Kiss Me Again Read Online Free PDF Page B

for a science fair project, too?”
    “No,” Mom said. “Just killed some plants, I think.”
    “Sam,” Joe barked. The string bean was halfway into her mouth. She let go with her skinny fingers but not her teeth, so it hung there limply.
    Joe smiled gently. “Don’t eat off the floor, sweetheart.”
    “Five-second rule,” Sam said. The string bean, still half-in/half-out, twitched as she spoke.
    “That’s not …” Joe’s smile was starting to mold. “That rule does not make one bit of sense.”
    “Mom says it does,” Sam said. “My mom.” She then proceeded to slowly chomp the string bean, which disappeared millimeter by millimeter.
    We all watched. When she finished, Joe took a deep breath, turned his face away from Samantha’s, and shrugged apologetically to my mother. “How was your day, my love?” he asked her.
    So much for my appetite. I’d been holding my phone in my lap the whole dinner, but Kevin, I guess, didn’t feel like texting under the table right then. Luckily. Because I certainly did not need to be texting with him. Hopefully he had gotten the point and was planning to just ignore me, too.
    I slipped my phone into my pocket to clear my plate from the table as soon as it seemed like I could get away without being yelled at.
    After a minute, when I was standing in the kitchen checking my phone to make sure it hadn’t died, Samantha followed me in, carrying her plate with the silverware and her cup on top. “Where’s the broom?” she asked.
    “Did something break?”
    “No,” she said.
    “Why do you need a broom, then?”
    “To sweep up after dinner. It’s my job.”
    “Oh,” I said. “Um …” I tried to think of where we kept a broom.
    “What’s yours?”
    “My what?” I asked her, leaving my plate in the sink and opening the hall closet to broom-search. “My broom?”
    “Job.”
    “I, my job? I didn’t—I just have an interview.” It hit me that I had not yet asked my mother if I could get a job. “I don’t actually have a job. Yet.”
    “After dinner,” Samantha patiently explained, beginning to wash off her plate thoroughly before placing it gently in the dishwasher. “What is your job, after dinner?”
    “Um, walking the dog.”
    “There’s a dog?” she asked, excited for the first time I’d ever seen. I felt instantly awful. “Where? I didn’t know we had a dog!”
    “We don’t. Sorry.”
    “So, but you said, your job is walking the dog?”
    “If we had one, I meant.” My shoulders weighed a thousand pounds each. “So for now I am off the hook. Is what I meant. Lame joke. Sorry.”
    “Oh.”
    “Is Charlie torturing you?” Kevin asked her, coming into the kitchen with his plate stacked similarly with his place-setting stuff. On his way he grabbed the saucepot off the stove, too.
    “Not on purpose,” I said. I grabbed a pear out of the bowl of fruit that was sitting like a still life on the kitchen counter.
    “I wouldn’t,” Kevin said.
    “Wouldn’t … what?”
    “Monday pears,” Samantha said. The two of them were both looking at the pear in my hand, which started to feel like a grenade I had just accidentally pulled the pin out of.
    “What’s wrong with it?” I asked them.
    They both shrugged.
    “Monday pears?” I asked. “Is that a thing? Or another old family joke?”
    Samantha said, “It’s a thing, I think.”
    Kevin shrugged, then went to the sink and started scrubbing the pot. I felt like a geranium plunked down awkwardly in the middle of my own kitchen. I bravely took a bite of the pear. I waited, but nothing happened like instant death or puking. It was just a hard, juiceless pear. No taste, not even poison.
    Joe materialized in the kitchen doorway with a broom and dustpan, which he handed to Samantha, and then kissed her on top of her head. She disappeared into the dining room to do her job. I sank onto a kitchen chair and took another hard bite out of the pear. I checked my phone while all the busy elves buzzed