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It was right around the fifth trip up the stairs that all the leasing agent’s talk about “health benefits” and “keeping the blood pumping” was so much horseshit. As he stumbled under the weight of the box in his arms and the pack on his back, Chris felt himself a man dying of thirst in a desert—oh what he’d give to turn his head to the side and see even the barest glimpse of an elevator oasis shimmering in the distance, to step into one of those beautiful air-conditioned closets and revel in their claustrophobia and bad pseudo-jazz.
But those were the dreams of a foolish man. A foolish, foolish man who’d just co-signed a lease for an apartment on the fourth fucking floor of a complex with exterior stairs and nary so much as a ramp in sight.
“I want to die!” he announced upon crossing the threshold. He’d meant for it to be a victorious cry: Honey, I’m home! It had come out as more of a wheeze.
From somewhere deeper in the apartment, Josh’s voice rang out clear as ever. “Yeah, get in line. Some of us were here first.”
Then, closer, “Are you seriously already violating the edgelord clause? Like…you realize I had them put that in the rental agreement for a good reason, riIIIAUGH!”
So much for catching his breath.
Boy he sure hoped there wasn’t anything important in that box, because it was not getting set down gingerly. It thudded when it landed…no sound of breaking glass, though, so that was reassuring. Chris wasn’t exactly used to the layout of the new place yet, but he headed for the sound of Ashley’s yelp with at least some measure of confidence, hurrying down the hall with the grimace of someone expecting to find one hell of a spider on the wall.
What jumped to meet him was a little bit bigger than that.
Lunging out of the bathroom to hang in the doorway like one of the godawful Halloween animatronics Josh’s dad stored in the Washington’s garden shed, Ashley stopped him in his tracks with nothing more than the look on her face.
“Holy shit, Ash! Why were you screaming like that?!”
For a long moment, she simply continued to stare at him, her brow furrowed, her lips pressed tightly together, her knuckles turning white as she clung to the doorframe. She took a long, steadying breath. “Why,” she began stiffly, answering his question with one of her own, “Is Danny DeVito in the frigging shower?!”
…not how he’d expected his valiant rescue to go, but hey, he was nothing if not a guy who could roll with the punches. “Huh! I don’t know this one. Uh, okay…” Sliding his backpack from one shoulder to the other, Chris narrowed his eyes and rubbed his hands together in excitement. In his best Seinfeld voice (something that inspired more secondhand embarrassment than awe) he asked, “Why was Danny DeVito in the shower?”
She stared at him for another beat, unblinking and unsmiling. Then, instead of delivering a real knee-slapper of a punch line, she took a couple steps back into the bathroom and yanked the shower curtain aside, revealing…
“Christ on a cracker!”
Lo and behold—there he was in all his shining glory. The man. The myth. Nay, the legend: Danny DeVito himself! He was looking a little more two-dimensional than Chris remembered, but hey, the camera added twenty pounds or whatever.
Josh appeared from seemingly out of nowhere (as he was wont to do), a dangerously overstuffed duffel bag hugged to his chest as he paused outside the door. “Awww…you guys found a new friend!” His expression was that of a proud parent watching their kids stumble through an Easter egg hunt; there was no doubt in either of their minds that had he not been struggling with the bag like that, he’d have been clutching his hands to his heart. “I was wondering when this meet-cute would go down.”
“Josh,” and oh, Chris might’ve been, but Ashley was not laughing, “Why did you bring a life-size standee of Danny DeVito into our apartment?”
“Yeah, and uh, not to be ‘that guy’ or anything, but while we’re on the subject, why’s he in the shower, of all places?”
The grin on Josh’s face told them in no uncertain terms he knew exactly what he was doing when he only answered one of their questions. “Uh, cuz he didn’t fit in the linen closet, duh?”
“Josh!”
