“Yeah and maybe all one hundred and fifty-two people you love would like you to chill out and worry about your own damn self for like five minutes, Sophie! Maybe we’re drowning in your constant need to fix every little thing, Jesus Christ, maybe it’s suffocating us! And maybe if you stopped for a second and actually worried about yourself, you’d realize that getting Megan to come here isn’t gonna change jack shit.”
“It’ll help us raise the money,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady.
“If you think that’s what this is about to you, then you’re out of your mind.”
“Hey.” Suddenly Chelsea appeared next to Terrance, holding her flute like a baton. “Just an FYI, everyone else here doesn’t feel like hearing about your rando friend-group drama.”
“Fucking shut it, Chelsea,” Brit snapped without even skipping a beat.
“I don’t mind hearing it, to be honest,” Becca offered from next to her. “We’ll just hear about it from everyone else anyway.”
“Whatever.” I stared at Brit like I could stare through her. “That’s fine. If you want to go around lying and punching people and doing stupid shit, then that’s totally your business, isn’t it? If you want your life to be one huge unmitigated Coach Junior of a failure, then I should just sit back and fucking let it happen, right?”
Brit looked as though I had slapped her.
No one spoke, not even Chelsea and Becca, who probably wanted their seats back. Ms. Hill had moved back to the front of the room—she was going to start the practice back up—but none of us moved.
It felt like the floor was slipping away, like I couldn’t even feel the seat under me.
“All right, folks,” Ms. Hill said, and people were moving back to their spots, picking up their instruments.
I stood, cut past Chelsea and Becca, and left.
* * *
When I got home, I fell across my bed, pulled out my phone.
I opened a text to Ciara.
Brit doesn’t get to be mad at me, it isn’t fair. She says a million shitty things and I say one shitty thing and it’s supposed to be equal? Like she gets to be just as hurt as me? It shouldn’t work like that, it’s bullshit, this whole thing is bullshit, and I wish you were here, you were supposed to come back, I wish you were coming back
I stared at it, the letters swimming in front of my eyes, and then I deleted it.
I squeezed my eyes shut, clutched the phone to my chest. I almost jumped out of my skin when it buzzed with a message a few moments later.
It was Flora:
Wanna sleep over tonight?
I didn’t answer. Instead, I tapped open the window for WHERE WILL YOU SPEND ETERNITY. Paused, and then removed myself from the group.
When evening came, I told my parents I was going to Flora’s.
I quietly got my bike out of the garage, wheeled it across the grass, crossed around back, and cut through the yard that backed up onto ours.
Then I pedaled away.
forty
People were meeting up at Jasmine Mead’s tonight. I knew Dash had to work, so Brit wouldn’t have a ride if we didn’t go together. Flora probably wouldn’t go if Brit didn’t, and Terrance wouldn’t if Flora didn’t, and who knew what August thought of anything.
So I went, because I wanted to be with people who weren’t my friends.
Not that they weren’t my friends—they were. The seniors on the drum line, the girls from the color guard who I sat with in world lit last semester. It just wasn’t the same kind of thing, and maybe that was good. Maybe that was less complicated. We could just have fun.
And I did have fun.
I ended up in the living room, dancing with Tegan Wendall and some other girls. I drank, and drank some more—level-three Brit drunkenness maybe, except this wasn’t Brit drunkenness at all, this was Sophie drunkenness, which was its own relatively uncharted thing. I didn’t know the levels of it.
I didn’t know which level was stumbling into the bathroom, looking for my phone to call someone, and realizing I didn’t have my phone at all. Not caring.
I didn’t know which level was throwing my arms around Tegan Wendall’s neck because she was so pretty, really, she genuinely was. Her body was insane, it was absolutely unreasonable, and yet she had this big goofy smile that squished her cheeks up, crinkling her eyes so that they looked almost closed. She could take pictures with a serious expression and look perpetually glamorous if she wanted to, but she always did that big-toothed grin.
