Tag had been over to our house a million times. He knew my mom always tossed her Red Sox lanyard in the kitchen’s catchall when she got home, and he knew that in addition to her ID, she’d charmed physical metal keys out of various departments. “Why do you need a key to the Buildings and Grounds facility?” I’d once asked, to which she airily replied, “I’m not sure yet.”
I wanted to scream. Tag expected me to steal my mother’s keys?!
TELL ME WHAT WE’RE DOING RIGHT NOW, I replied to his email.
No need to yell, Ms. All-Caps, he wrote back. It’ll be easy.
Easy? I typed. You think swiping my mom’s keys will be easy? When she probably won’t even be asleep yet?
YES, I DO, he said. YOU’VE GOT THIS!
I rolled my eyes when “the Jester” went offline. Hopefully to go brainstorm a contingency plan if I showed up tonight without my mom’s loaded lanyard.
Guilt squirmed in my stomach when I shut my laptop and looked over at my mother. “Mom…” I whispered but astonishingly went silent before I could add, I have something to tell you.
I told my mom everything, absolutely everything. From good grades to bad grades to student gossip to my first kiss with Tag. God, I’d even told her about our first time sophomore year. “Mom, Tag and I slept together!” I’d blurted after coming home and finding her in the family room. I hadn’t even bothered to take off my heavy winter coat or brush the snowflakes out of my hair. “And it was fine!” I barreled on before she could respond. “Totally fine! We were safe, so you have nothing to worry about! Again, totally fine!”
Then I nearly collapsed, breathless.
“Well, okay.” My mom nodded, a look of both bemusement and concern on her face. “I’m glad it was totally fine.” Her lips twitched up in a smile. “But now how about you take off your coat and stay a while…” She patted the couch cushion next to her. “Because I take it there’s a more romantic version of this event?”
Yes, there was, and I told her that too. Not every little detail, but most of them. That year’s winter musical had been The Sound of Music, and I’d somehow been cast as Liesl von Trapp. What had Mrs. DeLuca, the head of the theater department, been thinking?
Tag always picked me up after rehearsal, but one day he’d been late because his swim meet had run long. Everyone had left the auditorium’s basement lounge by the time he’d finally arrived. “How old are you, junge Dame?” he asked cheekily, finding me on the couch still wearing my floaty pink dress with my script. The show opened next week, but I kept butchering some lines. “Sixteen, perchance?”
I glared at him. “Nice try, Herr Swell.”
Tag laughed and climbed onto the arm of the couch. This was when he was still all arms and legs, after his first growth spurt but before he started hitting the gym. “Bambi,” Alex and I liked to call him back then. I watched as he spread out his arms for balance and began humming “Sixteen Going on Seventeen.”
“Okay, stop.” I stood up, my skirt swirling. “Seriously.”
“Why?” He was now precariously perched on the back of the couch. “This is a pretty good makeshift gazebo bench.”
I sighed. “We rehearsed this scene a lot today.”
“But not with me.”
I shook my head and smirked.
“Come on, Lily.” He crouched and kissed my cheek. “We’ve sung this song together so many times.” His green eyes glinted because it was true. Tag had always offered to duet with me when I’d first needed to learn the lyrics. “Please give me my time to shine.”
My heart swelled. “You’re such a dork,” I told him but didn’t say no. Instead, I queued up the music and shooed him off the couch. “It’s Liesl who dances on the gazebo benches.”
Tag’s voice was hoarse from his meet, so he was a terrible singer that day and I couldn’t stop laughing. But we could dance together; we were so good at dancing together, even if it wasn’t remotely the right choreography. And of course, Liesl and Rolf’s scripted kiss was supposed to be light and quick like a butterfly, but instead Tag put one hand on my waist and weaved the other through my hair. I rose up on my tiptoes and wrapped both arms around his neck. “That wasn’t meant for the stage,” I said when we pulled back a few inches for air. Our breathing was heavy but fully in sync.
“How convenient that we’re backstage, then,” Tag quipped, and before long, we ended up tangled together on the couch. His warm skin smelled like chlorine. “Do you want to?” he whispered after a little while.
“Yes,” I whispered back, feeling his hands slipping up my skirt. “I do.”
“Me too,” he said, nodding as I kissed his neck. “I do too.”
So we did, because we loved each other.
I made zero progress on my speech that afternoon, racked with too many nerves. My mom ordered Italian for dinner, but I only pushed around my ravioli, appetite nonexistent. She didn’t notice because she was overwhelmingly preoccupied with her plans tonight. Headmaster Bickford was a member of a local wine club, and so was my mother…theoretically. The club met once a month, but my mom had managed to get out of the last eight gatherings. “You know I’m not ageist, Lily,” she once said, “but I am the youngest member by at least thirty years, and those women…” She huffed. “I have nothing in common with them.”
“How would you know?” I goaded her. “You haven’t been to a single meeting.”
“Because Penny took me to that ladies’ luncheon, remember?” She rolled her eyes. “All they talked about was the goings-on at their country club. It was a full-on gossip session. Penny had to keep feeding me information to keep me in the loop.”
I made a face. “Penny’s a member?”
“Yes, almost every family in town is.”
Right. Most of the faculty was from elsewhere, but Penny Bickford was a true Rhode Islander. She had a whole community outside of Ames.
Unfortunately for my mom, there was no getting out of wine club tonight. It disbanded for the summer, so this was the last meeting until September, and Penny wasn’t taking “I’m swamped with schoolwork” or “Josh’s family is in town” for an answer. She’d even politely insisted on driving my mom to the hostess’s house.
Which, as I later watched the two of them speed off in Penny’s jet-black Jaguar, gave me the perfect opportunity to commit tonight’s impossible crime. I spotted the Red Sox lanyard lying lazily in the kitchen catchall with the usual assortment of crap. Lip gloss, spare change, hair ties, Post-its, colorful gel pens, and way too many Bed Bath & Beyond coupons. My stomach somersaulted with excitement.
This could work, I thought as I unzipped my backpack’s front pocket and pulled out my own red-white-and-navy lanyard. This just might work…
Josh had given us the matching lanyards last year, and like my mom, I kept my Ames ID and house key on it. But unlike my mom, I didn’t have a hundred other keys and kitschy key chains.
Time to get to work.
I needed my mom’s ID and master keys, but I also knew this couldn’t be an overwhelmingly obvious theft. Sprucing my lanyard up with her key chains and leaving it in my mom’s usual place would be a good enough disguise…right?