I slither out of bed and army-crawl over to the light switch, reaching up and standing for a split second before I turn it off. When I get up the courage to sneak a glance outside again, this time under the cover of darkness, Bethany’s side of the creek is empty and deserted.
The party behind it rages on.
Ruoxi forbade me from going over to say goodbye because she’s heading out so early, which doesn’t stop me from hauling myself out of bed in the blue summer dawn and showing up at her front door with a London Fog—her favorite drink from Ground Up, which opens at six every morning to catch the beach jogger crowd.
I hand her the cup and take note of her smudgy eye makeup, bedhead, and the slight green pallor to her normally dewy cheeks. “So I take it you had a good time?” I tease.
Ruoxi sinks down on the front steps of her parents’ house instead of answering, easing the lid off her London Fog and taking a tentative sip. “Oh my God,” she moans, setting it down on the concrete beside her and burying her face in her knees. “Why is it so bright out?”
The sun is just barely peeking up over the edge of the lake, actually, but this doesn’t feel like the right moment to state the obvious. After a moment, Ruoxi hauls herself upright again, then immediately lets out a loud, wet-sounding belch. “Oh my God,” she says again, clapping a hand over her mouth. “I’m a monster. I am so sorry.” She offers me a sleepy smile. “Anyway, it was fun. There were like a hundred people there—including, as predicted, your boyfriend.”
I shake my head, leaving out the part where after last night he’s probably out filing a restraining order against me at this very moment. “He’s not my boyfriend,” I remind her. “He’s not my anything, actually.”
“Uh-huh.” Her eyes dart to me. “Carrie was there too.”
I’m quiet for a minute, the mention of Carrie’s name hitting me with the same weird pang of loneliness and regret it always does. “Oh,” I say finally. All through middle school, Carrie was the third leg of our tidy little equilateral triangle, the three of us completely inseparable until we got to ninth grade and everything changed. Or, more accurately: Carrie changed. “I mean, that makes sense, right? She and Bethany are, like, obsessed with each other.”
“Are they still?” Ruoxi asks, running her thumb over the lid of her coffee cup. “They weren’t really hanging out last night at all. Carrie was kind of keeping to herself, actually.”
“Huh.” I file that piece of information away for later. “Did you guys talk?” I ask. I don’t know if I’m hoping they did or they didn’t.
“Not really,” Ruoxi said. “Just hi and bye and stuff, although I will say she didn’t seem as overtly bitchy as I remember her being. Maybe we’re all mellowing with age.” She shrugs. “You totally should’ve come.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I tease, rattling the ice in my cup. “I kind of feel like I got the full experience here.”
“And none of the regret,” Ruoxi admits, letting out another quiet burp.
I help her pack the rest of her things and bring them out to the car, waving to her parents before hugging her goodbye. Cell phones aren’t really allowed at Interlochen, but we make a pact to text each other as often as we can. Except for a few days after she gets back from camp, this is the last time we’ll really be together before college starts, and I can tell we’re both feeling wobbly. “Seriously, though,” she says, even as her dad points impatiently to his watch from the driver’s seat, “try to have some fun this summer, okay?”
“Sorting silverware and waiting tables count?” I ask.
“It does not, in fact.” She frowns. “When I get back, I expect to be fully regaled with all the tales of your adventures.”
“Swashbuckling and sword fighting, then,” I tease. “Got it.”
Ruoxi doesn’t laugh. “I’m serious, Rach,” she says. “You deserve it. If not now, then when, right?”
“Right,” I echo, though the truth is my skin is prickling unpleasantly. I can’t get over the sneaking sense that she got drunk at one party and now she thinks she’s some kind of authority on living a wild and carefree life. After all, this is Ruoxi, who skipped the prom not three weeks ago so that she could practice Chopin’s Etude in G# Minor for the seven hundredth time. Is she really about to tell me I need to loosen up?
And—ugh, why is this becoming the theme of my life all of a sudden—is it possible she’s right?
“Be good,” I tell her finally, hugging her tightly in the early-morning sunshine. She waves out the window of the car as she goes.
* * *
“Two Gondolas,” my dad calls over his shoulder into the kitchen at the restaurant that afternoon, soft rock piping in over the stereo and a huge pot of red sauce bubbling away on the industrial range. “One pig, one chicken. And can somebody check on that order of mozzarella sticks?”
I glance at the clock on the wall above the register. Seventy-seven days, eighteen hours, and twenty-two—twenty-one—minutes.
That’s all the time I have left before.
Before I leave for Northwestern. Before my life can really start.
It’s all so close I can feel it.
For now, though, I get started on the sandwiches, listening with one ear as Lionel Richie croons in the background. Gondolas are basically glorified subs stuffed with cold cuts, provolone cheese, a couple mealy hydroponic tomato slices, and a handful of lettuce; really the only thing Italian about them is the fact that they’re made on loaves of Nonna’s freshly baked bread, which doesn’t change the fact that they’ve given our humble family restaurant a kind of cult following. It’s a lot of food for five bucks, I guess.
I slice one sandwich in half and stick our trademark mini-pickle-on-an-Italian-flag-toothpick in each half before setting the red-and-white paper boats in the window. “Order up!” I call just as Miles finally shuffles in through the back door to the kitchen, grabbing his apron off the hook and squashing his DiPasquale’s baseball cap down over his tangle of dark, curly hair.
“About time,” I tell him, nodding with my chin at the deep fryer. “I thought I was going to be stuck back here covering for you all afternoon.”
“Sorry,” he says, lifting the basket out of the hot oil and dumping the mozzarella sticks onto a plate. “Got held up.”
“Uh-huh.” I brush some stray lettuce off my station. “Doing what, exactly?”
Miles looks at me sideways as he ladles a cup of marinara into a plastic ramekin, his olivey face all suggestion. “You really want to know?”