He made as though to sling the bag over his shoulder then thought better of it, letting it fall to the ground before turning his hands out to her, palms-up, the poster child of feigned insult. “What was I supposed to do, Ash? Just leave him at home? All alone? With no one to appreciate him? Run the risk of showing up to visit for Christmas and find Ma finally made good on her promise to throw him in the recycling? I think not.”
“J—”
“I think fucking not.”
“We’re not keeping him in the bathroom.”
Chris did his best to rein in his snickering as Ashley fumed. She seemed caught between actual anger and actual hilarity, and Lord help him, but he didn’t want to be the unlucky sap who found out which was currently in the lead.
Josh, on the other hand, appeared only too willing to test the waters of her temper. “How about this, Encyclopedia Brown…you find me a better spot to put him, and so help me God I’ll put him there.”
“You want to fill our brand new apartment with mold. That’s what I’m hearing. You want to put a giant mold-magnet in our bathroom, the steamiest room in the place—”
“I think ‘giant’ is being generous, Ash,” Chris cut in, pretending to wither under the scornful look she shot him. “I’m just sayin’! From a technical standpoint…he’s, y’know…” Shrugging, he gestured towards America’s sweetheart, Daniel Michael DeVito, Jr., “…a slightly below average mold-magnet.”
“Chris.”
“At least based on the typical American male, that is.”
“Chris.”
“Now if we had a life-size cutout of Andre the Giant in the bathroom, I-I-I think the argument could be made that he would be a giant mold-magnet, but…” He met Josh’s eyes and returned his cheesy grin.
With a long-suffering groan Ashley glared towards the cardboard standee (her eyes full of what Chris felt fairly confident calling ‘murderous intent’) before yanking the shower curtain shut again. “I don’t know why I let myself think living with you dorks was going to be a good idea…now I’m gonna be sharing closet space with Danny DeVito…”
“Hey, ah ah ah…Golden Globe winner, Danny DeVito.” When she made the mistake of stepping out of the bathroom, Josh grabbed Ashley by the shoulder, giving her a joking little twirl. Once both of them were close enough he struck, draping his arms around their shoulders and setting all of his weight against them in a gesture as familiar as it was annoying. “I don’t know who you think you’re fooling,” he snickered, “I see that rosy glow in your cheeks—you’re fuckin’ stoked for the twenty-four-sev slumber party energy we’re gonna be bringing to this dump.”
Ashley sighed aloud at that, rolling her eyes to fulfill her role as resident fuddy-duddy of the group. It wasn’t an especially convincing sigh, though…not when the corners of her mouth were turned up like that, but she still made a point of folding her arms across her chest all the same. “Uh huh. Yeah. Well. Just so you know, if I open the pantry and find, like, Anne Hathaway, I’m out. I’m still not convinced this isn’t some elaborate ruse you guys cooked up just so you could get some Candid Camera prank footage while foisting laundry and dish duty on me.”
“Ohoho, Ash. Please.” His smile going barbed at the end, Josh hooked his elbow to yank her closer. “Don’t get it twisted—that’s exactly what this is.” He ignored her glare and, if possible, only sunk more of his weight into his lean when she tried to shove him away. “‘Elaborate.’ Pfft, nothing elaborate about it. I thought I was being pretty upfront with my nefarious purposes, actually.”
“For what it’s worth,” Chris added, rolling his shoulder to knock Josh’s arm away, finally removing his backpack and dropping it amongst the rest of the shit they needed to unpack, “My purposes were not nefarious in the slightest. Questionable? Perhaps. Shady? It’s possible! I mean, anything is, right? And I’m sure there are those people out there who could argue the term ‘duplicitous’ might even come into play, but nefarious? Nooo!”
Josh narrowed his eyes and glanced his way. “…aw shit. And here we go.”
“What?” Not one to let a good bit go to waste, Chris skirted around the two of them once he’d gotten rid of his bag, moving to Ashley’s other side if only so he could also use her as a human armrest (much to her vocal displeasure). “Whaaat?”
