Sincerely, Emily ✓

14 • Big Fat Liar

At this hour? "Great, just great," I muttered, staying on the ground. "Let me guess, you climbed over the window?"

He grinned. "You know me so well, Woods." Then he nodded towards my phone. "So, who was calling?"

"Mom."

"Big fat liar."

I sighed. "Val."

"And you haven't told her yet?"

I answered him with silence, and he must've understood because he said nothing else. Then we hear a loud bang from outside the room, inside the house.

Both of us froze.

"What. . . was that?" Oliver asked slowly.

Since my bedroom was upstairs, I had no choice but to move to the guest room in the first floor after my leg condition. So that meant wherever that loud bang came from, it came from somewhere very close to us.

"I don't know," I responded quietly, my heart beating fast. There was only two of us in the house. So I sent out a quick text: 

Emily: Mom? Where are you?

The reply came a second later: 

Mom: Just rounding up Roseville. Why, dear? Something wrong?

Roseville was another neighborhood close to ours. I gulped. 

Emily: Nothing's wrong. Just checking.

Oliver was already standing by my side, reading over my shoulder. "Well, then. You better check it out."

My head whipped around. "Me? Why me?"

"It's your house!"

"I HAVE A DYING DISEASE, OLIVER!"

"FINE!"

He stomped across the room and slowly opened the door. Before he forgot, though, he went back to my bed — well, actually, across my bed and into my window.

"What are you — " He couldn't go to his room, since it was on the second floor. He knelt down, searching for something in the grass. I could hear him muttering a curse under his breath, but then there was an "Aha!" and he stood back up, a baseball in his hand. 

"What?" he asked as I stared at him. "We need a weapon!"

I raised my eyebrows. "And you think a ball is going to magically save us from whoever's there?"

"It's something, alright!"

He quickly went inside, then out, the door closing shut. A few moments passed and I started to worry. What if it was a real burglar? For the last seventeen — sorry, eighteen — years of my life, we'd never had burglars, but I knew some of the neighbours here who did. 

I stared at the door harder.

It opened abruptly and thank God, it was Oliver's face I saw. However it didn't relax me when I saw his expression. 

"There's no one here and the door's closed."

Was he serious? I could've sworn the loud bang came from inside the house. Or maybe it was just from a friendly neighbour's house "I wanna see."