“Ah,” he said, then took a bag of chips that still hadn’t been opened.
“Good, you learn fast,” I said.
“Too bad I’m a Cheez Doodle kind of guy.”
“Yeah, that is too bad,” I teased. “Because these are mine and they’re going to be delicious and—”
“Hiiiiiiiiiii!” Drew said, suddenly draping himself over both Oliver and me. “You made it!”
“It wasn’t exactly a treacherous drive,” I pointed out, then gave him an awkward one-arm hug while protecting my Cheez Doodles.
“Did you have to go into Caro and Heather’s bedroom?” Drew asked, and I nodded. “Then trust me, it was treacherous. But you survived. You’re here now! You’re alive!”
“It feels like everyone’s here,” Oliver commented as two people jostled past him.
“How drunk are you?” I asked Drew. “Here, have a Cheez Doodle.”
“He gets one?” Oliver cried.
“I get two,” Drew announced, then popped them into his mouth. “Sorry, dude, I live here. I get preferential treatment. And to answer your question, Ems, I am somewhere between that one bonfire last summer and that time that you and Caro and I went to Steve’s party before finals week.”
“So, kind of drunk but on your way to very, very drunk?”
He bopped my nose. “Exactly.” He let go of both of us to greet someone else. Oliver, sensing his opening, immediately dove for the Cheez Doodles.
“Hey!” I yelped. “You have tortilla chips!”
“They’re boring! And unsalted!” Oliver shook the bag in my face. “Besides, fake orange cheese is meant to be shared with friends.” He dug his hand into the bowl and ate a huge handful, then smiled at me with a huge, cheesy (no pun intended) grin.
“That is so gross,” I said, trying not to laugh and trying not to show how I didn’t think it was that gross at all, not really.
“Hey! Want some milk to wash those down?” Someone bumped into Oliver and I heard snickers over the music, which was suddenly loud and thumping and probably making the chandelier in the foyer dance on its axis.
Oliver swallowed quickly, then shook his head. “No, man, thanks. I’m good.”
The guy turned to me. “Hey, Emmy.”
I took a deep, inward breath. Brandon Mills. The last person I wanted to see at this party.
“Hey. This is Brandon,” I said to Oliver. “He went to our school, but he graduated last year.”
“We surf together,” Brandon added.
“I don’t think being in the Pacific Ocean at the same time counts as ‘surfing together,’” I said. “He goes to UC Santa Barbara,” I told Oliver. “Hopefully he’ll be going back there soon. Like, in the next ten minutes or so.”
“Aw, don’t be so jealous. Maybe one day you’ll be on the surf team, too.” Brandon tried to put his arm around my shoulders, but I shrugged him off. If I could, I would have shrugged him all the way out the front door and back up the coast.
Oliver was watching us both very carefully, his eyes shifting from me to Brandon and back to me. “Nice to meet you,” he finally said, even though his eyes were locked on mine.
“Hey, man, saw you on TV,” Brandon said, shaking his hand. Both of their grips looked tight. And painful. “Good interview.” He was still smiling, the way people smile when they want you to know that they’re talking shit about you, that they didn’t really see your television interview and don’t really care whether or not you’ve returned home after disappearing for ten years.
“Thanks.” Oliver sounded the same way that he had in the interview, clipped, not sure of the right words to say.
“So.” Brandon turned back to me. “Did Kane teach you any new moves? While I was away?”
“Oh, shut up, Brandon,” I said, rolling my eyes and taking Oliver’s arm to lead him away.
“What? It was just a question!” he yelled as we walked past, but he was laughing and so were a few other people in the kitchen.
“What was that?” Oliver asked. He was still holding the Cheez Doodles, bless him. “Are you friends with that guy?” The way he said “friends” made me think that he didn’t really mean “friends” at all.
“Um, absolutely not,” I said. “He’s just a douche bag. I mean, he’s in college but still goes to high school parties? It’s ridiculous. Where’s Caro? She always hangs out with the cool people.”
“Emmy!” Caro waved from the second-floor landing, a red cup already in her hand. “Wherefore art thou, Emmy?”
