Tighter (11 page)

“Where’s this place, the Rickrack?” I asked.

“It’s where the party’s at, darling,” said Emory, in that tone pretty girls often used—self-confident but on the boundary line of snotty.

“Woo-hoo!” Aidan turned up the music as I forced myself to leave my doubts behind, and I tested a laugh into the wind.

FOURTEEN

“Punch?”

We hadn’t been in the club for more than a minute when the guy stepped out of the shadows. He was offering me a hollowed human skull brimful of a bloody-red liquid and topped with a straw and a paper umbrella.

“Oh. Thanks.” I took the skull—plastic—from the guy, whose sudden, wide Hollywood smile broke the serious expression of his face. He nodded acknowledgment while reaching past me to hand another skull punch to Emory.

“
Merci
, babe,” she said.

“Out back.” He jabbed his thumb.

We made a bumbling train, me following Emory, who followed Movie Star Teeth, with Aidan behind me, no doubt checking out my butt, and all of us winding through the blue-lit space. The walls throbbed with a deconstructed reggae riff of an old Bowie song; a series of paneled screens around the bar showed a flickering tennis match where a Williams sister was clearly dominating.

I inhaled the warmth of salt air, weak beer and cigarettes—the heady fragrance of a beach party, like the ones Mags and I went to when we road-tripped to Avalon. I could feel myself loosen into the warm swing of the night. If only Mags were with me. But
at the very least
, it was happening, it was here and now, and it was definitely good enough.

From the clamshell claustrophobia of inside, we spilled from the back door onto a wide-planked platform terrace where about a dozen kids were camped at a table made from pushing two picnic tables together.

“That’s us,” said Aidan. He’d put his hand on the small of my back. Firmly.

Noogie was presiding. “Jamers, I was scared you’d bail!”

I smiled and sipped at my skull through a straw. Shyness, along with this tricky business of Aidan’s unwanted attention, had stolen my vocabulary. Did Emory see what was going on? And what should I do about it? Time for that pill. I popped it and chased it with the mystery drink, which tasted as innocent as Isa’s lemonade, though I knew it probably wasn’t.

“Everybody, meet Jamie!” Aidan proclaimed. As I sat, he settled next to me with a proprietary air. His body language had me on high alert; it was way too close, too touchy, too sure of himself and of my favorable opinion of him. “She’s the McRae au pair this summer.”

Skulls were raised. Fingers fluttered.

I fluttered mine back. “Hi, everybody.” I’d done my hair twisted up, with some pieces flat-ironed, and I’d made my eyes smudgy with a bare touch of bronze eyeliner. A deliberate mask to distinguish me from Jessie Feathering—who, in the cell-phone snaps Isa’d showed me, had usually kept her lips red and her hair styled in loose, wavy layers. Nevertheless, I got the usual double takes.

Movie Star Teeth had dropped to sit on my other side. Excellent. I’d focus concentration on him, and maybe Aidan would leave me alone. My bones were unhinging, my muscles relaxing. The pill already? No, but definitely the idea of the pill was at work.

“So, I don’t get it. What’s the theme of this club?” I asked Teeth. “Do skulls with umbrellas mean Hawaii? Or pirates?”

“Never thought about it.” He made a pose of looking serious. “Yeah, the Rickrack might be a Hawaiian theme. Like, Rickrack, God of the Pineapples. But then of course there’s the famous pirate, Cap’n Jack Rickrack.”

“Of course.” I laughed. Laughing felt good—it deflated my anxieties. We kept going, making stupid pirate sounds and overplaying lamely off the joke while not wanting to give it up.

“Sebastian, I’ve never seen you act so friendly,” remarked Emory.

“Because when I’m not acting, I’m not acting,” said Sebastian.

Emory made a face. “You theater geeks are
always
acting.”

“Not true,” said Noogie to me. “Sebastian’s middle name is sincerity.”

Sebastian raised his skull. “It’s actually David, but I’ll sincerely drink to that.”

While Sebastian did seem different from the other guys in this crowd, I couldn’t hone in on exactly why. His soft bristle of dark-blond hair wasn’t trying to be fashionable, in the trendy, Little Bly guy style of flopped in the eyes or tucked ragged behind the ears. He didn’t care about clothes, either; his threadbare cottons fell comfy against his sinewy body.

Maybe that was it. Sebastian was no-frills. No belt, no cap, no surfer-dude necklaces, only an economical-looking sports watch. There was one surprise, in that his left inner forearm all the way to his wrist was scarred in a welted crosshatch. It was easily visible, but he didn’t seem at all self-conscious about it.

