Hunter eyed us like girls were the weirdest creatures he’d ever seen. He took the bags from us and loaded them onto the flatbed with a thunk. “Maybe. I’d have to check with the band.”
“It would be pretty amazing advertising,” I said. Abby smiled at me gratefully. “For free, I might add.”
“Exactly! This would be the best possible exposure. You end the summer with a bang and start the school year right.” Abby nodded her head furiously, agreeing with herself.
I kept the ball rolling. “I bet you would get snapped up for sweet sixteens, quincea?eras, graduation parties. Maybe even the epitome of high school band achievements—a school dance.”
Hunter looked at me in disbelief. I guessed his sarcasm detector was in the shop that day. “Like I said, I’ll have to ask the guys. Not really something I can decide by myself, you know?”
“Of course, we understand,” Abby said, “Make sure to mention that the deal includes the sparkling wit and intellect of two beautiful women.” Two? Did she mean me? “That will definitely push them over the edge.”
Hunter laughed at that, while I put a hand up in the air to halt the conversation. “Pause please. Who is this ‘we’ you speak of?”
“You and me, silly. You’re our resident designer. How else can you be expected to find inspiration without seeing your subjects close up? Hear the music?”
I shook my head. “Right, but you seem to forget that I’m not here”—I gestured to the park and the office building—“by choice. I am effectively under house arrest for the rest of the summer. There is no band practice for this girl.” As much as I wanted to go to help Abby with her article and go to Sol Jam—which, despite the awkward name, sounded awesome—I couldn’t go without Belén’s approval. And there was no way she would let me out.
“The thing with Ashlyn?” Hunter questioned. I nodded slowly, my mouth suddenly dry. “I never heard exactly what happened.” He looked at me expectantly, like it was no big deal to share personal details about my shady criminal past.
Abby’s eyebrows lifted ever so slightly. I knew she’d been waiting for me to spill all the ugly details.
I gulped the humid air. No time like the present, and no use keeping it in any longer. “Right. So, there was this tiny misunderstanding at Mason’s right before school ended.”
Hunter and Abby stood still, like statues cemented to the insanely hot asphalt, as I told my tale of woe. They didn’t move a muscle until I finished, closing my monologue with a scarily accurate impression of Belén reprimanding me for losing my keys. When I stopped speaking, I realized all the other kids had packed away their bags on the truck and left. The sound of Alicia turning on the engine jolted me back to the park and out of my nightmare, which was in fact still my reality. I looked down at the ground, shifted my weight, and tried to slow my heart rate, which had elevated as I spoke.
As the truck backed out and drove toward the main road, Hunter started shaking his head. “Dang, girl.”
“Yep. That pretty much sums it up.” I kicked a stray rock with my toe.
“How do you live with rules like that in your house? I’d go bananas.” Hunter’s face bore a look of disgust, which oddly annoyed me. It felt a little weird to hear someone besides me criticize Belén.
“Well, I guess . . .” I tried to be diplomatic. “She feels very . . . strongly that there’s a right way to live your life.”
“Don’t all parents, though?” Abby asked.
“I guess so. I just wish her ideas weren’t so . . .” I said, fumbling for the right word. “Narrow.”
On some level, I got where Belén was coming from. She wanted Tilly and me to become productive citizens and go out into the world to do good things; I knew that at my core. I was just a little tired of defending why the things that made me happy were just as good as the ones she thought were best. I couldn’t wait to be out on my own, where no one would be looking over my shoulder, evaluating everything like I was an employee or something.
Abby’s sympathetic face was on, and she looked itchy to give me a hug, but also wary, like she was afraid that if she touched me, I might cry or break or punch her. Maybe all three.
“Do you hate her?” she asked in a small voice.
“Belén? No. She and I just don’t see eye to eye.”
“Ashlyn, I mean.”
Oh. I pulled in a breath. “No, I don’t hate her either.”
As I said it, I knew it was the truth. We had too much shared history for me to ever hate her, no matter how upset or annoyed I was with my estranged best friend. The first day of middle school, when we were forced to “dress out” for gym for the first time, Ashlyn and I were randomly paired to share a locker. She was painfully thin, with blonde hair reaching the middle of her back, and had been doing her best to cover her chest, which was still too small for a bra but covered in one anyway. She slipped the gray cotton shirt over her head and shoulders as quickly as humanly possible. We’d eyed each other warily at first, making sure that our street clothes never touched as they rested side by side in the blue locker while we sat in lines, tween robots doing pushups and crunches at the sound of a whistle. When Mr. Barton, the PE teacher fresh out of college and still struggling to grow facial hair, made us do a timed mile run, Ashlyn and I discovered we both were terrible runners. We competed with each other for last place, and eventually we started to talk, and then to laugh. We vented about our lack of athletic skills, about our strict parents—Belén and her father—and about our absent parents—my dead mother and traveling father, and her mother, who spent her days at the spa and expensive lunches.
When Jeremy Wu dumped me in eighth grade after a lengthy three-week relationship (for a cheerleader with better calves than me), Ash invited me to sleep over at her house while we blacked his face out of every yearbook she owned. When Ashlyn was named second place in the regional geography bee, I was sitting in the audience cheering the loudest, glittery sign in hand. And also comforting her when her father chastised her for not knowing which body of water had the highest level of salinity. In addition to countless sleepovers, we’d eaten lunches together, studied at each other’s homes, gone stag together to school dances. We’d both had other friends, of course—since she was far more obsessed with grades and test scores than I was, while I spent my free time in the computer lab or in the art room—but we always came back to each other, like boomerangs.
I wanted to believe that Ash would come back this time. We were bigger than this. Better than this. I just didn’t know how long it would take her to get here.
Hunter was still shaking his head. “You’re a better person than I am, Tatum. I would have walked and never looked back.”
I flinched.