“I think we’ve seen enough,” said Fletch. She took the phone from Slick and closed the video application. Fletch and I shared a disgusted look: Jake had no respect for others’ privacy, he had an outsized ego, and he was a perv.
“I’m sorry, Slick…” I started to say.
“Mercedes!” Slick interrupted. “My name is Mercedes! I’m sick of being called ‘Slick.’ It’s not that clever a name, I’m not that clumsy, and I don’t like it.”
If that’s what she was most mad about, we were going to be okay.
“Fine,” said Fletch. “Mercedes.”
“Does this mean we can’t call you ‘Fletch’ anymore?” I asked Genesis Fletcher. There were more important matters to discuss, obviously…but were there really? Our whole friendship identity felt cemented in our names for each other.
Fletch said, “I don’t really care. It’s your name for me. I’m fine with that. Everywhere else, I’m Genesis.” She didn’t say, I like that.
Slick—I mean, Mercedes, said, “Excuse me, I think you two lost sight of the real problem here. Do you dumbsluts have anything to say for yourselves and your betrayals—emphasis plural? Because you both did my brother?”
“Everybody does your brother,” Fletch said, gentle but informative.
“I know! That’s exactly why you two shouldn’t have!” said Mercedes.
I was a little bit less guilty than Fletch, it should be noted. “I didn’t…all the way,” I said, a coward trying to cover her very exposed ass.
“Wait a minute,” said Fletch. “You’re being hypocritical, Mercedes. You’re trying to dodge the real issue.”
“I am not!” said Slick. Damn it, Mercedes!
“Why’s she hypocritical? What’s the real issue?” I asked.
Mercedes rolled her eyes, and then said to me, “Fletch thinks I shouldn’t care about you guys being with Jake. Because I lost my virginity to Chester.”
“WHAT?” I screamed, this time so loud I was sure my voice echoed across the ravine.
“See?” said Mercedes. “How’s that feel?”
“Shocking!” I said. First there was the shock of, Ew, one of my best friends slept with my brother! Second was the shock of, My brother got some from a hot girl? “How did that even happen? When? You said you lost your virginity to Nestor Castillo!”
“Well, I guess I lied,” said Mercedes. “It was Chester, and it was while you were away at soccer camp last summer.” I was never, ever going to soccer camp again, because apparently everything interesting happened while I was away.
I said, “So did you guys go out? Was it a relationship? I don’t understand!”
“It was curiosity,” admitted Sli…Mercedes. “Just that one time. Random. There was so much unnecessary anticipation over doing the deed for the first time. For me, it was just something I wanted to get over with.” She sounded so casual about such a major thing. I would have felt bad for Chester except then she added, “And your brother is so sweet. He made me breakfast the next morning.”
I was a dumbfounded dumbslut. “Your definition of sweet romance is that Chester made you Froot Loops for breakfast after?”
“Waffles! And they were fucking delicious! He made a delightful apple compote on top!”
“Chester doesn’t cook!” I was seriously ready to punch Mercedes in the face. And I’d never, ever felt that way about Slick.
Mercedes said, “Yes, he does! Just not for you!”
Whoa, what had just happened here?
“You’re just using Chester and Jake to dodge the real issue!” Fletch shouted. “That you backstabbed us with Evergrace Everdell and Bao Ling!”
“YEAH!” I affirmed.
Then Fletch turned her wrath on me. “And you, Victoria Navarro! It’s your fault that I’m going to Africa tomorrow when I totally don’t want to go!”
“What? Why?” Mercedes and I both said, nearly forgetting that Fletch had just personally attacked us, because why wouldn’t she want to go to Africa when she’d spent the past few months so diligently preparing, and the past few years emotionally committing to returning to her birth nation?
Fletch said, “I want to be frivolous and, like, wander around Europe. I want to wake up hungover in youth hostels and not know where I’m going or what I’m doing. I want to kiss strange boys with funny accents, and be completely selfish.”
“So go do that!” I challenged her.
