“I can’t wait to get to the beach!” Dean yells into my ear, and it’s so loud that I quickly draw myself away from him. “I really, really can’t wait!”
“We need to get really drunk,” Rachael whispers into my other ear. I realize then that I’ve placed myself between the drunk and the drunk-wannabe. “Even Meghan is beating us!”
This is true. I don’t know how long everyone else has been here for, but they’re all moving over the tipsy borderline. Either they’ve been drinking for hours or they’ve been drinking extremely fast. Most likely a combination of both. As Dean said, Rachael and I need to catch up, and quickly. I glance around the circle of my friends—my friends plus TJ and Jackson—and they’re all grinning and yelling at the roulette wheel and looking like they’re having the best damn time of their lives. Except Tyler. I notice then that he’s standing behind Tiffani, hovering a step or two back from her, like he’s terrified to touch her. And he’s staring at me. Only me.
The whole situation is only stressing me out. Tyler’s still confused about the best way to handle our circumstances, and Tiffani’s grinning, bearing a huge smile that conveys a sense of authority as she glances at everyone around her one by one. I want to forget about the two of them for a little while. I don’t want to overthink the situation I’m in with Tyler, because I’ll only end up ruining my night, and I don’t want to attempt to figure out what Tiffani is thinking, because the only thing that’s rushing into my mind is that she thinks I’m not reckless.
My grip tightens around the bottle in my hand and I quickly force the biggest grin that I can possibly manage upon my face. I spin around to Rachael. I’ll show Tiffani reckless. “Okay, let’s get drunk.”
“I know where Dean’s parents hide the good stuff,” she whispers. She grabs my wrist and yanks me out of Dean’s grip, and we sneak away from the game. We hover by the archway to the living room for a few seconds, and when everyone gets distracted by another mud-water shot that Meghan has just drunk, Rachael gives me a thumbs-up and we skip through the living room and into a small hallway, where the music sounds muffled and the air is cold.
“Are they here?” I ask.
“Who?”
“His parents.”
Rachael smiles and points to the roof. “Upstairs.”
There’s another door and she yanks it open, opening up a dark, cold room. It’s not until she pushes me down a step and my hand hits a car that I realize we’re standing in the garage.
“Where’s the light?” Rachael mutters as she fumbles around on the wall, searching for a switch, and when she finally finds it, she flicks it on.
I’m standing next to a black BMW, and I quickly take a step back from it, careful not to touch it again, and I glance around. There are stacks of cardboard boxes in each corner, but the walls are completely covered in red and white football merchandise. There are football jerseys in glass display frames, huge flags and banners that stretch from the top of the wall to the floor, a small shelf with gold helmets in cases and a couple footballs, and then a collection of photo frames.
“His dad’s a total 49ers fan,” Rachael muses as she dances toward the shelves on the far wall, which is lined with bottles of alcohol. I watch her for a second as she picks up a few of the bottles and examines them, nodding her head in approval. “I told you I knew where the good stuff is!”
Rachael’s still scanning the booze, so I move around the car and run my eyes over the photos on the wall. A smile plays at my lips as I recognize Dean, draped in a San Francisco 49ers jersey and a red cap on his head, a few years younger than he is now. A man stands by his side, equally as dressed up for the game as Dean, and one hand rests on Dean’s shoulder while the other holds a hot dog. It must be his dad, and they’re standing outside the entrance to Levi’s Stadium. There are a lot of pictures like this, of Dean and his dad. It’s like every time they attended a 49ers game, they documented the moment.
One photo stands out. Instead of there being just two people in it, there are four. Dean and his dad are in their permanent pose, but on one side of them there’s a boy standing next to Dean, both of them around the age of twelve. Dean’s friend is dark-haired and green-eyed.
“We’re going to drink this tequila, and we’re going to drink it straight, like total badasses, without the salt or the lime,” Rachael states solemnly, her chin raised, bottle of Cazadores in hand as she twirls over to me.
I throw a skeptical glance down to the bottle before I swallow and point to the photo. “Is that Tyler?”