Reunited (25 page)

Alice started to speak, but Summer didn’t let her. There were still so many things she wanted to say. Hurtful things.

“Maz was right. You’re obsessed with me—with
us
. But there is no ‘us.’”

Now there were tears in Alice’s eyes.

“You think the three of us could still be friends after what the two of you did to me? After what you’re still doing to me?” The words came out of her mouth like bullets.

“How naive are you, anyway? Wait—don’t answer that. I know exactly how naive you are. It’s late June, and you still think Brown is going to let you in.”

Summer shut her mouth so Alice could absorb the full impact of her words.

“That was low,” Tiernan whispered, almost to herself.

“And you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you?” Summer shot back. “Tiernan O’Leary, the paragon of truth and integrity herself.”

Then Summer turned and ran. She could feel her blood pulsing through every corner of her body as she threaded a path through the swell of people. It was the same feeling she’d had at the freshman winter dance when Alice had caused that ridiculous scene, while Tiernan, her other supposed “best friend,” just stood there doing nothing. Summer could still hear the sound of Alice screeching her name as she entered the gym—like she
was happy she had the power to hurt Summer, to shame her, in front of the whole school.

Summer kept running even after she’d made it past the crowd. No more “drifting along” for her, no way. For once in her life, she was taking action, even if it just meant going home.

Back at the hotel, her bag was basically still packed, so all she needed to do was leave her key on the bed and hail a cab.

Twenty minutes later, her taxi pulled up to the curb at the New Orleans airport. It seemed almost too easy.

Even though Summer hadn’t traveled much, she’d always imagined airports were busy at all hours, like hospitals. But surprisingly, nearly all of the shops were dark, their metal chainlink gates shut. She had some time to kill before her flight boarded, so she wandered into the only open café she could find and bought an oversize chocolate chip muffin.

“You haddagit time in N’awlins?” the man at the counter asked, his Cajun accent so thick it took Summer a second to realize he was speaking English.

She nodded. “Mm-hmm.” Whatever. The truth was, she actually
had
been having fun in New Orleans. Up until Alice’s freak-out.

Summer took her thousand-calorie muffin and sat down among the other lost souls scattered about the café. In the corner, a TV hung from the ceiling playing CNN on mute. The closed captioning was on, full of typos and cut-off sentences, further confirming Summer’s theory that the world was conspiring to
mangle the truth. Not
one
of her friends back home had had the guts to tell her about Jace and that girl.
Not one of them.

Summer was angrier with her friends than she was with Jace himself. Everyone knows boyfriends cheat. But her girlfriends, they were supposed to have her back, no matter what. And yet, the only person who’d actually told her the truth was Alice.

Summer took a huge bite of the muffin, wincing from the crunch of the oversize sugar crystals against her teeth. She wished she could just sprawl out on the carpet and go to sleep, like those two backpackers she’d seen in the hallway. But she’d never been comfortable sleeping in public. Anyway, that’s what airplanes were for, weren’t they? She didn’t really know. The only other time she’d taken a plane was when her family had gone to Disney when she was ten. That was one good thing about this trip. At least she’d gotten out of Walford.

Summer pulled out her phone and composed a text to Jace. She’d be damned if she had to see his lying face waiting for her at the gate back in Boston.

“Won’t be there tomorrow. Think you know why.”

She pressed the send button and laughed out loud. Okay, so she was still a little tipsy. But who cared if all the random weirdos in here thought she was crazy. She
felt
crazy, being in an airport in the middle of the night all by herself. It was too bad she was only going home and not jetting off to someplace foreign and glamorous, like in the silly make-believe world she’d cooked up for herself as a kid.

Summer was the one who’d started their fantasies about the boys from Level3, the one who’d always begged them to play pretend. And to Alice and Tiernan’s credit, they’d always indulged her.

But the weird thing was, even now, at age eighteen, Summer still had just as many daydreams. Only, instead of imagining herself walking the red carpet at the MTV Awards as Mrs. Travis Wyland, she was strolling through Harvard Square, where her award-winning book of poems was featured in the window of the Grolier Poetry Shop.
Probably just as unlikely as marrying a rock star, truth be told.

Summer opened her journal, flipping through the dozens of pages she’d filled in her four short days on this trip—proof that pain and suffering were a writer’s greatest source of inspiration. Her eyes went right to two lines:

You steal my joy,

And now you give it back to me.

She’d written that after her phone call with Jace—the first time he’d tried to woo her back. They were uninspired lines at best, but right now it wasn’t the poetry (or lack thereof) that jumped out at her. It was the way the words were phrased, as if Jace were actually capable of stealing
her
joy. As if she didn’t have anything to do with it.

After all, she wouldn’t even be in this position if she’d just
dumped his sorry ass months ago, back when she realized she didn’t love him. But instead she’d let herself drift along, waiting for things to change, as if she had no control over it. As if waiting wasn’t a choice in and of itself.

In a way, Summer figured she should be
thankful
Jace had cheated on her, or knowing her, she probably would’ve ended up marrying the guy. Summer laughed out loud again, this time relishing the stares of the other customers.

She turned to a fresh page in her journal. For once in her life, she wanted to make a choice, even if it was the wrong one. At the top she wrote:

What do I want?

Back in her Pea Pod glory days, anything seemed possible. Alice and Tiernan never questioned her daydreams, no matter how wildly unrealistic they were. Maybe that was as good a place to start as any—to just own up to wanting all the crazy things she wanted, even if they never had a chance of coming true. In the left-hand margin Summer wrote the numbers one through ten.

