“Woo-hoo!” Aidan turned up the music as I forced myself to leave my doubts behind, and I tested a laugh into the wind.
FOURTEEN
“Punch?”
We hadn’t been in the club for more than a minute when the guy stepped out of the shadows. He was offering me a hollowed human skull brimful of a bloody-red liquid and topped with a straw and a paper umbrella.
“Oh. Thanks.” I took the skull—plastic—from the guy, whose sudden, wide Hollywood smile broke the serious expression of his face. He nodded acknowledgment while reaching past me to hand another skull punch to Emory.
“Merci, babe,” she said.
“Out back.” He jabbed his thumb.
We made a bumbling train, me following Emory, who followed Movie Star Teeth, with Aidan behind me, no doubt checking out my butt, and all of us winding through the blue-lit space. The walls throbbed with a deconstructed reggae riff of an old Bowie song; a series of paneled screens around the bar showed a flickering tennis match where a Williams sister was clearly dominating.
I inhaled the warmth of salt air, weak beer and cigarettes—the heady fragrance of a beach party, like the ones Mags and I went to when we road-tripped to Avalon. I could feel myself loosen into the warm swing of the night. If only Mags were with me. But at the very least, it was happening, it was here and now, and it was definitely good enough.
From the clamshell claustrophobia of inside, we spilled from the back door onto a wide-planked platform terrace where about a dozen kids were camped at a table made from pushing two picnic tables together.
“That’s us,” said Aidan. He’d put his hand on the small of my back. Firmly.
Noogie was presiding. “Jamers, I was scared you’d bail!”
I smiled and sipped at my skull through a straw. Shyness, along with this tricky business of Aidan’s unwanted attention, had stolen my vocabulary. Did Emory see what was going on? And what should I do about it? Time for that pill. I popped it and chased it with the mystery drink, which tasted as innocent as Isa’s lemonade, though I knew it probably wasn’t.
“Everybody, meet Jamie!” Aidan proclaimed. As I sat, he settled next to me with a proprietary air. His body language had me on high alert; it was way too close, too touchy, too sure of himself and of my favorable opinion of him. “She’s the McRae au pair this summer.”
Skulls were raised. Fingers fluttered.
I fluttered mine back. “Hi, everybody.” I’d done my hair twisted up, with some pieces flat-ironed, and I’d made my eyes smudgy with a bare touch of bronze eyeliner. A deliberate mask to distinguish me from Jessie Feathering—who, in the cell-phone snaps Isa’d showed me, had usually kept her lips red and her hair styled in loose, wavy layers. Nevertheless, I got the usual double takes.
Movie Star Teeth had dropped to sit on my other side. Excellent. I’d focus concentration on him, and maybe Aidan would leave me alone. My bones were unhinging, my muscles relaxing. The pill already? No, but definitely the idea of the pill was at work.
“So, I don’t get it. What’s the theme of this club?” I asked Teeth. “Do skulls with umbrellas mean Hawaii? Or pirates?”
“Never thought about it.” He made a pose of looking serious. “Yeah, the Rickrack might be a Hawaiian theme. Like, Rickrack, God of the Pineapples. But then of course there’s the famous pirate, Cap’n Jack Rickrack.”
“Of course.” I laughed. Laughing felt good—it deflated my anxieties. We kept going, making stupid pirate sounds and overplaying lamely off the joke while not wanting to give it up.
“Sebastian, I’ve never seen you act so friendly,” remarked Emory.
“Because when I’m not acting, I’m not acting,” said Sebastian.
Emory made a face. “You theater geeks are always acting.”
“Not true,” said Noogie to me. “Sebastian’s middle name is sincerity.”
Sebastian raised his skull. “It’s actually David, but I’ll sincerely drink to that.”
While Sebastian did seem different from the other guys in this crowd, I couldn’t hone in on exactly why. His soft bristle of dark-blond hair wasn’t trying to be fashionable, in the trendy, Little Bly guy style of flopped in the eyes or tucked ragged behind the ears. He didn’t care about clothes, either; his threadbare cottons fell comfy against his sinewy body.
Maybe that was it. Sebastian was no-frills. No belt, no cap, no surfer-dude necklaces, only an economical-looking sports watch. There was one surprise, in that his left inner forearm all the way to his wrist was scarred in a welted crosshatch. It was easily visible, but he didn’t seem at all self-conscious about it.
Sebastian’s biggest extravagance was his smile, I decided, and he sure didn’t throw it around. He might have Movie Star Teeth, but they didn’t accessorize a Movie Star Personality. In fact, the opposite. I wanted to talk to him more, but he’d turned away, diverted by a comment that spun into a conversation with a redhead named Lizbeth who was on his other side. She, and the others, had a lot of nicknames for Sebastian, including Bass, Sibby and Brooks—which I took to be his last name.
It was obvious that kids really liked this guy, to the point where they vied and jousted against one another for his attention. As much as I wanted to join in, I decided to take the laid-back route, and so I swiveled into listening to Aidan’s recap of his entire day at his landscaping job, which mostly entailed helping cranky old Mrs. Grosvenor, who’d made him haul a dozen rosebushes all around her garden before deciding she didn’t want them. It was kind of a funny story, except that the person most entranced with its humor was Aidan, which somewhat deflated my enjoyment of it.
“So, Jamie, tell me something.” Emory, seated directly across, had been looking at me. Now she leaned closer in, pitching her elbows in my direction so we could speak more privately. “What’s your take on Isa? I taught her tennis last year. Or tried to, anyway. She was pretty hopeless with the hand-eye coordination.”
“She’s an excellent swimmer,” I said, probably too defensive.
“But she’s an odd duck. She’s got a major case of la-la land, don’t you think?”
“Well, she has a great imagination.”
“No doubt. Sometimes that girl could make me feel like I was the freak,” said Emory, shaking back her hair and smiling as if this thought were so ridiculous it could hardly be imagined. “Just because I couldn’t see the people in her world. It’s lucky she’s grown up here, around all of us who’ve known her since she was teeny.”