Ford and all them are such hangers-on,” Becca says over her shoulder, hardly out of their earshot. She narrows her smoky lined eyes in disapproval and laughs a little to herself. “Not that they should be shunned or blacklisted. Ford wants to be Rusty, and Liddy has wanted to hook up with Rusty since forever, and I can smell their desperation on Mars is all.”
A tiny ping in my chest. I doubt that Liddy’s wanted to hook up with Rusty as long as I’ve liked Josh. In a former summer might Becca have sniped about smelling my desperation from another planet?
“It’s Ford I can’t stand,” I tell her.
Her glance is thoughtful. “Carolynn hates him too.” She frowns. “Maybe I don’t pay enough attention to see it?” Her grin returns. “Destination kitchen?” I nod. It’s hard to stay worried about Ford or what Becca might have said in the past when she’s tugging me along, girls who are buckets more popular than me eyeing our clasped hands with envy.
Belonging is its own kind of magic, and Becca is its grand sorceress.
Duncan is at the center of attention in the kitchen, a bottle of whiskey raised in a toast above his head. Josh watches, his expression a mixture of amusement and concern. It’s hot and stuffy with thirty kids in a spellbound knot, their conversations paused. Duncan clears his throat, more as an intro than a request for attention he already commands.
“Here’s to my oldest friend, Josh Parker”—he sweeps an arm to Josh—“who’s never gamed up any girl I was into. Not even once,” he booms. The crowd cheers. Duncan throws his head back, bottle to his lips, and drinks. Josh bows dramatically to the applause. His blue eyes land on us as he rises. He mouths an emphatic, “You’re here.”
Becca hooks her hair behind her ear, setting her gold earring swinging, and says, “Duncan’s been hammered the whole day and with Bethany J.” Her green eyes glitter and she bounces her exposed, freckled shoulders. “He gets a pass just like me too, though.” She wags her finger. “Car does not think so.”
I go to ask why Carolynn doesn’t think Duncan should get a pass, but Becca tugs me along. Duncan finishes his chug to louder whooping. His hat falls and I watch Bethany J., adjusting her crop top as she swoops it from the floor and places it on her sleek black hair like she’s crowning herself queen. Duncan doesn’t seem to notice. He’s unshaven, giving him an older, dangerous look. His feet are squared and he’s swaying like someone winding himself up for a fight. Duncan with his hard and shiny exterior, a glittery Easter egg of a boy, doesn’t seem like someone who cracks after seeing the body of a dead girl he knew only superficially.
Becca cups her hand around my ear. “Not everyone can deal,” she whispers. “Seeing a corpse.” With her face this close, she looks like she did when we were ten and she used to whisper secrets about her dad’s affair and her parents’ fighting.
Willa and Carolynn are at the breakfast nook, each facing away from the other. I throw my arms around Willa and even though she’s not a hugger, she squeezes me back. “I called you three times,” I tell her.
Her features look naked without glasses, and by the gentle squint of her eyes I know she isn’t wearing contacts. “I saw. Sorry. I wanted to think through some stuff before we talked,” she answers quietly. Tiny blue plastic barrettes I haven’t seen in years pin her bangs. Willa’s angry with me. Why else would she avoid my calls, need to think through what she wanted to say, and then show up for a face-to-face?
“Josh,” Becca squeals brightly. He’s all smiles, bobbing head and waving hand like he’s a small-town mayor greeting voters. He dodges a group of soccer players calling him over for shots. He delivers hellos to us as the kitchen goes quiet.
Only Duncan’s raised fist gripping the bottle is visible over the sea of heads. “Here’s to my best buddy, Josh, who always has my back, even when it gets him a broken nose and a split lip ’cause I talked shit about some senior d-bags frosh year.” Applause fills the kitchen.
A strange noise comes from Carolynn’s throat, and then in a deep, flat pitch meant to imitate Duncan’s, she says, “Here’s to Josh, who throws house parties so I can drink my face off like some alcoholic Neanderthal.” Josh reaches to take Carolynn’s hand.
