Chapter 9 People Don’t Full Felicity for Their Friends #2
“You’re Ethan’s ‘friend from Canada.’?” Her eyes sized me up, and I had to summon every ounce of confidence to keep looking back at her with an unbothered gaze. “That’s what we call you. We knew you were real, but Ethan’s fun to tease. I mean, you know. He’s so cute when he’s annoyed.”
“Yeah,” I said, watching her eyes measure my response.
The truth was, I didn’t know whether Ethan looked cute when he was annoyed because I hadn’t been in the same room with him since the eighth grade.
I only knew that Sadie thought he did. Sadie, with her Cool Girl bangs and her beachy waves that looked undone in a way that would’ve taken me hours but probably just happened to her.
I don’t know Ethan , I thought. I’d followed a boy I didn’t know to a place I didn’t belong to anymore. Lewellen wasn’t mine. There wasn’t anywhere on earth that belonged to me. The world was constantly shifting beneath my feet, and I was sick of all the motion.
The silence between us was the loaded kind. It settled at our feet with flakes of ash as we prodded the flames with our sticks until Ethan materialized beside me out of nowhere.
“Laurel kicked one of Petey’s housemates in the face doing a keg stand.”
My face froze, processing. “What?”
“And Petey’s, like, the only sober person at this party. He’s gonna take Laurel and Seth home tonight. Seth is the—”
“The guy Laurel kicked in the face?”
He nods. “Do you want to head back with them or stay here with me?”
His hand clapped my back like he was shaking loose a rogue bite of hot dog from my windpipe.
Sadie peeled her eyes off me to grin at Ethan.
It showcased all of her perfectly straight teeth.
Ethan acknowledged her with a nod, and something like jealousy slithered around my neck.
She really was very pretty, with a sultry edginess that complemented Ethan. They made sense together.
“Let’s stay,” I told him, willing myself not to look at Sadie’s expression.
A commotion seethed behind us somewhere. Ethan’s attention drifted in the direction of the rising voices. “Uh…Beek…” he started, and I followed his eyes to an animated Laurel and Petey.
“It’s not about the label . It’s the expectations of the label.
” Laurel leaned deep into each consonant.
With that one sentence, I knew she was starting to erupt.
Laurel fought like a volcano: she provided plenty of warning signs to evacuate, but if you ignored them, there would be no escaping her destruction.
Petey hoisted either a teammate or a literal giant into the back seat of his SUV. “It’s just a word, babe. There are no expectations.” Petey’s tone was teetering dangerously between mollifying and oblivious.
“Oh my god! I can’t explain the world to you, Peter!” Laurel stomped in our direction, knocking me with her shoulder as she charged past. “I think we should call it. Whatever this is,” she declared, gesturing between them. Petey’s face fell.
She hesitated, and for a second, it seemed to the gathering crowd that she might take it all back. But she cleared her throat and said, “Leave, Peter. I’ll stay with Charley. Your car is too crowded anyway.” She turned away from him and kept walking.
“It’ll be fine,” Ethan whispered against my ear, somehow perceptive of the tension gripping my neck. “I’ll be back in a sec. I’m just gonna…”
Ethan gestured toward Petey, who was pacing and kicking up hunks of grass next to his car. I nodded for Ethan to go and trotted after my sister.
“Laur, slow down. What’s wrong?”
When I caught up, I hooked my arm through hers. She leaned her head on my shoulder. “Nothing’s wrong,” she said in that wet-throated way people sound when something is most certainly wrong.
“Did Petey do something?” I asked.
“No.” She tried to turn her head away from me, but I outmaneuvered her. Her eyes were red with unshed tears. “He called me his ‘girlfriend’…and like…we’ve been talking a lot more, but it wasn’t…I mean, I guess it sort of was , but…” She hid her face with her hands.
I didn’t say anything. Instead, I pulled her into my arms. She was stiff at first, like she wasn’t sure she deserved it, but then collapsed into the hug.
“He thought by my coming here…But he didn’t even ask, and I’m not…I don’t know why I’m like this,” she murmured into my shoulder. She was so quiet, and I wondered if I was even meant to hear her.
“Like what?” I asked.
“Poisonous,” she answered, her voice wet and wobbly.
I’d seen my sister’s dramatic side, but the way she was speaking now flipped inside my chest. Poisonous. “What do you mean?” I pressed her.
She pulled away from me, wiping her face with the sleeve of her Lewellen College sweatshirt. Then she lifted her head and revealed a completely different Laurel—bright, sunny, and unbothered. Her emotional heel turn flattened my stomach.
