“Reevie . . . I feel wasted.” Her head sways from side to side, her hair hanging in her face. “Will you please take me home?”
I peer at her. She’s had, like, two beers. I’ve seen her finish a sixpack in under an hour and not get tipsy. “Wow, I didn’t even see you drink that much,” I say.
Rennie’s eyes suddenly snap into focus on me. “Maybe someone put something in my drink.”
I reel back a step.
Reeve stands up. “Ren, how much did you have?”
“I don’t know . . .” Rennie moans, now back to acting wasted. “I lost count.” She’s totally putting on a show. She’s only been at the party for like thirty minutes, and a second ago she was fine. “I’ll drive myself home. I don’t want to make you leave.”
“There’s no way in hell I’d let you drive like this,” he says, shaking his head.
He helps her to her feet, and then he hoists her up and Rennie wraps her arms around his neck. “You’re the bestest, Reevie,” she sighs, closing her eyes and snuggling closer.
“Go get your coat. I’ll meet you by the front door.”
“Okay. Huuuuurry.” Rennie wobbles off.
When Rennie’s gone, Reeve says to me, “I’m gonna drop her off.”
I stare hard and fold my arms. “I don’t even know what she’s doing here in the first place!”
Reeve straightens and says, “She’s here because all of us are, Lil. All her friends. What’s she supposed to do? Sit at home alone?”
I feel my lip curl. How many times did Rennie make it so I was doing exactly that! “Can you please not defend her to me?”
“I know she can be a bitch sometimes, but she’s a good girl at heart.” Reeve runs a hand through his hair, then glances over toward my front door. “Look, I’ll drop her off and then I’ll come back.”
I screw my lips together. “Don’t bother. I’m gonna make everybody leave soon anyway.” I flick my hair over my shoulder. “Just so you know, Alex left.”
Reeve sneers. “Good. Little rich boy punk bitch.”
“Reeve!” I glare at him.
From the front door I hear Rennie call out Reeve’s name. “Reevie! I’m ready!”
He glances back. “Look, let me take care of this, and then I’ll come back to help you clean.”
“I can do it myself.”
He sighs, exasperated. “Are you mad at me?”
Coolly I say, “Why would I be mad at you?”
Reeve grabs my hand and says, “I swear I’ll be right back. Give me twenty minutes.”
I want to tell Reeve not to come back tonight, but I can’t bring myself to say the words. Because I do want him to. I know I shouldn’t, but I do. I can’t help it.
I smooth down the pleats of my skirt. “Okay. If you want.”
After looking over both shoulders to see who’s around, Reeve plants a quick kiss on my forehead. Then he fishes his keys out of his pocket, asks me to save him a piece of pizza, and he’s gone.
When everybody else leaves an hour later, I turn down Ash’s offer to help me clean up. I hustle her out the door, and then I run upstairs and change into my cute pj’s, a pink cami with a bunny print and matching shorts. I feel nervous butterflies as I put on lotion and the tiniest dab of my Lillia perfume at the pulse of my neck. I put my hair up and then I put it back down.
I’ve never been alone with a boy in my house before. Anything could happen.
I don’t want it to go too much farther than kissing. Okay, I kind of do, but at the same time I don’t. I’m not ready yet. And anyway, I’m still angry. And I’m going to give Reeve a piece of my mind for sure. So I figure we’ll stay downstairs on the couch and that will have to be it.
While I wait, I clean up the living room, throwing away plastic cups, wiping down the tables, fluffing up the couch pillows. It’s taking so long for Reeve to come back, I even get out the vacuum cleaner. Another hour goes by and the kitchen’s clean too; the house almost looks back to normal. I set out two pieces of pizza on a nice plate, not a paper one, and I cover it in plastic wrap so I can heat it up when he gets here.
That’s when I get the text. It says, Stuck at Rennie’s. Not gonna make it back tonight. I read it twice to make sure I’m getting it right. He’s ditching me. For her.
Rennie and I never had crushes on the same boys. She had a rotation of boys that she liked, boys who were loud and brash and you never knew if they were making fun of you or if they were serious. She liked the ones who made her feel unsure. Because Rennie was always, always sure.
As for me, the only Jar Island boy I ever had a crush on was Patrick DeBrassio. And even then, it was the kind of crush you have on your friend’s big brother, when you’re safe in knowing that nothing will ever come of it. I was his little sister’s friend, a baby.
So Rennie and I didn’t have crossover crushes, but there was this one time it almost happened. It was that summer before ninth grade. This was when Rennie and Kat and I were all still friends. But this happened on a day when it was just Rennie and me.
There was a new boy scooping ice cream. He was there for the summer, but he looked young like us; he couldn’t have been older than fifteen. He had dirty-blond hair and a small mouth, and he was wiry but you could tell he’d be tall and strong one day. I’d seen him twice already, and both times I made Nadia go in front of me so he could be the one to take my order. I liked his dimples, and I liked how careful and precise he was with the ice cream scooper. All of his scoops came out perfect.
That afternoon there was a lull. I was trying to decide between strawberry basil ice cream or blueberry sorbet, and I was working up the nerve to ask if I could try a sample of one, when Rennie leaned on the freezer and asked him, “How old are you?”
Rennie had been doing that a lot this summer—talking to boys we didn’t know, boys who were on the island for the week, the month, the summer at most. Kat would join in sometimes, but it always made me feel shy.
His head jerked up; he’d been wiping the counter. “Why?” “Because I know for a fact that you have to be sixteen to work here, and you don’t look sixteen.” She said it in her ballbustery way, but with flirty eyes. The Rennie signature move. Rennie was so confident, even then, that he’d want to talk to her, that he’d be intrigued by her gutsiness and attitude.