"Are you serious right now?" Tuck asked in fierce whisper.
"You're lucky I'm being this nice with how you've been acting lately," Emily tossed back at him, hands propped on her hips fiercely. "How dare you ignore me just because you're upset with Paige! We're friends Tuck."
"This is utter bullshit!" Tuck said, gesturing wildly at the pile of furniture covering the stairs.
"It's an art installation, actually. I've just decided. Yep," Emily told him, crossing her arms firmly over her chest, feeling incredibly sassy. "It's a representation of your behavior lately. And its official name is now Utter Bullshit."
"You don't have to be a snarky bitch about it," Tuck said more quietly, but obviously still fuming.
At that moment, Charlie wandered out onto the landing, stumbling slightly. "What in the world is all of this!" she shouted in mock surprise.
"Oh shut up!" Tuck yelled at her. "I know you were in on this. All of you planned all of this together!" Tuck pointed an accusing finger at each of the girls in turn as he said this.
"You're right," Charlie said and slumped onto the banister of the upstairs landing, her head and arms resting on the railing, and stared longingly down at her three friends below her. "I miss you guys!" she shouted down to them, very drunkenly and very loudly, reaching her hand down towards them. "I wanna be down there now! On the winning side." As she said this she looked over at Tuck and started laughing.
"As soon as Tuck agrees he was the one being the bitch and apologizes to me," Emily began, explaining the terms of Tuck's release, "and he calls Paige to work things out with her, we'll remove everything and you can both come down."
"She put you up to this didn't she?" Tuck said, obviously referring to Paige. "I should have known you were doing this for her!"
"Nope," Emily replied honestly. "Paige doesn't know anything about this. I planned this just for you."
"Screw this!" Charlie shouted and disappeared back into her room.
"That's probably not good," Eden said to no one in particular about Charlie's disappearance. "Charlotte gets very impatient when she's drunk. You should probably hurry this along, Em."
"Right you are, Eden," Emily replied in a business-like tone. "Well?" Emily looked up at Tuck again, and raised her eyebrows expectantly at him.
Tuck heaved a deep sigh and drug his hands over his face and through his hair a few times. "All the seats in the auditorium," he said finally, staring directly at Emily, "and she had to sit next to you."
"Fate's a bitch and so am I," Emily smiled proudly at Tuck's reference to her and Paige's serendipitous first meeting. "Your move, Theodore."
"Alright!" Tuck said after the two stared each other down for a few silent moments. "I will admit that I didn't really have a good reason to be avoiding you, BUT, there is no way I'm going to call Paige."
"Tuck, come on!" Emily pleaded, her facade breaking finally. "Paige is—"
Emily was abruptly cut off though, because the front door had just burst open behind her. It was Charlie, limping slightly, but with the most triumphant look on her face that Emily had ever seen.
"Suck it, McCullers!" Charlie yelled, with a maniacal gleam in her eyes, as she crossed the threshold, slamming her hands into her pelvis in an obscene gesture.
"How the hell did you do that?!" Tuck yelled down at Charlie.
Jo ran outside, probably to see if there was a ladder or something propped against the house, but found nothing that would have aided in her descent.
"Seriously, Charlie, how did you get down here?" Jo asked from the front yard.
"I climbed off the roof," she said, looking smug as hell. "This is some Spice Girls shit right here!"
"What?" Tuck said, but Eden's shouting, "DON'T YOU EVER DO THAT AGAIN!" mostly drowned it out.
Charlie did a happy little jig and then grabbed Eden's face in both of her hands and planted a sloppy kiss on her lips. Then shouted "GIRL POWER!"
"Will you corral her, please?" Emily said to Eden.
"You are a special brand of idiot, you know that?" Eden muttered, shoving Charlie in towards the dining room.
"You love me," Charlie said happily as the two disappeared into the next room.
"I can't believe she jumped off the roof!" Tuck said, and stumbled off into Charlie's room.
"Goddamit!" Emily said, wrenching the front door open again. "Jo! Grab the rope!" she shouted as she ran out into the front yard.
Tuck's head was sticking out of the open window and he was looking around at the overhang of roof where he had once sat with Emily. He hoisted himself out of the window and climbed tentatively on his hands and knees a couple feet out onto the roof. Jo trotted out and stood beside Emily.