Sebastian’s biggest extravagance was his smile, I decided, and he sure didn’t throw it around. He might have Movie Star Teeth, but they didn’t accessorize a Movie Star Personality. In fact, the opposite. I wanted to talk to him more, but he’d turned away, diverted by a comment that spun into a conversation with a redhead named Lizbeth who was on his other side. She, and the others, had a lot of nicknames for Sebastian, including Bass, Sibby and Brooks—which I took to be his last name.

It was obvious that kids really liked this guy, to the point where they vied and jousted against one another for his attention. As much as I wanted to join in, I decided to take the laid-back route, and so I swiveled into listening to Aidan’s recap of his entire day at his landscaping job, which mostly entailed helping cranky old Mrs. Grosvenor, who’d made him haul a dozen rosebushes all around her garden before deciding she didn’t want them. It was kind of a funny story, except that the person most entranced with its humor was Aidan, which somewhat deflated my enjoyment of it.

“So, Jamie, tell me something.” Emory, seated directly across, had been looking at me. Now she leaned closer in, pitching her elbows in my direction so we could speak more privately. “What’s your take on Isa? I taught her tennis last year. Or tried to, anyway. She was pretty hopeless with the hand-eye coordination.”

“She’s an excellent swimmer,” I said, probably too defensive.

“But she’s an odd duck. She’s got a major case of la-la land, don’t you think?”

“Well, she has a great imagination.”

“No doubt. Sometimes that girl could make me feel like
I
was the freak,” said Emory, shaking back her hair and smiling as if this thought were so ridiculous it could hardly be imagined. “Just because I couldn’t see the people in her world. It’s lucky she’s grown up here, around all of us who’ve known her since she was teeny.”

“My friend Maggie and I were goofy kids, too,” I confessed. “In fact, Isa and Milo seem fairly normal, considering the circumstances.”

“Uh-oh.” Emory’s perfect eyebrows angled skeptically. “Milo’s back?”

I nodded. “He left camp early. It’s no big deal. We hardly ever see him. Honestly, it’s a good thing. It makes Isa happy to have her big brother again. Obnoxious as he can be.”

Emory primmed up her mouth as she shook her head. Not a Milo fan, either. “Yeah, sure, right. She used to try to make me play tennis with him. For me, Milo’s always been a pest who’s best left ignored. You’re cool to handle it.”

“Not everyone would,” said Aidan, his leg a sudden, intimate pressure against mine; it startled me. “But then again, you’ve got a lot of Jessie’s light.”

“Aidan, c’mon, you’re such a flirt. Don’t scare the girl,” said Emory. Her voice had gone tense with disapproval.

She didn’t know the half of it. Or maybe she did. The look she gave me was complex: a flash of female-to-female understanding that was just as quickly weighted with frustration, and then defaulted back to cool-girl indifference.

Quickly I slid a couple of inches away from Aidan. Even though it nudged me closer to Sebastian, who was getting a lot of breathy laughs out of Lizbeth. They’d been talking a long time. Were they going out? What was the deal? I couldn’t get a handle on it.

Worse than this, though, was my creeping-crawling realization that something strange was happening to me. A fuzz in my vision, and the unreasonable sense that I was five seconds behind every joke. As I laughed and sipped my drink and tried to appear as comfortable and appropriate as I could, I’d started to panic. My fingers squeezed the skin of my upper thigh, as if I could pinch myself back into my senses.

“Everything good?” Sebastian asked as he finally turned.

“Uh-huh.” But when I blinked, his face became a double image, two pairs of eyes peering at me intently as a blackbird
and wasn’t that a dainty dish to set before the king.

“You sure?”

“Mmm.” I thought of Sebastian flying out of a pie and I wanted to laugh. But that wasn’t funny. Something was wrong. I looked around the table. Voices were gummy vowels. Mouths appeared cavernous, and the collection of skulls on the table had come to life, eyeless eyes on me, trembling in a disembodied dance.

Which pill had I chosen? What was I drinking?
Idiot idiot idiot
.

“ ’Scuse me,” I mumbled as I stood up. Tried not to make eye contact with Sebastian, or anyone else, as I swerved back into the club. My hand trailing the wall for support, until I managed to find the restroom. It was packed, fluorescent, too much.

I veered out again, my hand on the wall.