“Not even un-fucking-packed yet and you’ve already got Cochise using four-syllable words. Does your depravity know no bounds, woman?”
She hummed mischievously, and when she ducked away from the both of them, it was suddenly enough that he and Josh crashed into one another. “Maybe you’ll be the ones regretting living with me.” Stepping gingerly over both of their bags, Ashley turned over her shoulder for only a moment, pointing her finger squarely between Josh’s eyes. “Find somewhere else for him to haunt. I mean it. I don’t want or need Danny DeVito watching me pee!”
Chris watched as Josh raised his right hand in a sweet Boy Scout’s salute, his left tracing an X over his heart. It wasn’t until Ashley was well out of earshot that he leaned over just a bit, nudging Chris’s shoulder with his own. “Which bedroom did she call dibs on, again?”
It didn’t occur to him until much later that, uh, maybe he shouldn’t have answered that one.
***
He’d been so sure—so fucking sure—that this was going to be a good idea. Honestly, on paper it had looked like the sweetest deal of all time: Getting out of the shitty dorms with their shitty rules and moving into a place with his buds? That was what dreams were made of, baby, walls they could cover however they wanted, no such thing as “quiet hours” or “boy-girl” mixing or whatever the fuck else the university shoehorned into their room and board agreements, a fridge they could fill with whatever booze they wanted…
The deal wasn’t seeming so sweet just then, though. Oooh no it was not. Fun and frolic were the farthest things from his mind, what with the fabric of his shirt sticky with sweat and the smell of cheap plywood carving splintery gouges into his sinuses, all while on of those quote-unquote best buddies of his did her level best to tear through what little patience he had to his name.
“If you value your fingers,” he said, giving the drill’s trigger a warning squeeze or two, “I’d ask that you kindly remove that shit from my shelves, thanks.”
“Your shelves.” It wasn’t a question, wasn’t even a statement—it was instead a snippy aside that reminded him just a bit too much of something his mother might’ve mumbled to herself after being asked to wash the dishes. “I’m pretty sure they’re our shelves, so…” And then, as though she was literally trying to see how far and how hard she could push him before he filled her hands with holes enough to constitute a fine Swiss cheese, Ashley put a second armful of books onto the shelves.
“Only, uh…they’re not. Our shelves, I mean.” This was probably a conversation better suited for a time when he wasn’t acutely aware of how clammy every inch of his skin felt under his shirt, or when the muscles in his arms and shoulders weren’t still vibrating, but something about the sight of those paperback spines, each one neat and unwrinkled as though Ashley had gone to great pains to keep them looking fresh out of the shrink-wrap, set his teeth on edge. “I put them together,” he pointed out civilly enough, thinking that was one hell of a way to oversimplify the hours of work he’d put into the endeavor, “Ergo…my shelves, thanks.”
Ashley set her hands on her hips (the picture-perfect image of any bratty next-door neighbor or younger sister from a hip and quirky 90’s sitcom, if perhaps a touch sweatier) and cast an unimpressed look across the empty boxes the shelving units had come in, the floor of the living area littered with empty plastic bags that had once held screws and nuts and bolts and dowels galore. She took it all in, but by Josh’s measure, still didn’t appreciate even a fraction of the work he’d put into assembling the things. “They’re huge,” she pointed out.
“Sure are.”
“And I have like…three whole boxes that are just books.”
“Brag about it.”
She rolled her eyes and blew a frustrated breath upwards, ruffling the few tendrils of hair that had escaped her ponytail. “I think you can spare a couple sh—”
“No, Ash, I cannot. Wish I could! But I can’t.” Josh set the drill down with a thunk he hoped carried a note of finality with it, making a grand show of brushing his hands off on his jeans before hooking one of his besneakered feet around the nearest box of his. Once he’d pulled it over, he nudged the lid with the toe of his shoe, kicking it off to reveal the VHS tapes crammed from edge to edge, most still decorated with bright green video store stickers. “See, these shelves…these shelves right here—” he paused just long enough to pat them, “—are for displaying real, actual, legitimate art.” He grabbed a couple of the movies from the box and slid them onto the shelf at his eye-level with a sort of precision that bordered on reverence. “If you want bookshelves, maybe get yourself some, huh?”
