Page 15 of That Summer Feeling

It didn’t seem possible, and the light was a little too low to really tell, but Stevie seemed to blush. “Please. I clotheslined you at the front door.”

“That’s not normal?”

She grinned at me. “I only do that for the best of people.”

Mason cleared his throat. “Let’s get going. Me and Gar against Stevie and Andrew.”

Gar was hands down the worst nickname anyone had ever tried to give me, but I swallowed back the urge to say anything about it. Beer pong reminded me of college, which reminded me of Ethan yet again, and I was doing my level best to stop myself from seeming too moody. I could be Gar, if Gar kept the mood light.

Ethan was beginning to turn into a representation of ideas instead of the man he was. Ethan was longing. He was knowledge in a crowd. He was the first eyes I found when something silly happened. No amount of alcohol could chase off the surfacing pains of what I’d lost. He’d have told everyone I don’t like beer. He’d have made sure to excuse me from the competition.

As much as I missed that, I didn’t want to be someone who needed another person to do work for them anymore. And it wasn’t that I didn’t like beer so much as I didn’t want to drink it in a random frat house with strangers. I’d never bothered to explain that to Ethan in the first place. I just let him do what he thought was right, because that was easier than trying to get him to understand a nuance that only made sense to me.

“Good luck,” Stevie whispered before she met Andrew on the other side of the table. “We’ve had tequila, vodka, and now we’re about to have beer. We better be on our best behavior.”

We weren’t on the same team, but she was still on my side. “No need to waste your luck on me. I am very bad at beer pong.”

She laughed as she walked away. I took my spot beside Mason.

“Please tell me you’re good at this,” he said to me.

The truth was, I could have been good if I really cared. I just hated the way people rested all their hopes and dreams on something so deeply trivial, like a game of beer pong in the loft of a campground event hall.

“Mm.” It was a noise, not a confirmation or denial.

Mason accepted it as an answer all the same, which was good. I didn’t want to ruin any of this precious newness between us by spoiling his hopes. This would be a great test of our ability to be teammates. Maybe he didn’t have to be the guy who protected me by stopping me from playing. Maybe he’d be the one who made competing worth it.

When we started the game, I threw the little ball so far past the table that Andrew had to go running to save it from falling onto the main floor.

“Sorry!” I told Mason, who could not hide his wince.

As the game went on and it became clear I was not going to get any better, panic set in. Mason was being friendly about his disappointment, but it couldn’t be long before that disappointment turned into outright resentment. I felt so terribleabout it that the beer didn’t even taste bad going down. When we lost, I chugged the last cup gladly. At least it would eventually quiet my ability to process my own panic.

“Nice game,” Andrew said with unearned kindness. “Should we play another?”

Stevie started nodding her head. Then she looked across the table at me, and a tiny mountain range of concern sprouted between her brows. “Actually, I wanna dance,” she said.

Andrew seemed as surprised to hear this as I was. “Are you sure? There are a lot ofpeopledown there.”

Peoplewas usually a word meant to indicate a group. The way Andrew said it made it clear that there was onespecificperson downstairs the Magnussons did not want to see. I couldn’t imagine a world where anyone disliked any of them. Especially not Stevie. She reminded me of the sun, not just because of her bright hair and beaming smile, but the way she pulled you into her orbit.

“I’m sure,” Stevie told him. “C’mon. Let’s go dance.”

6

By midnight, the lights overhead had changed to a pulsing purple and blue. The breeze that pushed into the hall from the open doors, keeping the air from getting too stale, developed a real bite to it. Cold enough for a coat, if you didn’t have your heart rate up as high as I did out on the dance floor. The band had been playing what I took to calling hee-haw music, only because it made me yell out “Hee-haw!” every time they kicked off a new song. We as a society do not yell the wordshee-hawenough, and once I discovered how much joy came from doing so, I became an unstoppable hee-hawing force of nature.

Mason could not dance. Not in the technical sense. He was all limbs and commitment. Several drinks deep, we started making up our own choreography together. It reminded me of being at a friend’s house and coming up with a performance to convince our parents to let us have a sleepover. Every so often,someone we didn’t know would join us, until we had a large group of campers united in our brand of chaos.

It was the most fun I’d had in solidly a decade. Maybe longer. Even Dara joined in with the dancing. Her fearlessness knew no bounds in this way. She’d gone the whole night without talking to anyone, yet she slapped her hand on her shoe alongside us, grapevining across the floor.

The only person missing from the magic was Stevie. Almost as soon as we’d gone down the stairs, she’d disappeared. Every time I tried to step away to find her, Mason pulled me into another dance, or Dara brought me a new drink, and it distracted me from uncovering where Stevie had gone. I felt her absence like hunger, a dull ache in my belly that grew with time, until the drinks made my head swim so much I couldn’t remember what to do about the feeling besides agonize over it.

The lead singer of the band asked for the lights to be dimmed. “It’s time to slow things down here so everybody can get a good night’s rest before tomorrow,” he said.

I booed.Loudly.

The lead singer laughed, recognizing that my taunting was in good fun. “Don’t worry, Garland, we’re here every night. There will be plenty more good times where this came from. We need to make it to tomorrow to get there, though.”