Meet Me Under the Lights

Chapter One

Eliza

“When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.”

—William Shakespeare, King Lear

I had hoped that if I showed up to a party dressed head to toe in black and feathers, a gothic fairy from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I could hide in plain sight.

I was wrong.

It only took thirty minutes after my walking inside for one of my exes, dressed as Mario, to appear at my side and ask if he could “jump me to level up.”

He earned a swift heel to his clunky plumber boot.

And minutes later, someone nameless dressed as Frodo hissed “My precious” into my ear.

Frodo’s journey to Mount Doom would take him a bit longer now with a bruised kneecap.

God, I hated big parties.

My best friend, Lauryn, however, lived for them. She waved and flashed a beaming smile while swaying with the bass in a haze of smoke. Her platinum-blond hair with lavender highlights bounced off her shoulders as her diamond nose stud sparkled under a chandelier.

“Elizaaaa!” she called out to the tune of “The Schuyler Sisters” before she wove through the crowd toward me.

Well, if anyone hasn’t noticed me yet, they sure as hell know who I am now.

My watch glittered under the string of neon lights above me, and I scowled. Barely 10:30 p.m. and she’s made a Hamilton reference.

It was Tracey’s—the most popular and fakest girl in school—annual Beginning of Summer Party, and after what happened last year, I couldn’t let Lauryn go alone to this one.

If she had more than three Jell-O shooters, she was a hot mess of cabaret.

Our friends still talked about last June’s performance of “Lovely Ladies” and her… dancing.

“Would you please stop sulking? You’re getting forehead wrinkles.” Lauryn grabbed my arm and dragged me toward a bar covered with white twinkle lights. “It’s a party! Lighten up! We’re going to be seniors in a couple months!”

Don’t remind me. I still had so much to do before school started again. “I’m not sulking. And I don’t have forehead wrinkles.”

“Maybe not yet, but you will.” She picked and plucked at my tank top. “Then again, it’s hard to tell anything about you underneath all those black feathers. Why’d you wear this, again?”

“I’m a dark fairy.” I flicked away her hand. “Plus, it helps me blend in.”

“You couldn’t blend in if you tried, girl.”

Fair.

It was hard enough having people fawn over me during the school year—the rich Crowley girl, daughter of the man who practically owned the town. But was it too much to ask to blend in for just one night? To not be a Crowley?

Lauryn hiccupped, her breath reeking of cherry syrup mixed with vodka.

“How many have you had?” I yelled over the music.

Lauryn snagged a pen from the bar and began doodling a necklace design on a small white napkin.

“Lauryn?” I nudged her. “How many?”

“What? Oh. Just a couple.” She tossed the pen aside. “So how do I look?”

I scanned her over. “Like a cute bunny.”

“I’m a cat.”

Oh. “Right. A really cute cat.”

I fixed my sequin-and-feather-covered mask so I could see better and gave a once-around to Tracey’s house.

Her parents always traveled at the beginning of summer, giving Tracey and her older brother dibs on the first official party of summer vacation for the last several years.

Warm beer or horribly sweet mixed drinks sloshed around in everyone’s cups, and phones were out or close by because something always went down at Tracey’s.

Lauryn adjusted her gray-and-pink pointed ears. “Okay, serious question. How’s my tail? Too poufy?” She whirled around and bumped into two girls who were all over each other.

One of them whined and flipped her mermaid wig. “Hey!”

“Please. Get a room.” As the girls staggered away, she wiggled her butt at me. “So?”

“The tail is perfect. Go get ’em.”

The front storm door opened, and a group of costumed boys stood beneath its frame. The entire room slowed down to watch these outsiders make an entrance as the music changed. One looked a little familiar, but getting a clear glimpse of him through this crowd? Impossible.

Not that it mattered.

In our small town, a group of strangers this time of year could mean only one thing: Diamond Boys.

When new crews of ballplayers came in from all over the state to play for Dad’s baseball team hoping to impress college scouts and earn extra conditioning over the summer, the locals threw out all the stops—discounts to anyone holding a ball game ticket or program, closed businesses on game days, free ice cream to the winning team.

Going to a baseball game was as common and routine in this town as going to church, maybe even more so.

Just like the opening pitch signaled spring, the Legion League signaled summer.

Dad had a good reputation for his players going D1, getting invited to showcases, sometimes to the minors after a summer season.

His boys were the best of the best, so the town treated them like homegrown celebrities.

