Tighter (Page 23)

“My friend Maggie and I were goofy kids, too,” I confessed. “In fact, Isa and Milo seem fairly normal, considering the circumstances.”

“Uh-oh.” Emory’s perfect eyebrows angled skeptically. “Milo’s back?”

I nodded. “He left camp early. It’s no big deal. We hardly ever see him. Honestly, it’s a good thing. It makes Isa happy to have her big brother again. Obnoxious as he can be.”

Emory primmed up her mouth as she shook her head. Not a Milo fan, either. “Yeah, sure, right. She used to try to make me play tennis with him. For me, Milo’s always been a pest who’s best left ignored. You’re cool to handle it.”

“Not everyone would,” said Aidan, his leg a sudden, intimate pressure against mine; it startled me. “But then again, you’ve got a lot of Jessie’s light.”

“Aidan, c’mon, you’re such a flirt. Don’t scare the girl,” said Emory. Her voice had gone tense with disapproval.

She didn’t know the half of it. Or maybe she did. The look she gave me was complex: a flash of female-to-female understanding that was just as quickly weighted with frustration, and then defaulted back to cool-girl indifference.

Quickly I slid a couple of inches away from Aidan. Even though it nudged me closer to Sebastian, who was getting a lot of breathy laughs out of Lizbeth. They’d been talking a long time. Were they going out? What was the deal? I couldn’t get a handle on it.

Worse than this, though, was my creeping-crawling realization that something strange was happening to me. A fuzz in my vision, and the unreasonable sense that I was five seconds behind every joke. As I laughed and sipped my drink and tried to appear as comfortable and appropriate as I could, I’d started to panic. My fingers squeezed the skin of my upper thigh, as if I could pinch myself back into my senses.

“Everything good?” Sebastian asked as he finally turned.

“Uh-huh.” But when I blinked, his face became a double image, two pairs of eyes peering at me intently as a blackbird and wasn’t that a dainty dish to set before the king.

“You sure?”

“Mmm.” I thought of Sebastian flying out of a pie and I wanted to laugh. But that wasn’t funny. Something was wrong. I looked around the table. Voices were gummy vowels. Mouths appeared cavernous, and the collection of skulls on the table had come to life, eyeless eyes on me, trembling in a disembodied dance.

Which pill had I chosen? What was I drinking? Idiot idiot idiot.

“ ’Scuse me,” I mumbled as I stood up. Tried not to make eye contact with Sebastian, or anyone else, as I swerved back into the club. My hand trailing the wall for support, until I managed to find the restroom. It was packed, fluorescent, too much.

I veered out again, my hand on the wall.

What had I taken? Not a sleeping pill. And yet I felt a chilling certainty that, yes, a sleeping pill was exactly what I’d swallowed. I remembered the last time I’d worn this sundress, about a month ago, during a drive-by of my parents’ bathroom. I’d sneaked out a sleeping pill from Mom’s supply. Hoarded it as ammunition against the next roaming, restless night.

Maybe I could stick my finger down my throat and vomit it up? I’d never done anything like that before. My relationship with food was normal—the whole freshman-year faux-bulimia craze had passed me by entirely.

But the air was too stuffy for me to think, and I was getting nauseous—with apprehension? From the pill?

If this pill was potentially going to mess me up, I needed to bust out some decisions, fast.

“Jamie?” Sebastian had come out of nowhere. “You all right? I came to find you.”

“I am, thanks. Something I drank. Must’ve gone down the wrong way.” I propped a shoulder against the wall. “And it’s just too, um, crowded in the girls’.”

“We’re right on the dunes, you know.” Sebastian swept out his hand. “Nature’s call can take you to nature. Come on. Outside. I’ll stand watch.”

“Oh.” He’d laced my fingers through his. “Okay.”

With Sebastian leading, we sneaked out a side exit and into the night, meandering along the boardwalk to where the dunes lumped across the starry horizon.

“Up there.” He pointed. “But I’ll stand guard down here. Watch out for pincer crabs.”

I stopped.

“Kidding, I kid.” He smiled. “You’re cute when you’re scared.”

“I was thinking … you’re cute when you smile.”

“We’re a pair of cuties, huh.” He gave me a nudge. “Holler if you need me.”

I knew he could tell that my equilibrium was off. But I stepped forward, pigeon-toed and buckle-kneed, through the sand. As the cool air flowed into my lungs and over my skin, my nausea eased. Throw up, no. But pee, oh yes. Though under normal circumstances, the idea of squatting so near a cute guy, in an open space, would have sent me up a tree with anxiety. On the other hand, these were not normal circumstances. I’d never tried to stay awake on sleeping pills before. It didn’t feel good. Not at all.

Mission accomplished, I picked my way back toward Sebastian, nearly falling on him. His hand shot out to steady me.

“Careful. Looks like you’ve got a minor balance issue.”

“Maybe slightly.”

“Want to stay out here a minute? We can check the horizon for pirate ships.”

“Sure.” I gulped oxygen and didn’t give in to the hazy, addled impulse to rest my hand on one of Sebastian’s muscle-knotted quadriceps.

The last time I’d sat so intentionally close to a male was when Sean Ryan and I had met at Maggie Moo’s for sundaes. We hadn’t called it a date. But we’d sat close, on that bench, in that mall, on the other side of town. It had meant something no it hadn’t forget it forget it forget it.

“You’re looking at me funny.”

“Sorry.” I felt terribly, tremendously bashful. “Didn’t mean to.”

“You sure you’re doing okay?” Sebastian let his hand rest a moment on my shoulder.

“Uh-huh.” Change subjects. “So, are you a lifer or a local?” I asked.

“Guess.”

“Local?”

“Reason?”

I considered it. “Somehow I don’t see you as a golf caddy or a tennis coach. In the perfect shorts and perfect pair of sunglasses.”

Sebastian laughed. “Good call. Yep, I’m a local boy, born and raised in Bly. As for a summer job, you’ll find me six days a week busting my butt down at Sunrise Dry Cleaners—my parents own it. It’s real money, and I need it. I’ve got a scholarship to Yale to study drama that pays exactly one dollar more than not being able to swing it at all. Which I’ve heard is how most scholarships tend to work.”