If there was a God, if there was any kind of higher power at all, that would’ve been enough. She would’ve seen that he was tired and thirsty and fuck, just so fucking damp, and she would’ve dropped it.
But she didn’t.
Which really only sort of solidified his idea of the universe as a callous, uncaring nightmare void.
“Yeah, uh…preeetty sure you can spare a shelf or two.”
“Can’t.”
“There’s no way you’re filling three whole shelving units with movies, Josh.”
“If that’s genuinely what you think, Nancy Drew, then I hate to break it to you, but you have not been paying attention to my character arc.” Instead of digging his heels any deeper into that particular fight, he flashed her one last smarmy smirk and bent down to begin unpacking the movies in earnest; as an eldest sibling, he knew just how strong the ol’ Cain instinct was within him, and three or four million fights with the twins had taught him precisely how far he could be pushed before it started kicking in.
As it turned out, it didn’t take all that much.
And still Ashley pressed her luck, throwing her arms to her sides as she watched him load the shelves up with schlock. “You are so…ugh!” She whirled around to face the other side of the room, flicking an impatient gesture his way even as she asked Chris, “Are you hearing this?”
“Yeah-huh,” and that was not the tone of a man concerned with anything besides alphabetizing his N64 cartridges, “I’m hearing it all right. Shocking. Truly and majorly shocking. If you’re looking for my vote, I say pizza.”
“Oh my God. That’s not—”
Josh couldn’t help snorting. “Duly noted, Cochise.” He met Ash’s eyes for a second, popping his eyebrows in the way he knew she hated. “You heard the man. Don’t know what else to tell ya.” Straightening back up, he shoved another stack of movies onto the shelf. “The people have spoken.”
She looked between the two of them as though they weren’t speaking the same language she was…and then in a few quick strides, crossed the room to lean her arm against the side of the entertainment center, gesturing grandly towards it as a magician’s assistant might. “Know what I see here?” she asked, not waiting for either of them to answer. “Shelves. Big ones, too! So, uh…why can’t you guys share these?!”
And Chris, dear sweet Chris, had the nerve, the audacity, to reel backwards as though Ashley had just slapped his grandmàmà clean across the face. Sure, the guy couldn’t listen when she was trying to horn in on Josh’s hard work, but when it was his shit…ohoho, then it was an entirely different kettle of fish, wasn’t it? Typical.
“This is the entertainment center, Ash! It’s for consoles and games and—”
“Movies?” she cut in, looking awfully pleased with herself. “Pretty sure movies constitute ‘entertainment.’” Then she paused, narrowing her eyes and pursing her lips. “Well. Maybe not Josh’s movies, but…”
“Consoles. And. Games. I-I-I don’t get how this isn’t making sense to you guys.” He seemed not to be able to decide where to look—at the games he’d already lined up in their neat little rows, or the boxes upon boxes still stacked in the corner, waiting to be added to the collection. “There’s barely gonna be enough room for the Xbox shit, I’m not about to lose more space to a bunch of DVD cases, you kidding me?”
“You guys seriously don’t need all that room!”
“Kiiinda do, Ash.”
“Yeah, have you not been listening, like, at all?”
She groaned again, pressing her fingers hard into her temples as she made her case for the hundredth fucking time: “If you guys share. There will be space. For at least some of my books. Then we can all—”
He was a reasonable man—a patient man—but there came a point where too much was too much, and goddamn it, this was, in fact, too much. “Y’know, not for nothing, but I’m the asshole who spent his day building these fucking things, so I think maybe I should get a say about what goes where. The wall units are for movies and movies alone, please and thanks, so you two can war this one out however you want, but so help me God, if I see so much as a single Koontz between my box sets…”
“I need these for my stuff. Okay? Sorry, but like, I do. And I’m still probably gonna have to store a bunch of it under my bed anyway, so—”
“Then where am I supposed to put my books?!”