“Don’t get your panties in a wad.” She holds her hands up in a state of embarrassed agitation. “I’m just messing around, okay?” She hugs herself and cuts a straight line, the crowd parting for her. I watch Josh as he watches Carolynn escape into the backyard. He isn’t himself tonight either. His tan skin isn’t as warmly hued. There are twin frown lines between his brows. And there’s something less tangible that’s off, like his usual aura of well-being is calibrated wrong. He meets my eyes. They are light blue like the shallows of the sea. Infinitely compassionate.
“She’s freaked out from yesterday and it’s just easy to take it out on Duncan,” he explains.
“Everyone is so bumming me out,” Becca says, giving a little stomp of her heel. She digs through her purse, unceremoniously pushing Winkie and Twinkie aside until she comes up with the flask of schnapps. She jiggles it, is reminded that it’s empty, and without a word, veers toward a group of popular junior girls passing around a bottle. Within seconds she’s surrounded, the girls enraptured by her guest appearance. Becca beams, motions to her shoes, and gestures as she recounts some exploit. Her fans laugh, delighted, each made to feel special with a brush of an arm or a compliment. Becca smiles blissfully when she’s given a bag of miniature marshmallows and control of the bottle. The natives lay sacrifices at their priestess’s feet.
Willa mutters that she needs to lie down. Josh produces a key from his jean pocket. “I lock my bedroom so I don’t end up with random couples in there,” he says in an apologetic way. “You can use it, though.” Willa starts toward the rear staircase. I should follow. She’s my best friend and she looks like she’s going to be sick. She came to Josh’s party to talk to me. But I haven’t been alone with Josh for days and I want to stay standing near him, on his birthday.
“I’m glad you came,” Josh says. He’s moved closer.
I try for calm and casual. “Where are your moms?” I ask. Fail. What kind of social outcast brings up parents at a kegger?
“They went out to dinner and a movie in Seattle.” Josh frees a bottle of water from the pack at the center of the kitchen table and offers it to me. We settle against the oak table, facing the drama of the room. I twist the cap off and drink. He runs a hand down the back of his neck. “Am I the lamest eighteen-year-old ever that I hope my moms get home early so the party can end?”
Duncan’s done toasting and our classmates have grown rowdier without his performance distracting them from their own drinking. The laughter is forced and bawdy; flashes fire as selfies and group shots are taken.
“I don’t think so,” I say. “Up until a month ago, I’d never really been to a party.” Josh is being honest, I should too. “I was surprised that most people seem to be too worried about fitting in to have actual fun.”
Josh frowns and looks around the room for a few seconds. His eyes cut back to mine, and they’re surprised. “You’re right. Everyone looks miserable.” He laughs. “Like they have to be here and they know they should want to be, even though secretly they’d rather be home playing Assassin’s Creed in sweats.”
“Or reading a Brontë novel,” I add.
“Or eating an extra-large pepperoni pizza, drinking a gallon of orange soda, and watching old-school X-Files episodes on Netflix.” He grins and then feigns embarrassment. “Or is that just me?”
“Everyone secretly loves Mulder and Scully.”
“This”—he waves his water bottle over the kitchen—“isn’t what I wanted. Some of the others needed a party. It feels weird to celebrate after yesterday.” He slides closer, and our thighs meet. Warmth washes up from our points of contact. “Not that I’m sad for her.” He reaches for my hand resting on my leg and hooks his pinkie with mine. It’s an innocent little touch, the crook of my pinkie on the crook of his. My breath goes shallow, though. “I know she wasn’t a good person. I bet finding her . . . being reminded . . . I don’t know . . . makes you hurt worse for Ben.”
“Yeah,” I chance. I worry that I’ll scare Josh by letting the grief spill into my voice. I try to keep it light with everyone except Becca and her policy of zero judgment. The core likes to reminisce about Ben the keg-stand champion or Ben the hothead who threw the first punch. Those are good. Those are safe, easy things to talk about.
“I know that the others can seem stuck in their own world,” Josh continues. “Seeing Maggie, how gone she looked, has everyone messed up.”
We watch as Becca tosses miniature marshmallows into Twinkie’s snapping jaw. She tires of the trick and throws marshmallows to the junior girls so they take turns catching them in their mouths. Soon she’s over that, and in a last-ditch effort to amuse herself, she targets a hapless girl standing in a nearby group. I recognize the girl as a reporter for our school’s news blog. Becca does a little victory dance when her marshmallow nails the girl between the eyes. The victim tries to laugh it off as everyone around her snickers.
