The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo Read Free Book Online Page B

expecting. She had dark hair and big eyes, but she was also pale—almost grayish—and there was something about the pinch of her mouth that reminded him of his math teacher, Mrs. DelBanco, who always told him he wasn’t trying hard enough. She didn’t fit in their kitchen; the muted blue of her sweater clashed with the red paint over the stove. Hanna kept telling him he had an impressive eye for detail.
    “Jonah’s got wonderful artistic skill,” Hanna said, reading his mind.
    Violet Sorenson-Lowell. The name didn’t feel right. He’d always thought she would have a more motherly name. Lisa or Cheryl or something. He read the school directory some nights while Hanna cooked dinner, paging through the lines of names, the kid first then usually two parents, Tom and Beth Costner, Kurt and Carolyn Newberg. Then an address, a house on a street named after a midwestern state—unless the family was rich, in which case the street was named after a variety of tree—and three phone numbers, home, work, and cell. Jonah was featured in this year’s directory, but his last name—Bendt—didn’t match Hanna and Terrence’s, and they had only one number listed because both of his foster parents worked from home and shared an iPhone because Hanna, as she’d told him many times, was resistant to technology. He was staring at Violet’s hands, the right twisting the bejeweled rings on the third finger of the left. Hanna wore a plain gold band; she’d told him about blood diamonds. He wondered if anyone had informed Violet but decided that they probably hadn’t, since her necklace also bore a number of shiny stones.
    “Why don’t you tell Violet about that, J?” Hanna said. He looked to her, startled. She fit perfectly in the kitchen with her brown sweater and her messy crumpling of hair. She smiled at him. She was moving to South America.

    “What?” he said. He looked to Violet.
    “Your— Hanna was just telling me about your ceramics class.”
    “Oh, yeah,” he said. “It’s cool.”
    “Cool how ?” Hanna asked, prodding him, nudging his foot with hers under the table. “Tell her about the Terra Fiesta exhibit.”
    “Oh, it’s just.” He stopped, shook his head once so his hair hung over his eyes. “Just this thing they do where they put your stuff on display and people can—like, buy it if they want.”
    “But tell Violet how they choose whose pieces get displayed,” Hanna said.
    “People vote,” he said.
    “The whole school votes,” Hanna said, turning to Violet. “Thirty-eight hundred students vote, and some faculty, and the person with the highest number of votes gets their work displayed at one of the biggest galleries in town.” It was actually the only gallery in town, but Hanna was good at making little things sound big.
    “That’s incredible,” Violet said, and she seemed pretty again, brighter. “That’s— God, that’s huge. You must be— You should be so proud.”
    “One of his mugs sold for twenty-five dollars,” Hanna said. He felt his face heating up.
    “Amazing,” Violet said. “That’s wonderful. Do you have— I mean, I’d love to buy one.”
    Hanna looked slightly troubled by this. Jonah watched her face for cues.
    “We have a number that we— Honey, is there one of our mugs you might want to give Violet?” She turned to Violet. “We’re so lucky. He keeps us caffeinated. We’ll never run out.” Until we move to Ecuador, she did not say. He doubted his stupid mugs would make the cut. They were selling the house on Wisconsin Avenue and having a big garage sale for everything that wasn’t what Hanna called an absolute necessity. “Why don’t you pick one out, J?”
    He shrugged, happy for an excuse to leave the table, and drifted to the cabinet where they kept the mugs. The red one was Terrence’s favorite, and Hanna liked the purple one, the one he’d given her for Mother’s Day. The rest were expendable, he guessed, but he was having trouble picturing