#cpwriting

“Now that’s unfair,” Ransom grumbles. Shitty presses his hand over Ransom’s mouth so quickly there’s a slap! and then a pained grunt.

“Affirmative action, man. Let them have this.”

Larissa snorts when Holster passes a hand over his face to force it into a serious expression. “Okay, LD, like we practiced,” he says with a nod.

“Mmph!” Whatever Ransom is trying to say is muffled by Shitty’s palm.

“TRICK SHOT!” Larissa cries as Holster twists her around and lifts her up so she’s backwards and two feet taller. She closes her eyes to throw the ball -- it lands in the center cup. The small crowd that always gathers to watch the pong players erupts in cheers while Ransom falls to his knees.

“Oh my god. Oh my god. That was amazing. I’m dead. You’ve killed me,” he chants, face buried in his hands.

“Fuck. I’m upping my weight training for the next time we play together,” Shitty says. Holster winks and kisses his bicep, and Ransom swoons.

Larissa takes a bow. “Losers. You need to up your pong training if you ever want a chance at beating me.”

“Anything, Your fucking Pongness.”

Ransom stands abruptly. “Hey! What about Ponger! Pongo? Pongsy!”

They stop, thoughtful, then shake their heads all together.

“Naaah.”

“Don’t think so.”

“Doesn’t feel right.” This from Shitty, who shakes off the excess beer from the ball and hands it off to Larissa. “We’ll get there one day. Never leave a bro behind.”

Holster gasps. “Hey, Larissa,” he says, “we’re looking for a new team manager. Want me to put your name in with Hall and Murray?”

Because she likes hockey, and she likes these boys, and it’s Frosh Week so she really likes all the beer she’s had warming her from the inside out, she shrugs. 

“Sure, why not?” she says, and Holster lifts her up again in celebration.

“Fucking ‘swawesome.”

“All right, fuckers, sit down,” Shitty says, barging into Holster’s dorm with what looks like a reluctant Jack in tow. Larissa’s got her head on Ransom’s stomach, both laying on the floor, and Holster’s at his desk, headphones in, watching Cheers. 

“We’re already sitting down,” Ransom says, barely looking up from his Scientific American. They’re not high or anything, because it’s early Wednesday afternoon and they all have classes later, and it’s still too early on in the semester and in their university careers for them to say fuck it and skip. Though she doesn’t think Ransom would anyway, and Holster wouldn’t because what the hell would he do for an hour and fifteen minutes without Ransom? 

“Listen,” Shitty says, ignoring Ransom’s comment and throwing himself on the bed. Jack sits gingerly at the edge. “We need to get a lockdown on this nickname thing. I’ve brought Jack along to help.”

Larissa doesn’t really know Jack -- well, she knows what everybody knows, what Wikipedia knows, but other than that, not much. He’s older, already 21, and quiet, and he plays hockey, and Shitty likes him. She doesn’t even know what he’s studying. 

“You said we were going for a walk,” Jack says, staring at Shitty pointedly.

“Yeah, and we walked here, didn’t we? Oh, don’t -- we’ll go once the froggies leave for class, okay?” He’d memorized their schedules sometime last week.

Holster takes his headphones off and swivels to face them. “Okay, what have you got, then?” 

Clearing his throat loudly, Shitty pulls out a crumpled-up napkin, making a show of smoothing it out. “Possible nicknames for one Larissa Duan: Duano--”

“Oh, God,” Larissa mumbles. Shitty goes on unhindered.

“--Dutsy, Dusty, Lassy--”

“Stop, holy shit,” Holster says, jumping up and cross the few feet to rip the paper from Shitty’s hand. “These are all awful. What -- oh my god, I don’t even want to read these. I can’t look at them anymore.”

Ransom pushes Larissa’s head so it sits on his lap, and pushes himself up. “Bro, you’re forgetting the most important aspect of a nickname. It’s gotta be organic, right? Natural.”

“Goddamn, you’re right.” Shitty hangs his head. “You’re fucking right. What was I thinking? This manufactured bullshit will never be it.”

“Maybe she can just be Larissa. Like me,” Jack says, shrugging.

“Jack, your name’s not Larissa. It’s Jack,” Ransom points out, rather unhelpfully.

Larissa rises from Ransom’s thighs and holds herself up on her elbows, eyeing them each in turn with an eyebrow raised. “You’re all just gonna have to work harder.”

“Damn,” Holster says softly. “Never leave a bro behind.”

