Chapter 9 People Don’t Full Felicity for Their Friends
People Don’t Full Felicity for Their Friends
Ten Years Ago
My dorm room was tiny and smelled like nickels. Luckily, my roommate had already lofted the beds, so that addressed my most immediate concern with the living situation. I had yet to meet Erin Gallagher but based on her decor, she had a singular interest, and that interest was horses.
“I’m still not over that you followed your pen pal to college. It’s literally psychotic,” Laurel chided me while fighting a collapsible milk crate that was refusing to cooperate.
“First, I followed my scholarship money to college,” I argued, breaking down the crate myself and stuffing it under the desk that wasn’t claimed by a Black Beauty tabletop calendar. “Second, Ethan’s not my pen pal . He’s my friend. People go to the same college as their friends all the time.”
Laurel unzipped an overstuffed suitcase. Several rogue “going-out tops” mounted their escape. “People don’t full Felicity for their friends.” She said the word “friend” as though it possessed an ulterior motive.
“Who’s Felicity?”
“Keri Russell, Charley. Get some culture.” She rolled her eyes.
I wasn’t sure what Keri Russell had to do with anything, but Laurel was a little bit right.
There was more to my college selection than friendship and finances.
It was also this town. College was the first choice I had that was all my own, and I didn’t want to go to another strange place packed with people I didn’t know.
For once, I didn’t want to be the new kid.
I wanted to be recognized. I wanted to go back to Lewellen.
“Why are you here then?” When I’d suggested she transfer from Milwaukee Area Technical College to be with me at Lewellen, she couldn’t wait for me to get the sentence out before she was ringing the registrar’s office.
“It wouldn’t have anything to do with a certain sophomore on the hockey team, would it?
” If she was going to reduce my college experience to chasing a boy, I could do the same for her and Petey, who was already making a name for himself on the hockey team as both the coach’s son and one of the distressingly few Asian men playing the sport at the collegiate level.
“I would never move anywhere for a man.” She straightens an already neat row of books on my desk. “Even one who watches all of my Snapchat stories and is clearly obsessed with me.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Liar.”
The door creaked and the tension between Laurel and me broke as Ethan and Petey burst into the Shrinky Dink of a bedroom, and suddenly, they were surrounding us with a megaphone and noisemakers.
“Beekman! Beekman!” they shouted in concert, their amplified voices echoing around us like we were in a coffin. Laurel and I covered our ears, but it was no use.
And then, for the briefest moment, the world paused.
It was Ethan and me, eye to eye, for the first time in too long.
For years, my best friend had existed only in pictures—intangible two-dimensional images of someone older than the Ethan from my memories.
When I imagined him—the sound of his voice, how his hands were always a little warmer than mine, the way his nose scrunched before he let out one of those laughs that exploded across his face—I was picturing the boy I knew back when.
But the Ethan in front of me now wasn’t a boy at all.
“You got tall,” he said, smiling in a way that made me smile back.
He was finally close enough to touch, and the sight of him overwhelmed me.
Ethan had always seemed to glow in the dark, but this was more than that.
He’d grown into his limbs and transformed from a skinny, sweet-faced kid into an eighteen-year-old with a devastating smile and a jawline that could cut glass, and I wasn’t prepared for how potent those developments would be in person.
But since I couldn’t very well say any of that, I accidentally negged him.
“You didn’t. Get tall, I mean,” I said back without thinking.
A boisterous laugh burst from his belly, surprising us both.
“You think you’re so funny. Don’t you, Chuck?
” He scooped me up by the waist and threw me over his shoulder.
My chest simmered with giggles as my legs flutter-kicked behind me.
Even with my feet in the air, I felt more grounded than I had in years.
It didn’t matter what Laurel had said. I knew in that moment that coming back to Lewellen was the right choice.
Petey, who was still chanting our names, took this moment as an invitation to start picking people up and sat Laurel on his broad shoulders, shouting, “Barn Party waits for no one!”
···
Barn Party, a Lewellen Welcome Weekend tradition, was exactly what it sounded like: an all-day party in a field abutting a barn.
Kegs sat on the ground next to pickups. Striped wool blankets lay strewn over truck beds.
