Carter
“Man, this is the most delicious,” Bodhi says after taking a swig from his bottle of hard lemonade.
“It’s freaking scrumptious,” Robbie agrees.
Bodhi, Robbie, Amir, and I are hanging out in the woods in Robbie’s backyard, one of our go-to after-school activities on days when Bodhi and I don’t have yearbook. Well, usually we hang out inside, but since I picked up a six-pack of hard cider, we’re back here. The trees obscure us from view in case Robbie’s parents get home early from work.
“You realize this is considered, like, kind of an immature thing to drink, right?” Amir asks as he takes a swig from his hard lemonade. “We should probably start getting IPAs or something.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Bodhi says. “I know it’s not the coolest position to take, but I gotta be real: I think beer tastes pretty bad, dude.”
“You are a child,” Amir says.
Bodhi shrugs. “I can live with that.” He raises his bottle in the air. “Being a child was dope!”
“Are you even drinking, Carter?” Robbie asks.
“Uh, I will,” I say, fiddling with some buttons on my fancy digital camera as if I know what I’m doing. I snap a pic of Robbie with the sun setting behind him through the branches.
I look at it on the small digital screen. It’s actually kind of good. Not ready to be shown to other humans who aren’t me, whomight rightfully call it out as unpolished or trying too hard. But I do like it.
“Though I actually might pass,” I say, “because someone’s gotta drive two out of three of you losers home.”
“So proud of you,” Bodhi says in a jokingly sincere voice. “So responsible. So thoughtful. At this rate you’ll turn seventeen for sure.”
“Yeah. Maybe.” I snap another pic, this one of Bodhi and Amir.
“Hey,” Bodhi asks, “did that Layla lady hit you back yet?”
“Nope,” I say. It’s been more than three weeks since I messaged Layla Banerjee, and my hope of her being any kind of key has pretty much fizzled out. I searched for her on other platforms, but the only place I found her was LinkedIn. So I sent her the same message there.
No response. Is it possible she’sstillmad at me five years after I dumped her? Or maybe she’s weirded out. Or maybe she didn’t look carefully at the message and thinks it was from some rando.
Whatever the reason is, I can’t apologize to her if she doesn’t respond. Not the way I want to, anyway. So I’ve tried to put Layla out of my mind, into the same locked box where I’m keeping Maggie.
I didn’t mean for that to sound so creepy. The box is figurative. Like, in my head. I haven’t put any of my exes into boxes! Is what I’m saying.
“Yo,” Robbie says. “Do you think this really happened because you dumped someone? Because if it did, I might be seriously at risk. I dumped Lina in September after eight months, and I didn’t even tell her like you did. I just stopped replying to her texts.”
“You mean you ghosted her,” Amir says.
“It sounds more messed up when you say it like that.”
“Itismessed up,” Bodhi says.
“What? I didn’t want to be with her anymore!” Robbie says. “And I knew she’d get really upset if I told her that.”
“Wow,” Amir says, gesturing to the unopened bottle of hard lemonade next to my feet. I hand it to him. “Just wow.”
“Do you think I’m gonna get what Carter has?” Robbie asks. “I really don’t want to.”
“Don’t worry, Robbie,” I say, framing his panic and taking a pic. “I think you would have gotten it by now.”
“Okay, yeah,” Robbie says. “’Cause yours happened the next day, right? Yeah.”
“I’ve dumped a ton of people, and I keep aging,” Amir says. “They usually deserve it, though. Like Patrick. He didn’t take my food allergies seriously at all. He’d eat hummus, like, right in front of me.”
“Such a dick,” Bodhi says, taking a final swig of his bottle before flinging it deeper into the woods, where it lands unseen with a somehow gentle shattering noise.