The late-night fro-yo runs have gained in frequency the closer they get to mid-terms, and this time she’s out with Emilie and Simon, who are the other occupants of her designated studio space. They’re second years who live in apartments off-campus, and Larissa likes them a lot. She thinks they like her too. They’ve got twenty-four hour access to the building, so it’s not unusual for one of them to scream FUCK IT past eleven, and drag the others to Simon’s car, sometimes stopping to pick up another friend or two in the rooms next to theirs, still splattered with paint and glitter and clay.

“I’m just saying that there’s gotta be a way to make the studios more accessible. Like I get that it’s an old building, but all those fucking stairs? And like, one elevator? Shit’s ridic,” Emilie says around a mouthful of spoon and chocolate yogurt, caramel dripping down her chin. Larissa knows all about the stairs -- and, though she’d never admit it, the elevator too. “I think we should write a letter to the department, get some signatures. At least get them to commit to look into it.”

“Mm, yeah,” Larissa says, scooping up a strawberry. “You should talk to my friend Shitty. He got the school to fix up the ramp at Faber last year, because it was pretty much falling apart.”

Simon laughs. “His name is Shitty? That’s unfortunate.”

“It’s a hockey nickname.” She shrugs. “Most of them have one.”

“Do you?” Simon asks. 

“Not yet. Maybe eventually. Hey, wanna trade bites?”

Emilie laughs and pushes her cup closer to Larissa’s. “Nah, just take some of mine. What’s the point of getting fruit when you’re going out for a treat, you know?”

Larissa scoops up half a spoonful of chocolate and caramel. “Hm. Not a lot of fresh fruit at the meal hall.” It’s only part-lie (she doesn’t stop to think about how big a part). “Thanks.”

Later, when Simon’s gone home and she and Emilie are back in their studio space (the building was converted from an old elementary school and there is still tape on the walls under jacket hooks with names like Sarah and Kevin and Tommy), Emilie asks her if she’s ever had sex. It’s not -- weird, really, because Emilie is like that; she writes sex-ed articles for the Swallow, wears shirts that say Consent is Mandatory, is part of the art school’s feminist collective. She and Shitty really would get along.

“Ever had sex?” she says, casually. Larissa notices she doesn’t ask if she’s a virgin -- Holster had, and Shitty had nearly yelled himself hoarse. 

“Yes,” she says. This one’s a full lie. She doesn’t know why she says it. Well, okay, that’s a lie too, because she knows. She definitely knows. 

“Do you, like, want to?” Emilie says. She’s at the sink washing off her brushes.

Yes, she fucking wants to. Social construct or not, it’d be a relief. And besides, she likes sex -- with herself. And she’s watched plenty of porn. Read plenty of porn. She figures it can’t be that hard -- vulvas aren’t as scary as dicks, anyway, even though she thinks she’d like both. 

Her heart is beating so fast she can feel it in her throat, in the back of her head, in her fingers, deep in the pit of her cunt. Pulsing.

“Like, in general? Sure,” she says, shrugging. She doesn’t look away from her canvas.

Emilie steps closer. “Well, with me. I just feel like we could use a bit of a de-stresser, you know?”

Larissa raises an eyebrow and tilts her head. “Smooth.”

She already knows she’s going to say yes, that Emilie wouldn’t joke about this.

“Hey, no hard feelings if you don’t want to.”

She measures the pause: enough for a breath, enough for her to seem like she’s considering it.

“Yeah, why not?” she says, and if her voice is a little higher-pitched than normal, Emilie doesn’t notice, grinning wide.

“Awesome. Put your stuff away and -- your place or mine?”

“Mine’s closer,” she says, stepping towards the sink, biting her lip. She concentrates on slowing her movements, because she feels like everything is spinning too fast, her heart beating beating beating. “And you’re in luck, I even made my bed today.”

Emilie steps into her space and stretches her arms around Larissa’s waist, drops her head down to her neck to kiss it. “We’re just going to mess it up again,” she whispers, her voice gravelly. Larissa’s breath hitches, like a silent hiccup.

“Jesus, Em. Impatient?” she forces out as Emilie’s hand sneaks under her shirt to rub along her ribs and stomach. Emilie laughs into her ear.

“I guess. I’ve been feeling really tense, ya know?”

“Mmm. Come on, let’s go.”

