“Val’s going to be Most Likely to Be Married with Kids by Twenty,” Jean said, laughing.
“That is so messed up, Jean.” Val slapped him hard. “Like, seriously, do you not know how freaked out I am about college and getting in and paying for it? And then you say something like that. You’re Most Likely to Hide in the Art Room Forever.”
“Okay, this is stupid,” Alice said. “Who cares anyway? I don’t want to be Most Likely anything. Gordie’s totally right. Even if I’m Most Likely to Save Scores of Dogs, which is probably what my unoriginal class would come up with for me, I’d feel like I never saved enough dogs. It is too much pressure.”
We were quiet, thinking about the overrated tradition. “I wonder if any of those Most Likelies in the yearbook ever live up to their label,” I said.
“If you forgive me, I’ll let you kiss my cheek?” Jean leaned over and smiled in Val’s face.
She rolled her eyes. “Fine.” He leaned closer and she pecked him on his beard.
“God, I just realized. I’m not Most Likely to do anything,” I said. “I don’t have a thing. You guys all have things.”
“What does that mean?” Alice said, slurping the last of her champagne.
“You people are lightweights,” Gordie said.
“You have things, Sadie,” Val said, leaning down to hug my legs.
“Like what?”
“You’re good at making care packages,” she announced proudly.
“I think it’s better to be a Most Unlikely,” Alice said. “Then when you do something awesome, everyone will be surprised, like when you saved that baby, Sadie. Right? If you went around saving babies every day, nobody would have given a damn. Except maybe the baby.”
“Good point, Alice,” Jean said. “We should aspire to be unlikelies.”
“Who put weed in the champagne?” Gordie said, getting up. He played a couple of chords on his harmonica. “Let’s go down. I’m about to get my groove on.”
“No. No. No,” Val said, pulling Gordie by the arm. “Let’s stay here.”
“Come on. I promise you’ll love it.”
“He keeps saying that,” Jean said.
We made our way down to the ballroom just in time for the two guitar guys to call a bunch of other people up to the stage. The lights dimmed and we moved to the middle of the floor. A pretty woman jumped onto the stage and took a mic from one of the guitar guys. She looked like she belonged on a boogie board. “Sylvie, Sylvie,” the crowd chanted. She smiled and tossed her wild blond curls. She reminded me of Shay.
“I’m taking requests,” she said, so obviously comfortable performing in front of a packed room. I looked around at the people gathering. It was the most random crowd of revelers I had ever seen, a swarm of bobbing heads.
Sylvie sang an old jazz song, “Summertime,” with a voice so smooth, so perfectly elegant, I got chills. She captivated the entire room.
Gordie looked over at us and smiled.
It stayed good. Every song, every singer, every instrumental made me want to cry, or hug someone, or jump up and down. The music filled me up. It serenaded my soul.
We danced in the middle of the crowd until sweat poured from our bodies and our feet ached.
“We need you, Gordie,” one of the guitar guys said into the mic.
Gordie nodded and left us for the stage, where he belonged. He stood there in his dark jeans and fitted shirt and messy brown hair and smiled before he put the harmonica to his mouth and played the hell out of Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely?”
The crowd sang together, “Isn’t she lovely? Isn’t she wonderful?”
I knew all the songs from years of listening to Dad’s music. I didn’t even need to read the words projected across the wall above the stage.
We sang “Don’t Stop Believin’.”
And then we sang too many Beatles songs to count. The lyrics swam above the band and we followed karaoke-style.
“I’ll never dance with another. Woo!”
I wanted to stay at Speakeasy forever.
It was well after two a.m. when the adrenaline retreated and the crowd, groggy and sweaty and eating the hot fries in waxed paper bags that had appeared from the kitchen, reluctantly disbanded.
“Are you okay to drive?” Val asked Gordie as we waited for the long line of cars to exit the makeshift parking lot.
“I’m good,” Gordie said. His voice was hoarse. “So… was I right? Did you like it?”
“Hands down, best night of my life,” Jean said. “The energy was like nothing I’ve ever experienced.”
“Good people, good energy,” Gordie said.
“The Beatles are my new favorite band,” Val said. “I don’t want this night to be over.”
“Not yet! Not yet!” Val, Alice, and I chanted from the backseat.
“I’m starving. Is there any place to get food around here?” Alice said, stretching her long legs between Val and me.
“We have no money,” I said.
“We can go to my house,” Jean said.
“I doubt your mom will appreciate us foraging in the middle of the night,” Gordie said. He drove over a stretch of lawn and inched into the long line of cars.
“My mom’s a nurse. She’s on the overnight shift. We’re good.”
We rode with all the windows down, singing at the tops of our lungs, until we got to Jean’s ranch-style house at the end of a tree-lined street.
“Here we are, White Castle,” Jean said. He fished a key out of a planter and opened the door. Paintings of palm trees and tropical flowers and bright-faced Haitian girls hung on deep red walls above the turquoise sofas.
Jean riffled through the refrigerator and brought out a glass container of rice and beans and another of fried plantains. He stuck the containers in the microwave while we studied an oversize portrait of Jean’s family.
“Your dad looks exactly like you,” Alice said, pointing to a gap-toothed, smiling man holding a baby Jean.
“That’s what everybody says. He’s gone. I mean, he passed away in the big earthquake we had in Haiti.”
“Oh my God, Jean. I never knew that.” Val’s face turned red.
“It’s not like I want to dredge it up all the time.”
The microwave beeped. Jean took out the food and we devoured the soggy plantains.
“You all can stop being awkward. I’m fine.” Jean licked grease off his fingers.
“We’re not being awkward,” Alice said. “If you want to talk about your dad, you can.”
“There’s not much to say. He was an awesome guy with a huge personality, and he died and left my mom to take care of me, my three sisters, and half the neighborhood because she was the only nurse around. It pretty much blew.”
We hovered over the counter, shoveling spoonfuls of rice and beans into our mouths while Jean told us about how his family had searched for nearly a week before they discovered his dad was dead, and how his mom bribed a government official to get their family out of Haiti, and how they were homeless and lived in a church in Brooklyn until his mom found work as a night nanny to pay her way through nursing school and certification here.
“Does anyone at school know any of this?” Val said.
“No. And let’s keep it that way,” Jean said.