by Sarah Dessen
I nodded—it was too hot to speak—taking a swig from my third (fourth?) beer before pressing it to my temple. The taste wasn’t bothering me anymore: really, nothing was. There was just the music and Taylor swaying in front of me, barefoot now, her own hair sweaty and sticking to her neck. I closed my eyes, thinking of my dad on the boat that day, shouting out orders to me when he knew I hated sailing. Telling Bailey my name was Emma, not Saylor.
“Whoa,” I heard someone say, just as I realized I was stumbling and had bumped into the person behind me. I opened my eyes, but still felt dizzy as I stopped where I was to get my bearings. So hot. So loud. I pressed my can against my face again, but it was warm. And empty.
“There you are,” said another voice from behind me, but this one was familiar. That said, I didn’t realize it was Bailey specifically until I turned around to see her there. She had on a black maxidress, her hair pulled back, silver hoops hanging from her ears. “I’ve been looking all over!”
“We’re dancing,” I said, grabbing her hand. I went to spin, still holding it, feeling a flush creep up my neck—it was so hot—but then got tangled as she just stood there, elbow rigid, looking at me. “What?”
“Are you drunk?” she asked.
“No,” I said automatically. “I just had one. Or two.”
“Still two more than I’ve ever seen you drink,” she replied as I dropped her hand, moving into a shimmy as Taylor did the same beside me. “Let’s go get some air.”
“I’m fine,” I said, making a point to e-nun-ci-ate this carefully. “I’m just having fun, like you have basically every time we’ve gone out.”
“Yes, but that’s me,” she said, eyeing me as I stumbled. Wait, was I drunk? Suddenly I wasn’t so sure. “Saylor. Come on. Now.”
She sounded strict, like a mother. Although not my mother. If anyone could understand blowing off a little necessary steam, it was Waverly. “I’m fine,” I told her. “Since when are you the party police?”
“Since I found you drunk for the first time, like, ever,” she said. And then, without another word, she grabbed my wrist and started to literally drag me toward the back door. Immediately, I resisted, surprising myself, yanking my arm from her. A bit too hard, as it turned out, because it flung back behind me, whacking Taylor, who was doing some low-down twist move, right in the face. I felt her eyebrows.
“OUCH!” she yelled, over the music and all the noise.
“Oh, sorry,” I said, “I didn’t mean—”
“Saylor.” Bailey had me again, this time so tightly I knew there was no point in fighting her. “Let’s go.”
I went, although I told myself it was my choice. When we neared the kitchen, where Roo and Hannah were, I tried to stop, wanting to collect myself. But the momentum worked against me, suddenly and surprisingly, and just like that, I was down.
“Oh, shit,” Bailey said as I hit the floor. In the next beat, a wave of dizziness hit me, just as I was trying to get up again. Maybe better to stay where I was, I thought. The tile was actually kind of cool. Above me, I heard Bailey say, “Can I get a little help here?”
“What’s wrong?” a boy’s voice said. Roo. I needed to get up. Off the floor. I was on the floor, right?
“Drunk,” Bailey said flatly. “Help me get her outside.”
After all of Bailey’s dragging me and literal arm twisting, what happened next was smooth and quick: I felt hands beneath my arms, and then I was on my feet. But only briefly, because they didn’t seem to want to hold me. Luckily, I collapsed into someone’s side. Oh, right. Roo.
“Careful there,” he said, locking an arm around my waist. “One foot in front of the other.”
“I’m fine,” I said.
“I know.” Then, loudly, he said, “Make way, you guys! Coming through!”
Somehow, we got to the back door. I wasn’t sure of the specifics because I kept my eyes closed, due to the fact that this was super humiliating. Also, I was suddenly feeling a tiny bit sick. I just need air, I told myself, and a second later, like a wish granted, I felt myself surrounded by it.
“Where are we going?” Roo asked before pausing briefly to scoop up my legs so he was carrying me outright. “Just on the porch?”
“Let’s go down to the dock,” I heard Bailey say. She sounded far away. “Just so we have some space to think.”