She tells herself it’s not a big deal, that she won’t make it a big. People have sex all the time. Good sex, even. Because it was -- good sex. At least, she thinks. But Emilie said so after, said that it was fun with a wide smile before she picked up her clothes off the floor and left only a couple bobbypins and the scent of fucking behind. Like, not a big deal. 

She texts the group chat anyway, approximately five minutes after Em leaves. 

Guess who just had sex, she writes. Resists adding a couple exclamation marks. Hides it under her pillow after she sends it. 

She’s kind of -- well, naked. And sticky. And is debating the merits of a shower when her pillow buzzes.

YOOOOOOOO SWAWESOME, from Shitty.

Then two seconds later, Ransom: Brah! Me too!

It’s a Tuesday night, Justin, Holster writes. You have class tomorrow morning!

So does LD!! Ur just jeal of us. Ransom answers. She hides her face in her pillow even though no one’s around to see her blush. 

Congratulations, Jack answers a few minutes later. It almost sounds sarcastic, and maybe it would be from anyone else, but Larissa has noticed Jack doesn’t really do sarcasm all that much. He’s probably being sincere.

She decides against showering for reasons she doesn’t really want to delve into but can probably be summed up to wanting to hold onto whatever feeling this is for as long as she can. Her phone lights up again when she’s trying to find sleep -- she really does have class early in the morning.

What about Larry, Jack writes, for the nickname.

She laughs to herself in the dark. Thanks for trying, she types out, but I don’t think so.

Maybe when you’re middle-aged and balding? from Holster.

Their landlord hired Liam back in May to look after his other properties after seeing all the work he’d put into the Haus to keep it liveable, and it’s good work that Liam enjoys. It doesn’t pay as well as fishing -- no job for students ever could, and his uncle says 2017 is the best season they’ve seen in a decade -- but the landlord says if Liam wants to keep doing it during the year he’ll pay his rent then too. It’s a good deal, and Derek’s got a job teaching at some summer camp for kids on campus, so it’s alright, really. It works out. 

But as with the heat, another thing Liam didn’t count on was the loneliness.

After last year he and Derek didn’t want to spend another summer apart, and they’ve got the Haus to themselves all the time, except when Bitty visits with Jack or Shitty and Lardo drive up for the day. Once Liam’s younger sister Katie visits for a weekend but it’s hard to come down often and she’s doing her apprenticeship now and can’t get much time off. And she’s got friends, at home, and their oldest brother Jake and his wife Melissa and their daughter Ava are closer than Liam, so he can’t blame Katie for wanting to spend time with her five-year-old niece instead of her brother.

He doesn’t know anybody here, not really. Some of the other Samwell athletes are familiar faces, they’ve partied together before, but he wouldn’t consider them friends. And he’s got Derek with him, of course, and he loves him and they’re happy and he doesn’t regret a single decision that led him to staying at Samwell over the summer, but he misses -- his family, and the friends he grew up with who all stayed home for the summer and who post pictures of bonfires and beach days and hiking trips and big lobsters they’ve caught and beautiful sunrises on the boats he can’t experience, and he misses his team, and he misses being known, being recognized, being home. 

And he didn’t think he’d be nostalgic over waking up before the sunrise every morning and the smell of lobster burrowing itself so deep in his skin he can’t wash it all off when he gets home and the way his body hurts and his hands get infected from the lobster juices and the sting of the salt and twelve- or thirteen-hour days when the catch is good and fearless seagulls swooping down to steal his lunch and the rough, sometimes overwhelming loud voices of the swearing men on the wharves but. Sometimes he misses it so physically it’s an ache. 

Derek, of course, notices, though Liam doesn’t say anything. 

“We should do something,” he says one evening. They’re sitting in the basement on lawn chairs having some beer, and it smells a little gross down there but it’s the coolest place in the Haus so more often then not that’s where they find themselves after work. 

“Do what,” Liam says. He wishes he’d brought his punching bag from home when his dad had offered to unhook it and drive it down because he’s frustrated and wouldn’t mind something to hit. 

“Well, you know there’s a week in between camps,” Derek says. “That starts next Wednesday.”

“Alright.”

“Well, what if we took a road trip?”

“Derek,” Liam says, and sighs. “I have to work.” 

The condensation around his beer can drips down his fingers and he has no energy to wipe it off. In any case the cold feels good. 

“Just ask Joe. You’ve got nothing to lose by asking, and it’s not like Jason Street is going to fall apart for a few days without you.”

