Luckily, Elise was in the lobby waiting for us. Morgan barely put her car into park before Elise came running out through the doors. I don’t know if this is completely accurate or if it’s just my memory, but I remembered thinking Elise looked slightly more exotic, like the way you’d expect a girl who lives in a hotel to, if that makes any sense.
We got out and hugged and jumped around like we hadn’t seen each other in years. It was joyous and I was glad. I was worried a bit that Elise would be cold to me over the phone thing. But she wasn’t. She was just happy to see us. And then the three of us piled back into the car.
“You guys, can I just say that I am already so so so sick of hotel food,” Elise told us. “I mean, we can order whatever we want. And Lord knows my brothers have been taking crazy advantage of it. They get two desserts every night, one with dinner and one before bed. The food is good, don’t get me wrong. But it’s not the same as something cooked at home.”
“I like your top,” I said. “Is it new?”
It was a light pink silk blouse with tiny red hearts embroidered all over it, and it was so very Elise. She smoothed it before buckling her seat belt. “Yeah. Someone from the governor’s office showed up at the hotel this morning with a big FedEx envelope full of gift cards and a handwritten letter from the governor himself, telling us to go to the mall and get whatever we needed.”
Morgan pouted. “All I did today was clean mud off of crap in our basement.”
“Honestly, it was more stressful than fun. I have to replace my entire closet. I couldn’t just buy whatever cute things I saw. I had to be strategic about it. I need underwear, socks, like, everyday stuff, a new coat. I knew it’d be cold tonight, but no stores are selling sweaters anymore. Just spring stuff. And there’s so much that’s gone that I’ll never be able to replace. All my pictures, the quilt my grandma made me.”
“So what’s the latest?” Morgan asked gently. “Has your dad gone to the site yet?”
Elise shook her head. “No. An adjuster came to meet with him, though. He brought pictures of everything, but my dad wouldn’t let me see them. He thought it would be too traumatic.” I was about to cut in and tell Elise about what my dad was trying to do, thinking it would be good news, but she kept talking. “Anyway, they started going over numbers.” Elise shook her head in disbelief. “Guess how much they’re going to give us to move?”
I leaned forward so my head was almost in the front seat. I’d given Elise shotgun as a courtesy. “Wait. They’ve already made you a deal?” I remembered what Levi had said on my front porch. How quickly this was all going to go.
“Five hundred thousand dollars,” she said shyly.
Both Morgan and I gasped. Half a million dollars? Even though I wasn’t super clued in to salaries, that had to be way more than most people in our town earned in a lifetime. Elise’s mom didn’t work. And her father was a mechanic, but only after being out of work for more than a year.
Elise quickly added, “We’re probably getting more because we lost everything. And please don’t tell anyone. It’s supposed to be a secret, I think.”
“So are you guys taking the money?” I asked.
“We don’t really have a choice,” she said. “We’re basically homeless.”
“Not for long,” Morgan said. “I mean, your family could buy any house in Ridgewood you wanted with that kind of money.”
“Well . . . my uncle Rob is in real estate, and he’s been sending us listings of condos near him and my aunt in Florida. There was one he forwarded today, you can almost see the ocean from what would be my bedroom window.” She bit her bottom lip. “I think we’re going to take it.”
“Florida?” Morgan said, stunned. “You’re not serious.”
“Uncle Rob might have a job lined up for Dad, too.”
It was quiet in the car for a few minutes, the three of us thinking about what this meant. Even though Elise and I weren’t the closest, she was still part of all my visions of this summer, and then our senior year after that. Everything I had once seen clear as day was suddenly blurry.
“You know,” Elise said, “my mom said flights are actually pretty cheap, if you buy them far enough ahead. We could plan a trip so you both can come and visit. Maybe at the end of summer, when you guys know where you’ll be moving to. We can go to Harry Potter World!”
I didn’t know if that thing about cheap flights was true. Neither Morgan nor I had ever even been on a plane, so it might as well have been a rocket ship ticket to Mars. Morgan’s eyes returned to the road, but her mouth still hung open.