“We’re not holding you back,” said Mercedes.
Fletch pointed at me. “Because you! You’re always holding me up as this standard. The Smartest. The Most Politically Committed. It’s like you created this identity of intellect and sacrifice for me that now I’m stuck living.”
Mercedes picked up on this accusation and pointed at me as well. “Yeah, Vic. You totally do that. You created this identity for me that’s all ‘Oh, Slick is so lazy, she’s so klutzy, she’s so lost and incompetent.’”
“I never said that!” I said.
“It’s the vibe you give out,” said Mercedes. “You cast people in roles and then expect them to live it.”
I didn’t think that was true about me at all, but I was too hurt and insulted to defend myself, so I turned it on them.
“At least I don’t take favors from Miss Ann Thrope,” I said to Slick. “You act like you hated her all this time but you were just another one of her pawns in her power-mad game to rule Rancho Soldado.”
Slick’s-Not-Her-Name said, “Thrope’s genuinely mean, but she’s not that bad once you get on her good side. She’s just another person you created a one-dimensional role for.”
Thrope’s not that bad once you get on her good side. Who’d be so soulless to try to get on Thrope’s “good” side?
My former best friend had allied herself with, and was defending, my worst enemy. My other former best friend had accused me of sabotaging her secret desire to be an epic goof-off, like it was my personal responsibility that she chose African aid work over European booty calls.
“Fuck you,” I said to them both.
“Fuck you,” they said back.
I thought I knew my friends, but they had turned into people I didn’t know at all. Monsters. Worst of all, they thought I was the monster.
There was nothing for me to do but leave them.
So, I ran.
Cuddle Huddle dismissed. Forever.
I ran back across the Ghost Cemetery until I reached the outskirts of Pinata Village. I didn’t know where to wander and I was too hungry and betrayed to think straight. So, as usual, I defaulted to where Lindsay wanted me to go, the same methodology I’d used when I didn’t get into USC and decided to move to San Francisco instead.
Was my methodology flawed? Should I have explored other options besides what Lindsay said I should do? At this point I was questioning every damn decision I’d ever made in my life, particularly my sucky choices of BFFs and my male lust target. Stupid Jake. Stupid Chug Bug. Stupid Cuddle Huddle. Stupid night. Stupid mythic roasted marshmallows that never found their way into my mouth.
Out of breath, exhausted, emotionally destroyed, and starving, I sat down on a cracked wooden bench in the outlying area of the village for some rest. I needed to not talk to anyone for a while. I needed to send psychic signals to Zeke to bring me some pizza now. And then let me eat in silence.
“Are you hiding?” I heard a voice ask me. I had closed my eyes and was about to fall asleep, into a welcome new consciousness where I wasn’t responsible for so many debacles. I didn’t want to return to a wakeful state, but the voice was sweetly familiar, like Dad’s.
“Yes,” I murmured. My eyes blinked open and I saw Chester staring at me intently, concerned, as if he was about to check my forehead for a fever.
“Should I leave you alone?” Chester asked.
“No.” I sat up. It was probably the first time in my life my brother’s goofball face was so welcome.
“Lindsay’s freaking out,” said Chester. “She’s been texting you all night and
not getting answers.”
“I lost my phone.”
“She was ready to call in the Missing Persons Unit. You’re sure gonna have fun living with that neurotic nightmare in San Francisco.”
“Don’t speak about your sister that way.”
“I speak truth.” I knew Chester was right. I adored Lindsay, but she also wanted to know where I was every second of the day, like she was my mom. Our real mother lived thousands of miles away and checked in occasionally, but truthfully, Mom didn’t seem all that worried or concerned about us. And maybe because she didn’t, Lindsay felt she had to. Maybe Lindsay didn’t need to anymore.
“Hey,” I said. It had never occurred to me before but suddenly I asked Chester, “Do you think I should go live with Mom in Montreal for a little while? I could learn French and…”
Chester shook his head. “Absolutely not. We’re Southern Californians. We fear cold.” I suspected he meant Mom’s coldness as much as he meant the northern climate. I suspected my brother was sort of trying to protect me.
