Sabrina Choudhury and Tobyhanna Mlynarczyk had come up to me my first day of third grade at Stanwich Elementary, where I was sitting alone at recess, trying to understand the weird game that was being played with a big rubber ball. They hadn’t played anything like that at Canfield Prep, where I’d transferred from after a poll showed that people—and the teachers’ union—didn’t like my dad sending his daughter to a private school. I was feeling like I’d landed in a foreign country, when suddenly there were two girls sitting on my bench, one on either side of me. They had been Bri-and-Toby even then, talking over each other, trying to get me to settle an argument about which member of the boy band of the moment was the cutest one. Apparently, I’d picked the right answer—Wade, the one neither of them thought was the cute one—because from that moment on they’d been my friends. Palmer and I became friends when I’d moved down the street from her when I was twelve, and when ninth grade started, she’d talked her parents into letting her switch from Stanwich Country Day to the public high school. When Palmer met Toby and Bri, they all got along right away, and from then on it was like we’d become the unit we were always meant to be.
“I appreciate it,” I said, grabbing Bri’s outstretched hand and pulling myself up from the floor and onto the seat next to her. I brushed some dirt off my jeans, very glad I hadn’t worn anything white tonight. “But I’m telling you, I’m fine.”
“We don’t believe you,” Toby said, looking at me through the mirror as she started doing her lips.
“Can I borrow that?” I asked, and Toby nodded and handed her lipstick to me. “Look,” I said, leaning over Toby to get a sliver of mirror. “It has nothing to do with me. It’s my dad’s thing. He’s going to sort it out.”
“But what if he doesn’t?” Palmer asked, her voice gentle.
“Then he’ll take one of the private-sector jobs he’s always being offered,” I said as I concentrated on getting the line of my lips even. “Or he’ll lecture for a while, or go back to being a lawyer, and then he’ll run again.” My dad not being in politics was nearly impossible to picture—it was intrinsic to who he was. “But nothing’s changed for me. I’m still going to my program, and when I get back, things will be settled.” I capped the lipstick and handed it back to Toby. “We ready to go?”
“Okay, Type A,” Toby said as she zipped up her makeup bag. I rolled my eyes at her in the mirror before Toby flipped the visor back up. “What?” she asked, shooting me a grin. “It’s from your name. That’s all.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, raising an eyebrow at her, but not disputing that it was true. So what if I liked to be in control of things? Someone had to be, after all. We piled out of the van, and I looked around, reorienting myself.
“Whose house is this again?” Toby asked. She straightened the skirt she’d changed into on the drive—I had heard the debate about what to wear, but she’d ignored my shouted-through-the-blanket opinions, even though I knew exactly what clothes she was talking about without being able to see them.
“Kevin Castillo’s,” I said immediately. It was the first question I’d asked when Palmer had started telling me the plan. I’d been to parties at his house before, which always made me feel a little better. In a new house, I was always looking for exits and escape routes, in case they became suddenly necessary.
“Which means it’s going to be good,” Palmer said, raising an eyebrow at me. “Remember the party he had in March?”
“Vaguely,” I said, starting to smile, recalling an hours-long quarters game and all of us ending up at the diner at four a.m., ordering plates of fries and laughing too loud.
“Where’s the house?” Bri asked, and I pointed down the street.
“That way,” I said.
Palmer nodded. “Like half a mile.” Toby sighed and reached down to take off her wedges, but didn’t complain. All of us knew the drill. And tonight, especially, not getting caught was crucial.
I’d been to only one party where it had happened. It was freshman year, and it was only the second real high school party I’d ever been to, and I was still thrilled and excited to be there. We were only there because Palmer’s brother Josh, who was a senior, had been invited. He’d agreed to let us come if he could disavow all knowledge of us if anyone got mad that freshmen were there. I was drinking a beer from a red Solo cup, like an idiot—I hadn’t yet learned any of the tricks I’d later need to employ at parties—when the red and blue lights streamed in through the living room window, bathing everyone in color. For a second the entire party seemed to freeze, but then everyone was in motion, running in a hundred directions, for cars or hiding places, just trying not to get caught. The excitement of being at a senior’s party had been eclipsed utterly by a wave of fear so all encompassing I started shaking. If I were caught at a party, drinking underage, it would be very, very bad for my father.
