No Charlie.
“Hey.” Harper’s voice is husky with sleep beside me, her arm across my chest. Paige never spent the whole night—she always snuck out before my mom woke up—and I’ve never brought anyone else here.
Last night I did things with Harper that I leapfrogged when I was fourteen and having sex with Paige in the horse barn behind her house. It’s not that I regret it. I don’t. It’s just—being with Harper is like getting a do-over.
“Hey back,” I say. “You give good sleep.”
“Is that what the boys have been saying about me all these years?”
“Yeah, I read it above the urinal in the locker room.”
She yawn-laughs. “What time is it?”
I pick up my cell phone. “Almost ten.”
“Oh, no!” Harper scrambles out of my bed and re-knots her hair. “I’m going to be late for work.”
My mom is in the kitchen when we go downstairs. Her eyebrows shoot up when she sees Harper, then she pins me with a death ray stare loaded with silent scolding. Travis Henry Stephenson, you better not have been doing what I think you were doing. Not with a sweet girl like Harper Gray.
“Harper,” she says. “What a surprise.”
“Yeah, um—nice to see you, Mrs. Stephenson.” Harper’s face is pink with embarrassment, even though she’s got nothing to be embarrassed about.
“Long story,” I say. “We’ve gotta go.”
I drop Harper off at the Waffle House and meet up with Kevlar and Moss at the beach. Moss is asleep on a lounge chair, but Kevlar is propped up with a beer in his hand. I’d laugh at his Afghani-tan—tanned face and neck, white everywhere else—but I have one, too. Charlie was the one who dubbed it the Afghani-tan.
“You missed one helluva night, Solo,” he says. “We went to this strip club called Fantasy’s. Did you know Amber is an exotic dancer?”
It doesn’t surprise me. Taking off her clothes for money is within her skill set. I peel off my T-shirt and fish a beer from the depths of the icy cooler. “Dude, she’s a stripper.”
“Don’t be a hater just because your girlfriend is a goddess,” Kevlar says. “Amber is a very amenable girl, if you get what I’m sayin’.”
“What you’re saying is you probably paid sixty bucks for three lap dances, then came back to the hotel alone to liquidate the inventory.”
“Fuck you.”
“Did you or did you not close the deal, Kenneth?”
“I don’t think I want to tell you now.” He crosses his arms over his scrawny freckled chest, all huffy, and turns his nose up, pretending to ignore me.
“Kevlar, man, I thought we were BFFs,” I say. Moss doesn’t open his eyes, but a chuckle rumbles out. “I still have my half of the necklace, and last night I wrote in my diary, ‘Dear Diary, Kenneth is my BFF. I hope he gets laid, because it’s a special night when a man loses his virginity and contracts a sexually transmitted disease at the same time.’”
“Hey! I used a condom.” A shit-eating grin breaks out on his face and I know he wants to rattle off every detail, but just… no. I don’t need those nightmares, too.
“Aw, Moss, our little boy is all grown up.” I shake my can. “We should celebrate.”
“Solo.” Kevlar jumps off his chair. “No.”
He runs down the beach and I chase, but he’s not faster than I am. I catch him, put him in a headlock, and spray beer in his face. “Congratulations, dude. It’s about damn time.”
We hang out on the beach for a couple of hours, until my friends have to head back to North Carolina. I sit in the room with them while they’re packing.
“Wish I was going back, too,” I say.
“Had all the family you can stand?” Moss asks.
They don’t know that Peralta “suggested” my extra leave. Or that Charlie, the only person I could talk to about any of this, is part of the reason I’m here. “Yep.”
“I love my mother,” he says. “But after about four days I had all the mothering I can take.”
“Don’t cry, Solo.” Kevlar comes out of the bathroom carrying all the little soaps and shampoo bottles. “We’ll see you next weekend.”
“What’s next weekend?”
“Kevlar, man, you didn’t tell him?” Moss smacks Kevlar in the back of the head, then rummages through his bag. He pulls out a cream-colored envelope and hands it to me. “We all got them. If you had your mail forwarded, you’ll probably be getting it any day.”
Inside is a matching cream-colored card. An invitation.
In memoriam
LCpl. Charles Thompson Sweeney
The honor of your presence
is requested at a memorial service
Saturday, the fourteenth of August
at five o’clock in the evening
The White Room
1 King Street
St. Augustine, Florida
My mouth goes dry and when I swallow it feels like I have sandpaper caught in my throat. I really don’t want to go to a memorial service, but I promised Charlie I’d visit his mom and I haven’t done it yet. How do you tell your best friend’s mother that everything you could do wasn’t enough?
“This Marine is looking forward to pulling out the blues,” Kevlar says. “And watching the panties drop.”
Moss smacks him upside the head again. “Have some respect. It’s a memorial service.”
“Dude, if he were alive, Charlie would be the first person to exploit the situation to get laid,” Kevlar says. “He’d be all Wedding Crashers, Marine style.”
It’s a fair point. Charlie used to joke about how he was going to buy himself a Purple Heart on eBay so he could use it to get sympathy sex.
“I guess I’ll see you guys next weekend, then.”
They leave me standing in the hotel parking lot and I’m tempted to go inside to the bar and get wrecked, because the only other place I have to go is home.
*
My envelope is lying on the kitchen island when I get there. I tear through the expensive paper, even though I already know what it says, and a folded note falls out with the invitation. It’s from Charlie’s mom.
Dear Travis,
I hope you will be willing to say a few words at Charlie’s memorial service. While I was blessed to have him in my life the longest, you knew him best. He called you brother. He called you friend. I know this is asking a lot and I will understand if you would rather not, but please call me when you decide.
Always,
Ellen Sweeney
“Please don’t tell her, Solo.” Charlie stands next to me at the island. “She thinks I’m a hero. Don’t take that away from her.”
“I won’t.” I rub the heels of my hands against my eyes to make him go away, but he’s still there. “But you need to go away.”
When I open my eyes, my mom is watching me from the doorway. “Who needs to go away, Travis?”
“No one,” I say. “It’s nothing. Headache.” Lie. I’m not telling my mom my dead best friend was talking to me. Or that I was talking back. “Seriously. It’s all good.”
I’m not sure she believes me, but she takes a whole key lime pie—my favorite—from the fridge and cuts it into wedges. “I was a little surprised to see Harper Gray coming down my stairs this morning. I hope you’re not—”
“I’m not.” It doesn’t matter how that sentence ends. “She’s really…” I shrug. “I like her.”
It’s a crumb, really, but Mom brightens as if I handed her a whole loaf. She slides me a small plate with a sliver of pie on it. “I always knew you could do so much better than Paige Manning.”
Laughing, I cut my fork into the dessert. “Yeah, well, I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but she moved on to Ryan.”
“What? No!”
“I’m surprised Dad didn’t tell you,” I say. “They hooked up while I was gone.”
She sighs. “I try to be charitable, but I’m sorry. I really dislike that girl.”
“I kinda got that impression.”
Mom gets a resigned look on her face. “Well, I guess if she has to… hook up with one of my boys, I’d rather it be Ryan.”
My eyebrows hitch up. “Oh?”