1
There is a full moon tonight.
It hangs in the blackened sky like a mermaid’s scale, glowing bright as candlelight against the darkness.
I stare up at it, wiping the sweat from my brow with an already sticky forearm.
The early September heat of St. Augustine is killer.
Enough to make you feel as if you’re drowning on dry land.
Humidity fills my lungs with each breath, and even the spectral moon can’t make me forget that I’m slowly boiling alive.
I’m going to kill Celeste.
My butt aches under the knife-sharp edge of her front porch step while she runs behind her house to retrieve some sort of surprise.
I have no idea what it is, or why we she’d need it when we’re supposed to be driving to the movies already.
Dad dropped me off on his way to work, giving us barely enough time to order popcorn before the trailers.
“Can I at least help you?” I call after her in frustration, but I’m left with only the sound of her parents’ television blaring a sitcom laugh track through half-open windows. “I’m getting eaten alive,” I say, swatting at a pair of overeager mosquitoes.
They drift away in the warm breeze, and I hunch, wrapping my arms around my knees while I wait.
Crickets chirp. A distant car horn blares.
Though I pull out my phone to scroll for a moment, I put it away just as quickly with an impatient sigh.
Whatever surprise she has planned, it’s taking forever, and we’re definitely going to be late to—
A branch snaps beside me.
Frowning, I turn toward the sound, but only a solitary lemon tree stands in that part of the yard. The moon casts long shadows behind it. “Hello?” I whisper, eyes narrowing on those shadows. No one answers me. Of course they don’t. Squirrels can’t talk.
Shaking my head, I ignore the prickling feeling at my nape. “Celeste, we really need to get—”
She returns in a rush, hiding the surprise beneath an old beach towel.
Her cobalt-blue curls blow like ribbons in the breeze.
“I know you have the whole control-freak thing going on, but try to be patient. I’m almost done.
” She charges up the steps past me and into her house.
Her parents yell at her for slamming the door, but she doesn’t bother apologizing.
Once Celeste Ward puts her mind to something, she becomes unstoppable.
I should know. That’s how our friendship started, after all—she marched up to me in first grade, tugged on the messy braids my father had clumsily thrown together that morning, and told me we were going to be sisters whether I liked it or not.
I don’t know why she picked me, but before that day I hadn’t known what true friendship meant. Celeste’s love is unconditional-and-all-consuming. And it’s worth sitting alone under a full moon while she does whatever it is she’s doing.
“Almost done!” she shouts through the door.
I bite back my retort. Because Celeste never cares that my father considers dinner to be a plate of hastily microwaved nachos served with a very loud side of police reports screaming through his radio, and I never care that she went through a minor shoplifting phase in middle school.
She brings me her mom’s leftovers for lunch, and I make sure she steers clear of every Target within a thirty-mile radius of us.
She sits front row at all my volleyball games wearing my number in bright red on her cheek, and I put on black lipstick and ripped tights for her favorite concerts.
So—while I’d like to whip around, kick down the door, and pull her to the car by her electric-colored hair—I force myself to sweetly and not at all aggressively say, “I already ordered our movie tickets.”
She doesn’t answer, and silence falls around me again. Weird. The crickets have stopped chirping. I resist the urge to glance back at the lemon tree. It’s a squirrel. Only a squirrel. But my nape still prickles as if I’m being watched.
Just as I’ve worked up the nerve to go investigate, however, Celeste finally returns. She helps me to my feet with a giant grin on her lips, giving me an up-close view of the massive purple hickey on her neck and banishing all thoughts of vicious, man-eating squirrels.
“Here.” She lifts a tiny porcelain plate, pretty and pink with bows trimming the edge and the most hideous, quickly made mud pie slopped atop it. A single lit candle sticks out from the pile of dirt, grass, and acorns. “Happy birthday, Vanessa.”
I stare at it with furrowed brows. Surprisingly, it’s not the earthly mess that confuses me. It’s the date. “My birthday isn’t until Tuesday. You’re early.”
“I know,” she sings. “But we have to celebrate now! It’s Friday, and there just so happens to be a big beach party tonight.
What are the chances?” Her long lashes flutter in an elaborate show of innocence, as if this hasn’t been planned since she called me and begged to hang out tonight.
If I didn’t love her so much, I’d peel off the tank top she let me borrow and strangle her with it.
“No.”
She lowers the plate a little and pouts her lip. “Vanessa Hart—”
“No.”
“—you only turn seventeen once. You have to celebrate it. What better way than drinking warm booze on the beach with sixty of your closest friends?”
My lips twitch. “I don’t even have five friends.”
“All the more reason!” She tosses her hair over her shoulder. “But we were invited, Vanessa, and what is an invitation if not a promise for the best night of your goddamned life?”
The candle burns longer, brighter, between us.
Purple wax drips onto a halo of dandelions.
The same color purple as the streaks in my hair.
She really makes it impossible to hate her.
“Last time we went out, you drank almost an entire bottle of tequila yourself and came home missing your underwear.”
“That was years ago!” she says with a laugh. The sound is feather soft with a sharp bite at the core, and so inherently Celeste—so familiar—that I think I could trace it in the stars.
