by Carrie Secor
Melody was seated in between Steve and Clint. She felt fortunate not to have to sit next to Mike and Patrick, who were easily the most obnoxious and immature kids on the planet. Melody was unsure if all eighth grade boys were like this, or if their section had just lucked out when the two of them had chosen the trumpet over all other instruments to play. Clint would often cast wide-eyed, helpless glances in Melody’s direction when the two of them started acting particularly idiotic. He was very quiet and rarely spoke, unless it was to ask to borrow some valve oil or something.
Mr. Bell was in conversation with Kristy, who was crouched low on the podium. Since their show this year consisted of Spanish music, she wore a red and black flamenco dress, similar to the colorguard’s costumes, though they wore pants. Mike and Patrick were hovering slightly above the bleachers, craning their necks in an effort to see down the front of Kristy’s dress. Clint rolled his eyes.
Kristy stood to address the band. “Take your jackets off,” she shouted.
This command was met with cheers as kids started unbuckling and unzipping their jackets. The heat and humidity were starting to become unbearable, and especially now that they had just finished marching their show, band members were starting to turn into human sweat factories underneath their uniforms.
Melody stood to stretch her back, twisting her right shoulder around to the left side of her body. She surreptitiously glanced over her left shoulder as she did so. In the stands, the saxophones sat two rows behind the trumpets, which hindered her ability to look at Andy as often as she liked. She had a series of stretches and other maneuvers she performed in order to do so.
During this stretch, Andy was staring down at his saxophone and fiddling with his mouthpiece. Melody caught Lucas’s eye over Andy’s shoulder. Lucas stuck his tongue out at her playfully. She stuck her tongue out back at him, then turned around and took her seat.
Cadie appeared at the bottom of the bleachers and began climbing toward the trumpet section, a bottle of Aquafina clutched in her hand. Patrick elbowed Mike as she approached, and both of them watched her ascent in interest. Melody thought her sister looked a little different; it was clear that she had straightened her hair, which was pulled into a ponytail just above her neck, and the Doc Martens she normally sported were replaced by a pair of shiny black boots.
Cadie reached over the three boys to hand Melody the bottle of water, which she gratefully accepted. “Here,” she said. “It’s really humid. I’m sweating.”
“Take off your sweatshirt,” Melody suggested, unscrewing the cap on the water.
Cadie glanced at Mike and Patrick, who were looking far too innocent to be innocent. “Maybe later,” she said dryly. She nodded in the direction of the saxophone section. “Are you still set on going to this party with Andy?”
“Yes. Are you still going to drive us?” Melody took a sip of the Aquafina.
“Yes. Actually, it looks like I’ll be making an appearance myself.”
Melody swallowed. “Did Stacy convince you to go?”
“Something like that.” Cadie glanced over her shoulder. “I’m going to go grab some food for myself. The show was good,” she offered as she started to head down the bleachers.
“Thanks,” Melody called after her.
Once she was gone, Patrick leaned around Mike and Clint to address Melody. “Was that your sister?” he asked hopefully.
“Don’t even think about it,” Melody said flatly.
Andy was not sure if he had set a record for the shortest amount of time taken to change out of a band uniform, but he was pretty close. Not only that, but he managed to change into a decent outfit (jeans and a striped, button-down shirt), reapply an inordinate amount of deodorant, and use water from the men’s bathroom sink to slick his hair back before Melody had even finished taking off all the components of her uniform.
“Are you seriously not ready to go yet?” he demanded.
“Are you seriously going to watch me undress?” she answered, stepping out of her band pants.
“You’re wearing clothes underneath, Mel,” he said in exasperation. “Don’t make me out to be some kind of pervert.” He nervously ran his hands over his hair.
She looked at him quizzically. “What happened to your hair?”
“It’s just wet.”
“Will it look better once it’s dry?”
Lucas, who had been eavesdropping on the conversation, walked up behind Andy and put a shako on his head. “Here, we’ll give it that nice band hat shape that all of us strive so hard for.”
Andy pushed the shako off his head. It clattered to the floor. “Come on, Lucas. Don’t be an ass.”
“It won’t take me long to change, Andy,” Melody said, making sure her uniform was secure on its hanger. “I’ll be back in like five minutes.”
Andy sighed irritably but did not say anything as she walked off.
Lucas looked at him strangely. “So I guess you’re forgoing that whole ‘be yourself’ attitude to fetch women.”
“I want to look good—so what?”
“So stop being a butthead to Melody,” Lucas shot back. “I don’t even think she wants to go to this stupid party. And she asked her sister to drive you guys, so she did you a favor.”
“Why wouldn’t she want to go to the party? She was the one who asked me.”
“She’ll probably regret it once you get to the party and you ditch her.”
“I’m not going to ditch her,” Andy argued. “I’m just going to strategically split my time between hanging out with her and trying to talk to Amanda.”
“Does she know this?”
Andy waved his hand dismissively. He stood there in silence for a few moments as Lucas continued changing out of his band uniform, then said, “Do you think I should pop my collar?”
“No,” Lucas answered immediately.
