A really bad joke.
“We’re leaving Saturday,” he said with a shrug as though what he was saying was no big deal, but it was a very big deal!
The first two years she went with them, she’d had a great time. She got to hang out with all of her cousins and her favorite uncles, went fishing with her new grandfather and Reese, and stayed up all night telling ghost stories with the boys and then last year, it had been decided that maybe it would be a better idea if she slept in the girls’ tent. She loved Jessica and Elizabeth. She did, she really did, but with that being said, Mikey wasn’t sure if she could take another week of sharing a tent with them.
Not after what happened last year.
At first, it hadn’t been bad. They’d set up their sleeping bags, discussed which of the boys they were going to shove into the pond, she’d voted for Jonathan, and settled in to play a game of Monopoly. It wasn’t too long after that, that the camping trip turned into a nightmare and she found herself sitting there, praying that they stopped talking about boybands, actors they wanted to marry, makeup, and a million other things that she really didn’t care about. That was followed by an impromptu karaoke rendition of all of Justin Bieber’s greatest hits and Mikey praying for a bear to tear through the tent and put her out of her misery.
Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.
What did happen was her cousins kept revisiting the earlier topic of conversation, boybands, and further discussing the likelihood of meeting them and that somehow led to a conversation about which one they could see themselves marrying. When they asked Mikey which boyband member she wanted to marry, she’d stared at them until they moved on. For seven hours, yes, seven hours, they’d giggled, whispered, and gasped as they talked about all those things that Mikey couldn’t care less about.
After the first night, she’d figured that they got it out of their system and they would move onto something else the next night. She’d been wrong. Very, very wrong. Apparently, Elizabeth and Jessica were very passionate about boybands and had the teen magazines to back it up. So, while Mikey had been forced to lay there, staring up at the tent ceiling, her cousins had debated the pros and cons of marrying someone from the latest boyband or Theo James.
Once they came to a decision, Theo James, Mikey had hoped the nightmare would end. It didn’t. No, what it did was progress on to other topics that had Mikey wishing that her parents came so that she could crash with them in their tent instead, but since her mom had just given birth to the second set of twins two months earlier, they hadn’t been able to come. That left Mikey with nowhere else to go.
When the conversation moved on to which of the boys at their school they thought were cute, Mikey tried to change the subject only to somehow make things worse. The girls had decided to find out which one of their brothers and cousins Mikey thought was the cutest since she wasn’t biologically related to any of them. When she’d told them in the driest voice possible that her baby brothers were the cutest Bradfords, they’d quickly agreed before asking her who she thought the second cutest Bradford was.
That’s when she gave up.
That’s also when she realized that she couldn’t put herself through that again, not if she wanted to maintain a hold on her sanity. Mikey swore she wouldn’t go this year and had planned to come up with a good excuse to stay home only she’d forgotten all about it with everything going on with school, baseball, and–
Baseball!
Clearing her throat, Mikey shifted in her seat, doing her best to look disappointed as she said, “I can’t go next week. I’ve got practice and three games.”
Not that she was looking forward to warming the bench, but anything, and she really did mean anything, was better than sharing a tent with Elizabeth and Jessica. In fact, she was more than willing to see if she could schedule her annual dental exam next week if that’s what it took.
“Your parents already said you were going,” Uncle Trevor said, shrugging it off as he looked from her empty plate to his with a disappointed sigh. “God, I’m starving.”
“But they’re not going!” she pointed out, somewhat hysterically.
“Which is why they want to make sure that you go. They don’t want you to miss out on spending time with the family because of the boys,” Uncle Trevor said as he signaled for the waitress.
“But, baseball…” Mikey mumbled weakly, knowing that it was pointless to argue at this point knowing how her mom felt about family.
Up until three years ago, their extended family had consisted of Uncle Eric, her biological father’s little brother, and Aunt Sarah, her mom’s best friend, and that was it. She grew up without any cousins to play with, grandparents to spoil her, or a large array of aunts and uncles to torment, so her mom was trying to make it up to her by making sure that she got to spend time with Reese’s family.
“Your coach will understand,” Uncle Trevor said, but something, mostly the fact that her coach seemed to really hate her, told her that this wasn’t going to end well.
Chapter 32
“Now, let’s see if we can come up with a solution that works for everyone,” Principal Miller said with a polite smile as the school lawyer and the Superintendent finished reading through Sebastian’s school records.
“I’m assuming that the school has a solution that they’d like to suggest,” Uncle Garret said, looking calm while Sebastian sat there, slowly exhaling as he told himself that this was going to work out because if it didn’t…
He was never going to listen to anything Mikey said ever again.
“We believe that the best solution to this situation would be to have Sebastian attend high school through our virtual program,” Principal Miller said as the school’s lawyer handed them each a packet on the virtual school program.
“And we believe that the best solution would be to allow Sebastian to enroll in the high school and give him a second chance,” Uncle Garret smoothly replied.
“Sebastian has already had several chances over the years to rectify his behavior only to end up abusing those opportunities,” Principal Miller pointed out as he opened Sebastian’s file. “In elementary school alone, Sebastian had an extensive history of behavioral issues from disrupting class, property damage, skipping school, fights, bringing animals into school, detentions, suspensions, and on one occasion, he even locked his teacher in a closet with a large snake. To be honest, your son should have been expelled a long time ago.”
“Since we’re bringing up his elementary school records, why don’t we discuss his grades?” Uncle Garret suggested, pulling out a small stack of folders and handed them out. “Even with all those behavioral issues and missed school, Sebastian was able to maintain his grades and even set several academic records. Before his expulsion, Sebastian had skipped several grades and was placed in middle school–”
“Where he hacked into the computer system, tore through the firewall, made changes to his schedule, destroyed a science lab causing over ten thousand dollars’ worth of damage, and got into a screaming match with several teachers in the cafeteria, and that was all on his first day,” Principal Miller said, interrupting him.