“Black cherry or raspberry lime?” Riley asks. “There was also grapefruit, butblech.”
“Black cherry, please,” Maggie says. She feels like she’s a kindergartener at a restaurant and Riley is her sophisticated server. Maggie has to hand it to her though: Riley is acting cool as a cucumber, like the two of them actually have experience going to parties.
The first few sips of Truly go down with some effort—Maggie has never loved carbonated beverages, and the aftertaste of the alcohol introduces an uncomfortable little zing into the back of her throat. But she perseveres, a good little soldier, and before she knows it the can is three-quarters of the way gone, then completely empty. By the time she’s done Jacob has arrived, and he and Riley kiss as though one of them has been on a desert island for forty-two days, and then they disappear, presumably to make out somewhere more private.
Maggie helps herself to another Truly, raspberry lime this time, then carries it outside and to the far edge of the lawn and gets to work on it. There’s a stone wall parting this yard from theland next to it, and she lowers herself to a seated position on the ground with her back against the wall.
She belches softly, then looks around to see if anyone heard her. Nobody is paying her any mind at all. She doesn’t know where Sam went. She can still hear the music from here. The Weeknd, of course. Obvious choice, but still fun. Nobody is officially dancing; however, some of the shadowy bodies are swaying. Maggie is within a few arms’ lengths of dozens of people, but she may as well be alone. She supposes she could find her bike and cycle home, but she doesn’t feel like putting up with questions from her mom or from Anthony or, worse, from Max, who is visiting them and whose incessant questions put Maggie’s teeth on edge. Does Maggie know that there are only five thousand Chilean dolphins left in the wild? Does she know that there will be a total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024? Has she seen the video with the dog riding on a turtle? (Yes, Max, literally everybody has seen that video. Maggie begins to wonder about the wisdom of giving a six-year-old access to the Internet.) Sometimes the questions are of a more personal nature. Where is Maggie going? Why? Can he come? Why not?
She concentrates again on Truly Number Two. This one is going downmucheasier than Truly Number One had. Her thoughts unbutton themselves and go free, and all she can think about is the photo on Riley’s phone, and the conversation that they had after.
This is just how it is. This is how we have to be.The hooded look, the careless shrug.
A few more sips.
The edges of the night begin to blur. She looks skyward, at the nearly full moon. The moon is blurry. Is it blurry for everyone?
“Is the moon blurry?” she asks the person closest to her, a girl with long dark hair and a pierced nose with a glinting gem in it.
The girl looks up at the moon, then looks back at Maggie andsmiles. “Not to me. But also I’m sober. I’m in rehearsals, and I don’t drink when I’m in rehearsals.”
“Oh,” says Maggie. (Isn’t everyone here in rehearsals?) “Right. Of course. That’s how you know Sam.”
“Yup.” She holds out a hand for Maggie to shake. “My name’s Amelia.”
“Maggie.”
“Come sit,” Amelia says, pointing to the wall she’s sitting on. It’s the same wall Maggie was leaning her back against, but it follows the grade of the lawn and is shorter where Amelia is. Why not? Maggie sits. “Did you come here alone?” Amelia asks.
“No.” Maggie waves a hand in the general direction of the house, of the moon. “I came with my friend Riley. But she’s...” Her voice trails off, and she’s suddenly filled with an unnameable sadness. “It doesn’t matter,” she says finally.
Amelia moves closer to her on the wall. She’s wearing perfume. Maggie doesn’t know enough about perfume to know what it is, she’s only familiar with Riley’s Ariana Grande perfume, but it smells nice. “Friend troubles?” she says. “You can tell me about it, if you want. Believe me, I’ve been there. God, I’m happy to be out of high school. Graduating was the best thing that ever happened to me. How old are you?”
“Sixteen,” says Maggie, because that feels more dignified than her actual age. She’ll be sixteen in the fall, so it’s not too far off.
Amelia pulls a vape pen from the pocket of her shorts and inhales. “I’m sorry!” she says. “How rude of me. I didn’t even offer.” She holds it out to Maggie. “It’s weed.”
“I thought you had to stay sober for rehearsal.”
“Yeah, I can’t do alcohol. That messes with me. This just calms me down.” Amelia shrugs.
“No, thank you,” says Maggie. She cringes a little; to her own ears she sounds formal and polite and very much not yet sixteen. She and Riley went through a vaping phase a couple of summersago, the same summer Maggie had a tremendous crush on a French boy named Hugo whose father owned a food truck that gave Maggie’s mother a lot of grief. Their vape pens took flavored cartridges, not weed. It was a brief phase and ultimately not worth the wrath of Maggie’s mother when she found the equipment in Maggie’s backpack.
“So tell me what’s going on. With your friend or whatever. I’m a neutral party.”
“Oh, that’s okay. Thanks. It’s stupid.”
“My mom always says, if it’s bothering you, it’s not stupid. And then I’d tell her whatever was bothering me, and she was totally right. It didn’t feel stupid anymore.”
Maggie thinks about this. Her mother used to be someone she could talk to, but since Anthony moved in her attention has been so...claimed. Joy Sousa is a pie, and that pie used to be divided exactly in two: half for Joy Bombs, and half for Maggie. Then Anthony moved in, so the pie got divided into three pieces. Sometimes more! Max, for example, doesn’t share Anthony’s piece. He gets his very own. Maybe a smaller piece, but still a piece.
“What’s your part in the play?” she asks Amelia. “Is it a good part?”
“Sure. I’m Hero. It’s a big part. And. To be in a play with Gertie Sanger? When I haven’t even started college? The kids in my program are going to freak out. That’s, like, adream. But TBH there are some cringey things about the character that I wish I could change.”
“Like what?” They readRomeo and Julietin school last year but otherwise Maggie has managed to evade Shakespeare.
“Well, like. Here’s the big one. Hero gets totally set up by these jerks who tell this guy she’s about to marry that they saw her with someone else so she’s not the virtuous woman he thought he was marrying.” Amelia inhales from her vape again. “This was in the way olden days, of course, so virginity was a big deal, you know.Not like it is today. So this asshole believes the lie and humiliates my character in front of basically the whole town at the wedding, and refuses to marry her.”