Cadie felt a sense of foreboding as she parked the Ford on the street in front of Stacy’s house. The driveway was full of cars already. There were two kids sitting on the front stoop with a cloud of smoke surrounding them. Cadie hoped all they were smoking was regular cigarettes.
She did not feel comfortable with Melody and Andy, either. She felt like a third wheel. Melody was completely caught up in Andy, and Cadie had absolutely no idea what Andy’s agenda for the evening was, but she had a feeling it had nothing to do with Melody.
As they approached the door, she noticed that the two of them had both slowed down their paces considerably. They both looked over their shoulders expectantly at Cadie.
“Yeah, I got it,” she said, pushing past them and approaching the door. It seemed like they should not be allowed to attend a party where they were too afraid to open the front door. “Excuse me,” she said to the two guys on the porch, whom she recognized as Mike Thompson and Shawn Beaver. They moved out of her way without a word. Cadie decided against knocking or ringing the bell; somehow she felt this was not a situation where announcing her presence was socially appropriate. She turned the knob and opened the front door.
It was like being hit with a wall of sound and heat. Cadie was not entirely sure she had ever seen so many people clustered in a foyer in her life. People were almost shoulder-to-shoulder, which made it difficult for the three of them to wedge themselves into the house and for Andy to shut the door behind them, but somehow they managed.
Once they had forced their way through the orgy in the foyer, the room was less crowded. Apparently everyone had just arrived and was milling in the entry way. The living room was still crowded, but much more tolerably so. The stereo’s speakers loudly pumped My Chemical Romance directly into their bloodstreams. Cadie looked around for Stacy. When she did not see her, she turned to look at Melody and Andy, who looked petrified.
“I’m going to go find Stacy,” she said. She almost had to shout to be heard over the music.
Melody and Andy did not respond.
She folded her arms impatiently. “Are you going to be okay?” she prompted.
“Then stop looking like this is your first big-boy party,” Cadie advised before turning and walking away. It had been several years since she had been to Stacy’s house, but she still remembered where everything was.
She made her way into the kitchen and was relieved to discover Stacy, who was in the middle of asking a couple of kids to put the liquor bottles back where they had found them. Good luck with that, Cadie thought sarcastically. “Stacy,” she said out loud from across the room.
Stacy turned and caught her eye, her face brightening into a grin. “Hey!” she said excitedly, crossing the room toward Cadie. She gave her a big hug, catching Cadie off guard. “You decided to come!”
“Yeah,” Cadie said lamely.
“Did you want a beer?” asked Stacy, pointing her thumb over her shoulder. Cadie saw a silver keg sitting upright in a plastic tub surrounded by ice.
“I’d better not. I’m driving.”
Stacy rolled her eyes. “Cadie, it’s only a quarter after ten. You won’t have to leave for at least another hour and a half.”
“Yeah, but—”
“It only takes an hour to burn off one beer,” Stacy interrupted. “We learned that in health class in ninth grade.”
Cadie sighed disparagingly, but she shifted her weight to her other foot and eyed the keg.
“Come on, Cadie.”
“Oh, all right,” Cadie agreed.
Stacy clasped her hand and pulled her over to the keg. She pumped the tap a few times, then filled a blue Solo cup and handed it to Cadie. “It’s Miller Lite,” she said. “I hope that’s okay.”
Cadie took a sip of the beer without responding. She had only had beer on several occasions in her life and would no more be able to tell the difference between beers than Susan could tell the difference between a groundhog and a woodchuck. She drank it without tasting, forcing it down before it could spend too much time with her taste buds. “Where is the rest of your family?” she asked. Stacy’s parents were suspiciously absent, along with her two younger sisters, Brittany and Chelsea, who were eight and thirteen, respectively.
“They went to my grandmother’s in Pittsburgh,” Stacy responded, refilling her own cup. “I’m meeting them there tomorrow.”
“That’s convenient,” Cadie remarked.
Stacy grinned. “I know, right? We rotate who holds the party every week and I knew my parents weren’t going to be here, so I volunteered for this week.”
Cadie looked around. “Do you think you’re going to have enough time to clean everything before you go to Pittsburgh?”
Stacy laughed and shook her head. “No.” She took a long swig from her beer. “So, what are your plans for the rest of the weekend?” she asked.
“Not too much. I’m going to the mall with Felicia tomorrow.”
Stacy rolled her eyes.
“What?” Cadie asked defensively.
“Oh, it’s not you,” Stacy said quickly. “It’s just… Felicia.” She waved a hand as if she needed to waft Felicia’s name away from them.
“She’s not so bad,” Cadie said. “You just have to get used to her.”
Stacy shook her head, looking out into the family room. “She thinks she’s better than everyone else,” she said. “I don’t mean to insult her or anything, because I know she’s your friend. But I’ll just never understand how you can be friends with her. You’re really down-to-earth.”
“Felicia’s down-to-earth.”
“Felicia has never been on the earth because she’s been up on her high horse since middle school,” Stacy shot back.
Cadie did not know how to respond.
Stacy grabbed her wrist. “I’m sorry,” she said emphatically. “That was pretty rude of me. I’ve gotten to that stage of drunkenness where I think it’s okay to say everything right as I think it.”
