“Not good beer.”
“What the hell do you know about good beer?”
“Macon’s all into microbrewing now. He’s been cooking shit in his kitchen for the past few weeks.”
“Cooking shit? Is he brewing beer or running a meth lab?”
“You know Macon. Always enterprising.”
I laugh. I do know Macon. He’s five years older than us and is sort of a jack-of-all-trades. He made straight A’s in school, can figure out anything if you give him about an hour of silence, and has never lost a game of Trivial Pursuit because he’s a wealth of useless information. He also never went to college, even though Emmy begged him to. Instead, he married his high school sweetheart, Janelle, and stayed in Cape Katie, helping his mom run LuMac’s and raise his equally enterprising little brother. He and Luca have already started selling a few of Luca’s weird creations around town, but after Luca graduates, LuMac Designs will launch full force.
Every time I think about it, a little pang of loneliness shoots through me. I’ve never been without Luca. Not for longer than a couple of weeks, at least. The thought of leaving him—?and leaving him here, both of us knowing I’m counting on him to make sure Maggie doesn’t fall off the edge of the planet—?has always ?filled me with a lot of relief and a lot more guilt and a hell of a lot more fear. Every time I’d start freaking out about it, doubting that I could leave, that I should leave, he’d make this really annoying game-show buzzer sound.
“Mraaaa! Wrong answer! Try again!” he’d yell.
“Jesus, Luca,” I’d say, covering my ears.
“Gray, you and I both know you need to get out of this town. Me? I’m good here. I’m happy. I’m not a college boy. But you? You need that concert hall, and you need your own damn life, so Mraaaa! Shut up about it.”
And so I would shut up for about a week, and Mom would even cook a meal or two and buy me a new top or something. I’d get comfortable and start snuggling into a little normal and then—?BAM!—?Mom would do something wildly alarming, like drive to the duplex we lived in two duplexes ago and bang on the door because her key didn’t work until the current resident called the cops on her ass.
“Did you find a piano?” Luca asks now.
“Yeah. Luckily. Though it’s a bigger piece of junk than mine was.”
“Where?”
“The Book Nook. Patrick Eisley has an old upright in the storage room that used to be his dad’s or uncle’s or someone’s. Who cares? It’s got eighty-eight keys. I got in a couple hours of practice this afternoon.”
He puffs out his cheeks with held-in air before letting it out with a little pfft sound. A sure sign he’s holding back opinions.
“I know,” I say. “You don’t have to tell me.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You wanted to.”
“Gray, I always want to when it comes to Maggie. You know I love her, but—?”
“This is a party, Luca.”
“So what you’re saying is, shut up and party?”
“Basically.”
“I can do that.” He nudges my shoulder playfully before he mumbles, “For now.”
We both drink and watch our peers drink, most of them getting more and more sloshed by the mouthful and spilling half the contents of their cups into the sand.
“Oh, finally,” he says.
“What?”
“Kimber’s here.” He tosses back the rest of his beer and drags a hand through his hair about five times, a sure sign he’s gearing up for some grade-A flirting.
“Kimber Morello?”
“Yeah.”
