26. Buzz
BUZZ
THEN
Graduation felt less like an ending and more like somebody had opened every door in my life at once and expected me to know which way the wind was coming from.
For two days, Northbend had been full of congratulations.
Balloons tied to mailboxes. Signs in front yards.
Parents taking pictures until their kids threatened to leave the state early out of self-defense.
Every grocery store checkout line came with someone clapping me on the shoulder and telling me Fargo was lucky, like Fargo was not a place with weather, expectations, and older guys who would happily staple me into the boards if I showed up acting like being good in high school meant anything.
I said thank you. I grinned. I let people be proud because being proud was easier for them than being scared.
My bedroom at home looked like I had started packing and then lost a fight with every version of myself.
Hockey bags sat open on the floor. A stack of clean T-shirts leaned against the dresser.
Mom had folded my jeans into neat piles I immediately felt guilty for disturbing.
A Fargo Force packet lay on my desk beside my graduation tassel, both of them looking too official for a room that still had a cracked mini-stick blade under the bed from sophomore year.
My phone buzzed against my thigh.
Mase: Keller lake house tonight. Do not be weird and say no.
I looked at the text, then out the window.
The evening was warm enough that the glass had fogged faintly near the bottom from the AC working too hard inside.
Across the street, someone’s sprinkler ticked over a lawn already smelling like summer.
The whole neighborhood had shifted into that strange June mood where everything felt too bright and loose, like school had been the only thing holding us together and now we were all scattering.
What if I want to be weird and say no
Mase: Then I’ll come get you.
That feels illegal
Mase: Then come willingly.
I tossed the phone onto my bed and ran both hands through my hair.
I was supposed to want to go. Mase’s parents were gone for the weekend.
Simon had been talking about the party since before finals.
Half the team would be there, along with half of Northbend High’s graduating class and probably some people who had graduated two years ago but still somehow appeared whenever someone mentioned a cooler near a body of water.
It was exactly the kind of night I was built for. Music. Lake. Friends. Summer starting. The last big, stupid thing before jobs and camps and college orientations and whatever came after.
I did not want to go without Lucy. Which was a problem, because Lucy had already said no yesterday while we were sitting in Betsy outside her house, her bare knees turned toward me on the bench seat, her Aldenmere hoodie pulled over the shorts she wore when she was pretending not to be cold.
“My mom asked if I wanted to get dinner Saturday,” she had explained, looking at her hands instead of me.
I had gone still in the stupidest, smallest way. “Your mom?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s good, right?”
Lucy had shrugged one shoulder. “Maybe.”
I had wanted to say the right thing. Something mature. Something that sounded like I understood what it meant that her mother had called first, that she had asked, that Lucy had not immediately said no.
Instead, I had said, “You should go.”
Her eyes had flicked to mine. “You think?”
“Yeah.” I had reached for her hand between us and tried to make my voice easy. “I mean, if you want to. Mase’s party is not exactly a once-in-a-lifetime cultural event.”
“It might be. Simon is apparently making punch.”
“Simon should not be trusted with liquids.”
That had gotten me a smile. Small, but real.
I had asked her again that morning anyway.
Then again after graduation, while our families were still taking pictures and Simon was loudly accusing his mom of blinding him with the camera flash. “You sure you don’t want to come later?” I had asked, my fingers hooked gently around Lucy’s.
She had looked pretty in a white dress beneath her gown, her curls pinned back on one side, her face tired from smiling for too many pictures. “I’m sure.”
“It’ll be more tolerable if you’re there.”
“You’ll survive two hours with your friends.”
“Bold assumption.”
Her thumb had brushed once over my knuckle. “Go have fun, Ty.”
She had meant it. Lucy was not testing me. She was not waiting for me to prove something. She had plans with her mom, and even if the whole situation made something protective and ugly twist beneath my ribs, I knew better than to make her feel guilty for going.
So I kissed her forehead in front of God, Northbend High, and Arlo Thomas’s judgmental face. “I’ll call you later,” I promised.
“You better.”
“I always do.”
Arlo, standing two feet away with his arms crossed, had made a noise like he was storing that sentence for future litigation.
Now, hours later, my room felt too quiet.
Simon: BUZZARD. KELLER’S. NOW.
