While Tracy waited for Seay to get back from his walk home - he'd asked to be dropped off at the gas station again, lying to Blaze and Michelle that his family's cabin was near enough to walk but tricky to find in the dark - she hid outside their actual cabin, fretting about the one light on inside. It had to be Mom, still up, waiting for her kids to come sneaking back in.
She was itchy. It was hard to tell in the dark, but by feel alone she counted ten fresh mosquito bites. Her legs were ablaze with histamines. Her tummy had one right by her navel. She had at least two on the back of her neck, but it could have been more for how swollen and close together they felt.
She heard Seay's flip-flops approaching on the gravel. She rose to greet him, quietly waving her arms and signaling to him to beware of the one lighted window of their cabin, which cast a long pale trapezoid across the yard. Seay walked around rather than through the light. The twins reconvened around the side of the cabin.
"What are we doing?" whispered Seay.
"Waiting for Mom to go to bed."
"But she's probably waiting for us."
"So?" Tracy fretted. "Let her wait. She has to go to sleep eventually."
"Are you even sure she's up? Maybe they just forgot to shut the lights out."
"I have a f-feeling," Tracy said. She shivered. The night air was growing nippy, and she still just had the cami.
"Let's sneak around back and peek in," Seay sighed, absently scratching at his own tic-tac-toe of shoulder bug-bites. "We can see if she's up."
"But she'll see you!" Tracy hissed. The sliding door in the back of the cabin was a single tall plate of plexiglas. There were tall plastic blinds that could be reeled along a track to cover it, but the family went in and out this lake-facing door so often these blinds almost never saw use.
Sure enough, the blinds were drawn. They had even been twisted shut.
"Shit," said Seay.
"W-we gotta just go in the front," Tracy said. She touched his shoulder. He flinched.
"Think she'll ground us?" he muttered.
"Here? On vacation?" Tracy said. She thought about it. She slapped at another mosquito tickle, but it was just a stray hair. "I doubt it?"
"Well," Seay sighed, trudging back around toward the front of the cabin, "let's go find out."
They deliberately did not sneak as they came in through the front entrance of the cabin. They kicked off their flip-flops, straining to listen to the silence, and exchanged wary glances. No sign of Mom or Dad yet. The only light still on in the cabin was the one they themselves had left on in the living room. They padded barefoot down the hall, through the kitchen, into the heart of the house.
"Wow," Tracy breathed a sigh of relief.
The room was empty.
"Maybe they just passed straight out after their 'frickathon,'" Seay muttered.
"Gosh, honestly, I was kind of hoping we would get in trouble so we would have to cancel on Blaze and Bitchface," Tracy confessed. She was still shivering a little, despite being back inside the comfort of the cabin.
Seay snorted at this.
"Why would YOU want to cancel? You were the one who invited them to where we live."
"Where I live," Tracy corrected, smirking as she took a step closer to her brother. "They think you live in the woods behind the gas station."
"They think we're dating," Seay said gravely, tensing as his sister tried to solicit a hug. He looked at her almost mournfully.
"They think we're cute," she smiled.
For a moment, Seay considered not letting Tracy cheer him up. He stared down at her. She gazed back up at him.
"You wanna come up and masturbate with me?" she asked cheekily, suddenly turning on her heels and prancing toward the ladder up to their loft. "I feel like we need to, like, process everything that happened tonight."
"Uhhm," Seay practically choked on the abruptness of the offer.
"Come onnn," she begged, climbing slowly and laboriously, as if he were weighing her down.
"O-our sheets. L-laundry," Seay managed to respond.
"Oh, right. Shoot," she sighed. She scampered back down the ladder, then quickly tip-toed over to the bathroom. She carefully shut the door. Seay heard her quietly transfer the wet clothes to the dryer.
"Don't start it," he whispered through the door.
"What? Why not?" she whispered back from the other side.
"It'll be loud! You could wake Mom and Dad!"
"So? For all they know, we never left the cabin!"
"J-just - " Seay tried to argue, but just then the dryer kicked to life.
Tracy stepped back out into the hall. She shut the door behind her. She stood smirking up at her brother.
"I thought we were being quiet," Seay frowned.
"We need sheets," Tracy frowned back, mocking him. "I'm not sleeping on a bare mattress."
"But we still don't know for sure if Mom and Dad - "
"Are you two still awake?" Dad growled, poking his head out of his and Mom's room.
"L-laundry!" the twins yelped in unison. Seay's heart leapt up into his throat.
"Go to bed," Dad grunted, and shut the door again.
Seay and Tracy stood stock still, staring at the door to their parents' bedroom. They waited. There was no sound from the other side.
"I... I think we're clear," Tracy whispered.
"Let's go," Seay whispered.
They left the hallway, and Seay followed his sister up the ladder to their loft. As Mom had foretold, although they'd removed their filthy sheets, it still reeked like "teenagers" up here. They would definitely need to clean before having company tomorrow.
With no bedclothes to lie on, the twins opted instead for the carpet. They sat on either side of the big window set into the wall between their beds. Its sill was at ankle height, its top nestled into a dormer.
Seay hugged his knees to his chest and stared fretfully at the top of the ladder on the far end of the room. He stayed vigilant for sneaky parental footsteps below. He ignored whatever Tracy was doing just beside him.
Tracy had the front of her shorts and underwear tugged down and was frowning at a razor bump that had turned itself into a pimple on the right side of her pelvis. She fretted about how it would be received by Blaze - or worse, by Michelle - tomorrow. Blaze might be cool, but his b-word girlfriend was guaranteed to make a crack about it.