I said, “San Francisco is cold, and Lindsay manages fine.”
“That’s because her veins are made of ice.”
I smiled, despite my pissy mood. “You hate that you love and worship Lindsay so much.”
Chester said, “No, you hate that you love and worship her so much.”
“I don’t hate it. I fully acknowledge it.”
“Repress it,” said Chester. “Much healthier.”
I laughed. “What are you doing here?”
“Checking in on you, obviously.” Chester offered no further information so I raised my eyebrow at him, like, Come on. Finally, he admitted, “Lindsay said I couldn’t leave tonight until I found you and got you home safely and sent her a text showing you asleep in your own bed.”
It was a sweet and caring demand on Lindsay’s part, but also a giant red flag about what it would be like to live with her. Would I never be allowed a night out carousing the city without my sister helicopter-parenting me the whole time? Dad and Chester were way more mellow housemates than my sister. If I was a neurotic, controlling person, it was largely because I learned it from Lindsay, the master. I loved my sister and would be forever grateful for the safety net she’d provided after our mom left, but was moving into her group house really such a good plan? If I’d learned anything from this night, it was that my spontaneous ideas had too much possibility for disaster. I had literally gotten the rejection from USC on April 15, and on April 16 I told my sister I needed to move somewhere, anywhere—and she said I should move in with her until I figured things out. If my sister says I should do it, I do it. (Except when I don’t. Like when she told me to apply to schools other than USC, and I didn’t. Like when she told me not to throw a party to impress a guy. And here I was.)
Was I doing it because it was the right thing to do, or to appear confident and decisive about my self-made lack of options?
“This night sucks,” I said. “And I can’t leave until the Happies and all my classmates have left the premises.”
“Sure you can,” said Chester. He paused and then added, “Although you’d be a jerk if you did.”
He sat down on the creaky bench next to me, and said nothing more, seemingly content to look up at the stars in the sky. After a few minutes of silence between us, I said, “If Lindsay were here now, she’d tell you that you need to, like, comfort me. Make me feel better.”
“Why?” said Chester.
“Because I’m upset.”
“About what?”
Grr, men! Clueless clueless clueless. “Um, the Chug Bug was destroyed. Did you hear?”
“I heard. Sucks. Hard.” His voice barely registered emotion, and the Chug Bug had been almost as much a labor of love for Chester as it was for Jake.
“Jake said he wished I never existed.”
“Harsh.”
“Do you wish I never existed?”
“Only when you leave the toilet seat down.”
“So, like, a lot.”
“Yeah. But it’s an irritated hate. I wish a second bathroom existed in our house more than I wish you didn’t exist.”
“Thank you, brother.”
“But not by much,” he amended.
So many other worries fluttered through my troubled mind. “Bev Happie is probably going to kill me when she arrives in the morning to close the real estate sale. Did you know the Happies locked up Annette Thrope?”
“Yup. Saw her on my way here, cuffed to the jail cell. It was beautiful. Maybe the best thing that’s ever happened in Rancho, even if she did promise as I walked by her that she was going to make every day in the future a living hell for the Navarro family.”
“I wasn’t even the one who locked her up!”
“But you were the one who threw the party that got the people who locked her up here.”
I ignored his logic and said, “Just like her to hold me accountable, and not the people who did it to her.”
Chester showed no emotion or concern and offered exactly no advice about Thrope’s jailhouse threat. He just said, “No worries.”
Perhaps there is some benefit to subsisting on a diet of Froot Loops and marijuana. It gives a person no legitimate cares in the world.
“You’re being a very bad Lindsay substitute,” I told him. “You’re not helping me at all.”
“You’re being too good a Lindsay,” he answered. “Telling me what to do and then telling me how badly I’m doing it.”
