JUNE 30
“The night after I saw you at the Holler Up, I had a dream that we were swimming in that lake by my grandma’s cabin in Emaleen,” Bea says. “I started sinking, and you didn’t see me. You kept swimming away; my mouth was full of water so I couldn’t shout out to you. You swam away from me while I sank to the bottom.” Bea scrubs at her eyes. “I’m so sorry, Camille. For driving away from you that day.”
It’s easy to think people forget about you when they walk away, like you never mattered at all, that you never shared a history. But of course that’s not true. I’m still pissed at Bea, but it’s not as if either of us has experience dealing with a problem like this.
I hug her. “I’ll never let you sink, Bea. I promise. We’ll always be friends.” I step back, my hands on her shoulders. “Let’s make a pact. Friends forever, no matter what?”
“Friends forever,” she says. She smiles.
“Shall we spit swear on it? Just like in My Girl?”
“Ew, no!”
“Come on!” I hold my hand up to my mouth, pretending to spit into it.
Bang!
“Shit!” I jump, and a little eeep shoots out of Bea’s mouth.
We swing around, trying to figure out where the noise is coming from.
“It’s by the dumpsters,” I say. “Nothing good comes from dumpsters.”
Bea shakes her head vehemently.
Bang!
We stare at each other for a second, wide-eyed, and then grab hands and start running. “It’s the hook guy!” Bea shrieks. “The hook guy.”
“I think it’s raccoons!”
“Raccoons with hooks!” Bea blurts out.
“That’s bad, too!”
We keep running, zooming around the parking lot, hand in hand, back to the car.
Bea peeks into the front seat. “Shhh! Annabelle is still sleeping,” she says, panting.
I look into the window. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone sleep that hard in my life.” I doubt she’d wake up for anything, even psycho killers or ghost strippers.
Bea studies Annabelle, who is lying on her back, her mouth half-open, her legs propped over her steering wheel, her bare feet squished against the window. “How can she sleep like that?”
“We might as well let her sleep a little longer. Are you tired?”
Bea shakes her head. “Do you want to play Uno?”
I laugh. “You have Uno?”
She looks at me like I’m crazy. “I always have Uno, you know that.” She gently opens the car’s back door, takes a deck of Uno out of her bag, and holds it up.
We find an old picnic table on the side of the Boobie Bungalow under a parking light, and Bea deals out the cards. “This feels like the weirdest slumber party ever,” she says.
“For sure.” Over at the dumpster, the crashing noise continues.
“Will someone tell the neighbors to keep it down?” Bea says.
“Shut up!” I yell in the dumpster’s direction.
Bang!
My Uno hand stinks, and Bea swiftly wins the round, as per usual. Bea is basically the undisputed Uno champion. She shuffles the deck and deals out another round, snapping each card down in a perfectly square pile.
“Remember when we thought our model horses came to life when we weren’t there?” she says.
I laugh. “Yeah. God, we were so goofy back then.”
“Why didn’t you want to tell your parents?” Bea asks, arranging her cards in her hands. She asks me this so casually that I think for a moment that she’s asked me something else.
“What a way to switch the subject—from model horses to telling my parents.”
“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
“No. I want to.”