Labor Day weekend, eleven years ago
“Turn that up!” Bonnie shrieked, her curly blonde hair whipping around her face as she gripped the leather steering wheel.
I laughed, cranking Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” on the radio.
It had been our anthem for the summer, which had easily been the best of my life.
I’d only met Bonnie in June, at a youth hostel in Santa Monica, but we’d almost instantly recognized each other as a soulmate.
Then, when we’d discovered we were both starting at Northwestern University in Chicago in the fall, our best-friendship fate had been sealed.
We chorused into the wind about staying up all night and getting lucky — me tunefully, Bonnie painfully off-key.
The late-summer sun beat down on Bonnie’s teal convertible as we sped along the shore of Lake Michigan towards Bonnie’s family home for the long weekend.
Not that it made a difference that it was a long weekend, for us.
Neither of us had been doing anything except having fun since graduating high school over a year ago, both enjoying a gap year before university.
Bonnie had half-heartedly interned in DC for a while, then spent the summer on the California coast, unnecessarily slumming it in hostels.
It wasn’t as though her parents wouldn’t have paid for a sweet vacation rental, but Bonnie was clearly looking to make new friends.
As was I.
After graduating high school in Indianapolis and deferring my place at Northwestern for a year, I’d taken nine months to travel around Europe, which I spent sitting in cafés and writing mediocre short stories — a trip paid for by guilt money from Dad, who moved back to Ireland following the divorce.
After Europe, I’d had an awkward stay with Mom back in Indy — but with her being unemployed and depressed, I needed to get away again before I slipped into my own malaise.
Dad was easily persuaded to fund a couple more months of me traveling the West Coast to keep me busy before school.
Thank goodness I did, or I’d never have gone to stay at that Santa Monica hostel near the beach.
I first saw Bonnie, golden curls splayed, sleeping off a hangover in the mock-Spanish courtyard.
Snoring gently, with last night’s dress hiked way up her thigh, she seemed like my kinda girl.
Slightly nervous, I’d taken a chance and grabbed two coffees from the kitchen, bringing one out to Bonnie, who was by then semi-awake from the morning’s buzz of activity.
“You look like you could use this,” I’d said with a shy smile. “I’m Millie.”
“Oh my god,” Bonnie gasped, sitting upright on the lounger. “You’re an actual lifesaver. Who knew that saints showed up with crop tops and shiny bobs? I don’t know you, but I literally love you.”
We’d barely spent a day apart since. With my poor excuse for a family long imploded, my tiny group of friends from Indy now heading for different universities across the country, and my high-school boyfriend having dumped me just before graduation, I didn’t have much of a community.
Or anything, really, except for a steady allowance from Dad each month.
It had felt like I had nothing.
Which meant Bonnie was everything.
And now I would be staying with her family for the Labor Day weekend, hopefully longer.
I mean, it wasn’t like I really wanted to kill another ten days back in Indy before school started.
With Northwestern only a half-hour from the Masons’ house in Lake Bluff, and all my worldly goods in a suitcase in the trunk of Bonnie’s convertible, it would be way better to stay with Bonnie’s family until the dorms opened mid-September.
I was so optimistic about this, I’d bought a one-way bus ticket from Indianapolis to Chicago.
It felt like I was saying goodbye to that life — and all the pain my parents had bestowed on me — forever.
The last thing I wanted to do was get the bus back to Indy again.
So, yeah, underneath the bravado of the song we were singing, I was pretty nervous.
I desperately hoped they would all like me.
Bonnie’s parents, Angela and Frank Mason, were both highly successful — her a family lawyer, him an architect with his own firm.
Plus there was an older brother still at home — a Northwestern alum who’d studied theater and was now writing plays. They all sounded a bit intimidating.
Bonnie gave me a sideways glance, no doubt picking up on something being off. She knew me so well already. “You still feeling okay about starting at Northwestern?” she asked, as the music subsided. “I know it’s been a weird few years for you, with your folks and everything.”
She could always pull me out when I was too much in my own head.
“Are you kidding?” I replied, lightly. “It’s gonna be a-maz-ing.
You and me living in Goodrich, tearing it up together in our Business Studies class.
Plus, bonus! I don’t have to listen to you snoring.
” We’d both snagged singles at the Goodrich House residence, thank Christ. With Bonnie planning on majoring in Political Science and me at the School of Communications, we’d already plotted to take minors in Business so we’d have some classes together.
And, as a keen if unpolished writer, I was also doing minors in Creative Writing and Journalism.
I figured it didn’t hurt to cover all the bases — after all, who knew what future career opportunities I’d get, or which path I’d want to go down?
“Uhm, yeah, and all the booooyyyys,” Bonnie drawled. “Why do you think I’m not gonna be staying at home with my folks, even though they live so close?”
