Read Online Drive Me Crazy by Terra Elan McVoy - Free Book Online

people.
    “Who was your best friend before Kendra Mack?” I ask, hoping I’m not in No Annoying Questions territory.
    Fortunately, Cassie forgets the rule, or is too distractedby her reflection to care. “Just this lame girl. Kendra Mack helped me realize that she wasn’t a very good friend.”
    “Oh. What did she do?”
    Cassie turns to face me with such intensity I worry for a second she’s angry with me . “She betrayed my trust. She was careless with my secrets. She humiliated me, and she never even said ‘I’m sorry.’”
    She tosses her hair a final time in the mirror. “But I’m glad that all happened, because Kendra Mack is fabulous. Being her friend is fabulous, and now my life is fabulous. I don’t even think about Fiona anymore. Like, ever. Okay?”
    I swallow, startled by the sudden ferocity of Cassie’s voice. “Okay.”
    Back at the table, Grandma Tess is laughing at something Grandpa Howe just told her while they were waiting for us, and their smiles put one on my face, too.
    “Hilarious,” Cassie mutters.
    “Oh, it is,” Grandma Tess says back, either not noticing Cassie’s grouchiness or ignoring it. “Tell them, Howie.”
    “Oh, I was just saying that you could’ve fit the entire house at the End of the Road in about one of those rooms we saw today.”
    Between ordering our food and eating, Grandpa Howe explains to Cassie how his grandfather built the oldsummer cabin in Maine. While he’s talking, another message comes in on Cassie’s phone, and when she starts to reach for it, Grandma Tess gives her a disapproving look. Cassie sees it, puts on an I’m Totally Listening face, and straightens up. Grandpa Howe hasn’t skipped a beat, telling us how one summer his own father tried following in his dad’s footsteps by expanding the back porch all by himself.
    “Every day that month, Mother would send my brothers and me out on longer and longer hikes, telling us not to come back until we’d found, well, all kinds of crazy things. An old snake’s skin. A certain kind of fern. Hairs from a fox’s tail. We thought she was sending us on an excursion, you see. That she was giving us our independence, letting us roam all over the place like that. Until one afternoon my brother Buck tripped on a root and broke his tooth. Me and Tad had to carry him back, bawling.”
    Grandpa Howe mimics lugging his youngest brother down the path. Grandma Tess laughs again, but a funny feeling has started swimming around in my head, and I can’t join her this time.
    “Loud as Buck was screaming,” Grandpa Howe goes on, “we could hear Pop cussing over those boards and shingles long before we reached the house. There were nails and scraps everywhere. Place was a mess. He’d been doingthat every day, Mother making him clean up before we got home. Sometimes, just barely.”
    “Oh, I can just imagine your poor mother,” Grandma Tess says.
    I’ve seen photos of Great-Grandma Rachel, even of her at the End of the Road with Grandpa Howe and his brothers when they were young. But right now all I see is Grandpa Howe and me, biking together on our own to the Custard Cup a few days before we left on this trip. We had just finished printing out the itinerary and weren’t able to wait for Grandma Tess to get back from her yoga class to celebrate. While we rode, savoring the sunshine and our sense of satisfaction, Grandpa Howe smiled at me and said, “It’s a good thing, this honeymoon, isn’t it?”
    I told him it was going to be fantastic. And I didn’t think very much about it when he’d said next, “I think the timing is just right for you.”
    Now, after the story of Grandpa Howe’s mother sending him away on “adventures” so that he and his brothers wouldn’t know how badly the new porch was going, his talk about timing echoes in my head. All my parents could focus on in the days before I left was what an adventure this was going to be. They were so eager to see what I’d come back with and