2
Celeste drives us to the party in her car. The yellow paint is mostly rusted on the outside, making us a bronze blur in the night as we race over the Bridge of Lions, toward Anastasia Island.
St. Augustine is made up of two parts, each as historical and haunted as the other.
There’s downtown, on the mainland, with closely huddled cobbled streets hosting ghost tours, pirate museums, and a castle abandoned long ago.
In sunshine, it looks like the perfect vacation spot.
Pastel flowers peek over the edges of pink walls, and Spanish-style tiled roofs shade most of the square.
At night, however, that’s when you can feel its age.
It’s the oldest occupied European settlement in the United States—of course, that doesn’t count for much when all the land in the US was already settled by the people who lived here first—but I do think it explains the magnitude of hauntings.
Before Plymouth, before Jamestown, the Spanish colonized this coast. This city.
St. Augustine is a land of bloodshed like any other, and there are more than enough ghost-tour companies waiting to snatch your money and tell you all about it.
Anastasia Island is across the bridge, and it’s less well known.
Sure, tourists will visit, and the ghost tours won’t exclude it from their stops.
But when you think St. Augustine, you don’t think about the island or the red-tipped lighthouse, or the refurbished mansions that pop up after every hurricane, standing proud and modern on an ancient beach, almost as if challenging the next storm to come and do its worst.
Celeste and I never visit the island. It’s where the rich kids live—the ones who drive luxury cars paid for by their parents and go to school in fancy universities along the coast. They don’t really waste time talking to us townies.
Celeste knocks on her steering wheel three times as we cross the river and make it onto the island.
A superstition that she’ll no doubt take to her grave.
“Five minutes,” she says, popping in a different CD without even bothering to glance at the stereo system.
The music blares, too loud and far too bass heavy for the heart already thumping painfully between my ribs. “You ready?”
“To pee my pants? Sure thing.” I lean my head against the half-open window, wishing her air-conditioning did more than just blow warm air at us through dusty old vents.
“It’s just a party, Ness.”
“To you,” I say. “You excel at parties. You’re funny and charming, and everybody loves you. I just… I always end up standing there and babbling until people leave.”
She slams on the car’s feeble brakes as we run into a red light. Whipping her head around, smacking me in the face with her hair in the process, she glares at me. “You do not make people leave.”
“I wasn’t saying—”
“I don’t care what you were saying. I have a very close relationship with your subconscious, and she can be a mega bitch sometimes.
You do not make people leave.” The light turns green, but she doesn’t hit the gas pedal.
Even when the car behind us honks, she continues staring at me.
Her brow crinkles, and a droplet of sweat slides over her nose, down to her petal-pink lips. “I love you, Vanessa.”
“I love you too,” I say easily. Because it is. Easy. The easiest thing I’ve ever said in the world. I love Celeste as if she’s my own flesh and blood, or maybe even more than that.
“Good. Promise me you’ll try to have a good time. Let loose. Be fun.”
“Saying be fun implies that I am not already fun.”
“Well, if the gigantic shoe fits.” She throws her head back with one of her tinkling laughs as I smack her in the arm. Finally, she presses down on the gas pedal.
“A size ten is not gigantic. You’re just a pixie.”
“I’d rather be a pixie than Bigfoot.”
I yank my purse onto my lap and stick out my tongue. “I hate you.”
“You love me.”
I do. But it’s not necessary to say it again, and even if I did, she wouldn’t hear me.
She cranks up the music until we’re in definite risk of noise pollution, screaming along to lyrics that don’t match the ribbons in her hair or the glitter on her cheeks.
That’s Celeste, though. She contains multitudes.
And I contain—“Two lip glosses, a pack of gum, a can of mace, and one sterling silver Swiss Army knife courtesy of one very worried father,” I yell, listing out the contents of my purse until she lowers the music.
“Oh, and a granola bar. Do you think we need anything else?” I hold up the snack by the edge of its crinkled packaging.
Celeste glances at it as she takes the wrong turn.
“I think we sound prepared for the apocalypse rather than a casual chill hang.”
“Hey, watch the road. The public beach is way farther down.”
She flashes me a devious grin. “Who said anything about a public beach?” We continue down a skinny road shaded by tall oak trees and turn into the unlit parking lot of a black-and-white-striped lighthouse.