"I don't know how something so well thought out has ended up going so wrong," Jo said sarcastically glancing sideways at Emily with her lips pursed.
"Everything is fine," Emily spat back. "I just need to talk Tuck off the roof."
"Tuck," Emily said loudly, "do I really need to remind you how scared of heights you are?"
"I've been out here before," he threw back at her, but he looked increasingly terrified and like he might puke the closer he got to the edge of the roof.
"Yes," Emily told him, "but you didn't jump off! Just go back inside and we can talk."
Tuck rolled, looking like he'd given up, rolled onto his back and lay spread-eagle in the middle of the slanted roof. "Why was I cursed with a twin?!" he shouted into the sky in a forlorn, melodramatic tone. "Why did she have to be gay?!"
Tuck reached into his jacket pocket then and pulled out his phone. "Fuck you, Paige!" he shouted as he pressed call.
Paige had just finished putting the clean dishes away from the dishwasher. She was exhausted. No one had told her that being a grown up was this much work. Most people, though, Paige reminded herself, went from college to a small apartment, not a fully functioning house they had to take care of while also spending most of their time in the geriatric ward of the hospital.
Paige's days had consisted of her waking up around 8 am, showering, eating breakfast and then going to the hospital to be with Grandma Hazel. The two had no trouble keeping each other company. They played cards and talked about the state of the world. Other times they read the paper or books together in silence, or Paige attempted to help her grandma do the crossword. She rarely knew any of the answers, but she was pretty good at the sudoku. At 11 am, Paige would help her grandma into her wheelchair and they would go on a walk around the hospital together. Hazel had asked Paige after the first day they did this if she would bake some cookies to hand out the doctors and nurses that worked in her wing. Paige couldn't say no, so she'd been baking a batch of cookies almost every night since.
After lunch, Paige would usually go home for a while to run errands and then eventually, make herself dinner and eat before she went back to the hospital around 6 pm. She and Hazel watched Jeopardy together at 6:30 and then went on another walk, wandering around the giant building for an hour or so. Paige didn't like the idea of her grandma being cooped up in the little hospital room, so she insisted that they get out and about at least twice a day.
Tonight, Paige had gotten home around 8:30 and then baked some snicker doodles and peanut butter cookies. Her clothes had some smudges of flour on them here and there and her hair was falling out of its messy bun. She couldn't wait to put her pajamas on and climb into bed. She thought fleetingly of calling Emily, but then she remembered it was Friday night and Emily was probably out at a party or drinking with her friends at the house. As Paige started to climb the stairs, however, her phone rang. She pulled it out of her pocket and was genuinely surprised to see that Tuck was calling her.
"Are you done being angry at me, then?" she said as a greeting.
"I have a riddle for you," Tuck said, nearly shouting, which caused Paige to pause on the stairs and pull the phone away from her ear. "What's mean…stupid…and trying to make me jump off the roof?!"
"Um…I don't get it," Paige replied, genuinely confused.
"Your mean stupid Emily is the answer!" Tuck said angrily.
"Are you drunk?" Paige asked. It was a rare occasion when Paige actually had the higher moral ground between the two of them and she was going to use Tuck's debauched state against him if she got the chance.
"I was set up is what I am!" Tuck yelled again. Paige could also hear someone's voice in the background saying something like "go back" but it was hard to tell. They sounded sort of far away.
"Okay…where are you, Tuck?" Paige decided she needed to get a better handle on what was actually happening before she started in on guilt tripping her brother.
"If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times," Tuck sighed. "I am reclining on the roof of The Monologue Cabin."
"Why are you on the roof?"
"I was so happy it was Friday. I was singing in the shower. And then Charlie says, 'Come over! We'll drink the peppermint schnapps!' and that seemed really nice, so I did that. And we played strip poker and I actually got her socks off! But little did I know, what was happening outside. In the downstairs! Betrayal! And when I went to leave, they were being the Spice Girls and the stairs were full of shit!"
"Well, that sounds….horrible…." Paige replied, stifling her laugh. Obviously, Tuck was very drunk and very upset. And on the roof for some reason. It didn't sound like a good combination. She decided to tread carefully so as not to make the situation any worse in case Tuck decided to do something stupid.
Meanwhile, Emily had gone back inside the house, leaving Jo in the yard to keep an eye on Tuck while she started clearing things off the stairs again.
