I swung my car into the open field that had been repurposed as a parking lot. I got out of the car, locked it, and walked toward the main part of the Orchard, where picnic tables ringed the open space and off to the side there was usually someone selling overpriced keg beer or cans from a cooler that never seemed to get very cold, despite the ice packed around them. I walked forward, looking around for my friends. I’d texted them when I’d stopped at the gatehouse and had heard from Tom (on Palmer’s phone) that they were en route. I was pretty sure I hadn’t beaten them there, but if I had, I’d just sit at one of the picnic tables and begin the process of putting this night behind me.
I felt someone nudge my shoulder and looked over to see Wyatt Miller standing next to me, a red Solo cup of beer in each hand and a half smile on his face.
“I know you,” I said, nudging him back, our version of a hug, careful not to spill the beers. “Welcome back.”
“Thanks,” he said, taking a sip from one of them and smiling a little wider at me, and I made myself look away before it affected me. I got used to Wyatt after a few days, but if it had been a while since I’d seen him, it was always a little startling—he was probably the best-looking person I’d ever seen in my life, outside of a multiplex or a cologne ad. He had light-brown hair that he wore a little long and was always pushing back with one hand. He tended to wear threadbare old band shirts, skinny jeans, and Converse, even when it was the height of summer. He was thin, with cheekbones for days, but Toby swore up and down that it wasn’t his looks that made her fall for him. She insisted that he had hidden depths, which Tom said must be really well hidden indeed. But I could see what she meant—he was quiet (which made it easier for Toby to project all kinds of silent, conflicted feelings onto him), usually observing more than participating. But he had a deadpan, snarky sense of humor that still caught me by surprise sometimes. He played bass in a series of bands at his boarding school (bands that always seemed to be breaking up and getting back together, which was probably inevitable when you lived with people and couldn’t escape them). Without even trying hard, I could picture all the girls at Briarville swooning over him during his concerts.
“How’s life? What,” he said, looking at me directly, like he was about to ask me a very serious question, “is the haps?”
I laughed at that. “You didn’t bring your guitar, did you?” It had been the thing Wyatt and I had argued about the most last summer. When he’d had a beer or two, suddenly his acoustic guitar appeared, and even though he was good, in my opinion, that didn’t matter. Suddenly, all conversation stopped and the night became about Wyatt strumming chords. Toby loved it, though, and spent way too much time speculating on whether he was writing her a song, despite the fact that nothing really rhymed with Toby.
“Nah,” he said, shaking his head. “Thought I’d wait and give you a private concert.”
“No.” I groaned, then looked over and saw one of his eyebrows was raised, which was how I knew he was kidding. Wyatt’s deadpan made it hard to tell sometimes. “Oh,” I said. “Gotcha.” I looked over at him and noticed that practically every girl in the vicinity was looking in our direction. “So how’ve you been, Miller?”
“I should be asking you that, Walker,” he replied, as he nodded toward the tables and started to lead the way over. Wyatt always called me by my last name, and even though I rolled my eyes at it, I secretly liked it. “I hear you had a hot date tonight,” he said, taking another drink from his cup.
“Not so much,” I said, falling into step next to him and spotting where we were going—the farthest picnic table, where my friends were.
“Oh.” He shot me a sympathetic look. “Well,” he said with a shrug, “always more fish in the sea? Etcetera?”
I nodded. That was pretty much what I’d been thinking the whole drive over here. “Something like that.”
Toby saw us coming and jumped up, then started to sit back down again, then stopped in the middle, doing a kind of half-lean thing that I’m sure she thought was natural but actually looked incredibly uncomfortable. She crossed her arms, then uncrossed them, then crossed them again. “I see you found Andie, huh?” she asked, then laughed loudly. After a few moments, she stopped abruptly and took a long drink from her cup, her face flushing as red as her hair.
“I did indeed,” Wyatt said, crossing over to Bri and handing her the other cup. In my peripheral vision, I could see Palmer surreptitiously wipe the excess foam off Toby’s nose.
“Don’t try to change the subject,” Bri said, mouthing her thanks to Wyatt and then pointing at Toby. “This is an intervention.”
“How is saying hello to Andie changing the subject?” Toby asked.
“An intervention for what?” I asked, looking around at my friends and starting to relax. I was already feeling better, just being around them. The date was starting to fade into the background a bit.
“Emojis,” Tom, Bri, and Palmer said at the same time.
“Andie,” Toby said, turning to me, “tell them they’re being ridiculous.”
“No,” I said, laughing at Toby’s outraged expression. “You’re out of control with them. I heartily approve of this. How do I join this intervention?”