I almost gag at the wave of shame rising in me. I’m reminded that belonging feels so good because not everyone does. Becca’s as much the sorceress of exclusion as belonging.
“It doesn’t look like Becca is upset, but she called Car at three a.m. last night. She kept having nightmares,” Josh says. His pinkie tightens around mine. I look away from Becca. This is all I want to feel, our pinkies, hooked and pressing. “Then I got to thinking that what all of us are feeling is like a millionth of a percent of what you’ve been feeling for months. If B’s having nightmares over a girl she didn’t like . . . I thought about what you’re going through.”
I drop my eyes to our joined fingers. “You’ve made it easier. It helps to do the kind of things Ben used to do. He liked bonfires at Shell Shores, and he loved breaking rules.”
“And spitting in authority’s face.” The corner of his mouth tucks up in a devious way that’s exotic and charged on Josh. “Ben was always trying to turn parties into rallies for something, like protesting the school store because they got our mascot hoodies from sweatshops.”
I laugh. “I hadn’t heard that one.”
“Yeah, but he’d be shouting about kid labor one second and then he’d be out-chugging every guy on the beer bong. That’s why people loved Ben. He was so . . . different,” Josh says.
I smile without feeling it.
Josh chews the inside of his cheek and then continues staring at my shoes. “Is it weird that we were sort of friends with him, partying together and hanging out at school with the same people, but not you, and now he’s gone and we’re friends?” He meets my eyes.
“A lot’s changed since Ben died,” I say, my voice shaking. I take a deep breath. “I don’t care about being weird, as long as I’m moving forward, away from sad.”
Josh’s side rocks into mine softly. “My grandpa died three years ago. My mom doesn’t have other family, and she was really broken up about her dad. She stayed in bed for weeks. And my other mom still had to go to work, and when she wasn’t, she was trying to be there for Mom. It was a rough time. I didn’t know how to make toast or wash laundry before that. You’re going to think I was such a lazy shit.” He smiles guiltily. “I didn’t know how to start the dishwasher, like, I couldn’t have identified where the buttons were for a million dollars. I learned so that I could help out. I should have known how sad you were . . . are.”
We just sit there, the length of his side pressed to the length of mine, and he doesn’t seem afraid of me and the sadness I’m hiding; nor is he telling me I need to stop grieving.
“Can I ask you a question?” he says. There are flecks of green like sea glass in his blue eyes. I nod. “It’s okay if you don’t want to answer. How did you get over it? Becca told me you said you stayed in bed for weeks after. Then all of a sudden you got up and made yourself better.” Phantom arms squeeze my chest. Becca spilled what I confided in her to Josh. He squints like he’s attempting to read the answer on my face. “How did you do it?”
The air in the room is forced out by the size of Josh’s question. Without knowing it, Josh is asking what started after. Ben’s death ended before. I couldn’t have been the same after he died if I’d wanted to be. Josh is asking what got me out of bed a month later. It was the truth inside an origami crane pressed between the secret pages of my journal.
Josh deserves the truth. But the words are giant and heavy, and they’d flop uncontainably to the floor, smashing this happy, ordinary house to bits. How do words have power like that? How can they open and drain you of all the I-hope-I-get-an-A, I-have-to-make-my-birthday-wish-list-for-Dad, and I-wonder-if-I-should-become-a-vegan thoughts that I was used to?
How did they fill me with questions I’ve never entertained before, bizarre ones, like what will happen if I let that spider crawl over my hand rather than smack it dead on the wall? Or if the boys can jump from Duncan’s roof into the pool, why can’t I? Or maybe I was never as odd or alone as I thought for feeling what I did. Those words made me new with nerve and mischief until I wasn’t myself anymore. I can’t explain this to Josh without sharing the secret in the paper crane.
Duncan appears beside us. The skipper hat is slanted on his head, covering most of one eye. “Here’s to Josh, the only guy in the room who isn’t wasted,” he slurs.
Josh claps him on his back, an easy smile pulled onto his face. “Hey bro, you really had them going.” Duncan plants his feet, swaying counterclockwise, eyes unfocused and expression mean. He’s a second away from saying something snide and stupid. “You hungry?” Josh keeps his tone light, sensing what I do. “I have that lobster mac-and-cheese you go ape for.” He mouths, “Sorry” to me over his shoulder and leads drunken Duncan away.
