She saw him looking and waved a hand. “Don’t worry about them,” she said. Her words were slurring together. “Some guys I know from a bar in Kingston. I only invited them because they brought the booze. I’m so glad you’re here.”
Dodge had Nat’s present wrapped in tissue paper in his pocket. He wanted to give it to her but not here, while people were watching. He wanted to tell her, too, that he was sorry about Panic. Nat had frozen up at the side of the highway and taken a little over a minute to cross. Just like that, the game was over for her.
On the way home from the highway challenge, Nat had barely said a word, just sat stiffly next to him with tears running down her face. No one had spoken. Dodge had been annoyed at Bishop and Heather. They were her best friends. They were supposed to know what to say to make her feel better.
He had felt helpless, as frightened as he had while standing on that highway with the blindfold.
But Nat was already hauling him off toward the back of the house. “Come get a drink, okay? And say hi to everyone.”
At the back of the house a large grill was letting off thick clouds of smoke that smelled like meat and charcoal. An old dude was pushing around some burgers on it, holding a beer in one hand. Dodge thought it might have been Bishop’s dad—they had the same nose, the same floppy hair, although the man’s was gray—and was surprised. In school he’d always thought of Bishop as kind of a dork, well-meaning but just too nice to be interesting. He’d imagined Bishop’s family would be of the mom-dad-sister-older-brother-picket-fence variety. Not some guy with a beer grilling in the middle of towers of rusting junk.
But that was another thing you learned when playing Panic: people would surprise you. They would knock you on your ass. It was practically the only thing you could count on.
Kids from school were standing around in little groups, or using some of the old furniture and gutted car frames as makeshift chairs. They were all staring at Dodge, some with curiosity and some with open hostility, and it wasn’t until then that he realized none of the other Panic players had been invited, except for Heather. That’s when it hit him that there really weren’t many Panic players left. Just five.
And he was one of them.
The two things—the fact that Nat was holding his hand, and the fact that he was getting so close—sent a thrill up his spine.
“The keg’s over there, behind the old motorcycle.” Nat giggled. She gestured with her cup, sending another bit of beer sloshing over the rim, and he remembered suddenly the time she’d called him Dave at homecoming last year. His stomach tightened. He hated parties, never felt comfortable at them. “I’ll be back, okay? I have to circulate. It’s kinda my party, after all.”
She kissed him—on the cheek, he noticed, and of course then again on the other cheek—and quickly disappeared, blending into a knot of people standing around the keg. Without Nat next to him, he felt like he was back in the halls at school, except this time, instead of everyone ignoring him, everyone was staring. When he spotted Heather, he could have run up and kissed her.
She saw him at the same time and waved him over. She was sitting on the hood of what Dodge could only imagine was one of Bishop’s projects: a Pinto junker, wheel-less and propped up on cinder blocks. He could count a half-dozen cars, in various states of construction and deconstruction, just from where he was standing.
“Hey.” Heather was drinking a Coke. She looked tired. “I didn’t know you would be here.”
Dodge shrugged. He wasn’t sure what that meant. Maybe Nat had only invited him at the last minute? “Didn’t want to miss the big birthday,” was all he said.
“Nat’s trashed already,” Heather said with a short laugh. She looked away, squinting. Again he was struck by the change that had come over her this summer. She was thinning out, sharpening, and her beauty was becoming more pronounced. Like she’d been wearing an invisibility cloak her whole life, and now it was coming off.
Dodge leaned against the hood and fumbled in his pocket for his cigarettes. He didn’t even feel like smoking—he just wanted something to do with his hands. “How’s Lily?” he asked.
She looked at him sharply. “She’s fine,” she said slowly. Then: “She’s inside, watching TV.”
Dodge nodded. The day before he’d been smoking a cigarette in Meth Row when he’d heard the sound of someone singing behind the shed where he usually kept his bike. Curious, he circled around to the back.
And there was Heather.
Butt-naked.
She’d shouted and he’d turned quickly away, but not before he noticed she was washing herself with the hose from Dot’s Diner, the one the kitchen boys used to spray down the alley in the evenings. He saw a car, her car, with clothes drying on its hood; and a girl who must have been Heather’s sister, sitting in the grass, reading.