The Worst Kind of Wonderful

Chapter SIX

It was one in the afternoon and the sun filled my room with a burning light that pooled to the floor. The room was filled to the very brim with soggy stale air from the uncharacteristically intense heat and a groan escaped my dry lips.

"Andie!" I called into the empty hallway, letting my voice bounce off the walls in its clumsiness.

"Yeah?" Andrea's head poked around the corner letting her hair tumble over petite shoulders.

"Can you turn up the air conditioning? It's like a million degrees."

"It's turned up all the way already. Nothing is cutting through this heat. It's cooler downstairs though if you wanna hang out with me and Thomas."

"Thomas is here?" I asked groggily.

"Yeah, and Annabelle called earlier to say she'd be here around two." After she left, I quite literally dragged myself out of bed. The sheets stuck to my legs in protest but eventually I was free. I had been surprised to hear that Thomas was visiting, he and Andrea were best friends all throughout elementary and middle school but as soon as Christian came into the picture they distanced themselves.

"Aw look it's Andrea's little sister!" Thom called sending me a warmly familiar smile. I groaned at his refusal to commit my name to memory. In the eighteen years I'd known him I was almost positive he had not use my name once.

"She's your little sister now too," Andrea reminded taking a swig of lemonade that's glass she gripped with long manicured fingers.

"Oh right. Well then let me rephrase: aw look its my little sister in law. I almost forgot about you and my little brother. How does it go? Zak and Mia sitting in a tree, first comes unreturned love, then comes marriage then comes fifty years of bossing around snot nosed teenagers with a thirst for rogue blood. Congrats."

"Why are you always so horrible?" Andrea slapped his arm sending a murderous look. "Nobody likes a cynic."

"Oh please Andie, you know you love me." They continued to bicker as I made myself breakfast, pouring sugary sweet juice into a glass and spreading melted butter onto burnt toast.

Andrea had been right in saying that the heat was more bearable downstairs. Though it still clung to the air like an unyielding fog, the tiny air conditioner that sat firmly in our kitchen window provided at least a small amount of some much needed relief.

It was two on the dot when Annabelle arrived bringing in another wave of heat in her wake. I was almost surprised to see that her usually sleek hair had frizzed into uneven curls and that her smooth skin had flushed a reddish pink color.

"It's a freaking inferno out there!" Belle groaned, stumbling through the kitchen and throwing her oversized purse into a chair and plopping down beside it.

"Hey Belle." Tom threw the words at her awkwardly and she snapped her head around to face him.

"Uh, Thomas... Hey?" I was reminded in that moment of Andrea and Thomas' first day of middle school. Annabelle and I sat on the stairs looking down at my mother as she snapped a far more than necessary amount of pictures, Andrea's groans of embarrassment echoing through the hall. Annabelle was making the occasional sassy remark about a new girl that was bothering her in class when the door opened and in walked Thomas.

You would have thought she found the holy grail by the way she looked at him and when he noticed her the expression on his face was practically a carbon copy. That was the first day I thought seriously about the possibility of the mate theory's validity, but as we reached the age of our first shifts and they didn't feel the connection I lost all hope in the idea; realizing the only reason they turned each other into fools was the fact that they were hopelessly and blindly infatuated with one another.