Becca’s still surrounded by junior girls, and she’s rearranging the friendship bracelets stacked on her wrist and—I guess—sharing the origins of each because she reaches the tangerine and gold and points to me, grinning. I brush its mate around my wrist. She bought them at a boutique that first morning she took me shopping. It was surreal, after all those years zipping by without so much as a text, having Becca confide her deepest, darkest secrets to me over lunch. She acted like we’d been separated by continents, cell-phone-less—no one’s fault we stopped talking—rather than three houses away, an invisible wall that she put up between us. Becca sees me looking and waves me over to join them, the juniors looking over expectantly, studying me as they would an exotic species of monkey introduced into the indigenous fauna.
I make for the staircase. Willa is here, and if there’s anywhere I belong, it’s with her. Before, after, whenever. I reach the third step and meet her at the fourth. She’s sitting in the dim corridor, just beyond the sight line of the kitchen. Her temple rests against the wall and her eyes are closed. “Are you sleeping?” I ask.
Her lids open. “There was a couple sucking face against Josh’s door. I didn’t want to interrupt them,” she inflects, annoyed. “Actually”—she taps her cell—“Mom would only let me come if she dropped me off and picked me up. I called her for a ride.”
“Already?”
A long pause. “You’re kidding, right?”
I can’t decipher her expression in the dimness. “About what?”
“Trust me”—she rubs at her eyes—“you won’t notice that I’m gone. You came with Becca and Carolynn. You want to flirt with the birthday boy. You won’t miss me.”
I drop down a step to bring our heads level. “I do miss you. I tried calling you earlier. You were upset last night and you said we’d talk about it today.”
“I’m still upset, and I didn’t want to have the conversation over the phone.” Her voice has a crackly, choked quality. “But I don’t want my mom to come to the door and see that there’s alcohol here.”
“I’ll wait with you out front, then,” I offer.
My fuzzy schnapps blanket has thinned and the cool, fresh outside brightens my senses. The white liquid moon gives everything a silver skin. The porch is empty, other than a couple in the corner making out; the baseball team gave up their post.
Willa’s arms are folded rigidly against her chest, and her hair lashes her cheeks as she shakes her head. She stifles a strange sob that comes from nowhere. “I get that you’re sad.” She holds a hand out, blocking me from approaching. “I don’t understand how sad because I don’t have a brother or sister.” I turn away. Willa’s always said we were sisters. “I know that loss changes people. And that’s okay.” Her tone softens. Her hand tucks in mine and she squeezes. “Lana.” Now she sounds just like her mother with steel running through her voice. “I shouldn’t have even been at Swisher Spring yesterday. We were lucky that the police didn’t charge you guys for underage drinking. There were beer bottles everywhere. We dragged up Maggie Lewis’s body. We were brought to the police station.”
I take my hand from hers and place it in the folds of my dress. “Ben died in June. Dead. I watched it happen.” She flinches. “So what that the police brought us to the station? So what that oh my God, there was drinking going on around you? Someone is dead.”
Her eyes, round and hurt, flick to me and then to the road. “Two people are dead.” It smacks of accusation. “I came tonight to tell you that I can’t be around this anymore. We weren’t supposed to waste our final summer before graduation. What happened to finishing our early admission applications? We were going to edit our personal essays. The eight-semester plan is leaving Gant. I thought you wanted that. And it isn’t just what’s stopped mattering to you; it’s what’s started mattering to you. You used to be counting down the seconds until you could escape all this islander crap. The core is their own little island in a sea of regulars. The core is Gant.”
“I’ve always liked Josh; I used to be friends with Becca.” I’m aware these aren’t my strongest arguments.
She gives me an inscrutable look. “You’re kidding. You can’t think crushing on Josh and doing the monkey bars with Becca when you were ten is the same as hanging out—every day—with Carolynn Winters and Duncan Alvarez. Tell me you see the difference. Tell me that you see what a hypocrite you are, complaining about how exclusionary the core is and how nasty all the populars are, and then you sell out and spend the whole summer with them the moment they’ll have you.”