As Emily skidded into the dining room returning a chair and lamp to their rightful place, she saw that Charlie had Eden pressed up against the fridge in the kitchen, oblivious to everything that was going on outside.
"Will you two stop making out and help me clear the stairs!?" she yelled at them as she headed back into the entry and grabbed more objects at random from the staircase.
"You're such a vag block, Fields," Charlie said as she and Eden appeared at Emily's side and began picking things up as well.
Paige was listening to Tuck go on and on about which of them was which Spice Girl when her phone buzzed with an incoming text message from Jo. All it said was, "Please encourage Tuck to go back inside the house."
"No, that doesn't make sense, though," Tuck was saying when Paige turned her attention back to him. "You're Ginger, duh. But I think Eden would have to be Scary Spice. Let's face it, that girl can be pretty frightening. And Emily is Posh. And Charlie is Sporty Spice, I guess. But that just leaves Jo for Baby Spice and that just doesn't work. Even if she is blonde."
"You are right about that," Paige said, placating her brother rather obviously, but he didn't seem to notice in his drunken haze. "Can I ask you something?"
"Of course you can! We shared a womb, didn't we?" Tuck answered.
"I really want to keep talking to you," Paige began, "but I'd feel a lot better about it if you got off the roof and went back inside. I'm worried you'll fall off."
"Okay…." Tuck said, in a exasperated tone. "But I am a dancer, you know."
"I know. A damn good one," Paige replied, unsure what that had to do with Tuck being on the roof, but deciding to just humor him.
"Hold on, I'm going to climb in the window now," Tuck said. For a couple minutes, all Paige heard was the odd shuffle or bump, and then there was a loud crash.
"Tuck?!" Paige called. "Are you okay?"
"Ouch," he replied groaning. "Ooh. A bed. That looks comfy."
"Yeah, why don't lay down and we can talk, okay?" Paige said, relieved he had fallen in the window and not out. "So are you still mad at me about leaving Stanford?"
"Well, yes," Tuck said collapsing onto Charlie's wrinkled comforter. "But just because I don't want you to hate your life."
Paige was actually thankful that she got to have this conversation with a drunk Tuck. He was much more dramatic, but also more honest and he didn't call her as many names, which was big plus.
"I wasn't happy at Stanford, Tuck," she said gently, stretching her legs out onto the stair below her, where she'd sat down nearly 15 minutes ago. "I know that's hard for you to get, because I hid the truth from you for so long. But Stanford was the wrong choice for me. Coming home is the right choice. It's not like my life is ending. I'm just going to finish college here instead of in California."
"I just know how miserable I'd be if I had to move home," Tuck said. "God, it would suck so hard."
"But I'm not you, and I didn't have to," Paige said. "You've gotta start trusting me. We have to let each other do our own things now, you know?"
"It's hard when I love you so much, Paigey, and you're so stupid sometimes," Tuck mumbled. "But I'll try."
"Thanks, Theodore," Paige said laughing lightly.
"Don't call me that," Tuck told her. "It sounds gross when you call me that."
Soon the only thing Paige could hear was the soft snores of her brother, and it was like a salve on her aching limbs, soothing the deepest parts of her. It was a different kind of peacefulness— older and surer— than the one she felt when she talked to Emily. She sat there happily and listened to him sleep, glad that things were back to normal; sure that one of the girls would find him soon.
Once Tuck had successfully crashed back into Charlie's room, Jo had gone back inside and helped the other girls return of all the furniture to where it belonged in the house. With the four of them working together, it only took about 20 minutes more for them to have the stairs completely cleared. As soon as they'd set the last half of the sectional back in to place, Emily ran up the stairs to check on Tuck and make sure nothing too bad had happened to him during the whole roof ordeal.
She found Tuck fast asleep on top of Charlie's bed, snoring, with his phone held loosely in his hand. The knees of his pants were a little scuffed up, but other than that he seemed fine. Emily narrowed her eyes at the phone curiously though, then put it to her ear tentatively, to see if Paige had stayed on the line.
"Baby?" Emily said.
"I knew you'd find me," Paige said quietly from the other end of the line.
"Did you and Tuck work things out?" Emily asked hopefully.
"We did," Paige answered. "I just hope he remembers it in the morning."
