Page 54 of Just A Little Joy

Never. But when you’re doing lab stuff, you can’t always answer. You’ll be there?

Jakob

Yep. I’m bringing the wine.

Rory

YAYYAYYAYYAYA, see you all at seven.

Even surrounded by all the noise, I still felt that small pull in my chest that wondered when I could see Daddy again. Hearing Anders explain himself made me think about how easily I bent over backward for people. I always overdid it, hoping someone would notice in a good way this time.

“Are they jellybeans? Are they rocks?” Jakob mused as he studied the pebble in his hand. With a grin, he popped it into his mouth and bit down. His lips parted to show us where he held it between his teeth. “Candy.”

“Oh, good, I was worried,” Rory responded dryly.

When the boys invited me to their gingerbread party, I hadn’t expected it to be such a big deal. They took their houses seriously, even though they skipped the gingerbread and used cartons and graham crackers instead. The table was piled high with every type of candy imaginable, plus the obligatory healthy element, which was the Shredded Wheat. The boys used the wheat to make shingles for the houses, and we plastered on as much candy as possible. Owen’s artfully styled home was an absolute mess, but it was the best evening I’d had in a long time.

There’s something to be said about finding your people and your place. If I wanted to give myself a little therapy, which I didn’t, I might argue that fear of settling down kept me at arm’s length from people.

But there was no keeping myself at arm’s length from these boys. They were a force of nature, pulling me into their club and their embrace. Even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t have kept my distance.

“Is Anders okay?” The question had been on my mind all evening, and I hadn’t figured out how to ask without being nosy about things that weren’t my business. Rather than answer right away, the boys looked around the table at each other before their eyes landed on Rory.

“He’s not in danger, but he does have questionable taste in men.”

The more the wine flowed, the more talkative everyone became. Soon, we were trading stories about horrible dates, every asshole we’d ever gone out with, and how glad we were to have them in the rearview.

“Dating sounds awful,” Jakob said, propping his chin on his hand like he was making some grand declaration.

It was hard to take him seriously while he drank wine out of a sippy cup with a pacifier clipped to his shirt collar. His feigned innocence didn’t last long after the other boys threw candy at him and he cackled with glee. “Well, it does!” he huffed before pouring another round of wine.

We all gathered at the round dining table at Owen’s house. When we arrived, we all properly oohed and aahed over the candy offerings, but I still wasn’t sure how it worked. The boys had immediately started talking and drinking, so the house-building portion of the evening had been pushed to the side.

“Okay, boys, let’s get to it.” The rest of them started assembling items in front of themselves, but I was at a loss.

“Casey, you good?” Owen asked me from across the table.

As always, his soft-spoken voice cut through the noise. All eyes turned to me, and I squirmed under the examination. As loud as I could be in a crowd, it was the quiet moments that made me uncomfortable.

“Sorry, I’m not sure exactly what I’m doing,” I answered with a self-deprecating laugh.

It was controlled chaos across the table between candy, empty cartons, and frosting bags, but that wasn’t great for figuring out directions. The boys had dived right in, as if they’d been doing this for years, although maybe they had.

“Oh, easy,” Rory said. “Just slap some frosting on the bottom of your carton, stick it on your board, and then cover it in graham crackers. You might have to nibble the edges to make them fit. If you put enough frosting on them, they’ll stick, and then you put more frosting and cover it with the candy. Easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy, right?”

“Yeah, that’s simple enough, I think.”

“Don’t forget to cut out windows and the door so your pretend people can get inside,” Owen added.

A quick glance at his house let me know mine was never going to look that good. He’d cut out the openings with real precision and was lining up his graham crackers, so they all had even lines and even the eaves were even off the roofline. His house was fancy.

“Or, and hear me out with this one,” Nico said, “you just slap it on there, put a wreath where you think the door would be, add a red hot for the doorknob, and call it good.”

“I guess that’s an option too,” Owen sniffed, then ruined it by laughing.

For the next little bit, we all concentrated on putting our houses together, but not so much that Jakob didn’t keep our sippy cups full of wine, except for Owen, who drank his from a bottle. Our houses got less precise as the evening went on. By the end, our makeshift village looked like a candy factory had exploded in the center and had been rebuilt by drunk elves.

“Casey, I gotta ask you a question,” Rory giggled. He was creating frosted branches on his tootsie roll woodpile, but he kept smearing it so it looked more like snow drifts piling up next to the house.