I hadn’t gotten caught—I’d been yanked out of harm’s way at the last moment. But that close call had been more than enough to scare me. My friends knew now that I wouldn’t go to a party that looked like a target, and I had all sorts of techniques for staying under the radar once we got to the party. And even now, as we walked in a single-file line along the side of the road, I could feel myself on high alert, looking around to make sure there weren’t too many cars parked along the road, nobody looking too long at us, nothing that might give us away. I didn’t even want to think what it would do to the story if, on today of all days, I was caught at a party. It would be like pouring gasoline on a forest fire.
We’d been walking in silence for a few moments when Toby cleared her throat. “Guys,” she said, her tone grave. “At the party tonight, something has to happen. This is when the curse gets broken. Because I refuse to spend another summer without a boyfriend.”
“I’ll be your wingwoman,” Palmer volunteered immediately. “We can totally make this happen.”
“No,” Toby said firmly. “You’re fired from ever being my wingwoman again. Last time you tried, everyone asked you out, and Tom got really mad at me.”
Palmer opened her mouth to protest this, and I just shook my head. “Toby has a point, P.”
“It’s not your fault you’re a blonde,” Bri added. I laughed as Palmer’s expression turned from disgruntled to embarrassed. Palmer was beautiful, though she seemed to have absolutely no understanding of this fact. She had long, thick blond hair that would be four shades lighter by the end of the summer. She was a head shorter than me, and whip-thin, with the ability to eat us all under the table, and she seemed to laugh more than most people. You wanted to spend more time with Palmer the second you met her.
“I’ll take over wingwoman duties,” I said. “What do you want me to look for? Are you still into the floppy-haired thing?”
“I honestly don’t care about looks.” Toby said, her voice wistful. “I’ll look across a room, the crowds will part, there he’ll be . . . and I’ll know.” Bri, Palmer, and I exchanged looks, but nobody said anything. We each had something that was off-limits for teasing, and love was Toby’s.
She’d had the misfortune of growing up with a babysitter who regularly brought DVDs of romantic comedies with her whenever she sat for Toby. Toby had eaten them up, and so, from a much-too-young age, she was watching Julia Roberts bargain with Richard Gere and lose her heart in the process. She was watching Meg Ryan scrunch up her nose before bursting into tears and Bridget Jones run through the snowy London streets looking for Mark Darcy. When Toby wasn’t around, the three of us talked about it all the time—how this had warped her perception of romance forever. She now expected what she’d grown up seeing—that was what she thought love would be like. She expected guys to lift boom boxes outside her house and talk in declarations about what they loved best about her and she was always—though she denied it—trying to turn Bri into her plucky sidekick.
I had tried to tell her, over and over, that romance in real life was nothing like the movies and that you shouldn’t want it to be. That, really, all
you needed was a guy who was a blast to hang out with, a great kisser, someone to have fun with. None of the rest of us expected movie-love. Palmer and Tom were practically married, and Bri tended to date seniors for three or four months at a time. But Toby wanted her happily ever after, her last-minute chase to the airport, her declaration of love. Which was why, I was pretty sure, she’d never had a real boyfriend. She approached every guy wondering if he was the end of her romantic comedy, which invariably freaked them out.
“Just . . . maybe don’t put so much pressure on it,” I said, choosing my words carefully. “Maybe just have fun?”
“Easy for you to say, Andie,” Toby scoffed. “You always have a boyfriend.”
“Not at the moment,” Palmer pointed out.
“But most of the time,” Bri jumped in, backing up Toby as usual. “Like, what, sixty percent of the time?”
“More like seventy-five,” Toby countered.
