Unfriended (8 page)

“I’ll have whatever your favorite is, Mad,” he said, his eyes not leaving mine. “I could use something sweet.” He gave me a smile, the one that used to make my knees weak. It couldn’t be that Justin was flirting with me—he knew I was going out with Nate—but he was definitely acting strange. Like maybe he’d spent too much time in the sun today or something.

“Okay,” I said, grabbing one of the plastic blenders and heading to the prep area. “Coming right up.” Kavya followed me, watching as I scooped frozen mangoes, peaches, blueberries, and ice into the plastic blender.

“I thought you said he was your ex-boyfriend,” she hissed as I placed the blender on the black base and turned it to the right to lock it on there.

“He is,” I whispered back.

“Not what it looked like to me,” she said, frowning. “Whatever,” she huffed, turning on her heel and flouncing off in the direction of the employee restroom—no doubt to examine her hair for split ends, as she was wont to do in the afternoons.

I blended Justin’s smoothie and shook it into a tall white Styrofoam OAB cup, snapped on the lid, and grabbed one of the long red straws to go with it. I placed them on the counter and rang him up.

“That looks great,” he said. I glanced down at the cup and wondered what he was talking about, since all you could see was white Styrofoam. He pulled out his brown leather wallet and extracted a five from it. “Keep the change,” he said, smiling at me.

“
Thanks,” I said, putting his change in our Tips … Because We Blend Over Backward For You! jar
.

He picked up his smoothie cup and looked at me for another long moment before nodding. “Thank you, Mad,” he said. “I’ll see you soon.”

“Sure,” I said, even though I had no plans to see him soon—unless I ran into him at the beach, or something, but I just nodded back. He headed for the door and I skipped the mandated goodbye, on the grounds that it would make me sound incredibly dorky. I watched him go, then placed the used blender in the sink. I rinsed it out and turned back to the counter—and saw Justin’s wallet, forgotten, still sitting there.

I grabbed it, pushed myself up to sitting on the counter, then swung my legs over it and hopped down. I ran across the shop, yanked open the door, and stepped out into the hot afternoon. Putnam Avenue was much less packed with shoppers than it normally was, and everyone who passed me seemed to be wilting in the incredibly humid air. I looked up and down the street for Justin, but he wasn’t anywhere to be seen.

I stuck the wallet in the back pocket of my jean cutoffs—the nice thing about not really having a manager around was that there was no dress code whatsoever—and took out my phone from my other pocket.

OUTBOX 1 of 35
To: Justin
Date: 6/21, 4:00
P.M.

Hey! You forgot your wallet. I’ll hold on to it for safekeeping until you can pick it up.—Mad

I’d only added my name because I wasn’t sure if I was still in his phone or not. I looked at the screen, waiting for a response, but none came.

I was about to head back in when I heard the distinct sound of two guys giggling. Hoping we wouldn’t have any customers for the next few minutes, I walked to the back alley, where Daryl and John were perched on empty, overturned plastic fruit crates, both of them cracking up about something.

“Hey,” I said, and they looked up at me. As was their habit, John waved amiably while Daryl frowned, as though he wasn’t entirely sure who I was. While I always thought of them as a unit, they actually looked nothing alike. Daryl was very tall and gangly, with a shock of bright red hair, while John was probably six inches shorter than him, and compact, with thick black curly hair.

“Hey, Mad,” John said. “Howzit going?”

“Mad,” Daryl said, drawing out my name and nodding like I’d just cleared something up. “That’s right.”

“So we’re working at the Stanwich Yacht Club tonight,” John said. Daryl glanced over at him, looking
surprised, as though this was the first he had heard of this. “Okay if we cut out early?”

Proving that there were lots of employers who didn’t have mandatory drug testing, Daryl and John worked nights as valets at the Stanwich Yacht Club. After I’d found this out, I’d told Schuyler and Nate and anyone else I knew whose families were members—to never, ever,
ever
use the valet service. I wasn’t sure if it was possible to misplace a car, but I wasn’t going to put it past them. “It’s fine by me,” I said to John, who gave me a big, relieved smile. “But, you know,” I continued, “I’m not actually your manager. So … it’s really not up to me.”

“Then who’s it up to?” John asked, after a protracted pause.

“Gary,” I said, and Daryl nodded.

“Gary,” he repeated slowly. “That’s right.”

I realized I should probably head back to the store and make sure that we weren’t being potentially robbed for the second time that day. “I’ll see you guys in there,” I said, turning and heading out of the alley. There was a back entrance to the store from the alley, but it required that you climb a set of unlit stairs that I never failed to stumble over.

