Kody Keplinger - A Midsummer’s Nightmare

After Sylvia and Nathan had gone and I finished eating, I went upstairs. I’d barely been in my room five seconds when my cell phone started to ring.

“Hey, Boozy!” Harrison said as soon as I picked up. “You hanging out with the toilet today?”

“Hardly. That was nothing last night,” I said.

“Oh, really? God, I’d be afraid to see something, then. So what’s up today, babe? Bonding with the stepbrother?”

“No,” I said. “He went to the gym.”

There was a long silence, and I heard Harrison let out a low sigh. I knew he must be imagining Nathan all sweaty and shirtless on the treadmill… or the exercise bike… with those lean, muscled arms and…

Christ, now I was thinking about it, too. Not a good idea.

“So,” I said, clearing my throat. “What’s up?”

“Not much. Just wondering if you had plans today.”

“Nope.”

“Want to hang out?”

“I can’t,” I said. “Grounded for the week. I’m not allowed to leave the house.”

“That blows.”

“I know.”

“Hmm.” He paused, then said, “Well, are you allowed to have people over to visit?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I wasn’t told not to. So…”

“Fabulous. I’ll be at your place in twenty.”

Sometime between Wesley’s party and the Father’s Day cookout Sylvia planned, Harrison Carlyle and I became friends. At least, that’s what he claimed we were. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it.

Don’t get me wrong. Harrison was fun to be around. He’d come over almost every day during the week I was grounded (just as I’d predicted, Dad hadn’t altered Sylvia’s punishment). We watched movies and swam and talked about college plans. I had to give him credit; he kept me entertained, and Sylvia never said a word about me having guests over. If it weren’t for Harrison, I might have gone crazy.

Still, once my sentence was over and Harrison and I began venturing out of the house, I wasn’t totally comfortable with the way he introduced me as “My friend Whitley” or the way he’d laugh when we were talking and say things like, “I’ve never had a friend quite like you.” I wasn’t really sure how to contradict him, though, since I did like having him around—which is more than I can say about most people.

We spent time together almost every day, and when I told him about Sylvia’s big cookout plans, he offered to crash the party to keep me from stabbing myself in the eye with a shish kebab rod. A party devoted to celebrating a father I’d barely spoken to in weeks, thrown by the people who’d taken him away? Since getting hammered wasn’t an option, I knew I’d need Harrison’s support.

We sat at the dining room table playing Crazy Eights—possibly the lamest card game in the world—while everyone else milled around the backyard with their hot dogs and red cups full of lemonade. Sylvia had invited all of her coworkers and their families, plus the other anchors from Channel 34. The turnout was pretty decent, I guess, but I couldn’t help thinking that I should be spending Father’s Day with my father, not with everyone he and his fiancée knew, and not with Harrison.

“You guys should come outside,” Sylvia said, poking her head into the dining room. “It’s a beautiful day, and everyone would love to meet you.”

“We’re fine,” I said, slapping the eight of spades down on the pile and watching Harrison groan. “It’s too hot out there, anyway.”

“All right.” She sighed. “But I hope you change your mind.”

A minute later I heard her slip through the screen door in the kitchen, back to where her guests waited.

“I don’t know why she won’t leave me alone,” I mumbled. “She’s always breathing down my neck. Checking on me, asking if I need anything, wanting to know if I’m okay. I feel like I barely get a second to breathe.”

“She’s being nice.” Harrison laughed, drawing from the deck of cards. “It’s cute.”

“It’s annoying.”

“At least she cares.”

I remembered what Sylvia had said to Sherri at the bridal shop about being a better stepmom than the one she’d had growing up. “Yeah,” I said. “I guess.”

“Oh, you know what I just thought of?” he said. “You should stay over at my house soon. We could totally have a slumber party.”

“Don’t you think your mother would have a problem with a girl spending the night?” I asked.

“My mom knows I’m gay,” he said. “She’s fine with girls. Especially when I make new friends. She tries to fit in and be cool. It’s kind of sad. So, will you stay over? We could watch movies and talk about boys and do all that fun stuff.”

Was that stuff still fun? I didn’t remember. I hadn’t been to a slumber party since seventh grade.

“I don’t know, Harrison.”

“Please.”

