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It always is.
Amber is looking at me in the rearview mirror, her eyes darkening slightly.
“Jesus, take it easy,” she murmurs.
“It’s Friday,” I tell her. “Justchill.”
—
Kristen’s fingers tremble as she scrolls on her phone. The nights are getting colder and she’s not even wearing a hoodie or anything, just a thin tank top and jeans with holes in the knees. The tips of her ponytails brush against her bony shoulders. “People are hanging at Cole’s,” she says.
At the exact same time, Amber and Cherie say“No”and point to me.
Kristen sighs, shoving her phone in the back pocket of her jeans and jumping up and down to keep warm.
We’re sitting on a picnic bench in the park, just four girls with bottles of Sprite and a bag of cheese popcorn on a Friday night. Innocence and fun. We won’t be able to stay here long. The park closes at ten, and there are some sketchy-looking people drifting around.
But for now we’re okay. I take a long sip of my drink, the vodka spreading in my body like a rush of warm water. The feeling I’ve wanted all day.
“You guys are like hobos, you know, boozing it up in the park,” Amber says.
One by one, we giggle.
“What else are we supposed to do, Amber?” Cherie asks. “There’s nothing todo.”
It seems like such a long time ago that we just stayed in, watching movies, practicing cat’s-eye makeup with YouTube videos, falling asleep in heaps of blankets and pajamas and messy ponytails, and now here we are. This is what we do. The park or parties or someone’s garage. It’s what everybody does.
How did it change, and where and when? This is just kind of life now. There was a life before, and sometimes it seems like one day I woke up and everything was different.
I don’t really like to think about it, how things changed so suddenly, because then I’d have to think about Laurel, and thinking of her feels like being squeezed by a very large, mean person. So tight that I can’t get away and I can’t breathe.
“How long is she going to be on social probation anyway? This is getting old.” Kristen turns to me. “Can youjustget over him, already?”
I raise my head and take a long drink of my Sprodka, as Cherie calls it. The combination of sweet and strong feels good as it goes down. I start to loosen.
Sometimes I’m so wound up I think my body is going to crack in a million pieces.
Okay, not sometimes. All the time.
“I’m totally over him,” I say, keeping my voice smooth and light. “I’ve loved and lost and learned my lesson.”
“Liar,” Amber says, scrolling on her phone.
“Agree,” Cherie says. “I saw you staring at him yesterday in the courtyard. You totally looked ready to cry.” Her hand on my back is gentle.
The tiniest pain races through my heart when she does that, so I take another sip and move slightly to make her hand fall away.
“You can’t go to any parties until we’re sure you won’t flip out again,” Amber says, looking up from her phone. “That last time was bad.”
“It was kind of funny, in retrospect,” Kristen says. “Bella’s Extremely Unfortunate Public Downfall.” She takes out her vape pen.
“Can we not talk about that, please?” I say, my stomach tightening. The memory of Luis’s party is still hazy. I can only remember blurry patches: The heat of too many kids in too small a house. Music from tiny speakers. The keg in the galley kitchen. Then seeing Dylan, in that sweater of his that I loved, the old green one we found at Tucson Thrift, the one that felt so soft when I leaned my head against it. His hands in his pockets, bending close to that girl, Willow, and the way her hair fell against her cheek as she leaned in to hear what he was saying.
Standing there, kids bumping me, sloshing drinks and yelling, I remembered what Dylan said when he broke up with me in the parking lot of our high school, his eyes traveling anywhere but atme,the way he said, “You’re just…too much.”
At Luis’s party, I watched as Dylan’s fingers tugged the ends of Willow’s hair, gently. Something splintered inside me.
After, things got weird.