Meanwhile, Elise flipped down the visor and checked her makeup. I saw it on her face, her hope that this would come true trying to butt out the reality that it probably wouldn’t.
• • •
On our way back into town, we hit the police roadblock, and all of us had to show photo IDs to get through. Every road that led to Elise’s street had been cordoned off with lengths of yellow caution tape and unmanned construction equipment parked to make an impenetrable barrier. The closest we could get was a good quarter mile away, on a wooded stretch of road that wound up the hill without any houses or streetlights. We pulled off at a place Elise said would be good, and Morgan’s car rocked to a lopsided stop half in the rain ditch. We got out and clicked on our flashlights.
Morgan and Elise were whispering quietly with each other. The vibe felt extra somber since the whole Florida thing. I ran ahead to try and scare them but ended up sinking pretty far in some mud. It took both of them to pull me free. I was laughing, and I admittedly made it a little tougher on them just to be funny, but the girls didn’t really get into it. And they didn’t laugh when I let myself flop on my butt, staining my entire backside with mud.
Elise led the way confidently, though she did get us turned around a few times. After about thirty minutes, I felt Morgan come up beside me. “Maybe we should go back,” she whispered, but before I could say anything, Elise called out for us. She had found an open lane cut through the trees where a stretch of telephone poles and power lines snaked down the hill toward the valley.
“This leads right to my house,” she said.
Another quarter mile and we veered left and ran smack into a mountain of fresh dirt, clearly man-made, that had to be as high as a house. It smelled so earthy and wet.
We scaled the dirt like we were in army training camp or something. Scrambling up like little kids. I think every one of us slipped at some point, and by the top, we were all streaked with dirt. No one was laughing.
We looked down into the canyon that had been carved away. What had once been a street at the bottom of the hill was nothing but a pit of mud.
“Jeez,” Morgan whispered.
It was odd, because we’d already seen pictures in the newspaper and on the television. But there was something about seeing it live.
It was finally, undeniably real.
Elise scurried down first. She fell hard and smeared mud across the front of her pretty new blouse. And then once again. It didn’t slow her. She took the stumbles and went with them.
At the bottom of the dirt mound, there were more bulldozers parked, and big Dumpsters filled with debris.
I had been on this street a hundred times, but there was no trace of pavement.
I had been inside Elise’s house more times than I could count. I burned the inside of my forearm baking Christmas cookies in her kitchen in December. I streaked nude around her backyard with my hair in hot rollers on a sleepover dare. But there wasn’t even a brick of foundation left, nothing even remotely in the shape of a house.
Morgan and I merged flashlight beams with Elise, hoping, I guess, that more light might help us find some kind of landmark. But Elise was wandering around aimlessly, spinning like a top that was running out of inertia.
“Is this it?” she said, breathless and impatient, finally coming to a stop in front of a spot that hadn’t been cleared away yet. There was no house left to speak of, but plenty of broken b
ricks, some twisted pipes, and a bunch of wood half buried in the mud.
I shined my flashlight on a nearby tree. “That sort of looks familiar,” I tried. “Couldn’t you see that from your bedroom window?”
She started to cry.
Morgan rushed to her, held her. Then they were both crying, shaking.
I hung back, continuing to look around with my flashlight, a cramp tightening in my stomach. I didn’t want Elise to be upset. I didn’t want her to have to see her house destroyed. I wanted to reverse the whole night, this whole idea, and go back to when Elise first brought it up. I should have pushed way harder for hotel swimming.
I felt my phone buzz in my pocket. It was a text from Jesse to a huge list of phone numbers, including mine.
He’d sent a video of himself, in nothing but a pair of soccer shorts, careening down a Slip ’N Slide while holding a beer, and he managed not to spill a single drop. He was in front of the old mill, down near the river. The person taking the video was laughing so hard, a hearty boy laugh, probably Zito. When he reached the end of the Slip ’N Slide, Jesse pointed at the camera and shouted like a general rallying his troops, “School’s canceled for the rest of the week! We can sink, or we can Slip ’N Slide! Who’s with me?”