I hold my stomach. There’s pain there. “I don’t just want to study and plan,” I say. “We’ve been in high school for three years and what have we done? I don’t want to go to college a virgin who’s never been hungover, or gone to a football game, or piled into a limo with friends for winter ball, or even had more than one friend.”
Her chin juts out and she gives me this sidelong look.
“None of it is real, Willa. Chem lab and honor society and Latin—my God, Willa, Latin is a dead language.” I duck between her and the road she’s so intent on. “I wasted three years on all that stuff.”
Willa’s expression, her arms at her sides, her bearing, all of her hardens until I don’t recognize her. “I’m sorry that I’ve been such a waste of your time.” There’s a bitter lilt in her voice. “Now is when I need to concentrate on what matters to me. If I don’t matter to you, I don’t see how we can continue being friends.” She pushes past me. I make to go after her, but P.O.’s station wagon has just pulled up and the passenger window is being lowered. I spin and retreat around the side of the house.
Tears build. The blood hammers in my forehead. Wait until tomorrow. Tomorrow, with brown sugar on her oatmeal, Willa will be thinking clearly. She’ll see that it isn’t about the core being popular. She’ll remember how stuck I was in sadness.
Being around the core is like twisting an orange peel under your nose, its spray making you wince and sneeze and laugh all at once. Intense. Refreshing. Stinging. A relief. Willa will understand why I can’t be stuck in my small life; why I’d rather feel chemistry than study it.
I unlatch the gate to the rear yard. I can’t stomach cutting through the crush of bodies inside. I pass under a trellis with tiny buds dangling like a doll’s upside-down teacups. I toddle from stone to stone until I make it to the expanse of lawn that ends at the woods. I stop short. A figure faces the tree line. The wind slips through the yard, and Carolynn’s white dress lifts and dances before she flattens it against her thighs with her hands. She’s ghostly. I cross to where she stands barefoot. It says volumes that between Carolynn and the party, I choose her.
Her gaze is focused on the dark spaces between the pine trunks. “You shouldn’t be out here alone,” I say. “It isn’t safe.”
She sniffs. “It’s nicer out here than inside.”
“Even with killers on the loose?”
Her head tilts my way; she’s smiling like you would when humoring a child. “Yeah. It would be a fair fight, at least. Out here I don’t have to watch Bethany J. fall all over Duncan or Duncan put on his usual ‘I’m the king of the party’ routine.” She glances down at her hands. They’re shaking.
I wipe the runny mascara from under my eyes.
“You shouldn’t be crying.”
“I’m not crying over Maggie,” I say quickly.
She tips her head back and laughs, a ragged, belligerent edge to it. “I know that. You shouldn’t let them”—she jerks her head at the house—“see you cry. Ever. They’re worse than anything that could be out here.” My classmates have superpowers for making one another feel small. It surprises me that Carolynn, the most popular girl in our class, arguably the entire school, knows this.
The grass is wet with mist, and the cold fringe tickles the sides of my feet. I bend to undo my sandals. My soles crunch the individual blades; a hundred tiny pleasant pinpricks make me shiver.
“There used to be a swing set right here,” Carolynn says, toeing the grassy spot. She gathers up her hair and begins twisting it into a bun. “The boys used to push us off the swings. It was a game—knock the girls on their butts. Not Duncan. If he came up behind you, it was to push you higher. He wanted you to fly.”
Abruptly, she tugs her hair loose from the bun. “He was so sweet right up until middle school, and then it’s like he forgot how. It’s his dad. He’s just one of those guys. All that master-of-the-universe garbage. Don’t cry. Be a man. He just unloads on Duncan, like it’s so easy to retire at thirty. As if that’s normal. And if you aren’t on your way to coming up with some billion-dollar app, you’re a waste of space.” Her gaze meets mine. “I thought since you’re more objective, since you’re more distant, you might see Duncan better. Do you think he’d still push us higher or knock us off those swings?” She winds and unwinds her finger in the platinum chain of her necklace, waiting.
“Is he wearing the skipper hat in this scenario?” I ask, half to make her laugh and half because I think it would make a difference. She huffs softly. I consider Duncan. Before or after, he’s never said anything mean to me. “I think that any boy who takes his little brothers bike riding every Sunday morning would probably try to push you higher.”