I chuckled. Bonnie’s enthusiasm for a fresh batch of guys to go through was unbridled. And, if her antics in both L.A. and Portland were anything to go by, indiscriminate.
“Pur-lease. That’s exactly what most of them will be. Boys.” I shook my head, my dark bob catching across my eyelashes in the wind. “Give me a man any day. Like that delicious theater professor I met on the campus tour. Rufus. Oh yes. Rufus Anderson.”
“Roooo-fus Anderson,” Bonnie crooned in delight. “Ooh, like the famous missionary!” She slapped a hand on the wheel. For all her quirks, Bonnie’s American history knowledge was impressive.
I laughed. “If you say so. All I know is he can put me in missionary any day.”
We were still giggling as we pulled off the highway and into the largely wooded residential area of Lake Bluff overlooking the water.
We meandered down a long street, shaded from the sun by tall trees, and pulled into a gated driveway, where Bonnie reached out and punched a gate code.
“Mom’s birthday,” she told me with an eye roll.
“Which, yeah, is also Valentine’s Day. I’m always telling Dad to change it. ”
The metal gates opened with a clang and a judder, to reveal a curved drive sweeping into a modern-build, classical-style house clad in stone, with oval frames in the second-floor dormer windows.
My boho mother would’ve hated it, as would my traditionalist Irish father, but to me it was charming and elegant.
“That’s weird — Mom and Dad’s cars aren’t here,” mused Bonnie under her breath as we parked outside the double front doors. There was another car in the driveway, a dark blue Honda, that I raised my eyebrows at. “That’s Ben’s,” added Bonnie.
As I dragged my case from the trunk, Bonnie tried the front door, but it was locked.
“I didn’t bring house keys with me,” she explained, watching me struggle with my wheeled suitcase on the gravel.
“I didn’t realize my folks wouldn’t be home while I picked you up.
I never have their house keys with me when I’m here. ”
I uprighted my suitcase in dismay. I was grimy and tired after my long bus journey from Indianapolis to Chicago. “Then how do we get in? Is there a key under a pot or something?”
“Oh, don’t worry. Ben’s in. He lives in the basement. We’ll just have to go in the side door. Leave that here.” Bonnie grabbed my case handle and unceremoniously dragged it up the steps to leave it on the porch. “We’ll get it when we come up. Follow me.”
Bonnie led me along the left side of the house, down a sloped lawn, to a lower-level side door.
“This door doesn’t even lock — the frame’s gotten warped, so you can always get in this way.
” Bonnie gave it a hard tug, and it opened with an unexpected rush of air.
She stepped silently aside for me to enter ahead of her into the relative gloom, from which guitar music was clearly audible.
“Starlight” by Muse, that was it — some acoustic guitar version.
Through the open living space, I could see right through to sliding doors that led beneath an upper deck onto a pool terrace, with Lake Michigan shining in a slice of silvery teal beyond.
The music stopped abruptly. “Jesus. Who the fuck are you?” came a low, gruff voice to my right. I started out of my skin and turned.
It had come from a guy wearing nothing but a pair of white boxer briefs, sitting on the couch, a guitar resting against his bare chest. He ran a hand through his tousled, dark-blond hair and frowned at me.
“Relax, loser,” said Bonnie from behind me, turning on the overhead light. “This is Millie. I told you she was coming to stay. Christ, Ben, you couldn’t have gotten dressed today?”
“Oh. Uh . . . hi. Sorry.” He put down the guitar and stood, seeming even more underdressed than before, as he stuck out his hand. “Ben, Bonnie’s brother.”
I shook it timidly, my neck flushing with heat, trying to look anywhere other than the vast expanse of toned, tanned man-chest in front of me. Jeez, he was tall — well over six feet. Probably a whole foot taller than me.
“Uh, hi. Sorry to disturb your playing. Nice to meet you.” I turned in desperation to Bonnie. “We should go up? Grab my case from the porch?”
“Sure.” Bonnie playfully whacked her brother’s shoulder with the back of her hand. “Put some clothes on, slob. We’re having pizza when Mom and Dad get back from wherever the hell they are.”
“Mom’s still at work, Dad’s shopping,” Ben replied. “For pizza, and supplies for the Labor Day party. Something about getting a cake to celebrate our guest’s arrival.” He turned to me and smiled disarmingly, his mouth stretching wider than I’d expected. “See you at dinner.”
My stomach did a little flip. “Er, sure. See you then.”
Lowering my head to hide the blush forming on my cheeks, I followed Bonnie past the couch. My glance caught on a cute, if slightly kitsch, framed print on the wall with cursive script writing that read “Home is not a place, but a feeling.”
With my pulse still racing, Bonnie led me up a set of stairs to the main floor and showed me to the guest bedroom, which I took in distractedly.
Well, this was a new development.
Bonnie had never mentioned to me that her brother was hot. Not once.
Well, okay — it might’ve been weird if she had.
But still.