He was already causing trouble, and he wasn’t even there.
3
Olivia scrawled hername on the front office sign-in sheet at Mason County Elementary School before following a familiar path down the third-grade hallway. She’d visited several different kids here during her years with the Big Brothers Big Sisters mentorship program, but her longest assignment was with Avery Pinson—a little boy who really just needed a friend.
She paused outside a classroom with colorful ducks on the door and knocked softly before pushing it open. The teacher, an elementary-school veteran named Mrs. Benedict, glanced her way.
“Avery!” the woman called, barely pausing her lesson. She was used to this exchange, which happened every Thursday after lunch.
A little boy with messy red hair rose slowly from a desk near the back, and Olivia furrowed her brow in concern. Avery was always excited to see her; sometimes he even knocked things to the floor in his haste to reach the hallway. But this time, he looked like he’d rather be anywhere else.
“Hey, buddy!” Olivia said brightly when he’d finally crossed the threshold and closed the classroom door behind him. “Are wedoing more art today?” Their current project was his submission to the fall art show: an owl made from soda tabs and a small ceramic pot. She’d spent countless visits wielding the superglue while he’d placed each painted metal tab in the perfect spot, building layers of bright feathers that made the tiny planter come to life.
Avery mumbled something incoherent as he shuffled across the tile floor.
“What was that?” she asked.
“I said it’s gone!” he repeated, almost shouting the words in the empty hallway.
Olivia stopped dead. “What happened?” she asked in dismay. The owl had been nearly finished the last time she’d seen it. The little boy’s eyes teared up, and Olivia immediately threw her arm across his shoulders. “Okay, how about we go to the library?” she asked quickly.
She steered him to the left and pushed open the first door they came to. Then she guided Avery past the reference desk, snatching an unattended box of tissues as she went, and led him into a small courtyard just beyond the wall of windows.
His first tears fell as the glass door shut behind them.
“Hey, it’s okay, we’ll make it better somehow,” she said in an attempt to soothe him. But it didn’t work. The tears fell harder and faster, and, while she wasn’t supposed to have prolonged physical contact with her young friends, she decided that—in this particular moment—the rules needed to be suspended. She set the tissues on the picnic table and pulled him into a hug. He returned it with surprising force for an eight-year-old, and Olivia had to concentrate on breathing properly.
“She sm-smashed it,” he spluttered. The words were wet, as was the front of Olivia’s shirt, and she reached awkwardly to one side for the tissues, glad now that she’d thought to bring them.
“Who did?” she asked. She finally managed to pinch a Kleenex between her fingers and pull it from the box, and she offered it to Avery as his grip on her torso loosened.
“My m-mom.”
An unsettled feeling blossomed in Olivia’s chest. She’d been told years ago that Avery’s father was in prison, and she’d heard stories of his tumultuous homelife with his mom. Whatever had happened to the owl, she was sure it hadn’t been an accident.
“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked.
Avery’s tears slowed, and he mopped his face with the tissue she’d given him. Then, when that was too damp, he lifted the hem of his shirt and scrubbed at his cheeks. “She was mad,” he said miserably.
“At you?”
“No, at Dennis.”
“Who’s Dennis?” Olivia asked. Avery was an only child, at least as far as she knew.
“Her boyfriend,” the little boy explained. “She threw my owl at him, and it cracked against the wall. There were p-pieces everywhere. Tabs everywhere.”