Ouch. “Sorry,” I said. I figured I owed him full disclosure of all the night’s suckage, so I gave him the other piece of bad news. “Slick and Fletch—I mean, Mercedes and Genesis, I guess—and I just had a huge fight and I don’t know if we’re really friends anymore.”
Finally, he had an actual human, non-Vulcan reaction. “Whoa!” Chester declared. “That sucks.”
“Thank you for acknowledging my pain.”
“The other problems will work themselves out. But the friend one, you need to fix. You need to make it right before it’s too late, before Fletch leaves.”
“They insulted me, attacked me, lied to me! Why should I be the one to find them and make up?”
“Because they’re your heart,” said Chester, as if it was just that simple.
I had to pause our conversation to suck in a wave of oxygen shock. There was a lot more depth to my brother than I’d realized. After taking a few seconds to absorb this revelation, and a moment of frustration that I didn’t have my phone available to text Lindsay about it immediately, I said, “So you and Mercedes, huh?”
“Aw,” was all Chester said back, giving me no clue whatsoever about whether the dalliance had been meaningful to him.
I was deprived of the opportunity to dig deeper into the topic when my head was, once again, bonked with a barrage of marshmallows.
“Evergrace Everdell, where are you?” I fumed. I was too mad at her to actually eat one of the marshmallows tainted by her touch. But damn how I wanted to.
Evergrace emerged from behind a tree next to the bench where Chester and I sat. She burped. “Right here.”
“Back away from my shoes,” I warned her.
Chester kicked some sand onto my feet. “That’ll help the stink,” he said.
“Doubt it,” taunted Everbitch. I couldn’t believe that Slick—ugh, Mercedes—was friends with this person, much less that they were going to be actual roommates and start new lives together in Las Vegas. “Have you talked with Mercedes? Bet you’re sorry you didn’t invite me to this party now!”
“It should be obvious by now why I didn’t invite you!”
Evergrace said nothing in response, but dared to shoot another marshmallow at me. I stood up from the bench I’d been sharing with Chester, walked over to her, took the marshmallow rifle from her hands, and said, “If you fucking shoot another marshmallow tonight, I will…eat your entire remaining supply!”
“Jealous!” Evergrace squealed. “You’re so jealous of me, aren’t you?
”
“Hardly!”
“It’s okay, you don’t have to admit it. I can see it all over your face. You tried to have me excluded from this party. Ever since I moved to Rancho Soldado, any time I tried to be friends with you and your stupid clique, you totally dismissed me.”
Chester said, “To be fair, Vic dismisses everyone who tries to get inside her clique. There’s them, and there’s everyone else. It’s not personal.”
“Thank you?” I said to Chester.
Evergrace started to sway a little, and Chester and I surrounded her on either side, each of us taking one of her arms to steady her. “Sleep now?” said Evergrace. Her body went limp as her eyes fluttered closed.
She passed out, into Chester’s arms. I didn’t want to touch that beast, but I couldn’t leave my brother hanging like that, so I helped him place her on the ground. She was in no real danger if we left her there for a while. She just needed a good slap. I mean, sleep.
“That was interesting,” said Chester over her dozing body.
I should have left it at that, but like a regular Lindsay, I had to offer unsolicited commentary. “For a guy who’s baked most of the time, you’re pretty together.”
Chester said, “I don’t smoke nearly as much weed as you and Lindsay have decided I do, with little to no evidence to back up your assumptions besides the occasional stash in my room, and because I rarely have that much to say. Know why? Mostly because you two never shut the fuck up.”
I kissed my brother’s cheek. “I love you, bro-man.”
“You too. Are you sure you really want to move to San Francisco?”
“What, do you want me to be your housemate longer?”
“I don’t care either way. But if you don’t have a job or school already lined up there, what’s the rush to leave? Your soul seems pretty rooted here.”
“You’re fucking with my head.”
“Get out of your own way,” Chester advised. “Now go find the Cuddle Huddle, make it right. And please, if you really do love me, make it so I never have to say the words ‘Cuddle Huddle’ again.”