Luke

Dropping into my chair, I set my backpack on the floor and kicked it under my seat with the heel of my foot. Then I slumped down over my desk, wishing I’d been at school for the past week instead of on a holiday break—which was sad because I always looked forward to days off school.

“Thanksgiving with your mom was that bad?” Tyler asked after getting settled at the desk next to me. We’d been best friends since we met on the first day of kindergarten two and a half years ago. My dad had told me we were lucky to be in the same class for second grade since we’d gotten into trouble a couple times last year for talking too much, but I wasn’t really worried about it. I knew my dad. If they tried separating us, he’d be at the school to convince the principal to change his mind before I could even complain about it. My dad was just that awesome. My mom on the other hand...

“You’re not going to believe this,” I hissed, leaning over so nobody else could hear what I had to tell him. There were only a couple of other students in the room since the morning bell wasn’t going to ring for another fifteen minutes. Our teacher was over by her desk, looking at a stack of papers. “My mom’s getting married to some guy. With a daughter! I’m going to have a stupid stepsister, and she expects me to be all happy about it.”

Tyler wrinkled his nose in disgust. “A stepsister?”

“Yeah! And she’s not even two yet. Why should I be excited about a little baby who’s going to want to follow me around everywhere and will probably break all my toys when I’m not around?” I complained.

“Ugh,” Tyler groaned. “At least my sister’s older and kinda cool most of the time.”

“Kinda,” I snorted, thinking about all the times she’d helped us build forts in the basement of his house. Or how she took us to the park when our parents didn’t want to go. And the movies. Pretty much anywhere we asked. “You don’t know how lucky you are. Your big sister is way cooler than my baby stepsister will ever be.”

“I guess so.” He shrugged his shoulders. “At least your dad is great, right?”

“Yeah, he’s the best,” I agreed. “But I still wish my new stepdad had a son who was our age. Or older.”

Tyler gave me a weird look. “I don’t know, if he did then maybe you’d want him to be your best friend instead of me.”

“No way! You’ll always be my best friend.” I held out my fist, and we bumped knuckles.

“Just think how cool it would be if we were step-brothers instead. We’d have sleepovers all the time.”

“And we’d always be on the same baseball team,” I added. We both frowned at the reminder of how we’d competed against each other last season.

“It isn’t brothers, but what if?” he mumbled.

“What if, what?” I asked.

“If my sister and your dad got married, then we’d be like cousins or something. Right?”

I thought about it for a second. “No, your sister would be my stepmom, so you’d be—”

“Your stepuncle!” he crowed.

I rolled my eyes and groaned. “At least that’d be better than the dumb baby stepsister I’m getting from my mom.”

“My sister doesn’t have a boyfriend. What about your dad?”

I wrinkled my nose at the thought of my dad dating anyone. He hadn’t brought any girlfriends around for me to meet, but neither had my mom and she was suddenly getting married. So what’d I really know? But he had me most of the time, and it’d be hard for him to hide a girlfriend from me. “Nope. No girlfriend.”

“I think we should give it a shot. Get them to go on a date or something. But I don’t know how we’d do it.”

“We need to come up with excuses for them to see each other.” I tried to think up ways that wouldn’t make my dad figure out what we were up to right away. “Like you could ask your sister to bring you over to my house instead of your mom or dad.”

“Yeah, she’d do that,” he agreed. “And I’ll ask if she can start picking me up from school instead of my mom.”

Our parents always talked to each other after school. “Great idea! What else can we do?”

“Is your dad helping as Santa again for the thing the school does at the mall right before Christmas?”

I shook my head. “He hasn’t mentioned it, but last year he said there was no way he’d ever do it again, not even if they couldn’t find anyone else.”

“You’ve got to get him to change his mind,” Tyler insisted. “My sister loves the mall. She and her friend, Holly, go there every year to shop for Christmas stuff together.”

“Yeah, but it’s not like she’s going to visit Santa while she’s there so that won’t help.”

He rubbed his hands together. “Just get your dad there as Santa and leave the rest to me. I’ll make sure she visits him. After they see each other all the time at school and stuff, it’ll be perfect.”