“SHE TOLD ME TO WALK this way,” Jake sang.
“Talk this wa-a-ay,” Lucas chimed in.
Zoey and the rest heard the party before they had even turned the last corner onto the street, Aerosmith almost vibrating the pavement underfoot. The Felixes had a great three-story town house right in the Portside neighborhood. Loud music wasn’t much of a problem because no one expected to be able to sleep on a Saturday night anyway.
“You know, Richie’s a dork,” Aisha pointed out, “but the boy does have cool parents.”
“Cool?” Christopher said, disbelieving. “They’re way past cool. They must be deaf.”
“They won’t be there,” Zoey explained. “Richard has these parties a couple of times a year. His folks check into a hotel for the night and hire a bouncer to make sure things don’t get out of hand.”
“No way.” Christopher laughed.
“A very strange family,” Jake said, mercifully cutting short his singing career. They walked as a group up to the door and huddled on the steps. Jake rang the doorbell.
“Like anyone’s going to hear the doorbell,” Claire pointed out.
But the door opened, letting out a blast of music and revealing a man with a wild mane of blond hair and a build like a professional football player. Behind him was a tall, leggy woman with blue eyes and a skeptical, downturned smile.
“Hi,” Zoey said brightly.
“Yeah, whatever,” the man said sourly.
The two of them brushed past without another word and headed down the street.
“Looks like the bouncer just took off,” Christopher said.
“No, they’re Richie’s parents,” Zoey explained.
They had left the door conveniently ajar, so Jake led the way inside.
A dark entryway opened onto a hallway, which in turn ran past several rooms and eventually on to the kitchen at the back of the house. An open stairway led from the hallway.
In the entryway: people. On the stairs: people. In each of the rooms as Zoey made her way along the hallway: more people. Everywhere people, low lights, loud music, shouted conversation. The last room on the right held a bed piled four feet high with coats. The kitchen held a fifty-gallon Rubbermaid trash can filled with ice studded with bottles of Coke and Mountain Dew. There was a table loaded down with crackers, cheese, brownies, chips and dip, all fairly well destroyed.
Richie appeared suddenly behind Zoey, startling her.
“Thanks for coming!” he shouted.
Zoey nodded. “Wouldn’t miss it.”
“Hey, you seen my parents?”
“They just left.” Zoey pointed back toward the door, hoping sign language would help.
“Excellent.” He grabbed Tad Crowley, who was walking by. “Tad. The ’rents are out of here. Bring in the keg.”
Zoey looked around for Lucas, but they had all been split up in the tide of bodies in motion, pulled away by friends or just the tidal surge. She saw Jake reach for a Coke.
“Brew’s on its way,” Richie told Jake.
Jake shook his head, and Richie shrugged and went off in pursuit of a girl Zoey didn’t recognize.
Jake leaned close to Zoey in order to be heard. “I think I’d better be a good boy and stick to the legal stuff.”
Zoey nodded.
“Where’d everyone go?”
Zoey shrugged. She tried an answer, but now it was Calvin Harris and the already loud music rose another notch. She leaned close to Jake, putting her hand on his muscular shoulder for balance. “I think I saw Aisha and Christopher heading upstairs. I don’t know about the rest. Too dark to see.”
“If you want a beer, go ahead,” Jake said. His lips actually brushed Zoey’s ear. Two junior guys came racing through and nearly bumped into Zoey. Jake pulled her out of the way, his hand casually on her waist. He didn’t remove his hand. Zoey didn’t take her own hand from Jake’s shoulder.
“I don’t drink very often,” Zoey said.
Jake made a self-deprecating face. “I think I may have a problem with alcohol, you know? So I better play it safe. Last time I got drunk at a party I ended up . . .” He prudently let that drop. “Wouldn’t want to do anything stupid. Or even say anything stupid.”
“Everyone says stupid things,” Zoey said dismissively.
For a frozen moment Jake’s expression became somber. His serious dark eyes met hers with a look of confusion, hesitation. His mouth opened as if he were going to speak, then he clamped it shut, literally biting his lower lip.
Suddenly he drew his hand away. Just as quickly Zoey took her hand from his shoulder.
“Well, I guess I’d better go find Claire!” he shouted, no longer standing so near as to be heard easily.
“And me, Lucas. I mean, I’d better go find Lucas.” She threaded her way from the kitchen and along the hallway, miming hellos as she went, pretending to be able to hear shouted greetings and shrugging at shouted questions. At the foot of the stairs she turned and looked back. Jake was alone, as if an invisible force field kept him apart from the crowd surrounding him. He was looking down, shaking his head slowly.
Zoey climbed the stairs and nearly ran into Lucas, who was coming down at the same moment.
“Hey, I was looking for you,” he said.
