The Quad Squad

Chapter Two

Chapter Two

I was desperate.  I mean, I had to be if I was seriously considering letting my sisters help find me a boyfriend. None of us had ever been any good at keeping out of each other’s business in the past. We all thought we knew how the others should be living their lives and rarely hesitated to say so. It was the one annoying thing about being a quad.

            So, willingly letting them into that part of my life meant that I’d be taking a major risk. Yes, I’d get my sisters back, but I’d actually have to let them set me up. With guys they thought would be good for me. And that could be trouble.

            I wasn’t even sure I wanted a boyfriend.

            As it was, Sawyer was the only one of us that had one. Cooper. He was one of the stars of the soccer team and also participated in debate club. They’d been going out since the end of freshman year and spent a lot of time holding hands and forcing the rest of us to witness their vomit-inducing PDA. Cooper was nice enough, though. Seemed to make Sawyer happy and he was actually pretty fun to be around. He wasn’t as annoying as most teen boys could be. But the emergence of Coop had threatened the whole dynamic of our relationship at home. In fact, he may have been the first thing to chip away at our perfect sisterhood.

            As soon as they’d started dating, suddenly Friday nights became “date nights” for them, and the rest of us were left one sister down. It wasn’t like it ruined things; we still went to the movies, had game nights, spent hours learning Beyonce’s latest dances and performing them in our best diva-like fashion. But it wasn’t the same without Sawyer. There was a delicate balance of personalities when the four of us were together. When one was gone, that balance was disrupted.

            So, in a way it had been a relationship that had started all this drama in the first place. I was pretty sure it was what gave the others the idea that they, too, could have lives separate from the Quad Squad.

            Wouldn’t bringing another guy into the fold just create a bigger divide?

            I thought about this the entire ride home from the mall, but no matter how many other “projects” I came up with, it was the only one I knew had the power to pull the Bay sisters back together.

            Girls loved setting people up. And the ability to do so successfully was akin to having a super-power. I wasn’t exactly sure why, but we seemed to be crazy-obsessed with pushing two people together in the hopes that they’d be shot by Cupid’s arrow. What happened afterward was, of course, out of our hands, but the ability to meddle and get the ball rolling on someone finding his or her soulmate, tended to give us a bizarre sense of satisfaction. Like we were making a significant impact on the world.

            I blame it all on The Notebook.

            So, I had to do it. Letting them meddle was the only way. Now I just had to get them to agree to it without becoming suspicious. Because me going straight up to them and saying, “Hey, why don’t you guys find me a boyfriend?” would bring up all sorts of red flags. I had to orchestrate it in a way that made them think they were talking me into it, and not the other way around.

            I could hear Sawyer chatting with Harley in her room, and I took a deep breath before entering. They were both sitting on Sawyer’s bed, looking at something on a laptop intently.

            “See? I want the Surfer to fade into the Can-Can, but I can’t seem to get it to work right,” Harley said.

            I’d heard her talk enough about riding to know that the terms were motocross tricks. What they actually entailed, I wasn’t sure. I moved over to the bed and sat down on the end to see for myself.