“Good,” Mason calls back through the wall. “Cassie and I are going to get some eggs at the hotel restaurant before heading to the Zimmermans’. We need to be there at eight. Are you coming?”
I wonder for a moment if Matt thinks it’s weird that my dad would call my mom “Cassie” instead of “your mother,” but he doesn’t seem to notice. Then my stomach sloshes in a very bad way and I quit wondering.
“Ask if you can stay here today,” Matt whispers. I nod.
Concerned about dragon breath, I turn my head away from Matt when I speak.
“Would it be okay if I hung around here today?” I ask the wall. There’s silence on the other side of the door. “I want to catch up on some reading,” I add, trying to sound normal but feeling anything but. Mason doesn’t answer for a bit, as if he’s considering what I’ve asked. Finally, he says:
“Stay inside the hotel.”
“Okay,” I call out. “Thanks.”
My stomach lurches again and I curl into the fetal position.
“Are you going to be sick again?” Matt whispers.
“I don’t know,” I whisper back.
“We’ll be back at seven,” Mason says through the wall. “We’ll eat together.”
Wishing Mason would stop talking about food, I gather all my strength to answer, “Okay, sounds good.” My stomach lurches again.
“Want to go to the bathroom?” Matt says quietly.
“I don’t want to move,” I whisper. Matt smiles weakly and brushes a piece of hair off my forehead.
“Then don’t.”
I gasp awake, heart pounding, eyes wide. Matt’s still here, next to me on the bed. He’s on his back now, staring up at the ceiling. I watch as he turns toward me, concerned.
“Bad dream?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” I say, because whatever ripped me from slumber is already out of reach. Without moving to know for sure, I can tell that my body is on the mend. I smack my lips and deeply inhale and exhale.
“So… I called you last night?” I say.
Matt rolls to his side again, facing me, smirking. “You drunk texted me.”
“What did it say?” I ask self-consciously.
“Something like ‘save me from frat boys,’ ” Matt says. I see a flicker of annoyance in his eyes. Jealousy?
“What else?”
“I called you when I got the text and you said you went out with a gay guy named Wade and—”
“I said Wade was gay?” I interrupt, frowning.
“Well, you kept saying over and over that he needs to come out of the closet,” Matt replies.
I laugh in a quick exhale. “I think I meant that about something else…. Anyway, keep going.”
“Okay, so you gave me this totally cryptic description of where you were,” Matt says. “You said you were at Freckler with the moose.”
“What does that even mean?” I ask, embarrassed about my weird language and about getting drunk in the first place. It’s not me.
“Eventually, I figured out that you meant Specter Hall,” he explains. “They have holiday reindeer on their lawn, all lit up and everything. One is really huge and could be mistaken for a moose.”