John gave me a salute, and Daryl nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “See you … Mad,” he added triumphantly, after a long pause.

I hustled around to the front entrance, pulled open the door, and walked inside the blessedly air-conditioned smoothie shop, which, thankfully, appeared
to be unburgled. As soon as I stepped inside, my phone beeped with a Constellation update.

I smiled. Dave’s parents were perpetually out of town, and so his pool parties were incredibly fun, as there was nobody telling you to observe water-safety rules or move the passed-out Ginger off the diving board.

As I put my phone back in my pocket, I felt Justin’s wallet next to it. I thought about putting it in the lost and found basket, but then hesitated. This was his
wallet
, with his money and license in it. And I had a feeling that Daryl and John, if they were seeking the means to pick up some more herbal refreshment, were not to be trusted with a wallet that might have some cash in it. So I left the wallet in my pocket. Then I glanced toward the door, but there was still no sight of Justin coming back. Trying to push the oddness of our interaction from my mind, I headed over to the smoothie station and got back to work.

When Nate and I arrived at Dave’s, we could hear that the pool party was already in full swing. And technically, we weren’t even
at
Dave’s yet, but parked about half a mile down the street. Putnam cops routinely broke up teenagers’ parties whenever they saw a lot of cars with Putnam High parking tags around one driveway. So it was now totally normal to hike from a great distance to get to the party itself.

I got out of the truck, holding Nate’s towel and my beach bag, and walked around to meet him. He took my free hand in his, kissed the back of it quickly, and then threaded his fingers through mine. We walked up to Dave’s with our hands intertwined and swinging back and forth between us.

Maybe it was incredibly rude to Dave, since we hadn’t even made it to his party yet, but I was already hoping that Nate and I might be able to leave a little early—especially since my father had left me a message that there was a crisis at the paper and he was needed late at the office. I was thrilled about this (well, not about
the crisis, whatever it was, but that I might be able to get some uninterrupted Nate time).

We walked around to the back of the house, where an expanse of grass overlooked the water of Long Island Sound, bordered by a low rock wall. We rounded a curve and there was the pool—large, with a diving board and an extra-deep deep end. And sitting on lounge chairs that lined the edges, or swimming in the pool itself, were my friends.

Ginger Davis, the theater department’s costume guru, was floating on a raft in the middle of the pool. She was leaning over the edge of it to talk to Jimmy and Liz, who were squeezed together onto a float that was clearly only meant for one.

Schuyler was sitting on the diving board, her mile-long legs hanging over the edge and her feet brushing the surface of the water. She was wearing a bikini—maybe because it was now night, and the chances of getting burned were significantly reduced. She was talking to Lisa and Tricia, who were standing by the side of the pool.

It appeared that once tanning hours were over, Lisa could go back to dressing for fashion, as she was wearing the most Parisian-looking bathing suit I’d ever seen, a vintage-looking strapless black one-piece paired with high black espadrilles.

Tricia was wearing a retro-looking sundress, and leaning over to better hear what Schuyler was saying. I just hoped that she wouldn’t get too close to the edge. Last summer, Dave had shown absolutely no impulse control when it came to pushing people into the
pool, whether or not they were fully clothed.

But luckily, Dave was busy steering a motorized toy car around the patio, causing Lisa to frown at it whenever it passed her. While Dave worked the remote, he was talking to Mark Rothmann, who was wearing a plaid bathing suit and had a pair of goggles perched on top of his head. Mark caught my eye and smiled at me, so he clearly had forgiven me for not visiting him more frequently at the Second Concession Stand.

Glen Turtell was sitting on one of the pool’s lounge chairs, fully dressed, talking to Brian McMahon, both of them watching the progress of the car as it careened around the patio. I was glad to see Brian, since it meant that his incarceration must have been lifted, and he was now allowed out of the house again.

Brian was always throwing legendary parties when his father was out of town, but was incredibly bad at covering his tracks, and so was always getting grounded. Proving that some people just don’t learn, he had celebrated the end of his last grounding by throwing a blowout “ungrounded” party. He was grounded again, of course, and the length was extended to “indefinite” when his father had seen his grades. Brian had been my lab partner in Marine Biology, which turned out to be a very bad pairing, as we’d spent most of the semester talking, and very little time dissecting starfish. I had realized my grade was in jeopardy after the prom, and had buckled down with an intense cramming schedule. I had received a good enough grade on the final that I passed the class with a B–. Brian, however, had not been
so lucky, and was now taking summer classes to make up for his F.