At first when I got outside, I could hear voices and music, the party still close by. Now, though, we were moving away, all of it condensing to a distant hum beyond Roo’s footsteps. Finally, he put me down.
“Ah,” I said, spying the water nearby and reaching out to dip my hand in. Again, though, I misjudged my own weight and felt myself starting to tumble, until someone grabbed me by my hair. “Hey, OUCH that hurts!”
“Too bad,” Bailey said, pushing me into a sitting position. Then she bent down in front of me. “What are you trying to do? Drown while we watch?”
“I’m hot,” I moaned.
In response, she dumped the cup she was holding, scooping up some water, and flung it on me. I went from sweaty to soaked in seconds.
“Hey!”
“Sober up,” she commanded. “I don’t like you this way.”
“Bailey, come on,” Roo said, and from the sound and direction of his voice, I realized what I was leaning against was actually his legs. I turned, looking at them in the light thrown from the house, as he said, “She can’t help it. She won’t even remember this.”
“She will, because I won’t let her forget.”
“How many times have I pulled you out of parties?” he asked her. “Have a little compassion.”
“I’m compassionate,” she said, sounding just about anything but. “I just don’t understand how she got like this.”
“I’m guessing it was the beer,” he told her, deadpan. “How many have you had?”
“Yes, but,” she replied, “I’m not lying on the dock on my back, staring at your calves.”
I laughed. Oh, wait, she meant me. I said, “What are these, anyway?”
A pause. Then Bailey said, sounding exhausted, “What’s what, Saylor?”
“These,” I said, pointing at the numbers on the back of Roo’s leg. “I saw them the first day, on the boat. And I’ve been wondering ever since.”
“Nautical coordinates,” he told me.
“For what?”
“For the lake’s center,” he said.
I looked at the numbers again, which were blurring slightly. “So you can find it, always.”
Roo gazed down at me. “That’s right.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Bailey said. “I’m going to get her some water.”
I heard her walking away, the deck bouncing with each step. And then it was just Roo and me and the lake, gurgling under the dock between us.
“She’s mad,” I observed.
“More like worried,” he said as he took a seat. “Funny thing about always being the one out of control. You tend not to like it when other people are.”
“I am not out of control,” I stated. “I just had a few beers.”
“Right,” he said. “Of course.”
Sitting there, though, I suddenly felt very fuzzy-headed, not to mention tired. And, apparently, honest, as I heard myself say, “Do you know that, at home, I always have to organize everything? My closet, the mail on the counter, even my toothbrush and toothpaste on the shelf. It doesn’t matter what it is. It’s, like, I can’t control it. I’ve done it for as long as I remember. I was doing it when I first got here.”
When he answered, he didn’t sound like he found this weird or notable, just saying, “Really.”
I nodded. “But then I started cleaning rooms, and hanging out with you guys, and I don’t have to do it so much anymore. It’s like this place is changing me.”
He looked over. “That’s good, right?’
“I guess. But now I’m gone and everything’s different. It’s just going to come back.”
“You’re not gone,” he said
. In the dark, behind my closed eyes, his voice was all I could hear, like a lifeline I was still gripping, keeping me conscious. “It’s just the other side of the lake.”
“It’s so different,” I murmured, curling into him. “I miss you.”
I mean, I miss it here, I thought, realizing too late what I’d said instead. But then it was fading, too, and I couldn’t reach it to take it back.
“It’s okay, Saylor,” he said, smoothing a hand over my head. “Just rest.”
But with this touch, this contact, I suddenly wanted to say something else, even as I knew I was fading. “I didn’t know you were into Hannah. I wish—”
A pause, but maybe just my sense of time. Then he said, “You and Blake were holding hands.”
“That was all him,” I said. “I had no idea. I came here to see you.”
It felt good, I realized, being this honest. At least now, whatever else happened, he would know. That day at his house, he’d said I’d always been part of his story. Now he would know that whatever happened from here, he, too, was in mine.
The dock was bouncing again as someone approached. So tired, I thought, closing my eyes. I was just about to drift off, leaning into his shoulder, when I heard Bailey speak.
