“Um, sure.” I wasn’t quite clear on why Sybil was sending me on this reconnaissance mission, but I took a lap of the party. I didn’t see Liam Russell anywhere, and when I asked after him, one of his former football teammates confirmed he wasn’t in town. I returned to the car and reported my findings to Sybil, who breathed a sigh of relief.
“Didn’t you guys break up junior year?” I asked tentatively. “At prom?” I couldn’t figure out why Sybil would suddenly be so awkward about seeing her ex from two years ago.
“Yeah, we did,” Sybil nodded. “But then we were kind of on again, off again senior year.”
“Oh.” We sat for a moment in silence, and I could only assume that Sybil was thinking the same thing I was—how strange it felt that there was this gap in our knowledge of each other’s lives.
Then, after a beat, Sybil broke the silence with “He proposed to me the day I got into USC.”
“Hewhat?” I turned to face Sybil so abruptly, I could feel the twinge in my neck. A thousand emotions competed for brain space, but shock took up the most real estate. Both shock that Liam, at only eighteen years old, would have asked Sybil to marry him, and, perhaps even more intensely, shock that she hadn’t told me when it happened.
“I said no, obviously.” Sybil avoided my eyes, instead rooting around in her bag for a ChapStick. “But I just didn’t want to have to deal with… all that tonight.” She smacked on a layer of lip balm, checked her reflection in the rearview mirror, and then turned to me. “Ready?”
I nodded, and followed her toward the Daltons’ front door, but my mind was still reeling from what Sybil shared, more grateful than ever that we’d be spending the next month together. Clearly, I had missed out on a lot in the past two years.
We dropped our offering of Fireball onto Katie’s parents’ kitchen island, and after we forced everyone within shouting distance to do a shot, the Sybil Effect took hold. I watched as she took control of the makeshift dance floor in Katie’s living room, pulling people off couches and into the center of the room. It was jarring to see the transformation right before my eyes, the quiet, uncertain Sybil I’d seen in the car shifting into this larger-than-life Sybil. Of course, I’d always known she wasmore than just a party girl. I guess I’d forgotten. But watching her twirl Katie Dalton around to the beat of whatever pop song was top of the charts that summer, I was reminded that even when Sybil was at her most effervescent, she could be masking something much heavier than anyone knew.
I danced a song or two with Sybil and the others, then went in search of fresh air, making my way toward the sliding doors that led to the patio. I’d no sooner stepped outside than I found myself face-to-face with Finn Hughes, who was sporting an ugly-looking black eye, standing beside an already sticky beer pong table.
“H-hi,” I stammered.
“Hi.”
Sybil spilled out of the glass doors behind me and spotted the two of us together, something gleaming in her eye. “Oh hey, there y’all are.” Reaching into the cooler behind her, she handed us both cans of Keystone Light. “You two catch up while I obliterate Connor at beer pong.” Finn already had a drink in hand, so he tucked the can into the back pocket of his shorts and took a long pull of his already-open beer.
Left without Sybil as a buffer, I struggled to come up with what to say. Sybil and I had an unspoken rule that we never talked about Finn. All I knew was that his dad had died recently, and that didn’t seem like the topic to bring up at a party. I was tempted to ask him about his black eye, but didn’t want to hear what I was sure would be an idiotic justification for an idiotic fight. So I asked the most innocuous question I could think of. “How was North Carolina?”
“I deferred to be home with my dad this past year.” The bitterness in his voice surprised me. Finn had never been abig social media guy, so without any digital evidence to the contrary, I just assumed he’d gone to school in the fall like the rest of us. I didn’t realize that while everyone else went on to live their brand-new lives, he’d stayed behind to watch his dad’s end.
Two minutes into our conversation, Finn had already finished his first beer, and pulled Sybil’s offering from his back pocket.
“How is UT?”
“Oh, you know, it’s…” I trailed off. What was I supposed to say? If I said it was great, wouldn’t that just make him feel bad about missing his own freshman year? And if I talked about the harder parts of my first year away from home, wouldn’t that make me seem like an ungrateful jerk?
Finn ignored my floundering. “I visited Andrew in Austin when y’all played Tech,” he said, referencing a mutual friend from AP Calc who also went to UT. “I think I saw you there.”
“You did?” I was shocked, though I guess I probably shouldn’t have been. After how Finn and I left things at the end of high school, it’s not like he was going to text me to meet up on campus. But still, the idea that Finn was there, that he saw me without my knowing, was unnerving.
“Yeah, but you seemed pretty occupied with some guy.”
“Ah, Scott.” The weekend Texas played Tech, he’d punched through a dozen drop ceiling tiles in his dorm. Though whether it was in victory or disappointment, I couldn’t remember—Scott was definitely a “win or lose, we still booze” kind of guy. Navigating the college boy scene while also juggling a full course load was one of the hard parts of freshman year. I was trying to figure out my own limits when it came tothings like sex and alcohol. (Mom’s were a lot more black and white:Never. Ever. For any reason. Until you’re thirty. Maybe older.) I constantly felt like I had to choose between being the fun girl, who gets drunk and hooks up, or the serious girl, who didn’t do either.
“He seemed like a fun time.”
“He’s definitely a fun time. Potentially too fun.” I had tried to be the fun girl my first semester at Texas, but it hadn’t felt right. I didn’t just want to go home with whatever Sig Ep I found on Sixth Street.
“Is he your boyfriend?” Finn didn’t look at me when he asked—his eyes were trained on the beer can in his hands—but even so, the question didn’t feel casual. I paused for a moment, figuring out how to phrase my response.
“I’m not doing the boyfriend thing right now.”
It was true, though perhaps not the whole story. Scott, who was the Houston version of all the guys I’d grown up with in Dallas,hadtechnically been my boyfriend in the fall, but only because I’d forced him to define the relationship when he kept pressing for us to have sex. We broke up—or stopped hooking up—at the beginning of spring semester due to diverging ambitions (me: to close out the year with a solid GPA; him: to finally shotgun an entire six-pack of Keystone) and the fact that he didn’t really want a girlfriend. He wanted the fun girl. He never missed a dollar-beer night at Abel’s or a home game at DKR, but only ever managed to make it to a third of his classes. He got to UT knowing that when he graduated, he had a guaranteed job with one of his dad’s golfing buddies in oil and gas. I didn’t have a safety net. So I’d pivoted to being the serious girl for the rest of the school year: no alcohol andno boys. But being home now, and seeing Sybil, who never seemed to be tied down to anything but herself, I wondered how I could find my way to the girl I wanted to be.
“Fair enough,” Finn replied. “I’m not really doing the girlfriend thing either.” His eyes caught mine, and my gut did a weird dance, but then, out of nowhere, he started laughing. “So much for smoking Connor.”
I looked over my shoulder just as Sybil was pounding one of the final cups of beer on her side of the beer pong table and groaned. “She’s going to be so hungover on the plane tomorrow.”
“Are y’all flying somewhere?”
