Page 11

6. Attend an insane pool party.

7. Go on a road trip.

8. Post a dance challenge.

9. Get a tattoo or other body modification.

10. Fall in love (whatever that means).

I watch the paper shake a little in Shal’s hands. We’ve gone so quiet I can hear the slight snores of the cats where they’re still nestled in a pile of blankets on the floor.

“This is so cheesy,” Priya mutters.

The silence of the basement makes her voice sound extra loud.

“Oh, it is, but…” Shal rests the paper on the table and then gets up to hunt around until she finds the nearly empty bottle of white wine and holds it up like she’s making a toast. “There’s no backing out now, bitches.”

CHAPTER 3

Andrea

“Is this where I turn?”

The car lurches to a stop at an intersection. Brayden blinks at me from the driver’s seat, waiting for directions.

I do a quick scan of the area and then point towards my window. “Yeah. Go right. I think.”

I’ve only been to this house a handful of times since Dad and Sandy moved in—just a couple awkward Thanksgiving dinners and one very strained week-long visit for my seventeenth birthday. Dad always came to pick me up from the train station in whatever his midlife crisis mobile of the year was, so I have a vague sense of the route to the house, but my memories aren’t much help in the pitch dark, when one looming mansion looks much the same as the next.

“Big houses,” Brayden says as he swings the car into a turn that’s a little too wide for the road.

The engine pops as he accelerates down the street, but after two hours in this junk heap of a car, I don’t flinch at the sound anymore.

Beggars can’t be choosers, as they say.

“Is your dad, like, rich?” Brayden asks.

We pass by a huge grey brick estate I think I remember my dad pointing out as an embassy, and I figure we must be on the right track to the house.

“Uh…I guess,” I answer.

People tend to get weird when they learn my dad is whatever is just underneath a C-level employee at one of the biggest banks in Canada. They get even weirder when they learn my mom is the founder of the biggest Pilates studio chain in the country and was previously the star of a very famous set of workout DVDs that everybody else’s mom seemed to own when I was a kid.

You’d think they would have been the perfect power couple.

You’d be wrong.

“Turn here,” I tell Brayden when we reach the end of the street. “Please.”

We arrive at my dad’s street. Brayden brings the car to a halt in front of the house’s gate and lets out a low whistle as he hunches over the steering wheel to peer up at all three storeys of the house silhouetted against the dim scattering of stars in the night sky.

I stare up at the sight too, searching for any sign that my dad and Sandy are not in Italy like they’re supposed to be. The last time my dad called me under what I’m certain were strict orders from my mom to try talking some sense into me about my life choices, I’m pretty sure he mentioned he was leaving at the start of July. I didn’t want to risk texting him tonight to confirm. There’s a slight chance he’d suspect something was up and call my mom, and she’d definitely know something was up.

Namely, that I broke up with my boyfriend and ended up alone in Montreal at the age of nineteen, just like she said I would. She’d count it as more proof that I should just come back to Toronto already and start my impending internship at her business early, but that’s not something I wanted to deal with today.

Hence, Dad’s house.

There are no lights on in the mansion that I can see, just some glinting reflections of the sky in the huge, floor-to-ceiling windows.