“In your closet.”
“Yeah, just go shove ‘em in your closet.”
“In my…there’s not enough freaking room in there! I let you guys put your stupid winter coats and boots in there, so there’s hardly enough space for like, a laundry hamper, much less all my books!”
“Well this may come as a shock, but I don’t care where you put the lending library, so long as it’s nowhere near my stuff.”
“Oh, but you can store your stuff in my room?”
One box down, only about five to go, Josh kicked the empty one away and set his arm on the next lowest shelf, giving himself a moment of rest by leaning forward on it. “That, I’ll remind you, was an offer you extended from the kindness in your own heart. Unfortunately for you, I have no heart, so…”
Chris raised a warning finger into the air. “Edgelord clause. That’s two in one day—pretty sure that means dinner’s on you.”
He and Ash spun around at the same time, and though he couldn’t really get a good look at her face as he glared Chris’s way, he had the distinct sense she was fixing him with the same sort of exasperated expression. “Not helping!” they both snapped, only for Chris to lower his hand with an apologetic flourish. They met each other’s eyes after that, both frowning, both feeling more than mildly betrayed by that wavelength they seemed to share only during the most inopportune times…and then Ashley groaned again, grabbing the few books she’d tried to put on the shelf.
“Thank you,” Josh drawled, knowing he was only twisting the screw that much deeper. “Now was that really so ha—” Though Ashley’s aim was miserable and she would’ve missed him by a country mile even if he hadn’t, Josh ducked in time to miss the paperback she haphazardly tossed his way. “Hey, I can’t pay hospital bills and rent, princess. Watch it!”
***
In a shocking twist that no one (not even she) had seen coming, the arrival of the pizza and the occurrence of additional temper tantrums turned out to be related. Like, closely related.
Directly related, one might’ve even said.
There were still two slices of pizza left, so Ashley didn’t feel too guilty grabbing one of them, pointedly ignoring the dark grease stain saturating the entirety of the box. Had there actually been a table under it she might’ve paid it more mind, but…well, there wasn’t, so she couldn’t find much of a reason to fret. As it stood, their dinner had been set down on a couple of overturned laundry baskets and a plastic tub still full of cleaning supplies, the closest thing to a table they had to work with for the time being.
…wait.
As though she’d only been running on 5% brainpower up until that moment, it occurred to her to…look around. The shared space of the living area was still an absolute wasteland, full to bursting with boxes in various stages of unpack, piles of clothes hanging off the backs of doors and over—oh crud, were those chairs? How had they forgotten they had chairs? Had they really just sat on the floor, huddled around their takeout like a bunch of cavemen because they’d literally forgotten what furniture they owned?
The more she looked, the more ridiculous it became: The pristine entertainment center, the painstakingly organized shelves of old movies, the (admittedly pathetic) shoe rack she’d (poorly) repurposed to use as a (temporary) bookshelf…and everything else. But it wasn’t until her eyes fell on three huge, very suspiciously shaped lumps along the back wall that it really clicked.
She set her half-eaten slice back onto the box, hung her head in her hands, and laughed. What else was there to do? She laughed! And yeah, she heard the guys’ conversation taper off, and uh huh, she knew they were probably staring at her like she’d just popped out a second head or whatever, but as realization of their stupidity washed over her—really washed over her—all she could do was sit there and giggle and pray it wouldn’t turn into outright hysterics.
“Was it something I said?” Josh asked, the flatness of his voice only making her laughter worse.
“Something you said? Fuck you bro, I think we all know it was something I said. I’m the funny one in this mix-‘em-up, I thought I made that perfectly clear.”