I waved at her, then looked at Oliver. “Do you know what we need?”
“A drink.”
I tapped my nose. “Bingo.”
A few hours later, the party had progressed (or de-gressed, depending on your point of view) nicely. And by that, I mean that I was drunk.
So was Oliver. So were Caro and Drew and pretty much every person I had seen since leaving Brandon behind. I was sticking to beer, but Caro and Drew were both doing shots and inventing some sort of complicated drinking game that involved a basketball, a feather duster, and some refrigerator magnets, and made no sense to anyone but them.
“You have to do the thing!” Caro screamed at him, waving the feather duster. “Shot!”
We had moved back down to the kitchen, but half the party was in the backyard, smoking weed and playing music. Someone had produced an acoustic guitar, as well, and there was an odd, drunken version of “Hotel California” being played.
“Ugh,” Caro said, dropping down onto my lap. I was sitting because, frankly, standing seemed too complicated. I had slumped into Oliver at some point, as well, his arm propping me up.
“Here,” Caro said, then put the feather duster on top of my head. “It’s a hat!”
“Why, thank you!” I said, then modeled it for her and Oliver. Drew was still kneeling on the ground, trying to figure out the magnets. “What do you think? Couture?”
“Ooh la la,” Oliver said. His words were a little sloshy, a nice change from earlier in the night. “You can wear it when you surf.”
“Impractical,” I told him, then plopped it down on his head. “It matches your eyes.”
“Picture! Picture!” Caro cried, then dug her phone out of her pocket and took a few staggered steps back. “Smile!”
We smiled. “Whoa, why is it—?” Caro squinted at the screen, then held it out in front of her. “I can’t tell if I’m blurry or if the picture’s blurry. And oh my God, who brought that goddamn guitar? I want to kill them. Do you know how you can tell who the douche bag is at the party? It’s the guy who starts playing the acoustic guitar.” She took the feather duster back from Oliver and jabbed it in the direction of the backyard. “Take that! And that!”
“Is it Brandon playing?” I asked her and she turned and pointed it at me.
“Oh God, probably. Brandon’s not even a douche bag. He’s a douche CANOE. A whole canoe, Emmy!” She sat back down in my lap and dropped the duster on the floor. Drew quickly snatched it up and took it back to the magnets. “Is he tripping or just really drunk?”
“He was hitting on Emmy,” Oliver said, his chin now resting in his hand.
Caro frowned. “Drew was?”
Drew just laughed from the floor, then started stacking the magnets.
“No,” Oliver said. “The douche canoe.”
“He was not!” I protested, trying to turn around, but my limbs were perfectly comfortable where they were and had no intention of moving.
“Oh, he totally was,” Caro said to Oliver. “I mean, I didn’t see it, but he always hits on her. What did he say to you that one time, Em?”
I reached for my beer, then took a sip and passed it to Caro. “‘You’re not like other girls,’” I said in my best dude-bro voice.
Oliver frowned a little. “Is that bad?” he asked. “I thought you were gonna say something way worse.”
“It’s bad!” Caro and I both screamed at the same time, then immediately jinxed and unjinxed each other, crossing our fin
gers and rapping our knuckles against the wooden table. “It’s just a stupid thing to say,” Caro added after we could both speak again.
“Like, what’s wrong with being like other girls?” I added. Just thinking about Brandon and his stupid comments was getting me riled up, killing my buzz, and I sat up from Oliver and immediately felt a little cold. “Why, because I surf? Plenty of girls surf. It’s not exactly a rare thing here. I’m not, like, this dinosaur fossil that he discovered. And girls are awesome! Caro’s a girl and she’s awesome.”
“I am.” Caro nodded to herself, then jabbed a thumb into her chest. “More people should be like me!”
“Agreed!” Drew announced from the floor. “Who are we talking about?”
“Brandon,” I told him.
Drew made a jerking-off motion. “That fucking acoustic guitar.”
“Right?” He and Caro high-fived.
Oliver was suspiciously quiet next to me, and when I finally turned my head to look at him, I realized that he was staring at all of us with the fondest look in his eyes. “I missed this,” he said.
