“Someone get this girl a record deal!” she yells back.
I thrash my hair, completely destroying all of my earlier efforts to straighten it, and she laughs. “Dammit, Savannah,” she says as the reverberation begins to fade. “What would I do without you?”
“Swim against Australian surfers on your own.” She whacks my arm and we crack up again.
I wish that we could keep driving. Pass the bridge to South Cross and see where we end up. Montauk for the sunrise. New York City, the opposite direction, for the lights. The two of us, the way it’s always been.
Ah, but not tonight.
I PARK IN the tiny lot next to the bay, where during the day fishermen cast into the water and boats push off from the launch. Tonight, the bonfire throws light and shadows against the cement underbelly of the bridge.
As soon as I shut off the engine, a Thermos is pressed into my hand like a trophy. “Driver of the year,” Cassie proclaims. “You should take my car to your next test.”
I take a cautionary sip. Hot chocolate mixed with something strong and minty. “I owed you hot chocolate,” Cass says, watching my reaction. Her eyelashes are thick with mascara, her blue eyes luminous. “And for Mr. Riley.”
“How are we getting home?” I take another sip. I can’t deny that after the wine coolers from summer bonfires, this is a significant step up.
“We’ve got hours,” she says with a wave of her hand. “And I’m not going to go wild. We can expect the usual shitty delicacies here, unless someone was really ambitious and stole a handle from their parents.”
I stare at the lid of the Thermos, debating whether or not I should have more or dump it once we’re out of the car.
“Cascade Hopeswell!” a male voice shouts.
“Call me that again and I will push you into the fire!” Cassie calls back. She’s met with laughter.
My feet sink into the sand and its coolness stings my ankles. The autumn night wind is sharp, not dreamy like the humid summer gusts, and I hug Cassie’s sweater close.
I follow her footsteps to the base of the bridge, home of the bonfire. Everyone likes to pretend that the cops won’t notice the flames and smoke down here, and truth be told, the cops like to pretend they’re not happening either. As I approach the cement pillars, I wave at the faces lit orange by fire.
They’re preoccupied elsewhere. “Cass!” One, two, three hands rise to slap high-fives with her.
“Don’t touch the Ponquogue scum,” someone says jokingly.
“Don’t be a hater just because our soccer team blew yours out of the water,” says Cassie, apparently a sports expert now. “Galway Beach can’t do it like we do.”
“What took you so long?” Juliana grabs Cass for a side hug.
Me.
“Little Cassie!” Always Late Nick (so named due to his propensity for arriving a half hour after his shift started) greets me. “You haven’t gotten any taller.”
“Your jokes haven’t gotten any better.”
“Touché.” He tosses me a Coors. “Hope you can handle the hard stuff.”
I make the rounds over the pebbled sand. Yeah, I’d been relegated to solo parking lot duty while Cassie peddled French fries with everyone else here. Doesn’t matter. I’m sure there’s plenty to learn, especially since I barely know any of them. Surely we’ll find common ground.
“Hey,” I say to Soft Pretzel Stephanie, who Cassie said was really meticulous about putting equal amounts of salt on each warmed-up-in-the-microwave pretzel. I can respect attention to detail. “How’s school going?”
“Sucks,” she says with a laugh, sipping from her Solo cup. “You?”
“Sounds about right,” I say.
We chuckle, and her eyes turn elsewhere.
On to the next.
I try Music Man Mark, who had inspired us all to try karaoke out on the deck one night after work. That was fun. He’s already too drunk to look at me with any kind of focus. “Who are you again?” he slurs.
Ouch.
I’m a quarter of the way through the Thermos and have yet to make meaningful headway. In the meantime, Cassie’s keeping this fiesta from being a total wash. Sure, there’s fire, but the light source everyone revolves around is my best friend. Her silhouette swings long and her flushed cheeks glow from the flames. Her eyes squeeze shut as she laughs, everyone around her smiling wider.
She used to call me exactly twenty minutes after practice, when she knew I’d be home and eating dinner. “Wanna hang tonight?”
“Speaking of hanging, I can’t lift my arms,” I’d say. “Tomorrow?”
She’d sigh, long and dramatically enough to make me hold the phone away from my ear. “I don’t have any friends besides you.” Not true, but she always made it out to be that way. Until this summer, when apparently grease and humidity were enough to forge bonds between the snack-bar employees. And Juliana.
“Remember how he tried to take apart the string cheese with his teeth?” Cass says now, and those around her start laughing, one girl spitting out her beer.
No, I don’t. I was the one sitting in the ticket booth, shielding my eyes from the sunlight glinting off of cars. At any given moment, I could have slipped out without anyone noticing. Like right now.
I HAVE CASSIE, but up until junior year, I’d also had Beth O’Leary on my side. We’d gone way back to kindergarten days, sat in honors classes together, and mutually bemoaned AP essays over brownies. The sort of things that Cassie couldn’t be bothered by, and it was nice to have someone else who was.
One problem: Beth’s sweet sixteen fell on the same day as Regionals, and the Cha Cha Slide was not coming between a shot at Nationals and me.
Cassie had been twisting my hair into place for the competition when Beth called me. “I’ll see if we can get back,” I’d said, “but it’s in Massachusetts–”
“I had a candle for you,” Beth had said. “I was going to talk about that AP Comp essay we wrote about Heart of Darkness and how we went through our own struggle.”
“That essay was the worst,” I’d agreed.