“It’s okay,” Cadie answered automatically. Truthfully, she was thinking about how strange it was to be on the opposite side of this conversation. She could not accurately remember how many times she had argued with Melody about her friendship with Susan; now she was defending her friendship with Felicia to Stacy. It was surreal.
It seemed so natural to want to object to Melody’s friendship with Susan, because of how much of an asshole Susan was. Melody always protested that she was a good friend, and Cadie had never understood why. Now, standing here talking to Stacy, she wondered what Stacy saw in Felicia that made her object to their friendship. She also wondered if her friendship with Felicia was as good as she thought it was, or if she was being shortsighted by defending it.
Stacy excused herself to go find Will, with a kiss on Cadie’s cheek that made her smile. She sipped at her beer, drinking it quickly to forgo the taste.
Cadie remembered why she and Felicia had become friends. They both had a dry, sarcastic sense of humor. They had similar interests and opinions. They were both pretty imaginative kids and they always had a good time together.
But how close were they really?
The past few months, Cadie had tried to stay close with Felicia, but Felicia’s main interest had been Brian’s imminent departure from high school and, eventually, their lives. At one point in time, Felicia had let on that Brian had been suggesting that the two of them have sex, but Felicia had turned him down. However, that had been at the beginning of the summer; by now things might have changed. Cadie thought that since he was moving next weekend, the two of them had probably started a sexual relationship. She found it hard to believe that they would not.
After all, it was after Cadie had learned that Tom was moving that she had had sex with him.
Cadie mulled this over as she moved out of the way of a football player named Kevin Bauer reaching for the tap. She had never told Felicia that she had had sex with Tom. That was a conversation she could not picture having with her.
She wished she had been able to tell someone about it; it was a secret she still had to this day and she had gone through it entirely alone. Cadie and Tom had started dating about a year ago, during September of her junior year. They had been dating for about three months when Tom told her that his father had accepted a job in Harrisburg and they would be moving in March, not even able to wait until the end of the school year.
Cadie had liked him a lot. She might even have been in love with him, though that was something that they had never said to one another. They went to the winter formal together in December, and afterwards, she had snuck him into her house through the silent sliding glass door in their family room, and they had lost their virginities to one another on the sofa bed in her den. This had been kind of risky, but she had told him ahead of time that she was not going to lose her virginity in a car, and they could think of no other alternative.
Three more months passed where they had sex fairly regularly—at least once a week. They returned to the sofa bed from time to time. They also made appearances in her bed, his bed, the couch in his family room, and eventually his car, which was not as unpleasant as Cadie had originally anticipated, though she preferred being inside an actual building.
Felicia never knew. Cadie thought that Melody might have suspected, if only because they shared a wall, but her sister had never said anything. Felicia never knew.
Tom’s family moved in March. They talked about trying to make a long-distance relationship work, but they were both more realistic than most juniors in high school and came to the conclusion that the only thing in the cards for them was a breakup.
Tom’s departure had made a severe impact, more than probably even he knew. At the beginning of her junior year, Cadie had begun writing a novel. She had written in it periodically before she and Tom started dating, but once their relationship began, it seemed she had the motivation to write in it every day. They dated for about six months, and during that time, she had added to the novel almost every day—admittedly some days were more productive than others, but it had g
rown exponentially in length and she knew the writing was good.
The day he had left, she had stopped writing. From time to time, she opened the document on her computer and read over it, sometimes editing it, but she had not written anything further in it since Tom had walked out of her life. All that she had managed to write since then were a few lousy poems that others praised and she detested. It was why she always told everyone that she was not working on anything special, because she really was not.
Cadie did not go to her junior prom. Felicia, only a sophomore at the time, had gone with Brian, as it had been his senior year. Cadie felt that the only thing more depressing than going alone would have been playing third wheel to them all night, so she opted not to go at all. Instead, she sat at home, played cards with her sister and her dad, and thought about Tom and how she might have been in love with him.
Cadie blinked away her tears and hid her face behind her blue Solo cup as she continued drinking her beer. The original question—how close were she and Felicia really?—still loomed. How close could she be to someone who did not even know anything about the biggest chain of events in her life? During the time that she was (maybe) in love with Tom, and having sex with him, and having him disappear out of her life forever, she never spoke a word of any of it to Felicia. And now as she thought back on those times, she could not recall if Felicia had ever even asked.
Nine
Melody and Andy took some time touring the house, as they, unlike Cadie, had never been there. The house was enormous, with high ceilings and spacious rooms. The first level consisted of two huge sitting rooms (one of which had a big screen TV), a kitchen, and a half bath. The staircase that led to the second level had bright yellow caution tape across its threshold; they determined that this must have led to the master bedroom upstairs. Downstairs, they found three bedrooms that must have belonged to Stacy and her sisters, a full bath, and a rec room that had a pool table and a card game going on. The house also had a double-level deck that looked over their backyard, which was a very steep downhill slope into the woods below. It could be accessed by sliding glass doors off of both the rec room and one of the sitting rooms upstairs.