Still…I had met most of Dad’s team already. These boys didn’t look like any of them.

Tracey hurried dutifully over to the newbies, her poufy cotton tail bouncing over black leggings, with a few of her friends, dressed as various animals, scurrying behind her.

It was like the costume designer from Chicago dressed Snow White’s woodland posse.

“Who are those guys?” Lauryn stood on her tiptoes.

I shrugged. “Who knows…”

“I’ll tell you who they are,” a voice slurred next to my ear.

I cringed at the overpowering and familiar smell of whiskey and ginger ale.

Truth: My cousin TJ was equally annoying whether he was drunk or sober.

Lauryn flicked the front of TJ’s pirate hat, which was too small to go over his blond, curly mohawk. “What are you supposed to be, Teej?” she asked. “A biker pirate? Oh! A birate? Or maybe a pirker…piraker…”

“I won the hat from some idiot freshman who bet me I wouldn’t walk across the peak of Tracey’s roof.” He took a quick swig from his cup and set it down.

“So you’re drinking and scaling roofs. Wow.” I quickly swapped his cup out for my can of Coke.

“You know me. I never back down from a bet.”

“Yeah, we know.” Lauryn crossed her arms. “My mom says the other nurses in the ER still talk about that stunt you pulled last summer at the railyard.”

TJ beamed. “That backflip was one of my best. It’s not my fault the others decided to try it.” He paused and leaned against the wall, his hat sliding down over one of his eyebrows. “We can go for a walk outside, Lauryn. Talk about it some more if you want.”

TJ had been crushing on my best friend since we were kids. But Lauryn was the queen of playing hard to get.

“No, thanks.” She pointed across the room. “I’ve got my eye on something better.”

TJ followed her gaze and cursed. “Those guys? Ha. They’re nothing but farmer trash trying to take away my family’s trophies. Bunch of low-life hicks…”

My ears buzzed. “Wait. What do you mean, take away our family’s trophies?”

TJ gawked at me like I came from another planet, an alien blip on his baseball radar. And then his eyes changed to his common mischievous-daredevil expression. I called it “the TJ.”

“Haven’t you heard, Princess? Old Man Fulton put together his own team this year, and he and your stubborn-ass father made a bet on the side. Our team has to have a better record than theirs or…” He took a swig of soda then looked at the can in confusion.

I smacked his arm. “Or what?”

“Or it’s bye-bye, stadium.”

“WHAT? Why would he—”

“I still can’t believe he put it up for grabs. And for what? A dumbass feud from thirty years ago? Freaking Fultons always know how to weasel their way in…” He rambled off a string of curse words and disappeared into the haze of smoke and bass.

What the actual hell? Dad made a bet with the stadium as a prize?

I whipped out my phone and started texting him a flurry of angry, all-caps messages, but Lauryn took it away and closed the message out.

“I don’t buy it. There’s no way.” Lauryn gave my phone back to me but held my hand and squeezed it. “TJ probably exaggerated. You know how he is when he’s been drinking.”

“Right.” The room started pushing in on me from all sides. “Exaggerated.”

But my gut told me TJ wasn’t making this up. It was too big of a story to craft, even for him.

Lauryn crouched down a little so her face was directly in front of mine. “I’ll see what I can find out, okay?”

“Okay.”

True, I hated the way Diamond Boys invaded our town every summer, but baseball helped keep the town going.

Small businesses were unpredictable, constantly having to adjust and change with the weather.

Baseball wasn’t. Was Dad really that prideful, to not only put our family at risk but the entire town too?

Or was it something else I had been too busy to notice?

A “nurse” sauntered by with a tray of shooters. I swiped one before I could think twice and squeezed the Jell-O out of the small Dixie cup into my mouth, immediately regretting it.

This crap tasted worse than cough syrup.

I hunted down a hard lemonade—one more drink wouldn’t hurt, right?

—and then scanned the house for a quiet place to hide.

Opposite the dining room, two French doors stood open, and a small desk lamp illuminated an office.

Keeping my back pressed to the wall, I inched my way around the awkward grinding, slinking into the office before anyone noticed.

It wasn’t that I didn’t like most of the people here; it was just easier to let only a few of them in at a time.

My brother called it self-preservation, because with a last name like ours, we found that most people wanted to be our friends for the wrong reasons—popularity, favors, etc.

I could count on one hand the number of real friends I’d had over the years, and that had always been enough for me.

Like Grandma had taught me: quality over quantity.