"Oh thank god," Emily said sighing. "The girls would have been so pissed if that was all for nothing."
"What exactly did you do?" Paige asked. "Tuck wasn't really making much sense when he explained the situation to me."
"How about this," Emily said, "I'll hang up Tuck's phone so I can leave it here with him and then I'll go down to my room and call you back from my phone."
"Mmm, that sounds good," Paige responded, groaning slightly as she stood up. "I'll put my pajamas on and meet you in bed."
The statement made Emily's heart flutter. She knew it was silly to get excited when Paige was 900 miles away and wouldn't really being meeting her in bed, but she didn't care. She just wanted to be with Paige so badly and this was how they could be together for now, so the words made her giddy. Just knowing Paige wanted her made her happy.
"Bye for a bit," Emily said as she hung up Tuck's phone and placed it gingerly back into his open palm. She kissed him on the forehead and whispered, "Sorry, Tuck," then turned out the light on her way downstairs, glad that Charlie wouldn't be upset that she had to sleep in Eden's bed.
5 minutes later, settled into her own bed in the basement, she called Paige back again and set in telling her what she had done that night in order to make Tuck call her.
"Wait, wait…"Paige interrupted her a few minutes into her story, "why didn't you just confront him and talk to him instead of planning this big stunt?"
"Well…that wouldn't have been very fun, would it?" Emily said, examining her motivations on the matter for the first time. "I've really been missing you lately. It was nice to have something to do to keep my mind off of you for the day."
Paige's heart broke a little when Emily said this and she made a silent promise to herself that she would work harder at trying to find the time to call and Skype with Emily, even though she had no idea when she was going to squeeze it in. She was already exhausted every day by the time she dropped into bed.
"God, you are so fucking sweet it hurts," Paige told Emily. "I'm sorry that being with me isn't exactly a walk in the park."
"It's okay," Emily smiled into the phone. "You're worth it. But back to my story—so Charlie lured him over with the promise of alcohol and whatever else it is that Charlie promises people, and while they were up in her room, me and Eden and Jo moved the couch and a bunch of other furniture and stuff onto the stairs. Seriously, there was not an inch of space left on the stairs. Oh my god, Paige. It was hilarious. You should have seen him! He was so pissed. God, if he'd been able to reach me he probably would've strangled me. I mean, looking back on it, Charlie probably shouldn't have gotten him drunk. I wasn't really thinking about him being with it enough to talk to you. I just wanted to prevent his escape."
Paige was laughing loudly by this point. "I can't believe you did all that! So how did he end up on the roof then?"
"Oh, jeez, well," Emily sighed, "Charlie was stuck upstairs with him, obviously, but she really didn't like that and she was fucking plastered, too, so she went out and jumped off the fucking roof, somehow, god, I don't even know how she did that. So the rest of us were talking and then she just burst in the front door in the middle of the argument! Eden nearly had a heart attack."
"I wish I could have seen that," Paige chuckled appreciatively, imaging the scene in her head. "I can't believe you did all of this just to get Tuck to talk to me. You're amazing, Emily. And also a little crazy, but I like it."
"Yeah, you make me a little crazy, I guess," Emily replied smiling at Paige's compliment, wishing she could kiss the girl. "I know how important Tuck is to you. I just wanted to help. Even if it was…an unconventional way."
Paige shook her head in disbelief. She had no idea how she'd ended up with someone as wonderful and passionate as Emily Fields. Her emotion towards the other girl flared up in her heart and before she could stop herself, the words had tumbled out of her mouth.
"I love you, Em."
There was silence for a few moments on the other end of the line. Emily had stopped breathing she was so shocked by the unexpected admission. Her heart was pounding madly in her chest. She could hardly believe Paige had just said that to her.
"You…you do?" she finally whispered.
"Don't sound so surprised," Paige laughed, her nerves sending the butterflies in her stomach into a frenzy.
"Paige…" Emily choked out, her throat suddenly very dry. "I love you, too."
Paige let out a breath she didn't realize she was holding and said, "Well, it's settled then. Posh and Ginger Spice ride off into the sunset together. Or wait…were you Sporty Spice?"
"What the fuck are even talking about, McCullers?" Emily asked, laughing loudly, a grin spreading over her face. She was happier than she'd been in weeks.