Free Moonshifted by Cassie Alexander Page A

from some kind soul.”
    I listened for the irony in his voice, or ruefulness, but didn’t hear it. Maybe he was happy living on someone else’s hand-me-downs. I’d gotten him some sweaters and new gloves. What else did you give a homeless person? I’d given him a couch to sleep on often enough.
    “I thought Mom and Peter would be here already?” He took off his coat and put it in my hall closet.
    “They said eleven.” I went to the thermostat and turned the heat up. “How’s things?”
    “The usual.” He sat down on my couch, and picked at the couch cover. “It’s better than the bloodstains.”
    “About that—” I walked into my kitchen to preheat the oven—the faster we could get Xmas over with, the better for me, sleepwise. “They don’t need to know, okay?”
    I saw a familiar light in his eyes. “What’s it worth to you?”
    Oh, had we played this game before. I gestured to the empty space where my dining room set had once been. “Me not telling Mom where my table and six chairs went.”
    Jake rocked back into the couch. “Deal.”
    I frowned. I shouldn’t have to make deals with him. Or apologize to anyone about anything. But he’d seen me a bit ragged lately, and while I didn’t owe him or anyone else answers, I didn’t want this dinner to degrade into a he-said, she-said meal. We’d had enough of those in our past already.
    There was a knock at the door. “I’ll get it.” Jake stood, and I went to go put on Christmas-morning-appropriate clothing that wasn’t footie pajamas.
    “Jakey!” I heard my mom crow from my bedroom. “Where’s Edie?”
    “Getting dressed—”
    “Go help Peter, will you?”
    I heard her coming down the hall, and of course she didn’t knock. Doors were foreign concepts for my mother, which was perhaps why Jake and I played the password game, to prove that boundaries existed. She blustered into my room. “Edie!”
    “Hey, Mom.” My mother, Shelly-Rae Spence (now Grinder), was shorter than me and much more petite. She’d called me strapping, growing up—not because I actually was, but because I was compared with her. She’d meant it as a joke, but I’d been an emo teenager and always felt self-conscious about being a moose to her deer.
    “Merry Christmas!” she said, arms flung wide. I barely made it into my shirt before she hugged me. I hugged her awkwardly back.
    “Merry Christmas. I preheated the oven.”
    “Always thinking ahead! That’s why you’re my favorite!” she told me. Jake and I were always her favorite, often within earshot of each other. “Peter, put the turkey in!” she yelled back down my short hall. “We precooked it this morning, before we bought it over,” she confessed to me in a quieter tone.
    “Thanks, Mom.”
    She patted my arm. “I know how you like to sleep.”
    I inhaled to defend myself, but she left the room before I could. It wasn’t that I liked to sleep so much as the fact that I’d gotten off work two freaking hours before. But my mother and I had had this conversation on multiple occasions, usually when she called me sometime during the day before three P.M. or from other time zones.
    I counted to ten backward, then followed her back out.
    Jake was wrestling with the card table my mother had brought in, while Peter was in the kitchen. I didn’t think I’d ever had this many people in my tiny apartment simultaneously before.
    “It’s a shame about your dining room set, Edie.” She was unfolding chairs and setting them in front of the couch.
    Peter pointed out at me with a potato-covered spoon. “Did you look on the Internet? Was that glass breaking some sort of manufacturing flaw?”
    “Uh—I didn’t even think of that, to be honest.”
    “Well, at the very least you should write a letter.”
    Peter, my stepfather, was the letter-writing type. He was the type who, when the waiter asked how the meal was, was always honest instead of kind, like he thought the cooks behind the counter actually