Lucy rolled her eyes on instinct. “That’s bullshit, dude. Why is it that every time a girl has strong emotions, you guys say she’s crazy?”
“How it feels, I guess. Besides, when a girl wants to marry you because you guys did some butt stuff, and that happened because she was afraid of the wrath of an imaginary sky dude, that’s actually crazy. Like fucking bonkers.”
Bucket said, “Yeah. That’s coconuts.” He leaned back toward Lucy. “No need to get all crazy about it.”
“Har har, dude.”
“Oh, shit!” Brewer said. “I just remembered the weirdest part about that story. So after Ben’s done talking about Tina and the laughter cooled off, there’s one of those lulls, you know, where the whole table is quiet all of a sudden and you can feel it, and then Jason Ward leaned across the table and looked Ben in the eyes and asked him, ‘How much did she cry?’ And at first I thought he was joking, but then I looked at his face and I realized he was very serious and very interested. Like, he needed to know how much Tina cried.”
Lucy shivered. Something had always seemed a little off about Jason. The only time she’d ever seen him have any kind of facial expression was when Luke Olsen and Dale Rupp got in a fight. There was Jason, standing on the periphery, rocking on his feet and smiling.
“So we all got the heebie-jeebies from Jason’s question, and I think Ben made some dumb joke to try to brush it all off, to make it about him and his anal conquest again. But guess who’s going out three days later?”
“Jason and Tina?” Lucy had found that answers that caused a dull ache in the pit of her stomach were usually the right ones.
“Yup. Jason and Tina. And that always creeped me out. I saw them holding hands in the commons one day, and I remember when he let go there were white prints from his fingers on her skin. Her fingers were all screwy, and her hand looked crumpled, like a baby bird after it hits your window. And I remember feeling this hate for him then, this really pure sort of hate. So when I heard he was missing, I thought about that crushed hand and I thought about him wondering how much Tina cried and I felt like, Good. You know? Like, Fuck him. And I hope they never find him.”
It was the group in the truck’s turn to hit a conversational lull. Brewer’s Fuck him echoed in their heads for a moment, grating against the blasphemy of talking shit about a kid who might be endangered, or worse. Lucy couldn’t decide whether Brewer was principled or vindictive, but then she thought of all the times someone like Jason had probably been curious about how much she might cry.
“Totally,” she said. “Fuck him.”
She caught Brewer’s eyes in the rearview again. Squinting this time. Wondering about her?
Bucket said, “Hey—mile marker eighteen! We need to watch for the turnoff, right?”
Brewer switched on his brights, lighting the brush and lava rock on both shoulders. “Yup. Should be after this next curve, then past that juniper that got hit by lightning last year.”
He comes here all the time.
Lucy saw the torched tree he was talking about, a ghost in the headlights, white and bark-free at its base, rent down the middle, its jagged, blackened branches reaching skyward.
Brewer said, “Here we go. Party time, y’all,” and turned his truck onto the old dirt road to the caves. He navigated through the rocky crags and washed-out dips in the road as if from sense memory. Lucy saw drifts of dust in the headlights and felt flush with anxiety as she remembered they weren’t the only people headed this way. Things had felt so good for a moment, so simple and real, with only her and Bucket and Brewer and the night breeze. She could have talked to them all night—there was something freeing about the way they spoke together. But now it was “party time”—she imagined that she’d soon be invisible to them both, erased by whatever other urges they’d come out here to chase.
She wanted to tell Brewer to turn around, to find a way to keep driving, but she also didn’t want to seem weird.
Shit. I’m faking it again.
Lucy wondered where she might be at that exact moment if she hadn’t spent so much time trying to be the right version of herself for those around her. But before she had the time to find any kind of answer, she found herself lurching forward as Brewer’s truck came to a sudden sliding stop in soft dirt. Empty beer cans clattered over one another and fresh clouds of dust rolled away from the truck for a moment before Brewer killed the halogens and left them sitting in dark.
“Ain’t nothing to it but to do it, y’all. Let’s party this piss-poor fucking excuse for a school year into the ground.”
Bucket drummed on the dash and let loose with a halfhearted “Whoop whoop!” It had been his ironic party go-to for months.
Lucy whispered, “Fuck,” to herself, pulled the cab handle, and stepped into the cold desert night. She spotted a small fire in the distance that struggled against the wind and darkness of the moonless sky to mark the entrance to the East Bear Caves. Lucy zipped up her hoodie and shivered and felt her feet sinking into the churned-up, sandy trail leading to the party. The sounds of muffled bass and laughter and the rumble of other arriving engines sped her heart, but she kept walking forward, afraid of losing Bucket and Brewer and entering those caves all alone.
Looking straight ahead, she had forgotten all about the stars above.
chapter four CAVING
They stood near the wide mouth of the cave, a few steps short of peering over the drop. “It gets pretty dark down there. Either of you bring headlamps?” asked Brewer.
“No,” said Bucket.
“Would have been a cool thing to mention when you picked me up,” said Lucy.
“Honestly, I was shocked you decided to come. Besides, I figured y’all had been out here before.”
Lucy could count the parties she’d attended in the last year on one hand. She guessed Bucket had been to a few more, only because his incessant desire to get laid occasionally outweighed any other considerations.
“I have a light on my phone, though. That’s about all it’s good for right now anyway,” offered Bucket.
“That’ll help once you’re down there, but a headlamp’s way better when you’re clambering over the rockfalls to get to the back. Plus, there’s no extra moonlight to help tonight, which means it’s going to get pitch-black a few feet back from the fire, unless they have a rager going. Probably only pallet wood and presto logs down there, though, since this wasn’t planned and everybody’s hucking down on a lark.”
Three kids in North Face vests with bright white LED headlamps walked past Lucy, beer bottles clinking in their backpacks. They took turns climbing out of sight using the aluminum ladders that descended into the cave system. The top rung on one of the ladders was marked “Stairway to Heaven” in thick black Sharpie. The top of the other read “Property of Brundage Concrete” though part of the text was covered by a sticker that read “40 oz to Freedom.” Both ladders wobbled with each kid’s passage, shifting against the soft soil and sharp stone of the entrance, and Lucy wondered why neither was anchored to keep it from falling over backward.
Brewer patted his face with his hands. Lucy couldn’t tell if he was trying to knock a solution to their new problem out of his brain, or if he was dealing with the frustration of being saddled with two amateur-hour party pals.