I hear her sigh. Her head bows, shaking. “Jesus. Why are you such a sappy freak?” It isn’t clear if she’s insulting herself or me. Without a word she slips her heels on and walks toward Josh’s deck. Blades of grass stick to her calves like dark slots in her skin. I stay at the edge of the trees. Their branches shiver in the night wind. I don’t budge at the snapping of twigs behind the darkness. In this moment, I’d rather face what’s outside the house than what’s within, like Carolynn. I choose one point in the shadows and I stare it down. That hungry, daring voice in my head, the one with all the questions, urges me to walk into the trees.
For the last month I’ve given in to that voice, mostly. I’m not crazy. The voice is mine. It was with me the day I left my bed for the first time in four weeks to stagger to the lower terrace, where Ben and I used to hang out. I watched the flames in the fire pit after lighting the wood, and I thought, I’ve always wanted to leap the blaze. I wondered if I could do it, so I did. It singed my socks—pink cashmere ones that Dad and Diane gave me for Valentine’s Day. It was thrilling. I was alive. That was the first thing I did in after. My inaugural act as a new girl.
At present that voice quietly urges me forward:
Come prove that you’re as brave as the girl in the stories.
Prove that you still exist.
It begins to sound less like me and more like Ben’s alto. What if all this time, it was him? My toes clench in the grass. I wish I could reach inside my brain and pinch the thought as you would the lit wick of a candle. Snuff it out. When you love someone, love them in your bones and know them until the backs of their hands are as familiar as yours, can they ever be gone? Is Ben all the way gone?
I take a step for the trees. Maggie’s killer is on the loose and maybe he’s concealed by the shadows, staring me down, inviting me forward. Who would I find if I looked?
“Ben?” His name slips out, an arrow aimed at the dark.
There’s laughter from behind me, not from the trees I’m focused on.
“Are you talking to your dead stepbrother?” Ford asks between snide chuckles.
My cheeks burn hot and I’ve scooped up my shoes and am halfway across the lawn by the time I can bear looking up at Ford. He’s a few stairs above the grass on the redwood deck, sneering like I’m a bug under his boat shoe he’s about to squish. “Liddy and Kristie were all, ‘I bet they only let Lana hang with them because they feel sorry for her.’ ” He makes his voice higher than either girl’s is. “And I told them no way Carolynn Winters”—her name’s said with contempt—“let some desperate wannabe join her crew, even for the summer, because that girl doesn’t have a heart.”
I stop short. This is not before. I am not Lana trying to listen to Mrs. Edgemont’s Mary Shelley lecture and refusing to let on that I feel Ford’s breath on my neck. This is not Mr. Gupta’s astronomy; I have more options than transferring out, or pretending I don’t hear Ford’s sniggers each time I speak, or risking making the bullying even worse if I tell Mr. Gupta on him. All those little jabs took divots out of me. They reduced me to easy and frequently picked-on prey. But tonight, I am not afraid of fighting back or making it worse.
I smirk at him like he’s told a joke. “You’re calling me a desperate wannabe? Do you hear yourself, Ford?”
He clears his throat, surprised. “All I’m at is that I was wrong. Pity it is: they must know you’re a desperate bitch who talks to herself when no one’s around. You were just mid-séance.”
I reach the bottom step and am about to jog up them and disappear into the house. It feels like retreating from this spiteful boy. With the woods at my back, the pressure of the breeze in my hair, and whatever presence I sensed in the trees still near, I refuse to.
I place my hands on my hips, channel Carolynn’s glacial stare, and say, “If it had anything to do with pity, it would be you they included. I wouldn’t normally say this, but you’re not a nice person.” I shift forward confidentially and enunciate each word. “They think you’re a hanger-on. But not me. I know the truth, Ford. You’re worse than that. Your brother was a sadistic asshole. But you are a zombie, completely unoriginal, feeding off his popularity and nastiness, hoping that no one will see how pathetic and mind-suckingly boring you are.”
He takes a step back and spits, “Screw you, bitch.”
I give a laugh. “Way to prove me wrong.” I jog up the stairs, hands shaking and blood singing between my ears as I half turn to look down at him. “Guess what, Ford? I see.”
Three light-headed strides later, I’m in the kitchen, dialing Dad to pick me up.