“Poor Zach,” said Palmer with an exaggerated sigh. “I liked him.”
“We should really stop learning their names,” Bri said, deadpan, and Toby grinned.
“Totally,” she said. “It’ll make things easier. I’ll just give the next one a nickname.”
“Funny.” I tried to look at her sternly, but gave up after a minute and started to laugh. The thing was, they weren’t wrong. They would tease me like this after most of my breakups, calling me a serial heartbreaker. But it wasn’t intentional—it was just the way it always unfolded. First I’d get a crush on someone. This could, in truth, last much longer than the actual dating-the-guy part of things. I wouldn’t be able to think about anything else, I’d talk about him constantly, I’d spend way too long getting ready, just in case I saw him. Then we’d start going out—and usually, the first week or so was great. Lots of making out, lots of butterflies in my stomach, lots of giddiness and hand-holding and endless conversations, either in person or on the phone late at night. But, inevitably, after the third week rolled around, he would start wanting more, and I would start getting antsy. Whether it was physical or emotional, it was always more than I felt comfortable with. I could never understand when guys wanted to talk to you about your feelings. That was what my friends were for. Why was it impossible to keep things easy? Light, fun, not too serious, and nothing more than kissing.
At any rate, three weeks seemed to be about as long as this had ever been able to last. Whenever my friends brought it up, I pointed to my relationship with Travis Friedman, which had lasted five weeks and change, but I was always told this didn’t count, because two of those weeks were over winter break. But this was the way I liked things. I ended it (or he did), I had a few weeks’ getting over it and listening to lots of girl-power music and eating ice cream, and then, before too long, I’d start to crush on someone new and would begin the whole cycle over again. It worked for me. And honestly, I’d never understood the point of getting too serious with anyone you met in high school. It was high school. Best to keep it light and date seriously in college or med school, with people who were actually going to end up mattering.
“Wait a sec. Why are you even scoping out prospects?” Palmer asked, turned her head to look back at Toby. “What about Wyatt?”
Toby shook her head. “He’s not back in town yet.”
“He might be,” Bri said. “I saw he posted a picture yesterday that looked like downtown.”
“Wait, what?” Toby asked as she stopped short, nearly causing a pileup as she dug in her purse for her phone and then frantically started scrolling through it. “That should have been the lead item! Why didn’t you guys tell me?”
“I didn’t know,” I said, holding up my hands and giving her a don’t blame me face.
Wyatt Miller went to boarding school in Massachusetts during the year, but his family lived here in Stanwich, and he came back for summers. We’d met him last year when he’d been working the beach concession stand, and started giving us free fries and unlimited soda refills. We’d all started hanging out—Wyatt and my summer boyfriend, Nick, had gotten along really well—and it hadn’t taken Toby long to develop a massive crush on him. He’d still been with his girlfriend from boarding school then, so nothing happened over the summer. But when Toby saw that they’d broken up right around Valentine’s Day, she was sure that her moment had arrived. She’d asked him to our junior prom and was thrilled when he accepted—even though he kept making it very clear that they were just going as friends. At the after-party, when I’d been breaking up with my date—I hadn’t loved prom—Toby and Wyatt had tipsily made out. Toby was sure this was proof of his feelings for her, despite all of us gently—and then not so gently—telling her that it was probably just the effect of Jägermeister and power ballads. Toby had tried to keep things going when he went back to boarding school, but Wyatt had reverted to treating Toby the way he treated all of us—totally platonically.
“Oh my god, I think you’re right,” Toby said, squinting at the brightness of the screen in the darkness, her voice rising with every word. “Why hasn’t he gotten in touch? Oh my god!”
“Shh,” I said, glancing around, not wanting to draw any more attention to us than we had to.
Toby nodded, then looked back at her phone. “Oh my god,” she said again, in a whisper this time.
“Okay,” Palmer said, stopping in front of a white house that I was relieved to see looked like any other house on the block, no sign of a party unless you were really paying attention to what kind of music you could hear faintly coming from it. “Are we ready? Andie?” I nodded and reached into my purse, then handed over my bottle of Diet Coke—three-quarters full—to her. “Any preferences?”