“If it was something you said, Cochise, then this is one hell of a delayed reaction. I wouldn’t go bragging about the show-stopping quality of my jokes if it took Ash three point five business days to get back to me with feedback.”
Something, maybe the sound of her name, maybe exhaustion, let her come up for air. It wasn’t that the spell was broken—no, she felt another wave threatening to bubble out of her the second she let her guard down—but at least she had a moment of respite where she could fan her face with her hand and choke out a few words. “Hey guys?” she managed, snorting hard and having to take a deep breath to keep from losing herself again.
“…hey Ash?” Chris echoed. He was looking back and forth between her and Josh, and, much like earlier that morning, wore an expression that suggested he was waiting for the punch line of her joke, whatever that might’ve been.
“I, um…” She cleared her throat and pulled in another deep breath. She wanted to appear at least somewhat put-together for what she had to say, but Lord help her, that sense of calm didn’t seem to be forthcoming. “I was just wondering something.”
The two of them exchanged another look, and darn it! They weren’t making it easy on her. When they turned back to her, it was Josh who answered that time. “…uh huh…”
“Where are we sleeping tonight, exactly?” Ashley managed to hold herself together right until the moment she saw them react. Josh narrowed his eyes and Chris cocked his head to the side, both of them obviously thinking she was out of her goddamn mind, and that was it. The giggles returned with a vengeance, and she actually had to lie down, sprawling herself out on the floor in resignation. She threw one of her arms over her face like a Victorian lady with a case of the vapors, feeling her shoulders shaking against the nappy carpeting they’d no doubt ruin within the first month of living there.
“So this is it, huh? Doesn’t even take a whole day of living together and Cochise is using SAT words while you have a full-on Joker breakdown, huh? I—oh shit, I’m the only one who hasn’t been touched by this weird It Follows curse yet. I swear to Christ, if I wake up tomorrow seized by the throat with a compulsion to tell shitty dad-jokes…”
“Ash, I—” Oh, she could see so clearly in her mind’s eye the look that would be on Chris’s face when Josh’s comment caught up with him. “My dad-jokes aren’t shitty. How fucking dare you.”
“Keep telling yourself that.”
“Okay. All right. Okay. Cool, you know what? How about you start providing the group with comedy gold, huh? See how easy it is to constantly be spitting out zingers.”
“Is that what you think you’re doing?”
“I—man, forget you, clearly Ashley’s going through something.”
“Yeah, I’ll say.”
Still on the floor, she threw both of her hands into the air, flaring her fingers out as dramatically as she could. “Where are we sleeping tonight?!” she repeated, waiting for a beat before forcing herself to sit back up, her face hot with overexertion and something bordering horribly on glee.
Chris, bless his heart, continued to look at her as though waiting for the joke to make sense. Josh, however, only narrowed his eyes further; he wasn’t expecting a joke, she knew, but some sort of M. Night Shyamalan revelation. “…in our rooms,” he said slowly, parsing each word out in a slow, deliberate manner, obviously trying to find the catch before she could point it out.
“Oh yeah?” She pulled her knees to her chest and hugged them there, leaning forward with a knowing smirk. “Where in our rooms?”
“Uh,” came Chris’s oh-so-helpful response.
Josh was squinting by then. Was he trying to read her mind? See through her eyes like her brain was the little advice doodad inside a Magic 8 ball? He could try all he wanted, he wasn’t going to get very far. “In our be—”
Ashley didn’t like to think of herself as an especially vindictive person, and certainly not a mean one…but…oh, but there was no denying she would’ve paid just about any amount of money on Earth to have a recording of the way Josh’s face dropped as the realization hit him too. Any amount of money. The joy of watching him go through each of the five stages of grief all in that one moment? She thought that could’ve gotten her through even the worst finals week.