“I was looking for you, too.”
He took her arm and drew her back upward. “Come upstairs; it’s a little less loud.”
Zoey followed him up and the intensity of the music did diminish somewhat, at least enough that screaming was no longer necessary. Upstairs were several bedrooms feeding off a central hallway. One room reeked of pot smoke. Louise Kronenberger poked her head out, a joint hanging from her mouth. She held it out for Zoey.
“Don’t think so, Louise,” Zoey said.
Louise giggled happily. “Come on, Zoey, it might loosen you up. You might actually have fun.”
Lucas crooked his finger at Zoey. “The relatively normal people seem to be down here.”
Zoey bridled. Louise’s snide remark about loosening up had rankled a little. Now Lucas was leading her where? To the boring room? To be with the normal people? She grabbed his arm and stopped him in the hallway.
“Am I boring, Lucas?”
He gave her a deprecating look. “Why, because you don’t get high? I don’t get high, either.”
“I don’t do lots of things,” Zoey said.
Lucas shrugged dismissively, but Zoey noted he hadn’t exactly denied what she was implying.
“I wonder sometimes if maybe you’d be happier with a girl who was more, you know—”
“More like Louise? I had a shot at Louise, remember? No big accomplishment, since basically every guy in school has a fair shot at Louise, but I blew her off.”
“Okay, some other girl,” Zoey said. “What if we’re not right for each other?”
Lucas’s smile disappeared. “What are you saying?”
“Nothing, I was just thinking maybe I kind of hold you back. Maybe you’d be happier if I weren’t your girlfriend.” It had started as a teasing, nonserious conversation, but now it was deadly earnest.
“Zoey, I love you. Not some other girl.” He glanced around self-consciously, lest some male overhear him.
“I love you, too, Lucas,” Zoey said. She felt troubled, like she was sliding down a long, slippery slope, but she couldn’t stop now. “But you must look at other girls sometimes.”
“Of course I look,” Lucas said. “Everyone looks. That doesn’t mean anything.”
“When you see other girls, don’t you sometimes think, I’ll bet she’d be easier to get along with than Zoey is?”
“Only when you’re having PMS,” Lucas said.
“I’m serious. Don’t you think, I’ll bet that girl would be more fun, or more cool, or maybe she’s prettier, or maybe she’d, you know, have sex?”
Lucas’s eyes narrowed. “Are you saying this because you’re thinking about other guys?”
“Of course not.”
“Like maybe you’re thinking some other guy has more money or has a cool car or maybe this other guy wouldn’t be trying to pressure me into sleeping with him?”
“We were talking about you,” Zoey said impatiently. “About what you want.”
“I want you,” he said simply.
“Just me?” She looked searchingly at his face.
His eyes darted away, then returned to meet hers defiantly. “Just you, Zoey.”
“It’s important for me to know, Lucas. To be absolutely sure. I mean, sometimes people seem like everything’s okay, like they’re a happy couple and all that, then you find out that’s not the way it was.”
“You mean like your parents?”
Zoey nodded in mute acknowledgment. Of course that’s what she meant, although she hadn’t been thinking about it consciously.
“You know, maybe your dad really does still love your mom and she loves him. I mean, maybe it was just one of those things that happened.”
“Just happened? My mother just happened to sleep with another man?”
“There was a lot of history there,” Lucas pointed out. “She’d just found out your dad had a kid by some other woman nineteen years ago and never even told her. She was pissed. She wanted to get her pride back after the way your dad treated her.”
“Yeah, she really has her pride now,” Zoey sneered.
“People do stupid things they’re sorry for later,” Lucas said. He looked down at the floor and shook his head, reminding Zoey of Jake.
“Don’t expect me to forgive her,” Zoey said. “If two people supposedly love each other, they don’t do things like that, betraying the other person behind their back.”
“Maybe you’re wrong,” Lucas said earnestly. “Maybe that is the way people are.”
“Then they’re jerks,” Zoey said harshly. “I would never do that to you.”
“No, I guess you wouldn’t.”
“This looks serious,” Christopher said, passing by.
Lucas looked relieved. “No, no, just talking.”
“I lost Aisha in here somewhere.”
“Here I am.” Aisha appeared and wrapped her arms around Christopher from the back. “Let’s go downstairs and dance. The DJ said he’d do some dance tunes.”
“You guys want to come?” Christopher asked.
“Maybe in a little while,” Lucas said.
“I guess I’m being kind of a drag, huh?” Zoey said. “Sorry. This whole divorce thing has kind of preoccupied me.”
“I understand,” Lucas said.
“We’re not my parents,” Zoey said. “I do understand that. I mean, it’s stupid to start being suspicious about everyone. Especially you,” She slipped her arms around his sides and pressed against him.
Lucas kissed her.