“It’s nothing,” she said with a straight-lipped smile. “Thanks for letting me stay with you guys tonight.” Then she walked in the direction of a red Jetta blasting Fetty Wap, leaving me to wonder if I’d imagined the whole interaction.
···
After a forty-minute heart-to-heart with Petey, Ethan let his friend leave in an SUV packed with six or seven other hockey guys. I waited for him inside the tent, entranced by the glowing yellow light of the camping lantern. It was the kind that exploded stars in every direction.
“Is the lamp too ‘try hard–y’?” he asked when he stepped inside. “I wanted it to be perfect.”
I’d probably slept in as many tents and trailers as I had houses, often remote sites while my dad was shooting. It always felt special, particularly at night. There was this sense of anticipation for the next day, like the world was building up to something.
“I like it,” I told him. He smiled as if that meant something to him. “It reminds me of that projector Petey had in his basement.”
“Hopefully a little nicer than that,” he muttered.
“Definitely. This one isn’t stuck on ‘strobe effect.’?”
He straightened a bright red sleeping bag on the tent floor so that it was about a foot from a lavender one. “You know, the battery compartment eventually melted shut. We couldn’t turn it off, and garbage collection refused to take it. Mrs. Thao had to bury it in the backyard.”
I gasped. “Like a haunted doll?”
“Yes.” His whole body lit up with excitement.
“I kept calling it Chucky, and Petey thought I was talking about you . No one understood. This is why I need you back in my life.” He shook me by the shoulders.
My lungs fluttered. After the day together, I’d mostly adjusted to how he’d changed physically over the years—not the way that looking at him made my skin tighten across my ribs, but, you know, baby steps.
Still, I definitely hadn’t accepted that time had passed. That Ethan had lived four years where I was only words on a screen and he was…him. The person everyone was drawn to and the Sadies of the world fell for.
A noisy unzipping sound announced Laurel’s entrance into the tent.
“I was talking to this guy, Cory, and he didn’t know what a nectarine was. What is happening with the men of today?” She starfished on the floor with a dramatic sigh.
“Really?” I said while nudging her calf off the pillow. I searched her face for remnants of her earlier distress, but she just looked like Laurel. An ethereal beauty with blue hair and a cracked phone screen. Charming chaos personified.
“Yes. And it’s not even a quirky fruit.”
“What’s a quirky fruit?” Ethan asked.
“Kumquat,” Laurel and I said in unison.
“Noted,” Ethan responded through his snort-laugh. “Can you give my guy Pete twenty minutes before you start talking to the Corys and the Codys of the world?”
“Men will flow in and out of our lives.” Laurel sighed. “It’s important not to get attached. Charley, let me into your sleeping bag. I’m freezing.”
“You smell pickled,” I whined but still shuffled to make room, enjoying in spite of myself the comforting certainty of people behaving the way you expected them to.
Minutes passed, the three of us lying side by side as we stared up at the simulation of a starry night, no noises apart from crickets and the distant murmurs of a dispersing party.
I squirmed under the weight of the quiet. “Sadie seems nice,” I said, breaking. She didn’t. She seemed weird and territorial, but starting something with Ethan’s…“someone” wasn’t going to serve me.
“Uh-huh.” He stretched the syllables like he was waiting for me to say more.
“Who’s Sadie?” Laurel butted in.
“Ethan’s girlfriend,” I answered, my eyes pinned to the lights dancing on the tent ceiling.
He groaned and turned to face me. The foot between our sleeping bags seemed to contract as an exhalation stumbled in my throat.
“She’s not my girlfriend. We’re just friends who…
hang out sometimes, but we haven’t talked like that in almost a month.
” He said “girlfriend,” “hang out,” and “talked” like each word had alternate meanings I should know. “We’re not like…a thing.”
“We don’t want to hear about your hookups, Edna. It’s disgusting, and we’re trying to sleep.” Laurel retched performatively and rolled away so she and I were pressed butt to butt. At that moment, I felt a little grateful for my sister and her revulsion to Ethan’s love life.
He and I exchanged smiles and I reluctantly closed my eyes, knowing one thing with absolute certainty: I wasn’t jealous of Sadie.
To Ethan, Sadie would only ever be a girl he’d once liked enough to “hang out” with and was now distancing himself from in a crowded tent. Sadies would go in and out of his life like regrettable haircuts, and I couldn’t allow that to happen to us. I was something better to Ethan. More permanent.
I was Chuck.