What had I taken? Not a sleeping pill. And yet I felt a chilling certainty that, yes, a sleeping pill was exactly what I’d swallowed. I remembered the last time I’d worn this sundress, about a month ago, during a drive-by of my parents’ bathroom. I’d sneaked out a sleeping pill from Mom’s supply. Hoarded it as ammunition against the next roaming, restless night.

Maybe I could stick my finger down my throat and vomit it up? I’d never done anything like that before. My relationship with food was normal—the whole freshman-year faux-bulimia craze had passed me by entirely.

But the air was too stuffy for me to think, and I was getting nauseous—with apprehension? From the pill?

If this pill was potentially going to mess me up, I needed to bust out some decisions, fast.

“Jamie?” Sebastian had come out of nowhere. “You all right? I came to find you.”

“I am, thanks. Something I drank. Must’ve gone down the wrong way.” I propped a shoulder against the wall. “And it’s just too, um, crowded in the girls’.”

“We’re right on the dunes, you know.” Sebastian swept out his hand. “Nature’s call can take you to nature. Come on. Outside. I’ll stand watch.”

“Oh.” He’d laced my fingers through his. “Okay.”

With Sebastian leading, we sneaked out a side exit and into the night, meandering along the boardwalk to where the dunes lumped across the starry horizon.

“Up there.” He pointed. “But I’ll stand guard down here. Watch out for pincer crabs.”

I stopped.

“Kidding, I kid.” He smiled. “You’re cute when you’re scared.”

“I was thinking … you’re cute when you smile.”

“We’re a pair of cuties, huh.” He gave me a nudge. “Holler if you need me.”

I knew he could tell that my equilibrium was off. But I stepped forward, pigeon-toed and buckle-kneed, through the sand. As the cool air flowed into my lungs and over my skin, my nausea eased. Throw up, no. But pee, oh yes. Though under normal circumstances, the idea of squatting so near a cute guy, in an open space, would have sent me up a tree with anxiety. On the other hand, these were not normal circumstances. I’d never tried to stay awake on sleeping pills before. It didn’t feel good. Not at all.

Mission accomplished, I picked my way back toward Sebastian, nearly falling on him. His hand shot out to steady me.

“Careful. Looks like you’ve got a minor balance issue.”

“Maybe slightly.”

“Want to stay out here a minute? We can check the horizon for pirate ships.”

“Sure.” I gulped oxygen and didn’t give in to the hazy, addled impulse to rest my hand on one of Sebastian’s muscle-knotted quadriceps.

The last time I’d sat so intentionally close to a male was when Sean Ryan and I had met at Maggie Moo’s for sundaes. We hadn’t called it a date. But we’d sat close, on that bench, in that mall, on the other side of town.
It had meant something no it hadn’t forget it forget it forget it
.

“You’re looking at me funny.”

“Sorry.” I felt terribly, tremendously bashful. “Didn’t mean to.”

“You sure you’re doing okay?” Sebastian let his hand rest a moment on my shoulder.

“Uh-huh.”
Change subjects
. “So, are you a lifer or a local?” I asked.

“Guess.”

“Local?”

“Reason?”

I considered it. “Somehow I don’t see you as a golf caddy or a tennis coach. In the perfect shorts and perfect pair of sunglasses.”

Sebastian laughed. “Good call. Yep, I’m a local boy, born and raised in Bly. As for a summer job, you’ll find me six days a week busting my butt down at Sunrise Dry Cleaners—my parents own it. It’s real money, and I need it. I’ve got a scholarship to Yale to study drama that pays exactly one dollar more than not being able to swing it at all. Which I’ve heard is how most scholarships tend to work.”

“Yale. That’s impressive.”

“I’m selling too hard.” He made a face. “I know you for ten minutes, and I go and college-drop. Maybe I still have to say it out loud to believe it.”

“Hey, Yale’s a huge deal. And you’re rocking a scholarship.”

“You think I’m That Guy Who Brags.”

“Not at all.”

“It’s okay; I probably
am
bragging. On that, maybe I don’t own the perfect pair of sunglasses, but I do have a couple of incredible pairs of driving goggles.”

“Driving—
what
?” I laughed.

“You’ll see.” He tapped two fingers to my nose, an offhand gesture that dizzied and thrilled me. “See, now I’m attempting to be fascinating yet cryptic. Instead of braggartly. Wait—is that a word?”

By now we were both laughing. “Oh, definitely
braggartly
is a word. I use it all the time.”

“This is new for me.”