It struck me then, a thing Jesse and I had in common. We both would do whatever it took to make people happy, to keep them smiling. And everyone needed that now more than ever.
The girls looked up at the sound of his voice.
I was going to wait until Elise had finished crying, but I held up my phone. “Apparently there’s a Slip ’N Slide party going on at the mill tonight.”
Elise wiped her eyes. “Oh yeah?” She didn’t sound that excited about it, but she and Morgan cuddled around me and I replayed the video. This time, they chuckled and sniffed back their tears.
“What do you say we drown our sorrows in cheap beer?”
Elise wrapped her arms around herself. “Is that even safe? To be that close to the river?”
“It’s got to be. I mean, Jesse is crazy, but he’s not that crazy. And it might be good to be around other people right now.”
I made sure to say it gently, because it was up to Elise.
If it had been up to me . . . well, it really wasn’t even a choice.
16
* * *
Tuesday, May 17
Clouds clearing in the late evening, dropping to a low of 50°F
* * *
The ride over to the mill was painfully quiet. Morgan had the radio going, but the volume was turned so low, you couldn’t really hear what song was on. Elise stared out the window. She opted for the backseat.
“If it’s not fun, we can totally leave,” I said. I really wasn’t being selfish. I wasn’t even thinking about Jesse Ford. I turned around to face Elise. “Whenever you decide you’re ready to go, we’ll go.” I meant it 1,000 percent.
“Okay,” she said, and managed a smile. “Thanks, Keeley.”
Morgan glanced across the car at me. “Are you excited to see Jesse?”
I didn’t feel like I could say yes, not with what Elise was going through. But I was. “I’m more excited that we’re finally going to a party at the mill.”
The mill was our high school’s backup party spot. By that, I mean it was a place people went to drink when they couldn’t find another place.
You didn’t have to be invited. Anyone could just show up, after a football game or on a random summer night. It was mostly upperclassmen, and of course, the rare freshman or sophomore who might be hooking up with someone older.
It wasn’t our scene. We rarely went to parties in Aberdeen. In fact, the three of us had had our first drinks only a few months ago, when Elise invited Morgan and me to go to midnight Mass on Christmas Eve with some of her old friends from Saint Ann’s. Turns out midnight Mass is the ultimate tailgating party for teenage Catholics. Everyone met up in the Saint Ann’s parking lot. The church was a half-block away, but you could hear the choir singing hymns.
The kids who came had stolen some kind of alcohol from whatever family holiday party they’d been attending. It was the most random assortment of booze. I drank way too much Peppermint Schnapps and puked in the bushes underneath the kindergarten classroom windows. Not my finest moment.
That was also, coincidentally, the night Morgan first met Wes. He was a friend of a boy Elise knew.
Morgan liked him right away, I could tell. Of all the boys who were hanging out, throwing snowballs at each other, bouncing from car to car to car to keep warm, clinking beer bottles, she stayed focused on him, smiling like a goofball every time he’d say something. Which wasn’t often. The kid was super-shy. He nursed one beer all night. I noticed that he had a habit of checking to make sure the tails of his scarf were of equal length and lying flat against his coat.
I knew Morgan wanted to talk to him, but she usually needed a push from Elise. And Elise was too busy catching up with her old friends to notice. So I grabbed Morgan’s hand and walked over to Wes and started complimenting him on his ugly Christmas sweater, even though it wasn’t an ugly Christmas sweater, it was just a normal sweater. By this point, I was already pretty buzzed.
It worked, though. I made the joke and Morgan immediately jumped to his defense. “I like his sweater!” she said, swatting me with her mitten. And Wes, blushing, groaned out a “Thank you,” which I interpreted at the time to be said faux-indignantly, but I now understood was just indignantly.
Wes probably hated me from that first moment, even though there wouldn’t have been a first moment if it hadn’t been for me.