Tegan and I danced, and the beat of the song was loud and pounding and it all became a swirl in my mind—community colleges, state schools, private universities, and I saw a mullet today!!!! and I talked to mom about the visit and Miss you lots. And I spotted Troy Fowler across the room, laughing unpleasantly just like he had that night in the kitchen with August, the scene of the beer can demonstration, and suddenly all I could think of was the slap of his hands coming together in fourth grade, of the sheets held up around the terrible car crash he saw, so people couldn’t see the dead bodies when they pulled them out.
Was dead bodies redundant? When do people ever refer to it as a body unless it’s a dead one? Pop songs, maybe? Get your body on the dance floor—that’s what I was doing now, but it had to be qualified, the body had to belong to someone. No one sang about “the body”—just “your body” or “my body” and if you were addressing someone about their body or yours, you were both alive, right? Get the body on the dance floor was way more sinister. The implied emptiness. The body was vacant. No one was home.
Everything was tilting a little.
And loud, too loud, and Tegan was looking at me with concern in her eyes, very far from the squishy-cheeked grin. I wondered how much of the bodies discourse I had said out loud.
“Are you okay, Sophie?”
“I’m excellent,” I said, but she didn’t look like she believed me.
She disappeared after that, and I was sad, because I would have rather she smiled than disappear, but then she returned at some point, parting through the crowd with August behind her.
He looked tired—hair tousled, dark smudges under his eyes—but still undeniably, annoyingly attractive.
He leaned into me, and for a second I thought he was going to kiss me, but instead he put his mouth by my ear, talking over the pound of the music.
“Let’s go home, okay?”
forty-one
August led me out, one of my arms around his neck, one of his around my waist. It was the same way we had taken Brit out to the car, what felt like ages ago at that party at Tegan’s.
“You have good shoulders,” I told him. For some reason, it seemed pressing for him to know. “You should get a tattoo across your shoulders,” I continued. “And then I can lick it off.”
A choked laugh escaped him abruptly.
“Jesus.” He tightened his grip on me. “Jesus, you’re drunk.”
“I am. I think I’m very drunk. Maybe that’s good. Maybe I’ll forget everything. I think it would be awkward next time I see you if I remember that bit about licking your tattoo off.”
He didn’t speak, just marched us forward.
“You have to forget it too, though,” I said as we reached the front door. “You have to promise.”
He just looked at me for a moment.
“You have to,” I insisted.
“I promise,” he replied, eyes strangely solemn. Then he opened the door and led me out to the front, looking up and down the street and then taking out his phone.
“Can’t call Dash, he’s working,” I said. “Can’t call Flora, Flora can’t drive. Terrance can, but Dash won’t let him drive the Cutlass ’cause he backed their mom’s car into the mailbox last year.” My voice stuck. “Can’t call Brit. She hates me. Can’t call Ciara.” I shook my head. “She didn’t want to come back for the summer.” Suddenly tears sprang into my eyes, hot and stinging. “We fought, you know. She tried … She wanted to …”
“It’s okay.” He squeezed my hand. “It’s all right.”
Headlights appeared down the street, and suddenly the Cutlass was pulling up. It wasn’t Dash, though—Brit hopped out of the driver’s side.
“Why haven’t you been answering your phone?” she demanded. “Why did you leave the chat?”
I couldn’t lose the thread of the conversation. “I wouldn’t text her back,” I said, and more tears pricked my eyes. “For so long, I went so long—”
“It’s all right.” August’s voice was gentle. “She’s here now.”
“Not Brit.” I shook my head again. Not Brit. I had Brit, even when I didn’t. “Ciara.”
Brit’s face turned sad.
“Here. Come on.”
And she was opening the car door and guiding me into the back seat.
“I wouldn’t answer her,” I said. “For ages.”
“It’s okay, Sophie,” Brit said.
“It’s not. It’s not okay.” I was crying in earnest now.
She cupped my face, wiped her thumbs roughly under my eyes. “You’re drunk. It can make the bad things feel worse, if you’re not careful.”
Brit didn’t know what she was talking about—nothing could make this feel worse. Being drunk didn’t magnify it—it just gave it a way out.
“What’s she talking about?”