Chapter 12
12
Evie
LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem” blares and my fingers clutch Bree’s arm as she drags my introverted soul through the throbbing living room. Brilliant white strobe lights seem to pixilate the writhing bodies that lurch against me, beer splashing on bare skin as a glass bottle smashes on the timber floor, voices shrieking.
We burst onto the floodlit pool deck of the Pritchards’ mansion. It’s not an actual mansion, but it’s the biggest house I’ve ever been in and is currently hosting the wildest party I’ve ever been forced to attend.
“Relax!” Bree screams above the music. She knows this is not my natural habitat. Put me in front of the class for an English oral and I’ll smash it, but at a social event I suddenly can’t seem to choreograph my limbs and lose command of the English language.
“Come on, Evie! It’s fine! We can’t hide in the library forever.”
The library sounds good to me, but Tom Jenkins is at this party, and that’s why we’re here. Well, it’s why she’s here. My role is basically keeping her drinks safe and trying to find a normal way to stand while I count down the minutes until we can go.
“Back in a sec!” Bree buzzes off for drinks, leaving me stranded. I pull out my phone and attempt to look casual by texting someone (Mum) about something fascinating (this house).
Check out the fairy lights! I type, sending a photo of delicate lights threaded through the branches of a fruit tree in a giant planter. Mum and I once spent a whole weekend overhauling a corner of the backyard with lights and potted plants and old wooden furniture we found at the dump and brought back to life with vibrant paint.
When she doesn’t reply, I call her.
“Sorry, sweetie, your father and I are watching Antiques Roadshow .”
“Mum, did you see the photo? This pot is at someone’s house . You’d only ever see it in the foyer of the Hilton Hotel or somewhere.”
“Are you at a party, darling?” she asks. “Try to focus on your friends.”
I wish I was sitting beside her now, on the comfy sunken couch in our Newcastle terrace watching cozy British TV. Or back at Bree’s. I endured the first four years of high school in the boardinghouse, until Mum and Dad came to an arrangement with Bree’s parents and the school that I could board with them. It suits my social anxiety way better.
“I know you’re not keen on big groups,” she continues, “but I’m sure if you just try to strike up a conversation with someone nice, it will all be okay.”
She’s right. What am I doing, standing here talking to my mother about garden ornaments and feature lighting while everyone else gets happy on whatever Max Turner tipped into the punch?
“Stop gawping at that pot and try to look normal!” Bree instructs when she returns with a paper napkin full of cheese and crackers. She’s caught me fidgeting with the black midi pencil skirt and cropped emerald cami she made me borrow, even though it’s unexpectedly cold.
“Oh, God,” I say under my breath when I notice that boy, Kennedy, from the Photography Club. “What’s he doing here?”
Bree follows my line of sight across the pool to where Kennedy’s standing, looking exactly as humorless as he did last week in the classroom. Definitely not in a party mood. I doubt he ever is.
He’s talking to some girl. She’s well into the party and clearly also into the whole moody Brat Pack thing he’s got going on. She knows precisely how to wear a dress without fidgeting and where to put her legs and arms, which is basically all over him at every opportunity, while flicking impossibly shiny platinum hair over her shoulder at regular intervals. Exactly the hair I wish I had instead of this mass of wild curls that took Bree an hour to straighten.
“Is that him ?” Bree is fascination personified. “The photo-grapher?”
I hadn’t realized my blow-by-blow account of the whole train wreck had painted him quite so clearly in her mind. “He’s cute,” she decides.
Hardly.
“He’s just like all the others.” I shrug and stuff a cube of cheddar into my mouth, washing it down with a swig of the beer she brought me in a red plastic cup, the sour taste biting my tongue.
“I don’t know how else you expected your exhibition idea to go,” she says.
But isn’t that exactly the point? Bree knows why this matters, although now is not the time to remind her of the website half the boys at this party have probably seen her on or of how scared it made her feel.
That girl is still trying to get Kennedy’s attention. He looks a hundred miles away as reflections from the pool dance across his stern face. I suppose if you dressed him up in trousers instead of jeans, ditched the leather jacket for a long, dark cloak and thigh-high boots … with those waves of dark hair, he might be at home traipsing across the moors, dark and tormented, in a Bront? novel.
When I look back at Bree, she is studying me from under her precision-straightened black fringe. Her on-point, cat-eye liner crinkles as she smiles knowingly.
No! “Bree! He put me on the spot in front of everyone. And then he let my suggestion get howled down.” Wherever she’s going with this, she’s dead wrong.
Luckily, someone screams annoyingly over by the punch, which distracts her. She takes a sip of beer and plots to overthrow what she calls the “fangirls holding Tom Jenkins hostage near the drinks table.” I had no idea she was so interested in Tom. It’s not like her to let a group of girls stir her up this much.
“Don’t look now, Evie,” she says, softly. “But your nemesis is staring at you.”
My heart thumps, and of course I do look.
“Hey! Evie!” he calls across the pool.
I watch as he removes the girl’s hand from his person and points at me, as though I’m his long-lost best friend. Right when I’m galvanizing myself to reject his olive branch, a brawl breaks out behind us. Bree and I spring out of the way, only to be crashed into by the drunken boys, who push us to the edge of the water.
And then push me into it.