Chapter 21
WHY DID YOU MAKE ME change my plans with Ryan today?” I ask Rory, one of my many questions as she and Savannah follow me into my room a few days later.
“Lunch, Stevie? Really? Lunch is what you get with your great-aunt so she keeps giving you fifty bucks on your birthday, not something you get with the guy you’re trying to bone.”
“Rory, shut up,” I whisper. “That’s not what I’m trying to… I’m not…” I shake my head, at a loss for words.
“My point is, you need to take him somewhere fun. Somewhere you can look hot.”
As if on cue, both of them unzip their jackets to reveal matching American flag bras and booty shorts.
Oh. No, no, please no. They are really going full tilt into this.
“I’m not sure Ryan would exactly consider Truck Night fun.” I wouldn’t even consider it fun, and I grew up here.
“Well, he agreed to go, didn’t he?” she presses.
“I guess,” I reply, but it doesn’t do anything to reassure me.
Truck Night takes place after dark the second Friday of every month through the summer at Creed Lake, which actually isn’t a lake at all.
It’s a town with a population of under a hundred people, and their claim to fame is literally just a giant pit of mud, and if you’re real lucky, it’s slightly filled with water from a recent rain.
Even more shocking, people travel from all over the tricounty area to drive their pickup trucks around in it.
People like Savannah’s boyfriend, Jake, and all his friends.
And inexplicably, they apparently all dress like the flag even though there’s nothing particularly patriotic about it.
“Let’s get you dressed,” Savannah says as she dumps out a duffel bag of red, white, and blue clothes onto my bed.
“I love you guys. I do. But please tell me you are not expecting me to match you,” I say.
“Excuse you, we look hot as fuck,” Rory says, giving me an overly dramatic offended look. “It’s Truck Night, girl. You gotta dress the part… but no. I do know you better than that, Stevie.”
It puts a smile on my face to hear that.
Despite how off things have felt among the three of us, they do still know me.
Maybe our friendship can really get back on the right track tonight.
After all, I didn’t switch my date with Ryan because I thought he’d find me hotter there or something. I did it for them.
“How about these jean shorts and this red-white-and-blue tank top?” Rory asks, holding them both up.
I let out a big sigh. I feel like my butt cheeks are still going to be hanging out the bottom of the shorts, but at least the tank top has a high neckline.
Suck it up, Stevie. For your friends. This is how you fix this.
Savannah pulls up right next to Ryan in the gravel parking lot, and I’m already embarrassed before I even step out of the car.
What am I getting myself into?
We all get out and Savannah and Rory greet Ryan before the two of them run ahead to find Jake and his friends, including a guy Jake is setting Rory up with who graduated a few years ahead of us, which honestly doesn’t feel that promising.
Ryan steps up to walk alongside me as we head toward the stadium lights and the sounds of country music blasting through oversized speakers. He hasn’t said anything, but I saw him look me up and down and not in the way Savannah and Rory were intending. He’s had a smirk on his face ever since.
“Just say it.” I roll my eyes, tugging on the bottom of my shorts.
“I’m just not sure if I should be turned on or reciting the Pledge of Allegiance,” he says with a laugh, and even though that’s my thought exactly, my cheeks flush out of embarrassment.
“Well, if you think my outfit is something, you’re in for a big surprise, buddy,” I tell him as we reach the end of the parking lot, where the mosh of pickup trucks comes into view.
“I know I tried to warn you over text earlier, but you really have no idea what we’re about to walk into.
Honestly, I don’t even have any idea what we’re walking into.
I’ve never actually been here. I’ve only seen pictures posted online. ”
“Truck Night.” He shrugs. “How bad can it be?”
He quickly gets his answer as we crest the hill and everything opens up to a mud pit the size of a football field, filled with trucks so caked in it that you can’t even tell what color they are. I don’t know what’s louder, the trucks’ exhausts or the music.
“What on earth…,” Ryan says out of the side of his mouth as we walk through the slew of trucks parked on the side, waiting for their turn.
Shirtless guys sit on top of each one, with girls on the tailgate, beer coolers wide open beside them.
One Ford Raptor’s bed is filled to the brim with thirty-something-year-old women dancing in cowboy boots and hats.
