RACHEL
FRIDAY, 8:50 P.M.
“Why are you stopping? We’re at least three blocks from his house.”
I thrust my phone at Mo, the line on the GPS app still defiantly long.
“He’ll just make us move the car if we park closer. This is good. Plus, the woods that run behind his house let out over there, by the park.” Mo pointed over to the left where a few straggling trees tottered up to the plastic fencing around the playground. “If the cops come, it’s better not to have to walk down his street.”
Trust Mo to have planned additional exit routes in case of emergency.
“We’re not going to be here long enough for it to matter.”
“Noted,” Mo said tightly, clicking her key fob. The car chirped behind us. “It’s literally the only thing you’ve said to me since I picked you up. It still doesn’t hurt.”
Whatever. She couldn’t know how short our stay would really be. She was right; we hadn’t spoken the entire ride over. I figured I didn’t owe her any warning about turning Kyle down; she hadn’t given me any. She’d prattled on about how to stay natural in front of a camera, and which stores had the best dresses for homecoming, and which of the apparently myriad smiles I had was my “good smile,” trying to fill the dead space.
I just stared out the window. I needed a ride—there was no way I was delivering the bad news entirely sober—but that’s all Mo was to me right now. Besides, even if I weren’t pissed at her, why would I want to party with a bunch of strangers who were almost certainly responsible for “decorating” my locker on Wednesday? If I hadn’t wanted to deliver the news in person, Mo wouldn’t have even gotten a text back.
I’d never been to Beau’s house, so I didn’t know how secluded it was until we were almost there. It was big and blocky and white, with dark-green trim and a porch that wrapped all the way around the back of the second story. You could hear kids shouting and music blasting once you got right up to the front, but it was tucked way back into the woods, the last place on a dead end, and the next house was too far away for the neighbors to hear anything at all.
Everyone was right. It was the perfect place for a party.
I looked over at Monique. Her mouth was pinched closed and her eyes were wide—maybe she was regretting coming as much as I was. After hesitating on the flagstone sidewalk that wound up under the front portico, I shrugged and started walking across the lawn toward the back. The night was cool, and the damp grass tickling my ankles made me shiver. I heard Monique following, steps soft and squishy in the grass.
Out back, people thronged the deck overhead, but we’d either missed the stairs or there wasn’t a way to get up to it from outside. At ground level, light spilled out from a pair of sliding glass doors leading into a big, open room with a few people clustered in corners. I turned to Monique. Her face looked pale in the glow from the basement. I felt my stomach flutter slightly. These were not my people.
Not that I really had people. There weren’t that many artsy weirdos at Apple Prairie.
“Are you coming?” I snipped. She nodded mutely but didn’t move. Neither of us really knew how to enter a party like this. Suddenly the doors flew open and a huge figure stepped toward us, backlit so it was hard to make out his face.
“Ladies! Come on inside,” he boomed. It was Lamont Davis, the absolutely massive captain of the football team. He put an arm around my shoulder. His hand felt about the size of a baseball glove. “You know Anderson, right?” He tilted his head toward Beau, standing just inside the door and grinning at us. “It’s his party, so you better be nice to him.”
“Okay,” Monique squeaked. She cleared her throat and pasted on a huge, stagey smile, ready-made for a dance recital, or an audition. “As long as he’s nice to us.”
Lamont roared with laughter and pushed me into the house, which was impossible to resist since his arms were approximately the size of tree trunks.
“Feisty, huh?” He followed us in and closed the doors. “I like that. I’m Lamont, by the way.” He extended a hand. “Who do you know here?”
“I’m Monique,” she said, smiling and thrusting her hand forward. “And this is Rachel. Kyle Bonham told us to come.”
“Oh man, I thought he was making that up,” Lamont said, chuckling.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“Nothing. Here, let’s do a ‘nice to meet you’ shot,” he said, pulling a bottle off a thin table running along the back of one of the two couches that dominated the right half of the basement. “Anderson, you got glasses?”
Beau crossed over to a dated, wood-paneled wet bar at the bottom of the stairs and returned with four glasses, each painted with the name of a different spring-break location. They had clearly been used recently. I could see the ghostly outline of a lip crescenting the top of “CANCUN!”