Page 33 of That Summer Feeling

Stevie herself had told me nothing about Allison, so I was well within my rights to pretend I had no idea who she was. “She didn’t say anything. Do you guys know each other or something?”

Allison had to laugh. When my face didn’t break as she expected, she went quiet. She couldn’t read me, which made me feel wild with power. I’d never tried to be anything but nice to a complete stranger before. This wasn’t me being mean either. I didn’t know what I was being, but it worked all the same, unsettling her in the exact way I hoped it would.

“We lived together for a year,” she eventually told me, speaking in a totally different register of her voice. “I saw you with her all of yesterday. She wouldn’t even look at me.” She’d taken to scanning me top to bottom, appraising my every inch, deciding if I was someone worthy of knowing Stevie.

God help me, in the Camp Carl Cove T-shirt and Docs, I wanted to be.

“Oh,” I said, as if remembering. “Her roommate!” Now I was using my brightness to its full effect, employing my Garland-the-friendly-stranger tone in a way I never had before.

“Her girlfriend,” Allison corrected.

I colored my reaction not with shock but a sort of pity. “Hm. She definitely didn’t say anything aboutthatto me.”

Maybe Iwasbeing mean. I didn’t like knowing this woman had hurt Stevie. Embarrassed her in front of her friends and family. Cheated on her. She wasn’t worth birthday cards. Why had Stevie’s mother done that?

Why didIdo that for people who didn’t deserve it?

I leaned over the counter and ordered a single vodka cranberry with a squeeze of lime in the same way that Stevie had the night before.

Allison had run out of words to say. Or she figured they’d be wasted on me, because I’d shown that I wasn’t going to give her a single ounce of power in the situation. I waited for the drink in silence, confident that Stevie was watching every single moment of this interaction.

When I came back with her drink, Stevie asked zero questions about what Allison had said. She was prideful, that much I knew, but the levels she’d go to for her pride continued to surprise me. She had to want to know what Allison and I had talked about. Instead she said, “I believe we have a vision to fulfill,” and grabbed my hand to lead us to the dance floor.

When the band saw my feet hit the parquet, the lead singer stopped singing to tell me, “We’re playing your song next!”

“Can’t wait to hear it!” I called out. Then I turned to Stevie and whispered, “Literally. Because I have no idea what they’re going to play.”

She smiled at me. I hoped Allison could see. She hadn’t taken Stevie’s light. No matter how much she’d tried to, Stevie was still Stevie.

We danced together through the end of the current song, a heart-thumping folksy tune that made me remember exactlywhy I’d started yellinghee-hawthe night before. The musicrequiredit.

Stevie moved similarly to her brother in that she did not care about embarrassing herself. But she had way more rhythm than him, and a much better sense of what style of movement the music required. She danced with the exact same conviction as she did all other things in life, and her commitment demanded a match from me. I didn’t need alcohol to do this with her like I had with Mason.

I wouldn’t like that, I realized. Drinking would dull my ability to feel her energy. To remember each moment in its completion. By the last chorus, we jumped up and down, singing lyrics to each other’s faces. It was so easy to rise to her level and stay there, lost in the beat.

After the applause died down, the lead singer set up the next song. “Last night, one of our campers had a big ask of us. And she asked it so much we had to go home and figure out what it was she kept shouting at us to play. So we spent all afternoon on this. We even printed off the lyrics just to be sure we don’t mess this one up. Garland, this one is for you. Hee-haw!”

At that, the band started playing “Hoedown Throwdown” fromHannah Montana: The Movie.

“Thisis what you requested over and over?” Stevie asked me. She was genuinely on the verge of falling to the floor in amusement.

“Oh my god. I guess so,” I told her. “I saw the movie in theaters when it came out. I was in college. I didn’t realize it made this much of an impression.”

“Stop it,” Stevie said. Not in a dramatic way. In a serious one. She was laughing so hard she’d started using me to hold herself upright. “I can’t take this.”

The lead singer sang out the commands of the song.

“I’m so sorry, Steven, but I’m going to have to do a choreographed dance now,” I said. “I owe this not just to the band but to the me of last night who insisted this get played.”

I headed to the spot in front of the stage and began dancing the hoedown throwdown in proper, hitting moves I’d learned long ago, stored in some long-neglected part of my brain that harbored all kinds of random silly things I thought I’d never again do. Lucky for me, there were two other campers who also knew the dance. They joined my movements. Soon, other people got behind us to follow along and learn it. By the second chorus, we’d built a little army of Hannah Montana dancers. Including Stevie.

The cowboy boots and sundress she’d put on for the night’s event couldn’t have looked better for the moment we were having. We danced side by side, beaming under the disco lights, having too much fun to worry about anyone else in the room. There was only her and me. The whole moment was so joyful I felt wild with it.

No matter how old I got, I could always find new ways to be young again.

14

My feet went numb from stomping the ground. Beads of sweat dropped from my hairline onto the floor. At some point, Mason tried to join Stevie and me, but we’d become so exclusionary he eventually left, dancing somewhere else.