“Joe is a nice guy,” Liam says. And he’s salaried, not paid hourly. “But, like, what would we do, anyway? Gas isn’t cheap.”

“Liam, babe. There’s two of us to pay for it. And -- well, I thought maybe we could go see your parents, and you know they’ll fill the tank before we leave like they always do, and we can stop by and see Mel and Jake, and maybe Bitty and Jack, and Shitty and Lards, and then if we have time we could spend the last few days at my parents’, who will probably take us for groceries and get whatever else we need.”

“That’s a lot of time in a car.”

Derek sits forward in his chair across from Liam’s and sets his beer down to take Liam’s hands. Derek’s are also cold and damp from his can but holding on tightly. 

“So let’s do all the touristy stuff you never got to see because you’ve spent like, every single second of your life outside of school working or playing hockey. We’ll get out and take super cheesy pictures and all that."

Liam sees Derek lift his hands to his mouth and feels him kiss them, then Liam sighs again. He’s tired and sore from working all day and maybe on another day he would say no and stand firm but as it is he can’t say no to Derek. He can already hear the gulls and smell the seaweed and see his parents’ house with its decrepit swing set in the front yard and the fire pit out back. 

There was a tree before the Zimmermann house, and in the spring it blossomed pink and beautiful before it bore sweet cherries in the summer, which were coveted by the young people in the village, though none were brave enough to sneak onto the property to steal some. None save of course for Kent Parson.

The reality of the thing was that Kent Parson was not, he said, afraid of anything and so to him Robert Zimmermann’s cherry tree represented nothing more than a goal to achieve. And perhaps to most this sounded like some kind of lie that came from the infatigable pride which only the very poorest possessed, but Jack had heard enough stories about Parson and the things he did that he knew it was the truth.

Jack was twelve when his father caught Kent Parson climbing the cherry tree in the front yard after the sun went down one July evening. Kent, who was the same age and defiant, swore some gadelles he had certainly learned while sneaking around on the wharves, while Robert pulled him into the house with a tight hand on his collar. Jack watched and heard that part from his open bedroom window on the second floor though he did not go down to eavesdrop on the rest, knowing his father would not take kindly to that.

In fact his father did not take kindly to most things Jack did, though the other villagers didn’t know that. Jack was weak and shy and sickly and mostly wanted to read books which Jack’s mother Alicia indulged but which his father detested, as he wanted to begin grooming Jack to become a business-man too. To take over the store, eventually, though that seemed too far away to even think about. Robert wanted to open another store further up the coast near Digby but as it was didn’t have the manpower or resources to do it until the war ended. 

In the morning Jack woke early so he could go pick cherries for his mother’s breakfast but found instead Kent Parson sitting at his kitchen table with his mouth stained red.

He stayed with them through the summer, and Jack never asked why or even went out of his way to speak with the boy though he gleaned from his mother’s gossip on the telephone with her sisters back in Boston that it was because Kent had been living in barns and on the sofas of whoever would take him and mostly eating day-old bread from the bakery and dried fish and crab apples and the clams he dug up from the bay during low tide and smoked over fires he made on the beach. And the more Robert loved Kent it seemed the Jack the more he hated his real son, as was proven in the fall, when Robert told them both that he was putting them to work on the wharf to clean and go down into the hulls of lobster boats, where they were small enough to fit into the pits where the fish was held, and throw them up to the fishermen and older boys waiting to load them into crates for Robert to sell to the States.

At times it felt like Jack was drowning in lobster and the smell would stay beneath his skin forever and his hands would never heal from the ways the lobsters’ juices would seep into his cracked and cut-open fingers and infect them. Salt felt like a weapon upon them, upon him. One of the ocean’s many.

But at least it shut his father up.

Of course it meant he could no longer go to school, as the season started in mid-November until May or June, and the preparation work began a month before. And then summer was for repairing boats and traps and digging for clams and diving for scallops and for some going up the coast and even to Cape Breton to fish the summer season there, where they had crab as well as lobster. Some fished tuna and herring, cod, mackerel. Some spent the summer in mink farms, some became draveurs, raftsmen driving logs down rivers, some went up to the Annapolis valley to find farmwork, some went even further, to the mines or to steel plants. There was money in all of it, though not always good money, and Boston was only a few hours’ boat ride away, so some said the villages along the French Shore suffered less than others as the war went on. At least in the Bay of Fundy they were more or less safe from the German U-Boats which sometimes came close to Halifax Harbour or even nearer, in Shelburne.