One of them only has those on; her nipples are just covered with tassels, little Liberty Bells hanging off the ends.
God Bless America, I guess.
“Yeah, so I feel like you did not properly prepare me for this at all,” Ryan says as I spot Jake’s truck looming over the others around it.
“I don’t think I properly prepared myself,” I reply.
I don’t know if I feel fifteen or eighteen right now, but neither age feels particularly appropriate to be here.
Thank God I didn’t tell my mom the truth about where I was going when we were baking cookies together this morning, or she never would’ve let me come.
I wasn’t thrilled about lying to her, but I did it for the sake of rebuilding my friendship with Savannah and Rory.
And it was just a small lie, one that any normal eighteen-year-old would tell.
“Stevie!” Before I know it, something is whizzing through the air right at my head from the bed of Jake’s truck. Thankfully Ryan sticks his hand out just in time to snatch it. I turn and see him holding a can of Bud Light.
“Nice catch! Sorry!” Rory yells, but she doesn’t really sound all that sorry. Great. Very thoughtful of my best friend. The last thing my head needs is to be nailed by a full can of beer. “Here, Stevie.” She winds up to toss another one, but I stop her.
“No, no, I’m good,” I reply, looking between Savannah and Rory both up there, double-fisting.
I have no problem with them drinking, I can drive us home, it just throws me off-balance a little.
It feels like just a couple of months ago that the three of us drank a six-pack of beer together for the first time and then hated how we felt after.
I think I remember Rory swearing off the stuff for the rest of her life, even in the afterlife.
But I guess that wasn’t recently… it was years ago, and obviously things have changed since then.
I wonder if there’s some version of me that could have grown up to be more like them, to be up there dancing and drinking and not worrying if my ass is hanging out of these shorts right now.
“Laaaame,” Savannah sings into one of her beer cans along with the melody of the song, pointing at me and making me feel even more uncomfortable than I already do, standing here with Jake’s Confederate flag waving in my face.
I look up at Rory dancing in front of that guy she came to meet, who… actually seems more than a few years older than us. I visibly cringe as I read his shirt.
I LIKE MY WOMEN THE WAY I LIKE MY DEER. HORNY.
Savannah being with Jake I guess I could understand at least a little.
But Rory with this guy? She’s like the smartest person I’ve ever met.
I mean, she got into UNC’s biomedical research program.
The Rory I knew wouldn’t have come within a hundred yards of a shirt like that.
But here she is, grinding on him like her life depends on it.
Ryan cracks his beer and takes a small sip, and the two of us awkwardly stand there as everyone else dances and sings around us.
This was supposed to be an opportunity to get to know him more, to catch feelings again, but I can barely hear myself think here.
I should’ve just let him take me to lunch like we originally planned.
Savannah and Rory used to give me the best advice, but despite what Rory said earlier…
it feels like they don’t even know me now, not just that I don’t remember them.
And then it gets worse.
“Yo, Bruce Lee!” A deep voice shouts from behind me, pulling my attention away.
I turn around to find a man old enough to grow a full beard sliding down over the side of his truck toward us.
“Come on, let’s see what you got.” The guy laughs, holding his fists up in front of him like a boxer… a very drunk boxer.
Ryan turns his back to him and so do I, but he doesn’t give up.
“Who wants to see me fight Bruce Lee?!” he yells, and the people around his truck erupt with cheers behind us.
“He can’t understand you!” a woman yells.
My blood is freaking boiling and there are a thousand things running through my head that I could say, but everything feels caught in my throat.
I look up at Savannah and Rory and Jake and all the other people here with us, hoping maybe someone else will speak up or jump down to help, but they all just keep dancing.
The guy comes right up behind us then. I see him out of my peripheral vision, hopping back and forth between both feet before he throws a few light jabs into Ryan’s back.
Ryan closes his eyes as his face goes beet red.
But the guy doesn’t let up at all until finally Ryan turns around.
He gives him one shove. It isn’t very hard, more like he’s trying to create distance than fight, but it’s enough to knock him off-balance in his inebriated state.
He stumbles backward until he ends up on his ass, still laughing the whole way.
Jake clangs two empty beer bottles together and yells, “Round one! Bruce!”
My face drops as I watch both Savannah and Rory not only paying attention now but laughing along with everyone else surrounding us.