“Missed what?” Caro said as Drew slid back to the floor, propping himself up on my and Caro’s legs.
“This,” Oliver said, waving his arm so that some beer sloshed out of the bottle and landed on the floor. “You guys. This.”
Drew, Caro, and I all exchanged glances. “Uh, dude, sorry to ruin your moment, but right now is not that great,” Drew said.
“Nope. We are incredibly, off-the-charts normal right now,” Caro slurred. “This party? All a terrible cliché.”
“Hey!” Drew yelped.
Caro gave him a peck on the cheek. “You know what I mean, lovebug.”
“I didn’t ever have normal,” Oliver said. “I mean, I thought I did, but now . . .” He shrugged a little. “I just wish I had known you all longer. All those years. Without the ten-year gap in the middle. It would have been nice.”
Caro stared at him a moment, then burst into tears.
“Oh, shit.” Oliver’s face, already solemn, immediately shifted to panic. “Caro, no. Oh God. What is she doing? Did I break her?”
Drew and I just shook our heads. “She always cries when she gets drunk,” Drew explained as he pulled Caro off my lap and down onto the floor with him.
“I can’t help it,” Caro wept, wiping at her eyes. “I’m tenderhearted! And this isn’t waterproof mascara. Fuck.”
“It would have been nice,” Drew told Oliver as I patted the top of Caro’s head and Drew passed her some napkins that looked . . . not very fresh. “But you’re back now, right? We get a do-over.”
“No, we don’t,” I said without thinking. (I don’t cry when I’m drunk, the way Caro does. I just talk.) “There’s no way to do over what happened. And even if there was, all of the pieces fit differently now. Oliver’s not the same person he was when he was kidnapped. I’m not the same person. None of us are. It’s not a do-over. It’s a start-over.”
“You can’t step in the same river twice,” Caro sniffled.
Drew just rolled his eyes, even as he continued handing her napkins. “Caro, we get it. You like The Great Gatsby. You don’t have to keep quoting it.”
“It’s not my fault I do the reading and you don’t!” she told him. “And it’s a classic line. Please educate yourself. And don’t cheat off of me, either.”
“It was ONE time!” Drew protested.
“I need some air,” I said, nudging Oliver with my elbow.
“Good call,” he said, then helped me stand up. I was drunk enough that it took my head an extra few seconds to catch up to my body, but once I was upright, walking wasn’t too difficult. Oliver took both of our beers in one of his hands, then used the other to steady me as we stepped over Drew and Caro (“Take a jacket,” Caro mumbled from the floor, her voice already starting to sound far away and sleepy) and made our way outside.
Brandon was still playing the acoustic guitar, strumming out Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” with a bit more competence than I expected from him, and I led Oliver through the shadows so we wouldn’t have to deal with him. One encounter with Brandon was enough to fill my quota for the next year.
“Here,” I said to Oliver, leading him toward a gazebo that Drew’s parents had built on their property soon after they bought the house. The wood was old now, the white paint starting to peel and revealing spots filled with dozens of potential splinters. “Drew and Caro and I used to have ‘secret meetings’ in here,” I told him, sitting down on the steps. “Though I don’t know how secret they were in a gazebo. Lots of potential for enemy surveillance and infiltration.”
Oliver smiled as he sat back down next to me, then handed me my beer. It was warm and flat, though, and didn’t taste as good as the ones at the beginning of the party had. “Can I ask you a question?” he said.
“Is that the question?” I nudged his shoulder when he raised an eyebrow at me. “I need a better audience for my sense of humor. And yeah, of course.”
He traced his thumb around the beer, wiping off the condensation in one clean stripe. “Why don’t you join the surf team?”
I blinked at him. “That’s your question?”
“Because you flinched when Brandon said that maybe one day you would. You’re good enough, right? It’s not a big secret or anything that you’re good. I bet you could make the team, no problem.”
“Dude, my parents. I told you, they’d freak out. Like, werewolves during a full moon freak out. And the surf team costs money. There’s fees, meets, equipment, signed permission slips. There’s no way. No.”
