“I’m asking you,” I said.
Now, he did meet my eyes. “She wanted him to stay. He wanted to go. And drinking and boats don’t mix.”
The accident. I blinked, it only just then hitting me that we were talking about his dad, and that night all those years ago, when my mom was with him.
I squinted through the dark, to the road. Bailey was about a block down now. “I should go, I guess.” I kicked off Trinity’s shoes, picking them up in one hand, then started across the grass.
“Hey,” Roo called out. I turned. “See you later?”
I told myself it was just what they said here. And yet. “Yeah,” I said. “See you.”
I had to jog to catch up with Bailey, leaving me breathless. Finally I reached her, the lights of Campus dimmer now behind us. “Hey,” I said. “You okay?”
“No,” she replied, still walking. “Yes. Maybe. I don’t know.”
We walked in silence for a bit, passing the back of the Tides—PRIVATE! GUESTS ONLY! said several signs—as well as the boardwalk, which was pretty much deserted. It was clear that North Lake and Lake North had many differences, but neither was a late-night town.
“I wasn’t going to take the boat home, just so you know,” she said suddenly as a gated neighborhood called Bellewether came up on our left.
I didn’t say anything.
“Seriously! I wasn’t.” She tucked a piece of hair behind her ear. “I figured Roo would bring them over, Jack would take our boat back, and we’d catch a ride with someone. It would have worked out fine if he’d just not been such a jerk. But lately he’s always a jerk because my dad is putting all this pressure on him about taking over the Station.”
A car was coming toward us now, moving slowly, headlights bright in my eyes. I started to move out of the road, but then it turned, leaving just us and the dark again.
“I’ll be honest,” I said. “I don’t really understand what happened back there.”
She sighed, shoving her hands in her pockets. “Jack’s the oldest of all of us. He knows that what he does, everyone else will do. He’s hung out with Rachel and Hannahbefore on our side. If he’d come over here in good faith, it would have been just like any other night. Only the setting is different.”
“But he didn’t do that,” I said, clarifying.
“Of course not. He had a chip on his shoulder, the way he always does about guys from the yacht club, and everyone from Lake North, for that matter.”
“And it probably doesn’t help if they’re into his little sister,” I added.
She glanced at me. “That’s irrelevant. He’d rather I date a certified douchebag from our side than a saint from over here.”
“Is there really a verification process for that?”
She rolled her eyes. “Ha, ha.”
I smiled. “So maybe he’s biased. But it seems like what you were actually about to come to blows about was the whole drinking-on-the-boat thing.”
“Because he knows that subject negates anything else!” she replied, loudly enough so I stopped walking for a second, startled. “Sorry. It’s just we’ve heard about that accident our whole lives. It’s the cautionary tale of all cautionary tales and had nothing to do with all this. And the fact that he brought it up in front of Roo just makes me look more like a jerk, because...”
She trailed off, her flip-flops slapping hard against the pavement as we passed a third gated neighborhood in a row, by my count, on this tiny deserted road. What were they keeping out? Civilization?
“Because it was his dad,” I finished.
“Which, again,” she shot back, “had nothing to do with Jack sabotaging my night and this thing I had going with Colin!”
“I know,” I said carefully, holding up a hand. “I’m new here, remember? I’m just trying to catch up.”
She ducked her head down, not saying anything for a minute. Up ahead, the road was widening as we approached an intersection, a single red blinking light above it.
“Your mom never talked about it?” she asked me finally.
“The accident?” She nodded. “No. She told a lot of stories, but not that one.”