“Okay. So we have a problem.”
Nineteen
“Just do me a favor. Don’t puke again.”
I blinked. I was in an enclosed space, and moving, by the feel of it. Also sitting on something very cold. But how did I get here?
“I threw up?” I managed to say. The thought of doing it was bad enough, but not realizing? I was horrified.
“Yep,” Bailey said. She was beside me, one hand thrown across my midsection like a makeshift seat belt. “Luckily, Roo gave me that bucket, so you didn’t make a mess.”
I looked down at my lap: there was a plastic sand pail between my legs, the word TIPS APPRECIATED written on it in black marker. Inside was a bit of liquid I chose not to examine closely, instead turning again to my surroundings. White. Metal. Rattling and in motion. And my ass was freezing.
“Wait,” I said. “Are we in the Yum truck?”
“Yep,” I heard Roo say, from somewhere to my right. “And on our way to the Tides.”
The Tides? Oh, shit. My dad. “What time is it?”
“Eleven,” Bailey said, handing me my phone. “Which would be an hour after your father first texted asking you how the movie was.”
Movie? Oh, right. I grabbed the phone from her, then opened up my texts. My dad had sent his first message at 9:58.
How’s the movie? Want company? Can’t sleep!
Then, at 10:05.
Hello? Are you getting this? Let me know please.
I was starting to panic now. I gave a sideways look at the TIPS APPRECIATED pail, swallowing down a bad taste in my mouth. 10:21.
Concerned. Coming down to find you.
“Oh, shit,” I said. I thought I might puke again.
“No joke,” Bailey replied, craning her neck to look ahead, out the windshield. “Where are we now? I can’t see anything from back here.”
“Still in North Lake,” a girl replied. “But we’re getting close to the line.”
Oh, that’s Hannah, I thought as I recognized her voice. A beat. Then I remembered. Everything. Oh, God. Shame went over me like a wave.
It’s so different, I’d said. I miss you, I’d said. I wish, I’d said.
Panicked, I made myself turn my head and look at Roo, who was bent over the steering wheel, squinting in the headlights of an oncoming car. How could I take it all back, now, after the fact? I’d been drunk, I didn’t know what I was saying.
But I did. And I’d meant every word.
“Okay,” Bailey said, pulling me back from this crisis to the other one at hand. “Now, the key is what you say to him first. It sets the precedent for the entire incident.”
“Incident?” I said.
“Well, he is pissed and, to use his word, concerned,” she said, gesturing to my phone. “Which means that once he sees you are safe, he’s just going to be pissed.”
“I’ll tell him I didn’t have reception.”
“And that might work,” she agreed, “if he does not see you arrive in this ice cream truck but instead finds you somewhere on the beach, ostensibly just finishing the movie.”
“Movie’s been over for an hour, though,” Hannah added from the front seat. I felt surprised by the rush of anger I felt toward her. What was wrong with me? “So you might want another plan.”
“How about this,” Bailey said as we went over a pothole, the entire truck rattling. “You were at the movie, then you bumped into Hannah and went to her place for a bit, where you had one beer, immediately regretted it, and returned to the Club, but the movie was over, so you just sat down on the beach to contemplate your bad choices.”
“This sounds like something we’d watch in health class,” Roo observed.
“Then come up with something better!” she barked at him.
“Okay, you don’t have to—” Roo stopped talking, suddenly, and I saw him look out his window. “Oh, crap. Pit stop ahead, at the market.”
“What?” Bailey asked. “We don’t have time for that!”
“We also don’t have a choice,” he replied, slowing down now and starting to take a left turn, widely, which almost threw both Bailey and me off the cooler and onto the truck floor. “It’s your mom with Gordon. She’s waving us over.”
“My mom?”
We stopped with a jerk. The lights in the back of the truck immediately came on, bright all around me, and I caught a glimpse of the contents of that bucket for real. Ugh.
“Thank goodness!” I heard Celeste say. She had to be standing outside in the lot. “My arm’s about to fall off from waving.”
