“Okay,” Beckett said. After a stretch of silence in which I was sure he had fallen asleep, he asked, “What about Sloane?”
I opened my eyes and pushed myself up on one elbow to get a better look at him. “What do you mean?”
“I mean . . . we won’t do this when she comes back, right?” My brother’s voice was small. “You’ll probably be too busy.”
It was my first instinct to deny this, to assure him that nothing would change. But a second later, I knew that I wouldn’t be here, now, with my brother, if Sloane was still in town. I would either be hanging out with her or waiting to hang out with her. “It won’t matter,” I finally said. I could hear the certainty in my voice, and just hoped Beckett could too. “You and me. Next month. I promise.”
“Awesome,” Beckett said around a yawn. “Night.”
A moment later, I heard his breathing get longer and more even—it was a running joke in our family how quickly Beckett could fall asleep, and apparently being outside wasn’t impeding that.
I rolled onto my back and looked up at the stars. Beckett’s words were reverberating in my head, but for some reason, I didn’t want to think about what would happen when Sloane came back, how things might change. Instead, I looked over at my brother, already fast asleep, before letting my own eyes drift closed, feeling like maybe I’d been able to set something right.
8
PENELOPE
Just because I knew what Sloane had intended with some of the items on the list didn’t necessarily mean that I wanted to do them. The next day I’d stood at my dresser, my neck itching from where the mosquitos had gotten me, staring down at number five. I knew what she meant by “Penelope,” and I also knew what she wanted me to do. Even though I knew it hadn’t moved, I reached into my top drawer and pulled it out, staring down at it, my picture and the unfamiliar name, realizing that this was probably the one I needed to do next.
MAY
Two months earlier
“Okay!” Sloane said as she got into my car, slamming the door behind her and turning to smile at me. “Are you ready?”
“I guess,” I said with a laugh. “I’m just not sure what I’m supposed to be ready for.”
Sloane had arranged for us to hang out on this Friday night a whole week in advance, which was unusual, but I was grateful for it. She was always with Sam, and while usually one night a weekend it would be me and Sloane and Sam and Gideon, it wasn’t enough, especially since her attention was focused on her boyfriend when we were all together. There was also the fact that she was different around him. It was nothing I’d been able to put my finger on for the first few times we’d hung out together. But I’d come to realize I didn’t like the way Sam treated her, and I hated the way Sloane acted around him.
I had really tried for the first month. Sloane obviously liked him, and saw something really special in him, so I’d done my best to do the same. But the more time I spent with him, the harder it got. To start with, he didn’t like me. He was alternately possessive and dismissive of Sloane—something I really didn’t like to see—but from the beginning, he had seen me as some sort of threat. He always seemed to be trying to stir up trouble in subtle, hard-to-define ways. He would look at me a little too long when I came into a room, or stand a little too close to me and just smile blandly as he did it, as though daring me to call him on it, or say something about it. He corrected me whenever he got the chance. And on the occasions when Sloane—or Gideon—would say something about it, he would just shoot me a big smile and say, “I’m just messing around. Emily can take a joke, right?”
“It’s just his sense of humor,” Sloane would say the few times I’d tried to broach the subject with her. “He’s actually really shy, and that’s how he compensates.”
And even though I didn’t see this, I figured that my best friend knew him better than I, and so I’d let it drop, not wanting things to be strained between us, any more than they already were. So the possibility of a night that was just the two of us was something I’d been looking forward to all week.
She had told me to “dress to impress” and then we’d spent a full hour on the phone as she went through my outfit options with me. We didn’t even need to video chat, since Sloane knew my wardrobe as well as her own. When we’d selected an outfit that worked, I’d put it on and wondered just what was going to happen tonight. I was wearing the shortest skirt I owned—it was actually a skirt of Sloane’s that she’d given to me, and you could tell, since I had several inches on her. She’d paired this with a gauzy white one-shouldered top, and told me she would bring a red lipstick for me to wear that would make the whole thing pop. Sloane was dressed much the same, in a tight-fitting dress, her hair long and a little wilder than usual, her eyes done smoky in a way that I could somehow never pull off without looking like I’d been injured.
“I’ll give you directions,” she promised, clapping her hands together. I pulled to the end of her driveway and looked at her expectantly. “Left,” she said with great authority, as she cranked the music—her mix—and I headed away from Stanwich, and toward Hartfield.
I hadn’t spent much time at all in downtown Hartfield, and was glad that Sloane was providing directions. Considering it was also a weekend night, the main strip of bars and restaurants was packed, crowds of people walking along the sidewalks and spilling into the street, the slow-moving parade of cars trying to edge past them.
“We should try and find parking,” she said, as I passed a lot where the prices had been raised to ten dollars for the night, and guys with glowsticks and flags were trying to direct people in.
“So we’re doing something around here, then,” I said, glad to have some indication of what was going to be happening tonight.
“Maybe,” Sloane said, raising an eyebrow. “Maybe not. Just—there!” she pointed ahead, where the car in front of me was, miracle of miracles, pulling out of its parking spot.
I put on my blinker and turned quickly into the spot, and it was a good thing, because three other cars had zoomed forward toward it, one from the opposite side of the street, and were currently blocking traffic. “You know what?” Sloane said, as I killed the engine and handed her my iPod to lock in the glove compartment. “I think that’s a good sign. I think it means tonight’s going to be the best ever.”
“So?” I asked as I unbuckled my seat belt and turned to face her. “Do I finally get details?”
Sloane pointed across the street. “McKenzie’s,” she said with a grin.
I turned to look, not quite understanding how this was going to happen. McKenzie’s was a straight-up bar, with no all-ages dining area, which bugged Sloane to no end, since there was also a stage at the back and great bands were always performing there, and we could never get in to see them. “Did they change their policy or something?”
“Nope,” she said. She pulled something out of her bag with a flourish, then took my hand, opened my palm, and dropped something into it. I picked it up and held it up to the light from the streetlights to get a better look. It was a Nevada state ID card, with my picture, an address I didn’t recognize, and the name Penelope Entwhistle. “What is this?” I asked, looking closer at it and seeing a birthday that was five years earlier than mine.
“Your first fake ID,” she said, leaning over to look at it. “Want to see mine?” She dropped it into my palm, and I could see that hers was from Utah and her name read Alicia Paramount.
I smiled at that. “Nice name.”
“Thanks,” she said, taking it back. “Ready to go?”
It hit me, much later than it should have, that we were going to use these IDs to get into a bar. And we were going to do it now, before I’d had any time to wrap my head around the idea. “Wait,” I said, as Sloane’s hand was already on the door handle. “We’re going to use these for McKenzie’s?”