“Mother…fuck.” There was a beat, and then a thud as Josh too slumped onto the floor, his hands on his stomach in a terribly corpse-like pose as he stared up at the ceiling. “You have got to be shitting me.”
“What?” When neither of them answered right away, Chris shoved aside one of the table-baskets and scooted closer between them. “What?”
Releasing a sound not entirely unlike a kettle that had been left on the stove for too long, Josh pointed towards the back wall and the mass of shit yet to be unpacked. “Can’t sleep in our beds.”
“Why not?!”
He thumped his hand on the ground to bring Chris’s attention to where he was pointing. “Can’t sleep in ‘em because we haven’t fucking assembled them.”
Almost as though she were seeing it through his eyes, Ashley watched as Chris followed the line of Josh’s finger, noticed the massive boxes resting against the wall, realized their sheets were all folded nice and neatly on top of them, and…yeah, there it was. The understanding that they hadn’t so much as touched anything other than their stupid shelves and stupid toys—including, of course, their bedframes.
Chris also flopped himself onto the ground.
Not one to be left out, Ashley slid to the carpet again, another giggle escaping her. “We’re so dumb.”
“We’re a little dumb,” Chris corrected, holding his hand up, his index finger and thumb pinched together. “Little dumb.”
“Well, I guess I did mention something about bringing the slumber party energy earlier…” With a grunt and a groan and a sigh, Josh propped himself up on his elbows, rolling his eyes in her direction. “Guess we’re just gonna have to do this the sleepover way, huh?”
“Good thing we have all these games set up…” she joked. “And allll these movies.”
From where he lay splayed out in a classic roadkill position, Chris moaned, “This again? God, can’t you see your constant fighting is tearing this family apaaaaaart?!”
“So glad I signed into an actual lease to live in these conditions. An actual, legal lease. With actual, legal money. And my actual, legal signature.”
“Blah blah blah, awfully big talk for someone who nearly just pissed themselves laughing.” For a moment (short but beautiful) Josh was quiet…and then, as though it had only just occurred to him, he nodded towards one of the open bedroom doors. “But if we’re doing this shit right, I think I saw Cochise stashing the sleeping bags in your closet right before I put my jackets in there. You wanna get those?”
“What am I, your maid?” But who was she kidding—now that her stomach was full and the prospect of living with these two dorks was really taking root, Ashley couldn’t help but grin like a fool. They could deal with squabbles and the occasional bout of hangry arguing, after all…especially if it meant getting to capture that buzzy energy of staying up too late and laughing a little too hard whenever they wanted. She got to her feet, making sure to poke Chris’s side with her toes before stepping over him. “You know you’re going to have to clear some room on the floor if all three of us are going to fit!” she called over her shoulder as she stepped into her room, rolling her eyes when she saw whichever one of them had been in her closet last had left the door open a sliver.
“Of course, Your Highness,” Chris called back, only for Josh to add, “Any other requests?”
“Yeah,” she snickered, throwing the closet door wide open, “You coulAAAAUUGHH!” There were not words for the terror that gripped her heart when she found herself staring into a pair of eyes, unblinking and all-seeing, couched there in the darkness of her closet. Her knees went out from under her, but only for a second!
Ashley scrambled back to her feet in time to see the other two leaning in the doorway, beaming ear-to-stupid-ear. She took it back—she took all that sappy, crappy stuff about being happy to live with them back! She was going to kill those two before this was all over, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. They’d just signed their own deaths warrants, is what they’d done! If this was an omen of things to come…oh, but she wasn’t ready for that thought, not when they were guffawing at her like that.
“Why,” she breathed, jabbing a furious finger over her shoulder, “Is Danny DeVito in my freaking closet?!”
“Well, Ash,” Josh said, oddly calm considering Chris was almost in tears beside him, “You did tell me to find somewhere else to put him. So really, when you think about it…” He spread his hands out as if in supplication and shrugged. “He’s in your closet because you wanted him there.”
Oh yeah.
She was going to kill them.