“Sounds great!” Colin, oblivious, replied. He clapped his hands. “So two cars? Or one?”
“Two,” replied Lana, who had somehow become part of all this without me noticing. She smiled at Colin. “I’ll ride with you.”
“Oh.” Colin glanced at me. “I figured Finley—”
“Great,” I said. Narrative, changed. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
I glanced in the side mirror of the truck, looking again at the car behind us. Colin, behind the wheel, was saying something while Lana, who had her bare feet up on the dash, trailed one hand out the passenger window. I could only imagine what the topic was.
At least they were talking. Ben and I had sat in silence for the entire ride so far. But quiet in an enclosed place is the opposite of restaurant time, dragging.
Finally, a noise.Bzzzzzz.On the seat between us, his new phone jumped, the screen lighting up.UNKNOWN NUMBER, it said. He glanced at it, then turned his attention back to the road.
Bzzzzzz.
“Your phone’s ringing,” I pointed out, unnecessarily.
He picked it up. “Hello?” I heard a voice, speaking quickly. “Wait, what?Tonight?”
Whoever was on the other end of the phone continued speaking, undeterred.
“No, I agreed, reluctantly, to the happy hour,” Ben said as I again glanced in the side mirror. Lana was now holding a bagof some kind of snack, she and Colin both chewing. It felt surprisingly intimate. “Dude. I’m not getting into semantics. The answer is no.”
Then he hung up, dropping the phone onto the console between us.Clunk.
“Hector,” he muttered. The word itself sounded like a curse.
“What’s going on?”
He glanced at me. “He’s trying to get me to agree to a gig he wrangled in Bly Corners. Local showcase at some club.”
“Wow,” I said.
He turned his attention to the road, switching lanes. “Apparently, there will be a talent manager there with connections to other venues around here. He’s decided this is our moment. Like, he literally used those words.”
“Looks like you might be in a real band after all.”
I kept going back to our old inside jokes, as if it might somehow get me closer to him. It seemed pathetic, even to me. Yet I couldn’t stop.
“Nothing’s changed,” he replied. “That’s what Hector doesn’t get.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning,” he said, “that just because you want something doesn’t make it happen.”
I had the feeling we were not just talking about gigs anymore. “So… what do you want?”
Now he took a pointed look in the rearview, at Colin and Lana behind us. “Does it matter?”
“I didn’t tell him to come here,” I said quietly.
“But heishere,” he replied. “So it’s pretty clear what comes next.”
“Oh, really?” An edge had crept into my voice now. “And what’s that?”
“You get whatyouwanted,” he said. “Your tornado. Colin as your boyfriend again. School together in the fall. It’s like I said: Nothing’s changed.”