I frowned and tossed an ace of diamonds onto the pile. “Fine,” I said. “Let’s make a deal: You throw a party, let me get wasted, and I’ll stay at your house that night.”

“God, Whitley. You’re practically auditioning for a starring role on Intervention.”

“What?” I grinned at him. “I’m more fun when I’m drunk, anyway. Give me enough to drink, and I might even let you give me a makeover.”

He laughed. “Okay. It’s a deal,” he said. “I’ll just have to trick my mother into leaving the house for the night.”

“Will she freak about the party?”

“Hell no.” He snorted. “She’ll want to hang out with us. And I wouldn’t be able to survive that kind of social humiliation.”

So it was settled. Harrison decided he would hold the party/sleepover on the Fourth of July, just over two weeks away. He could get his older sister to buy the alcohol, and his mother would be on a holiday retreat with some girlfriends. Perfect.

We’d finished our game of Crazy Eights and had moved on to Go Fish when Bailey walked into the dining room.

“Hey, Whitley,” she said, hanging in the archway that connected the dining room to the kitchen. “Mom wants to know if you and Harrison want cheeseburgers. Greg is firing up the grill again.”

“No thanks,” I said.

“I’ll take one.” Harrison smiled at her. “You ungrounded yet, sweetie?”

She nodded. It had been two weeks since Wesley’s party, which meant her punishment was finally over. Not that she seemed particularly excited about it the way I’d expected her to be. She’d taken the grounding without complaint, and not once had I heard her express a desire to go anywhere once it was over.

Actually, since that party, Bailey hadn’t been as chatty, at least not with me. It was really starting to freak me out.

I watched her disappear into the kitchen and out the back door. “Harrison, who were the boys you introduced Bailey to at the party?”

He shrugged. “Just some sophomore kids. I don’t know them that well, but one of the boys was my friend Kelsey’s younger brother. You met Kelsey at the party. She’s skinny, blond.”

“Oh, one of the Blond Mafia?”

“Is that what you call them?”

“Yeah.”

Harrison laughed. “I like it…. Got any twos?”

I shook my head. “Go fish.”

That night, I decided to give Trace a call. We hadn’t spoken in weeks, and texting wasn’t enough. I’d been ignoring Mom’s calls for a while, unable to listen to her bitching, and I needed to talk to someone on the outside of this little bubble I’d been living in.

“I miss you, too,” Trace said, sounding agitated. “Whitley, can I call you back later?”

“Um, sure, I just thought—”

“Emily’s expecting a phone call about a job and our call waiting isn’t working and if I tie up the line she might have an aneurysm. I’ll give you a call later tonight if you want.”

“No. It’s fine,” I told him. “Really. I’ll call another time.”

“Great. Love you. Bye.”

The next day, Bailey asked me to help her practice for cheerleading tryouts. I wasn’t sure how I, the anti-cheerleader, could help, but whatever. I sat on the front steps and watched as she did cartwheels across the grass and belted out goofy little rhymes.

“How am I doing?” she asked after about an hour of this.

“Good, I guess.”

“Good isn’t good enough.” She sighed.

“It’s just cheerleading.”

“But it’s important. If I want to be noticed in high school, I need to get this right.”

“Christ, Bailey, you watch too much TV,” I said. “That is so not how it works. You can be noticed for a lot of different things in high school. You don’t have to wave a pom-pom for people to know your name.”

“Did people know your name in high school?” she asked.

“Some of them. But I went to a big high school.”

“How did you get noticed?”

I bit my lip. That wasn’t a question I particularly wanted to answer. Not in detail, at least. “I partied a lot,” I said. “So people started recognizing me.”

“That won’t work for me,” she said. “I don’t think I like parties.”

“There are other ways, too. And being noticed isn’t all that important. Trust me, sometimes it’s better if no one knows your name.”

She shook her head, as if I had no idea what the hell I was talking about.

“Fine,” I said. “Keep doing your backflips or whatever. But for the record, I don’t think you’ll have any trouble getting noticed. People noticed you at that party, didn’t they?”

She stared down at her feet. “I guess.”

“See? Your life won’t end if you don’t make the cheerleading squad.”

“I know.” She tugged on the hem of her T-shirt and cleared her throat. “But will you help me work on this more tomorrow?”

“We’ll see.” I got to my feet. “You coming to the Nest tonight? To celebrate being ungrounded?”