Then my phone lit with Lucy’s name. “Hi.” Her voice came through softer than usual, a little muffled around the edges.
My body reacted before my brain did. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” A pause. “I just wanted to say have fun tonight.”
I leaned forward, forearms on my knees. “Dinner still happening?”
The silence lasted one beat too long. “It should be,” she said.
I stared at the floor, at the heel mark I had left in the wood when I was twelve and pretending I could hockey stop in socks. “You want me to stay close?”
“No,” she said immediately. Then softer, “No. Go to Mase’s.”
“Luce.”
“I mean it. If things change, I’ll call Naomi or I’ll call you. But you should be with your friends tonight.” She took a breath. “You’re leaving soon.”
“I’m not leaving leaving.”
She went quiet again, and I hated myself a little. Because I was. We both knew it. I could dress it up with phone calls and road trips and Boston-and-Fargo jokes, but the facts were already packed in the corner of my room with my training gear.
“I know,” she said.
I closed my eyes.
Downstairs, Mom laughed at something Kendrick said.
The sound carried up through the vents, warm and familiar, and for one wild second I wanted to be eight years old again.
No future. No scouts. No plane tickets. No girl on the other end of the phone trying to be brave because I had not figured out how to be scared without making jokes.
“I love you,” I said.
Her breath caught so softly I almost missed it. “I love you too.”
By the time I got to Mase’s lake house, the party had already spilled out onto the deck and down toward the dock.
Early summer sat thick over everything, warm and damp and smelling like cut grass, lake water, sunscreen, bug spray, and smoke from the firepit someone had started too early and too aggressively.
Trucks crowded the gravel drive. Music thumped from open windows. Someone had strung lights between the deck posts, and they glowed soft gold against the deepening blue of the sky.
Simon spotted me before I made it halfway across the yard.
“There he is!” he shouted, holding one arm up like I had returned from war instead of driven fifteen minutes from my parents’ house. “Fargo’s problem!”
I pointed at him. “Your speaker sounds like a dying lawn mower.”
Mase came down the deck steps behind him, calm as ever in jeans and an old Northbend hockey T-shirt, a bottle of water in one hand. “You came.”
“You threatened kidnapping.”
“That was only motivational.”
“It was a crime.”
“Gray area.”
I let Simon throw an arm around my neck and drag me toward the deck.
People called my name from every direction.
Teammates. Classmates. Girls from our grade who had hugged Lucy after graduation even though I was pretty sure Lucy had only spoken to them twice.
Guys I had played with since mites. Everyone bright and loud and sweaty from summer and freedom.
For a while, I let it carry me.
I argued with Simon about the speaker. Lost to Mase at darts because he had the focus of a man who enjoyed making his friends suffer quietly.
Ate two hot dogs I did not need. Took a plastic cup of lemonade from Claire, who informed me I looked emotionally constipated and then walked away before I could defend myself.
I checked my phone too many times.
No new messages from Lucy. She was with her mom. That was good. It was supposed to be good.
Near nine, my cousin Samantha found me by the sliding door.
She was technically my second cousin, but the Burns family used cousin as a general category for anyone who appeared at holidays and knew which aunt made the bad potato salad.
Samantha was a year younger than me, all long dark hair and sarcastic eyebrows, wearing a denim jacket despite the heat because she was always cold.
She had come with one of her friends from school and had already spent twenty minutes making fun of Simon’s punch from a safe distance.
“You look tragic,” she said, leaning her shoulder against the doorframe beside me.
“Thank you.”
“Not in a hot way.”
“I assumed.”
Her mouth curved, but it faded quickly. Her eyes moved over the deck lights, then toward the living room where the music was louder and bodies kept passing in front of the lamps.
“You good?” I asked.
Samantha got migraines that could take her out for a day if she did not catch them early. I knew that because she had once vomited into Mom’s hydrangeas during a Fourth of July barbecue while every adult in the family argued over whether she needed crackers, darkness, ice, or prayer.
I straightened. “Do you have your meds?”
“In my bag.”
“Where’s your bag?”
She waved vaguely toward the hallway. “Guest room, I think.”
“Samantha.”
“What? I didn’t know Simon was going to create a nightclub for people with poor judgment.”
Across the room, Simon shouted, “This playlist is art!”
Samantha winced.
The smile slipped off my face.