Morgan pulled into the mill parking lot, a crumbling pad of concrete where the parking lines had long faded away and tufts of grass and weeds sprouted between the cracks. There were tons of other cars already there, as if our whole high school was meeting up tonight.
“Cabin fever, I bet,” I said as we climbed out. We snaked our way between parked cars and then along a chain-link fence until we found a rip to sneak through.
There were a couple of different ways to get inside the mill, but that night most people were using an old truck bay with a metal garage door that had been raised. Jesse had set up the Slip ’N Slide a few feet away in a patch of muddy grass, a bright yellow rectangle of plastic, but no one was taking a ride.
I imagined when people came to the mill they had to be quiet and inconspicuous, in case a cop drove by. I guess people already felt the end coming, because no one seemed to care about keeping it down. There was a fire going in a circle of bricks, people smoking and laughing and drinking beers right there in the open, legs swinging on the open loading dock. It looked like a beach party on a cool summer night.
The floodwater had mostly receded, but you could tell it had been pretty deep here at the worst of it because of the puddles and the debris and the mud it had left behind. The river was just across the parking lot. I saw what was left of our sandbag wall. It had been a perfectly constructed thing, but now the bags had toppled over, split open, and spilled out. The river was black, all except for the little whitecaps where it rushed over some sunken thing.
We climbed inside the truck bay and headed into a cavernous room. There was water on the floor, but people had thrown down old boards or ripped pieces of Sheetrock from the walls to make planks to walk on. I’d always wondered how it worked, since there was no electricity in the mill. But people had brought flashlights and lanterns and someone even had battery-powered floodlights like the police had used at Spring Formal when the power went out.
We walked in completely covered in mud, the three of us. People turned to look at us. Elise whimpered a few times, like she was about to break down. I grabbed her hand and gave it a squeeze and she nodded and said, “Don’t worry. I’m okay.”
A bunch of other juniors came over to say hello. Clearly word had spread that her family had lost everything. Elise gladly accepted their hugs, their pats on the back. Morgan turned to me and smiled, like I’d done something good.
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I really loved that look.
“Keeley!”
Jesse walked toward us. He was now wearing a pair of brown cargo shorts, an Aberdeen soccer sweatshirt, and a pair of army-green galoshes. He had a cluster of beer bottles in his hands and offered me one.
“Thanks,” I said, smiling graciously. Morgan gave me an excited look, too excited, but she immediately ushered Elise away to give us a minute to talk.
Jesse reached out and scratched away some dried mud from my arm, as if we regularly touched each other. I probably should have been born in Victorian times, because these tiny touches were doing huge things inside me. “What have you been up to?”
“We went to check out Elise’s house. It was crazy. Like, you couldn’t even tell where it had been. It was just gone.”
“Bummer,” he said. Which did, I guess, cover it.
“So where did you come up with the idea to throw a Slip ’N Slide party?”
“Umm . . . when I dropped my mom off at Walmart this afternoon and saw they had Slip ’N Slides on sale.” He spread his legs apart so he’d be less tall and could look me in the eyes. “Couldn’t resist. Plus, I just needed to get out of my house.”
“How’s your sister doing?” I couldn’t imagine how a kid Julia’s age would process what was happening.
“She’s good. We’ve been having a ton of fun together.” His answer was so breezy, I figured he didn’t get what I’d meant by the question. He scanned the room, tipped his beer bottle to his lips. “Where are your friends at?”
I pointed. Jesse walked over, me following closely behind. He passed out the rest of the beers he was carrying and the girls smiled. And then he kicked three boys off the milk crates they were sitting on so we could sit down. It was a glimpse at what having Jesse as a real-deal boyfriend might be like. He’d definitely be the kind your friends would be charmed by, who knew how to be cool and friendly and fun.
We cheersed and took big fat sips.
And then a devious smile crossed his face. “All right. Let’s get down to business. Which one of you is going to take a run on the Slip ’N Slide to pay for these beers?” My friends and I turned to each other. “It doesn’t matter that our little corner of the world is sinking. You are still underclassmen, got it?”