Free Two Roads by L.M. Augustine

can’t help but wonder… if he knows something I don’t.
    I shake my head, pushing the thought away as I step onto my floor. Of course Logan doesn’t know why it happened. That’s ridiculous to think. No one knows why it happened. But I still wish I could know, wish I could find a way to forgive myself for not doing anything to stop what happened.
    Sighing, I reach the door to my room, and the same loud rock music is playing inside. I roll my eyes. Ruby again. The beat has already started pulsing through me, seeping under the doorway and through the walls as I turn the knob. I start to step inside, to act normal and ask how her day was or whatever, when I nearly fall flat on my face.
    Because the whole floor is filled with plastic cups.
    Hundreds of plastic cups.
    All in a line, all filled to the top with lemonade, all right in front of me.
    I hold my breath, gasp, and nearly have a heart attack as I look around the room. There is not an inch of actual floor not covered by cups.
    And then, immediately, I know who is behind this. My face flushes. Logan .
    That bastard is so in for it.
    I jerk my gaze around the room, looking for a way to step inside but finding none that doesn’t end in me tripping and falling into a pile of lemonade. Shit. Logan really outdid himself this time. I can’t even step inside my own room.
    “Ruby?” I call, because I can still here her music on.
    “Yeah?” she says back, calm as ever, like she doesn’t even notice the hundreds of filled lemonade cups covering our room. I peer around and see her lying on her bed.
    “Was Logan here?”
    She pauses. “Yeah.” Still no emotion.
    I strain to get a good look at her face but it doesn’t help. “And you let him… do all this?” She is really not the best protector when it comes to my things.
    “Pretty much,” she says like it’s nothing, but I can sense the smile behind her voice. She finds this whole thing funny. Of course she does.
    I raise an eyebrow, trying to be angry at her but failing miserably. Unlike Logan, Ruby is difficult to hate. “…Why?” I manage to say.
    “I’ve never claimed to have morals. Plus, your little rivalry entertains me.” She pauses and I know it’s to hide the amusement in her voice. “He left you a note in the doorway,” she adds after a minute.
    Immediately, I glance down at my feet, and sure enough, I find a small piece of scrap paper lying there. I pick it up, recognizing Logan’s handwriting as soon as I see it. As I read the note, I wish like hell he were still here so I could kick him in the balls. “Just my friendly reminder that I hope you get abducted by witches and boiled into soup. Oh, and I hate you. -L”
    I toss the note back to the ground immediately, hating that I find it kind of amusing, and I already start wondering what I’ll do to Logan in return for all of this. It will be bad--it has to be bad. I promise myself I’ll scare the crap out of him, so much that he won’t even know what hit him. But first, for the matter of figuring out how to get inside my own room.
    The task is, unfortunately, much more difficult than it looks. If I take a step forward, I’m almost sure to trip on one of the cups and fall face-first into the hundred others and considering they’re filled with lemonade, the only place that will get me is possibly blinded and bathed in stickiness. Theoretically, I could pick each cup up one by one, but I’m really not in the mood for that.
    I glance back up at Ruby, even though it’s only her feet I can see. “Any ideas for how I can get in?” I say, trying to make my voice sound as annoyed as possible.
    “I’m going to leave this one to you. So basically, you’re screwed,” she says. Then, Ruby pops something into her mouth--popcorn, it sounds like. Ugh. I’m trapped outside of my room and she’s not only failing to help me, but she’s also eating popcorn . That evil, evil girl.
    “Does this mean you give me permission to do whatever I want to