“I’m coming right back to work,” Roo explained. “Just have to drop someone off. Everything okay?”
“Oh, yeah,” Celeste said. Beside me, Bailey opened her own purse, pulling out some breath mints and tossing a handful into her mouth. Suddenly everything smelled like wintergreen. “I just saw you coming and Gordon really needs a YumPop.”
“What’s Gordon doing up this late?” Bailey hissed to me, cracking her mints in her teeth.
“She’s up late,” Roo noted to Celeste.
“Joe and Mimi went to Bly County for the night and Trinity’s too grumpy to be around anyone,” Celeste explained. “Poor Gordon, she’s tired and bored. I’ve been texting Bailey and Jack, but of course neither of them are answering their phones.”
“Can you turn this light off?” Bailey whisper-hissed from beside me. Roo, still focused on Celeste, shook his head almost imperceptibly.
“I think we can manage a YumPop,” he said, pulling the truck’s brake and getting up. “What flavor, Gordon?”
My head was hurting now, and I was pretty sure I had never in my life been so thirsty. Gordon’s voice sounded very small as she replied, “Chocolate?”
“Move,” Bailey said to me, giving me a shove as Roo came toward us, pointing at the cooler. I started to slide down, then fell instead, landing with a bang on the floor. Ouch.
“What was that?” I heard Celeste say.
“Just some junk falling,” Roo told her, shooting me an apologetic look. “Chocolate, you said?”
“Oh, crap,” I heard Celeste say. “That’s the store phone. Can you just give it to her, and I’ll see you when you get back? And if you hear from Bailey, tell her to call me and that she’s in trouble.”
“What?” Bailey whispered. “What did I do?”
“You’re hiding from her,” I pointed out from the floor. She ignored me.
“Chocolate!” Roo announced, pulling a wrapped cone from the cooler. “I’ll bring it to—”
Before he could finish this thought, however, his driver’s-side door creaked open and Gordon stuck her head in, looking down into the truck at us. “Saylor? Are you okay?”
“She’s fine,” Bailey told her. “And keep it
down. You didn’t see us, you hear?”
Solemnly, Gordon nodded. She was still looking at me. “Are you sick?”
I shook my head, but even as I did so, I felt it: shame, thick and hot, creeping up from my chest to my face. Here I was, in front of the only person who probably would ever think I was perennially awesome, drunk and sprawled on the floor of an ice cream truck with what I was realizing was probably vomit on my shirt. It was a horrible impression to make on anyone, but especially a kid. They were supposed to be protected from things like this, their world consisting only of chocolate YumPops, swimming, and a warm, safe place to sleep at night. Not this. I knew how scary it could be. Because I’d been that kid.
“I’m fine,” I said to her, but even to my ears my voice sounded rough, uneven. “I’m just not feeling great right this second.”
“Now take your ice cream and go act like you never saw us,” Bailey added as Roo walked back up to the front, handing it to her. “Can you do that?”
“Yes,” Gordon said. She was still watching me.
“Good girl,” Roo told her. “See you when I get back, okay?”
Gordon nodded as Roo took his seat, cranking the engine again. The lights went out. But I could still see her, the market lit up behind, as we drove away.
“What’s the over-under of her telling Celeste everything anyway?” Roo asked as we pulled out onto the main road.
“About even,” Bailey told him, hopping up on the cooler again. “But either way, she’ll wait until she’s done with the ice cream. So step on it.”
He did, the engine rattling as we accelerated. From the floor, I watched the Lake North sign approach in the windshield, then disappear over us. I couldn’t get Gordon’s face out of my mind. Luckily, Bailey was not so distracted.
“So we’ll drop you at the Pavilion,” she was saying. “From there, you go back to the Tides and say you’ve just been out enjoying walking and thinking and had no reception. Okay?”
“Right,” I said. I sat up, locating my purse, then dug through until I found my hairbrush and an elastic. My head was pounding as I pulled my hair up in a high ponytail, securing it, then accepted the mints that Bailey was already holding out to me.