People were everywhere. A group of girls in matching T-shirts squatted together for a group photo.
Boys in Greek letters were pitching a tent.
Countless bodies were stacked on top of each other in lawn chairs, attempting to make the most of every available seat.
A group in the center was commandeering the music with an amp so loud its vibrations shook the grass.
A few cars were attempting to compete, blaring Rihanna, Kendrick Lamar, and a country artist I didn’t recognize.
Binge drinking aside, there was something almost wholesome about it all. A Norman Rockwell portrait of Midwestern collegiate debauchery.
“This reminds me of the ‘Party in the USA’ music video,” Laurel said before wandering off with Petey in the direction of a cornhole game.
Solo cups snapped under my feet. Ethan winced at the red trash scattered every which way. “So much plastic,” he murmured.
“Is this your nightmare?” I asked.
He looked at me, his eyes bright. “Nah. This is the dream.” He slung his arm over my shoulders, and I caught sight of his tattoo.
It looked almost exactly like the flowers in the photo I’d sent to him of the two of us lying at the top of the waterfall, our heads knocking together.
The waterfall I never did dive off of. Maybe college could be my second chance.
Ethan and I took a lap around the field, sizing up the party, but still found ourselves irresistibly drawn to the people we’d arrived with.
Laurel and I made it two rounds into a contentious flip cup tournament before getting knocked out of the bracket by Petey’s hockey teammates.
At some point, the RAV4 behind us started blaring “See You Again” through the open hatchback, so naturally, Petey wept as he recalled the plot of Furious 7 .
“That’s really beautiful, man,” Ethan told him, comforting his buddy and validating his deeply felt opinions on the poignancy of big-budget action movies.
But then a Demi Lovato song streamed through the speakers, and Ethan and Petey swiftly downshifted into what appeared to be an intricately choreographed dance routine.
Everything about the four of us together felt like old times, and still, I couldn’t quite settle into our new dynamic.
For one, Laurel and Petey were always touching. If he wasn’t stealing her sunglasses off her face in that way men tease women they’re hoping to have sex with, she was “noticing” another one of the stupid tattoos he’d inked after losing a bet.
“Are those the lyrics of ‘We Belong Together’ encircling a DQ Blizzard?”
She traced the cursive with the tip of her finger, face equal parts disbelief and unfathomable arousal. He whispered something in her ear and she practically cackled. What could Petey possibly be saying that would make her laugh like that?
In the time it took Ethan and me to assemble our pop-up tent, Laurel was on the hood of a car with her tongue down Petey’s throat.
“Well, that seemed inevitable,” I said to Ethan, pointing them out.
His hair fell onto his forehead in handsome wisps that made my fingers tingle with the urge to touch it.
If for no other reason than to compare it to the feeling of his freshly buzzed hair in my memories.
“Oh yeah, Petey lost his mind when Lo said she was transferring. You know he’s, like, fully in love with your sister? ”
I laughed. “What?”
“He compared her to a mermaid who would put a curse on a sea captain. But in a hot way.”
“How…” Unease swirled in my stomach. “They hardly know each other.”
He shrugged. “They know each other as well as we do.”
Before I could fully consider who it was I didn’t know as well as I’d thought—my best friend or my sister—Ethan began reintroducing me to old friends from middle school who pretended to remember me, my face vague to them like an old locker combination.
When the sun went down, and he left to relieve himself behind a tree, I helped my new/old friends build the bonfire with a group of seniors who looked like honest-to-god adults.
“Here.” The only girl who looked about my age passed me a long stick. “Just poke at the fire. As long as you look busy, no one will send you out into the woods for kindling.”
“Ooh. I like that strategy,” I replied, taking it from her. “I was planning to stare into the flames and look generally unapproachable, but this works too.”
She laughed generously, the crackling firelight dancing on her face. “Always good to have a backup option if the stick breaks. I’m Sadie, by the way.”
“Charley.”
“Oh, I know,” she said back, flicking her brown bangs out of her eyes. “You’re the famous Chuck.”
“Famous,” I repeated, hoping my tone didn’t mirror the sinking feeling in my stomach. I didn’t know of Sadie, but Sadie knew of me. She knew of “Chuck,” which for some reason had me feeling like I was dangling over a ledge.