“That was two nights ago,” I say, rolling my eyes. “I’m not being wrenched into any more of your salacious affairs.”
“You sound a lot like Brenda right now, Vanessa.” Her manicured nail points to her front door, midnight blue and threatening. “As in my mother, whose favorite hobby is church followed by shopping at Costco. This is your seventeenth birthday. Don’t you want to live a little?”
I take the plate from her, but she won’t let me blow out my candle. Instead, she covers it with her hand.
“I know you hated the last party we went to, and socializing basically turns you into an extreme-risk analyst, albeit one with a nice ass, but listen to me.” She grabs my chin with her free hand and angles it down until she has my full attention.
“One day, you’re going to work in a beautiful office overlooking the ocean and you’re going to have the world’s hottest husband and two adorable kids.
You’ll spend your weekends taking cooking classes and critiquing the latest movies in between his shifts at the hospital—”
“Just to be clear,” I say, “my future husband is a doctor?”
“A heart surgeon, and part-time male model,” she explains, before continuing.
“You’ll have the life of your dreams, and it’ll be a goddamned nightmare for me to lose you to suburbia.
For now, however—for tonight—you are young and hot and basically seventeen.
We are not wasting this Friday on extra-buttered popcorn.
We are going to Max Cayden’s party, and you are going to ram your tongue down his throat. ”
Oh god. A shiver runs through me, and I bite my lip. “You didn’t say it was Max’s party.”
She grins wickedly. “Got your attention now, huh, bitch?”
I blush, remembering the time he’d helped me up off the floor in the middle of a volleyball game.
I’d slipped on the hardwood after a bad serve—the other team’s fault—and he’d been on the sidelines.
It was divine destiny that he’d offered me a hand, and traitorous hormones that made me not score a single point for the rest of the stupid game.
It wasn’t fair that his eyes were so blue. In fact, it was supremely distracting.
I pull the plate away from Celeste and back up until I hit her car.
Leaning against it for support, I shut my eyes and sigh.
There’s no way I can go to a party hosted by Max.
I’ll make a complete ass out of myself. Even if I’m confident in front of Celeste—particular, stubborn, often controlling, and wholly myself—I can’t be that way in front of a boy I hardly know. I can’t be that way in front of Max .
Celeste rests against the yellow hood of her ancient Volkswagen Beetle.
“I can’t live with another year of you being too afraid to chase after what you really want.
You are so… full of life , Vanessa. If only you’d let anyone aside from me and the girls on your volleyball team see it.
” Then, less gentle, she says, “You’re getting laid if it’s the last thing I do, and if your wish is for that to be with Max, so be it. ”
I turn toward her with a scowl. “Grant—”
“Grant Austin does not count, and I don’t need to remind you why. Or maybe I do, and it starts with, just the ti—”
“Okay!” I blurt, lifting the plate of mud to my face to hide my ever-reddening cheeks. “Okay, I will go to Max’s stupid party if you promise to never say those words again.”
“Ha! I win.” She beams at me and flicks the purple in my hair. “Make your wish so we can get this show on the road. I heard Max’s big sister is home from college and she’s supplying the liquor.”
My stomach flips anxiously. Liquor. Max. A party. Three things at which I’ve never been adept. I swallow roughly and wish I could wipe my clammy palms on my skirt. “Are you sure this isn’t a stupid idea?”
“Would I ever lead you down a bad path?” she says.
I raise my brows and say, “Missing underwear and a whole bottle of tequila? Your mom almost locking you out?”
She laughs as if she doesn’t have a single care in the world. “And wasn’t that the best time we’ve had recently? Come on. No take backs. I promise not to lose my panties.”
Her brown eyes meet mine, and they’re so full of hope that I can’t bring myself to say no.
Even though I want to. Even though I’m not sure I should want to.
In the end, it doesn’t matter anyway. Celeste is like my North Star.
Or maybe we’re more like the Gemini constellation—twins.
Where she goes, I go, and where I go, she goes. Always.
I glance at the burning candle. The flame has nearly run halfway down the wax, purple speckling the dirt cake and painting a much nicer picture than before.
Every year since first grade—when my father was called into his station on my birthday and there were no cake and presents, just a very annoyed babysitter who immediately sent me to bed—Celeste has made me a birthday cake of mud and sticks and twigs and whatever else she can find in her backyard.
She used to walk it to my house after school.
This year is different, though, and all of a sudden, with the candle casting shadows between us, I feel different.
Older, maybe. Taller. As if I can almost see over the fence of childhood and into the future.
Celeste might not want the same, but normalcy—two parents and a house with a white picket fence and a schedule that’s reliable and unchanging—it’s all I want.
My mom left when I was so little, I can’t remember a time when I had more than just my father.
My father and Celeste. The other officers at his precinct.
A few girls on my volleyball team. Grant Austin last summer for a month.
That’s it. That’s been my whole circle my entire life.
A car barrels down the street, flooding the lemon tree with light. Nothing is there. Of course nothing is there. This tight, jittery feeling in my stomach is for another reason entirely, and perhaps Celeste is right. Perhaps I’m ready for something else now. Something new.
Celeste grabs my hand and squeezes. “Make a wish, Vanessa.”
When I close my eyes and blow out the candle, I do.
I wish for more.