So Jack and Kent worked year-round from twelve-years-old on, and lived together almost as brothers, and it was Jack who found Kent when he began wandering again, and who taught him to read, a little, and, when Robert grew tired of Kent’s chaotic and often insubordinate nature, Jack who brought him to his favourite spots in the woods, who taught him to play hockey in the roads and on frozen ponds.

Alicia, when she was not busy with her quilting group and tea parties in Yarmouth and other such things, took it upon herself to teach them both how to play the piano, which Jack hated but Kent, somehow, excelled at. His fingers were nimble and his mind was clever and he learned quickly. So with something akin perhaps to jealousy Jack asked his mother for a fiddle and took it upon himself to learn. Robert had been angry when he found out and Jack had played louder. But the music was just another thing he and Kent could do together, now, and it seemed Kent knew which tunes Jack would play next without prior warning, and by the time they were sixteen they were playing in kitchens at parties and both knew some dance steps.

Kent spoke English, by virtue of having been born to a Yarmouth fisherman’s wife who died in childbirth, and though the language was something to be mocked and hated when it came from Jack’s mouth, from Kent the girls found it charming. As such Jack spoke to him mostly in French.

By then the war was over and they had each been given a place on a boat, a friend of Jack’s father who was old and needed much help, and whose crew had found other, better, newer boats. His name was Éphraim à Cyprien Bourque and in addition to his lobster license and his boat the Honorine-Marie, he was a bootlegger who made his own moonshine out of his back shed and who sold it to whoever could pay.

Jack’s first day at sea made him sick of it, so sick he could barely stand or look out at the rolling expanse, and somehow the only thing that helped was some moonshine Kent had bought from their captain the week previous. It made no sense but neither did the way Kent laughed when he brought the bottle to Jack’s lips, unmocking, perhaps relieved.

They were sixteen, and they were sailors, and maybe more or less than brothers, and musicians, and Kent had many friends and even girlfriends on occasion, and they brought home money with which Jack could buy more moonshine. Robert said nothing about it or about anything regarding Jack and Kent these days as he had finally opened his new store and though he made it clear he still wanted Jack by his side eventually perhaps, he and Kent had at some point begun to resent each other and so wouldn’t speak, though Kent had not yet left. It was something Jack didn’t understand and perhaps never would or wouldn’t try to. Alicia saw nothing and Éphraim only wanted his money. In any case Jack and Kent were some of the best workers he’d ever had on his boat, he said, despite how Kent picked fights with the boys on the others wharves at barn parties and sang too much before the sun rose at sea and Jack spoke too little always.

But Jack came to love the ocean, perhaps even more than he feared it. As powerless as it made him feel he thought sometimes he needed that, to be reminded of his smallness, his impotence – and anyway Kent always said he felt the opposite. Like if he could conquer the sea he could conquer anything. 

In the first summer of the new decade Éphraim gave Jack the boat. They signed the proper papers and the license and just like that the Marie-Honorine was his. July 4th, 1950. Happy birthday, Kent. Eighteen years old. It was a surprise, to an extent – certainly they had both been wondering without saying aloud who they each thought would get it. Privately Jack thought both expected Kent.

“Es-tu paré,” Jack asked Kent the night before Dumping Day, when they would go out and lay their traps and coloured buoys with their new crewman, Norbert à Édouard à P’tit Joe Surette. They were sitting on the stern of the boat as it was an unseasonably warm night for November.

Are you ready.

“Pour n’importe-quoi,” Kent said, “pis pour toute.”

For anything and for everything.

Later he drank almost enough to mask the taste of Kent, and of salt, perpetual on their lips. A weapon, both.

Derek goes with Dex in the spring, after classes are done and Dibs are secured from Ransom and Holster, like everyone knew they would be. Only for a few days – it’s Sandy’s 50th birthday, and there’s a surprise party at the firehall – then he’ll go to New York for the summer and work for his mom. A receptionist at the accounting firm, like he did last summer.

But for now, he goes with Dex. He hasn’t actually been since Thanksgiving, and the difference is stark – the village is awake now, if a little muddy, seagulls circling overhead. There are more cars, more OPEN signs in shop windows. It smells like spring, but a cleaner and sharper spring than Derek’s ever experienced.

“You can tell which ones are the summer homes,” Dex says, still a little sleepy from the nap he took while Derek drove. He points to an enormous house up on a hill, facing the harbour. “The shutters are still closed.”