“Celeste,” I warn, a bad feeling rotting in my gut.
She turns off the engine. “You wouldn’t have said yes if I’d told you.”
“What happened to ‘casual chill hang’? We can’t party at the lighthouse! There will be alarms and cops, and we’ll be thrown in jail before our top schools can even reject us.”
“Says the girl fondling the knife.”
I throw the knife in my purse and sit up straight, refusing to undo my seat belt even as Celeste opens her door.
I thought last Wednesday when we went to Brooklyn Davies’s house—a boy Celeste swears she’s in no way into—was as wild as we’d ever get.
She drank, she smoked, she went missing for an hour in a sea of people. … That was supposed to be the apex.
“I’m pretty sure this is a felony.”
“First of all,” Celeste begins, “we aren’t partying in the lighthouse, just out back on the boat ramp. Brooklyn’s dad works here. It’s totally legal.”
“Oh, and there’s that name again. Are we stalking Brooklyn now? I thought Max was throwing the party.”
“He is. With Brooklyn.”
“They don’t even share a class.”
“So you’ve memorized Max’s schedule already?
I knew you could use your powers for evil.
Think of everything we might accomplish if you grew a pair.
” She steals my purse and leaps out of the car with a yelp.
Slamming the door shut, her pale frame fades out of view as soon as she takes a few steps. I clamber after her.
“This is not what I consider a good birthday!”
“I want to live, Vanessa. I want to be free!” She twirls in a circle, arms thrown wide. “Are you going to join me or what?”
I hesitate. One foot planted ahead of me and the other behind me. It’d be so easy to turn around and sit in the car until the cops come. She’d be busted, but it wouldn’t be for anything she doesn’t deserve. On the other hand… I think of Max and blowing out my candle.
I wanted more. I wished for more.
“Live,” she demands. “You’re only seventeen once.”
“Fine.” I step forward. “But I’m blaming you if any bad shit goes down.”
With a squeal of delight, she pulls me past the lighthouse, down the block, and through a tangle of bramble before we find the ramp on the shore.
Our arms intertwined, she shoves my purse into my chest, and I take it greedily with my free hand.
Cling to it like a life raft as we step over uneasy terrain.
Being here reminds me of falling asleep. That space between nothing and dreams, when you go from deep silence to an explosion of imagination, thoughts, and feelings without ever realizing it’s happening.
The creaky wooden bridge is abandoned, hidden beneath overarching trees whose swaying limbs and rattling branches disguise the sound of the Atlantic. And then, the bridge ends.
The party begins, and that bad feeling in my gut stays.
Sweaty bodies fill every crevice of the open space.
Sand shuffles between our toes, invading our shoes and grating against our skin.
The salty air feels heavier at night, like a blanket drawing closer.
Tempting under the moonlight with rays of gold glittering atop an endless ocean of black.
Phones illuminate what the moon can’t, set up on coolers and kegs and rainbow beach chairs that all look more like a kaleidoscope of shadows.
I don’t know where to go at first, so I continue clinging to Celeste as she parts the crowd of our classmates and heads straight for the coolers near the shore.
She doesn’t stare at the ground when she walks, doesn’t falter as we hit a dip in the sand.
Just marches with her back straight and her chin tipped up, her face bathing in moonlight. I wish I could say the same for me.
I’ve been to parties before—bonfires on the beach and house parties—but nothing like this.
Not at a party this large and loud that it’s as if I’m drowning in noise and scent and flickering bright lights.
They illuminate the faces of my classmates, my teammates, and some kids I don’t recognize.
Beautiful kids. Rich kids, with designer brands dripping from perfectly broad shoulders and muscled arms. Their heads turn in our direction, as if… as if they’re watching us.
Doing a double take, I nearly step on Celeste’s sandal and send us both sprawling to the ground.
A redhead in a black leather skirt laughs as I straighten, and my stomach pitches as I realize she saw—they all did.
I can feel their eyes continue to follow us as Celeste sneers, flipping them her middle finger, before leading me away.
And I don’t know where to look. I don’t know what to do.
My limbs feel foreign, heavier than usual.
Do I smile, or is that weird? If I frown, will my classmates think I’m a bitch?
If I start to move to the booming beat of EDM, will I look like a goddamned idiot?
Or will I look like Celeste—a tiny pixie swaying gracefully to the music?