“Anything but brandy,” I said, making a face. “That did not mix well.”
Palmer nodded and led the way into the house. I knew Kevin enough to nod at in the halls, but I didn’t think I’d ever actually had a conversation with him, so I was happy to let Palmer go first. I heard Bri and Toby laugh about something as I followed Palmer inside. I looked around and realized it was like pretty much every other party I’d been to. There were groups of people standing around talking or lounging on the couch, and the dining room table had been commandeered for what looked like a pretty major game of beirut. The kitchen counter was covered with bottles and mixers and a half-filled blender, and through the open doors to the patio, I could see a keg. The people who always headed to the edges of people’s yards to smoke were smoking, and I could already see two people standing in the shadows of the living room, talking close, only minutes away from starting to hook up.
Palmer headed directly to the liquor bottles, and Toby and Bri headed outside to the keg as I scanned the room. I hadn’t texted him that I was coming, but I had a feeling he might be here. From what I’d heard, he and his last girlfriend had ended things around when I’d dumped Zach, meaning we would both be unattached at the same time, which hadn’t happened in a while. I was about to give up looking inside and see if he was by the keg when a girl I recognized from my AP Chem class stepped aside. And there he was, leaning against the kitchen counter, looking bored. Topher Fitzpatrick.
My pulse kicked up, the way it always did when I saw him. I took him in for a moment longer, since I was sure he hadn’t spotted me yet. There was a petite girl talking to him. I didn’t recognize her, and she was laughing, smiling up at him while he gave her a smile she probably thought was genuine, and an invitation to keep talking. I knew better. But then, by this point, I probably knew him better than most people.
He looked away for a second, scanning the room, and his eyes met mine. I held his gaze for just a second, but it was enough to know my evening had just taken a turn for the better.
“Here,” Palmer said as she appeared at my elbow with the Diet Coke bottle, the top firmly on. “It’s rum. I mixed it up.”
“Thank you,” I said, giving her a smile as I took the bottle. It was the only way I let myself drink at parties. If any pictures from the night got posted, the only thing I would b
e drinking, or even holding in my hand, was a Diet Coke. I knew only too well that all it would take was someone’s cell phone picture on their profile, with a picture of me in the background, holding a beer or even a glass with liquid in it that couldn’t be identified, and suddenly it would be a story. I unscrewed the cap and took a long drink, feeling the kick of the rum.
“Oh, look who’s here,” Palmer said flatly, her eyes straying to the kitchen. She sighed and looked at me. “Andie.”
“I know.” Topher was still talking to the petite girl as he drank from a Sprite bottle that I would bet money didn’t just contain Sprite—after all, he was the one who’d taught me well.
“What?” Toby asked as she joined us, sipping a beer that appeared to be mostly foam. Toby had never been great at tapping kegs. She followed Palmer’s glance and then looked at me. “The Gopher surfaces?”
“Stop it,” I said.
“You know we don’t approve,” Palmer said in her best serious voice.
I nodded. “Noted.” I’d given up defending Topher to them years ago. He could be charming when he wanted to be; he just never seemed to want to be around my friends.
“Speak for yourself,” Toby said, taking another long drink. “I think it’s romantic. Like Harry and Sally, circling around each other until they can admit how they feel.”
Palmer shook her head. “I really don’t think that’s what’s happening here.”
“Well, what do you know?” Toby retorted.
“I know you have foam on your nose,” Palmer replied.
“Goddamn it,” Toby muttered as she wiped it off.
“What’s going on?” Bri asked, joining us, holding a cup of her own. She followed Toby’s nod and then turned to me, shaking her head. “Andie.”
“I heard it all from them already,” I said, swirling the contents of my Diet Coke bottle for a second before taking a quick sip.
“Hey,” Toby said, flicking me on the arm. “Wingwoman. You’re falling down on the job.”