37
Dinner is strained, and wegather around a bonfire for s’mores afterward. Seating is trickier than usual. I don’t usually bother with seating for something like a bonfire—even I’m not that big of a control freak—but then, we’ve never been on the brink of a serious group implosion with multiple forces of massive pressure acting upon us.
There’s a first time for everything.
I end up placing Emily next to Mila, next to Ryan, across from me, next to Chelsea, next to Chase. That way Emily is farthest from me, and Chase is farthest from Ryan. And, though it’s getting pretty damn half-hearted on my part, Emily is across from Chase, and Mila is next to Ryan. So if there’s still some remote cosmic possibility that Chase and Emily are meant to be together, let there be magic tonight. It’s not really about that, though. It’s the gesture. The peace offering.
Because if peace isn’t restored soon, what then?
Chase starts the night off with a toast, short and sweet. “To friends, old and new.”
We clink branches, and the chill begins to settle like a slow, creeping dread.
I pull my sweater closer around me and gaze aroundanxiously, but the night is a beautiful sunset haze. “Tell us a story, Chase.”
He lights up. Chase is full of stories, most of them true. Things just happen to him. He’ll stroll into the grocery store and run into a celebrity, or stumble onto a movie set on a morning jog and be recruited as an extra. Once he sat on a bus for an hour chatting with a man, only to realize after he got off that it was Stephen King.
“Okay,” he says, breaking his bar of chocolate into precise little squares. “I’ve been saving this one.”
Emily twists her hair over her shoulder and leans on her elbow. “Do tell.”
Ryan catches Chelsea’s eye over the fire and rolls his eyes, and she hides a smirk behind her hand. But she looks tired. Maybe a little sad. I squeeze her hand and she squeezes mine back.
Chase swallows a square of chocolate and then looks around the circle. “I’ve told you about the hunting cabin up in Phoenicia, right?” He launches into a ghost story, obviously 100 percent pure, unadulterated bullshit. Chase’s parents and mine go back to the days before Chase and I were born. I know him better than anyone else sitting in this circle. And Chase doesn’t believe in ghosts or know anything about them. This house is too full to just ignore them. If you spend a night in the lake house and don’t see a ghost, it’s because you can’t see them, and you never will.
Emily squeals and grabs his arm, and Mila glares at her openly. I don’t blame her.
Ryan cuts him off halfway through the story. “Let me guess. The brother did it.”
Chase lifts his glass. “You’ve been reading my diary, you scoundrel.”
Ryan averts his eyes. I guess the “talking shit out” didn’t go particularly well. I rise to clean up, but Chelsea tugs me down by the sleeve.
Here’s what’s messed up about this whole situation. Everyone’s acting like nothing’s wrong, and at the same time, they’re sending out major signals that something really bad is about to happen. Not otherworldly bad. Living bad. It feels like the night before a battle. If you didn’t know us and you dropped in, you wouldn’t notice a thing. You’d see Chase telling one of his epic stories and Emily and Mila listening like an onstage Greek chorus. Ryan and Chelsea trading knowing looks back and forth over the fire. Me, nodding and smiling, keeping up the conversation, asking questions where appropriate to show that I’m engaged, offering more chocolate and graham crackers at intervals, catching crumbs before they fall.
But it’s all wrong.
It’s supposed to be Ryan and Chase having an animated discussion, or Chase telling the anecdotes and Ryan constantly interrupting him, not letting him get away with embellishments. Chelsea, Emily, and I discussing the evening plans. And Mila. Mila isn’t even supposed to be here.
I blink back to reality, and Chase is already on to another story, really putting on a show without Ryan to keep him in check, and after a while I wonder whether it’s to get Ryan’s attention. “So the tire’sshredded, the bus is blocking two of the lanes, and we have no way of getting to the game or home. One hour from the game, three hours from home, nobody’scoming to get us. Farmland all around, as far as the eye can see. Semifinals. We gear up, divide into two groups, and play our own game, right there on the cornfield.”
“Wow,” Emily says, her eyes shining.
“That just shows so much spirit.” Mila takes a sip of her wine.
“Well, I mean, some of the guys wanted to give up.” Chase takes a bite of his double-decker s’more, his specialty.
I glance at Ryan, wondering if it’s a dig at him. He’s on the lacrosse team. I wasn’t listening to the first half of the story. But Ryan doesn’t react. He’s using one of my father’s knives to sharpen the end of his roasting stick. Ishouldtell him that the knife has been used to scale hundreds upon hundreds of fish, that it’s the last flavor you’d want to infuse into a chocolate-marshmallow dessert. But I pettily want to see if he notices.
“That’s unfortunate,” Mila says. “Spirit is kind of my thing. Obviously. It can literally change a tragedy to an uplifting story.” She gestures to him, and Emily snorts into her lemonade. I frown at her. This is going too far. Mila looks at her for a moment, and her demeanor completely transforms. It’s absolutely stunning. For just a split second, she looks older. Cool, confident, disdainful. But it melts in an instant and she turns back to Chase. “When something bad happens, youcanlet it ruin your day. Or you can use your spirit to make something amazing.”
“Yeah, babe, that’s what I said.” Chase winks at her. “It was a little bit of a downer. We were short a couple of players—”
“I had a sprained neck.” Ryan slams his hand down on the table.
Chase laughs. “Whoa. I wasn’t specifically talking about you. Of course you couldn’t play. You had a sore neck.”
“Asprainedneck.”