1. To be able to eat whatever I want

without getting fat

2. To know what I want

Three through ten were blank. Summer stared at her list until sunlight started slanting through the airport’s glass doors, then she closed her journal and tossed it in her purse. She was going home. Not making a choice was kind of a choice, too, right?

But as she stood up to leave the café, an image on the television caught her eye. She didn’t need to read the horribly misspelled closed captioning to see that it was Level3. There was a “rdiocpntest in Huustn, TX.” At five thirty a.m. , people were already lined up around the block for a chance to compete for front row “tckeets to tonigh’sshiw.”

Seeing all those excited Level3 fans on TV made Summer realize just how bummed she really was to be missing the concert. She’d just been too consumed with Alice’s hysteria to realize it. Oh, well. It was too late now.

The line at security was long and Summer stood in the back reading a sign that informed her exactly how many ounces of liquid she could bring in her carry-on.

“You need to check your luggage with your airline first,” the man behind her said, pointing to her duffel bag. He looked like a frequent flyer, gray suit, laptop case, freshly shaven.

“Thanks,” Summer said, stepping out of the line and lugging her bag toward the ticketing desks. She glanced back at the man. She swore she’d seen him earlier that night on Bourbon Street, making drunken catcalls at girls half his age. Now he looked totally professional, chatting with a woman in a
business suit, a completely different person than he’d been the night before.

Summer stepped onto a moving walkway to save her the trouble of hauling her bag the entire way. She stood to the right, letting the expert travelers zoom past her on the left with their little wheeled suitcases. Even the people who weren’t on the moving walkway seemed to be going faster than she was—the businessmen, the parents with their strollers and babies in backpacks, a rowdy group of middle school girls in matching red Riverdale Junior High Volleyball shirts.

The volleyball girls were way too loud for five in the morning—singing, shouting, busting the occasional dance move, the beads on their cornrows swinging to and fro, clattering in their hair. Even in identical outfits it was easy to pick out the leader of the girls. Her hair was the longest, the beads on the ends of her braids the most intricate. There was something about the way she strutted in her flip-flops that caught Summer’s eye. It was a walk of sheer confidence—like she didn’t need to look where she was going or think about her next step, knowing she had a buffer of friends to safely guide her wherever she was headed. She was the leader of the group, and yet, her hangers-on were the ones paving the way.

Summer was so entranced by these middle school girls she hadn’t noticed that her free ride on the walkway had come to an end until her right foot hit the metal ridge, sending her face-forward onto the scratchy blue carpet. Of course, the volleyball
team exploded with laughter. Summer’s face flushed red, her chin raw from rug-burn. And yet she found herself laughing too—deep, forceful laughs so intense people inched away from her instead of stopping to ask if she was all right. Robert Frost chose the road less traveled. Summer Dalton chose a moving walkway. And this is where it landed her—flat on her face.

Summer pulled her journal from her bag, right there on the airport floor. Let the people step around her. She had something to add to her list and she needed to do it right now, before she changed her mind.

3. To see Level3 play tonight.

By the time Summer looked up, the volleyball girls had moved on. And on the flat-screen TV on the wall, in front of an outdoor stage in Houston, Texas, the sun was just beginning to rise.

“CHRISTMAS IN JULY”

THE VERY THING THAT I WANTED

WAS TO GET

EVERYTHING I WANTED

THEN IT ALL CAME TRUE

THAT’S WHEN I KNEW

SURPRISE, SURPRISE

—from Level3’s third CD,
Natural Causes

ALICE OPENED HER EYES AND STARED UP AT THE BROWN WATER-
stained ring on the ceiling above her bed. Her tongue felt dry, like she’d slept with her mouth open. The sharp details of last night stabbed at her head.

She remembered a blurry taxi ride, stumbling into the hotel room, Tiernan putting her to bed. The rest she didn’t want to remember.

It was 6:06 a.m. The same time she’d woken up every Monday through Friday for the last four years. Hangover or not, Alice was a morning person and her internal clock was strong.

A strange vibration made her sit up so fast her brain seemed to flip inside her skull, as if it were trapped in one of those frozen drink machines. Then she realized she’d slept with her phone in her back pocket, in her entire outfit from last night, earrings and all.

It was Quentin.
Finally, Quentin
. Thank God her phone had been in her pocket and not her purse. She needed someone to tell her everything would be okay, that she wasn’t a horrible person. Even if it wasn’t true.

But when she opened his message, all she saw were two little words:

I can’t

A wave of nausea traveled from her belly to her eyebrows. She made it to the toilet just in time.

The last time Alice puked was after the eighth grade beach day when she’d gotten sun poisoning. Summer had rubbed her back while Tiernan assembled a cold pack for her neck out of a facecloth and a bag of frozen peas. She hadn’t deserved their kindness.

Tiernan rapped at the door. “You okay in there?”

“No,” Alice moaned.

Tiernan came in anyway, last-night’s makeup smeared across her cheeks, and puffy owl eyes.

“You want something to hold back your hair?”

Alice shook her head, her knees digging in to the cold tile floor. “I just need to be alone.”

Tiernan closed the door, and Alice retched the last of it into the bowl. It was all gone. Everything was gone—
Summer, the Level3 tickets, her dignity
. And yet she kept on heaving like her body had more to give.

When it was finally done, she scrubbed her hands with the hottest water she could stand, the smell of the hotel’s soap so perfumey, she thought she might get sick again. She brushed her
teeth, washed her face until it was squeaky and raw, then stared at her reflection for a solid five minutes.
Who was this girl underneath the pink skin?
Her mirror self seemed to answer more honestly than the real Alice was capable of. It frightened her.