“But how do you know?”
“Look, Ollie, you don’t—” I started to say, but the look on his face stopped me. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“No, it’s just, no one’s called me Ollie in, like, forever.” He smiled a little.
“I was—I am—the only one who was allowed to call you that,” I told him. “I guess it’s still habit. Is that okay?”
“No, it’s fine, it’s fine. Sorry, go on.”
“You don’t know, okay? When you disappeared, my parents, they changed. They would’ve smothered me in Bubble Wrap if they could have.”
“Well, that wouldn’t have been very safe.”
“You know what I mean.” I nudged him with my knee.
“But they want you to be happy?”
“Yeah, I guess. But sometimes happiness means different things to different people. And if they found out and said I couldn’t do it anymore?” I shivered at the thought, the idea of not cutting through glassy water in the morning, not riding out the wave and having it take me somewhere that I didn’t know I could go, that first sweet gulp of air after wiping out and resurfacing. “Maybe when I go to college. Maybe then. I’ll be eighteen and I won’t be here anymore.”
“You won’t?” Oliver asked. Neither of us were looking at each other: he was pulling paint chips off the gazebo’s front step and I was plucking grass out of Drew’s parents’ immaculate lawn, one blade at a time. If the conversation kept going the way it was, we were going to cause some serious damage to the backyard.
“I, um, I actually applied to UC San Diego,” I said. “No one knows that, though. Not even my parents—or Caro and Drew.” Just saying the words out loud made my heart start to race. “They have a surf team. It’s like, second-in-the-nation good. And even if I don’t make it, I could still surf at Black’s Beach. That’s a good place to go. If I get in, I mean. I probably won’t, but if I do, then yeah.” I hugged my knees to my chest. “Don’t tell anyone. Okay?”
“I won’t tell,” Oliver promised, looking down at his lap. “I, um, I lied to my dad, too. About school.”
“You did?”
“Yeah. You know how they found my fingerprint in that forensic science class? I didn’t actually tell him that I was taking it. I signed up behind his back. It was a Saturday science class through this local college. He was always so weird about me doing things outsid
e of the house, so I just didn’t say anything. I forged his signature and I went.”
“You liked science so much that you were willing to give up your Saturdays?” I teased him. “Nerd alert.”
Oliver huffed out a little smile. “So now I’m home and it’s your turn to leave. I see how it is.”
“Oh, please.” I shoved at his arm. “It’s not like I’m going anywhere right now. We still get to have our do-over. I mean, our start-over.” I sprinkled a handful of grass over his shoes, then shivered again.
“Cold?” Oliver asked.
I wasn’t sure what I was. Yes, I was cold, my hair still damp from surfing and the sea air starting to creep over the hills and drift into the suburban yards. But it was his knee pressing against mine, the fact that neither of us moved away or acknowledged it, the warmth of his skin under his jeans and the way it felt so new and so familiar at the same time.
“Yeah,” I said. “Really cold.”
“Here.” He started to slip out of his hoodie.
“Is this new?” I asked him as I tugged it over my head, fixing the sleeves so that they came down past my fingertips.
“Yeah. My mom got it for me.”
She had bought it for him, bought it so he could fit in and look “cool,” bought it so he would talk to her and not hate her for taking ten years to find him.
I thought of Maureen watching Oliver walk up the front steps to school on his first day back, her face so tight and scared that it was hard not to feel the same way when you looked at her, and when I thought of my parents watching me the same way, I suddenly wanted to go back inside and cry on the floor with Caro.
Instead, I grabbed the strings and tightened the hoodie around my face so Oliver couldn’t see my eyes. It smelled like the twins’ shampoo again, but also like Oliver, soap and salt air and just him.
“You’re a weirdo,” he laughed, trying to pull the strings out of my hand so he could see my entire face. “You look like a hobbit.”
“It’s my disguise,” I told him, blinking fast to keep the tears at bay.
“Well, considering that I just gave it to you, it’s a pretty terrible disguise.” Oliver tugged at the strings again and this time I let him unravel them so the hoodie opened back up. The moment had passed and I was okay again.