“And you know who everyone is anyway,” Derek says. He too feels alive with the town. He takes Dex’s hand and kisses his knuckles one by one as he drives through, then takes the street where the Poindexters live. It’s begun to feel familiar, and he has time now to memorize the details of the town. The red house on the end has a weather vane on its gable shaped like a cat, its tail pointing northward. Next door, there’s still a wreath hanging under a window, looking worse for wear but still somehow intact. The potholes have grown since the ice melted, and the white line is nearly invisible, rubbed away by the salt and the slush. “Who lives there,” he says, pointing to a beige duplex with an impressive tree in the front yard and a little garden bed with blooming crocuses.

Dex laughs. “On one side it’s Glen and Lisa Carter and their big-ass Bernese Toby, and I’m actually not sure who’s on the other side anymore. It used to be the McTavishes, but I don’t recognize the car.”

“Maybe they got a new car, William,” Derek says. “Or someone’s visiting.”

“Maybe,” Dex murmurs. He’s smiling, and smiling at Derek, which isn’t that new anymore but hasn’t gotten old yet. Right now, he doesn’t feel like it ever will.

“Do you think Ava will like the paints I got her?” Derek asks, because he wants Dex to keep looking like that.

“You don’t have to get her something every time you see her, you know,” Dex says. His face still unchanged, bright in its happiness. At Thanksgiving, Derek had gotten her a miniature hockey stick with a rubber ball as a puck. “You’re starting a potentially expensive tradition.”

That Dex thinks of it as a tradition is – well. The main reason Derek decided to set the precedent at all.

“I’m just trying to be the favourite uncle, here. And I missed her birthday, so let me live.”

“You’re not even her real uncle. And anyway, I built her an actual dollhouse for Christmas, so like, I’ll be super offended if you become the favourite.”

“We’ll see,” Derek says.

When they pull up to the soft yellow house, dilapidated swing set still out in front (having weathered another winter), Ava is already on the step waiting for them, hopping up and down impatiently with her grandmother smiling from behind her. Derek honks the horn when they park because he knows it makes Ava laugh and Sandy shake her head.

“Hello!” Dex calls as he steps out of the car and stretches his arms out, loosening his muscles after being cooped up all afternoon. Ava runs towards him, but makes a detour at the last second to go to Derek, who laughs and catches her as she trips on a crack in the pavement and falls into his waiting embrace.

“That was a close one,” he says. She shrugs and hugs him tighter. Over her hair, he sees Dex roll his eyes.

“She takes after you,” says Dex, and Derek says nothing -- probably wise, he thinks. He lifts Ava and drops her in her actual uncle’s arms instead.

--

“You boys have any plans for tonight?” Sandy asks while they’re tucking into supper -- spaghetti and meatballs, though Derek’s plate is meatless, and nearly spotless. It’s just Will, Sandy, Dex, Derek and Ava tonight, because Katie’s doing a welding apprenticeship in Bangor and will only make it down tomorrow for the party, and Jake and Mel have claimed that they’re needed in Boston at a pharmacy conference. In reality, they’re spending the night at a friend’s house in town. Jennifer will come up tomorrow too.

“I think --” Derek starts, but is cut off by Will’s gruff voice 

“Liam, we’re at the supper table. 

There’s a clatter as Dex drops his phone on the floor, which means he’s been looking at it under the table, and Ava flinches at the sound. 

“Sorry, I’m just -- just waiting for an email,” Dex says. Derek frowns. He hasn’t heard of any email.

A motherly click-click of a tongue from Sandy. “It’s past six on a friday. You’re not getting any emails now. Put it away.” She stares at Dex as he bends down to pick up the phone and makes a show of putting it on silent and in his pocket. “Great. Now what were you saying, Derek?” 

“Oh. Just that I think Liam said something about meeting up with his friends.” 

“Which ones?” Sandy asks. “Where are you going?”

“Mom,” Dex says. “Does it matter?”

“Liam,” Will says, a warning clear in his tone.

“Just some guys from my old team and their girlfriends. Like, whoever’s around. Going down near the gravel pit.”

Derek catches Ava’s eye from across the table and makes a funny grimace at her, and she giggles, sweet-sounding and soft.

“Are you going to be drinking? You better not be driving if you are. Neither of you are 21, anyway. You shouldn’t be drinking at all.”

“Mom,” Dex says, stops, then sighs. “We’ll be fine.”