“Campfire Bingo?” I asked, trying to sound casual. “What’s Campfire Bingo?”
“You’ll see,” Loretta said. “Don’t worry. The kids always seem to enjoy it. And there’s hot chocolate!”
“Where is it? What time does it start?” I asked, dreading the answer.
“Outside around the fire pit,” Loretta told me, cutting a small piece of chicken. “Promptly at nine o’clock.”
* * *
• • •
So there I was. Playing bingo under the stars. With about two dozen second graders and their parents. When Loretta said, “the kids always seem to enjoy it,” she meant the kids. As in overtired little humans with snot running down their faces and a serious inability to sit still. Yes, the stars overhead were lovely, and the fire roared impressively. Plus there was not just hot chocolate but s’mores of all kinds. But still. Not another person my age was in sight. Unless you counted the college-aged nanny who had a toddler pulling on her braids across the fire while she tried to keep track of three other kids’ bingo cards. Which I did not.
“N twenty-two! That’s N twenty-two!” shouted the gentleman in charge of the snowballs. That was what they were calling the little white balls that came out of the bingo tumbler, which had been decorated to look like a snowy mountain. There was really no detail overlooked around here. My grandmother ran a tight holiday ship.
I looked down at my card, which was shaped like a snowflake. No N 22.
“Bingo!” a little kid named Ethan shouted, jumping up and down with his arms in the air and then striking some semi-disturbing weight lifter poses like he was a pro-wrestler or something.
“See? Isn’t this fun?” Loretta said, leaning toward me as she cleared her own bingo board.
“Ethan’s sure having a good time,” I replied.
I only knew Ethan’s name because his mother had been shouting it at him for the last twenty minutes straight. Ethan, stop hitting your sister! Ethan, get your finger out of your nose!! Ethan, don’t eat that! Ethan! Ethan! Ethan!
Now he ran over to the bingo table, trampling everyone and everything in his way, to pick up his prize—a brand-new, light-up Bluetooth speaker.
“I already have one of these!” he wailed, and threw it at the ground. Everyone around the fire heard the loud crack of the speaker inside the box breaking.
God, kids really sucked sometimes.
“Ethan! Say you’re sorry!”
There was a bit of a distraction while Ethan threw a tantrum and his mother tried to corral him, so I took the opportunity to check my phone. There were a bunch of texts from Christopher.
I got us a table. Have you begged out of bingo yet?
It’s starting. Where are you?
The song list is filling up fast. Should I sign you up?
What do you want to sing? Did you decide???
OK I signed you up. Are you coming?
This was a nightmare. I both really needed to go and really didn’t want to go from the depth of my soul. Maybe I should just say forget it. Maybe this list thing wasn’t meant to be and I should just sit here under the heat lamps and this glorious fleece blanket and play bingo with the brats. But then I thought of the list. And of Christopher’s face when he told me the plane had flown for over thirty seconds.
And of Christopher’s lips when he’d almost kissed me.
Okay. I really needed to go.
But how? There was no sneaking away from Loretta when she was sitting three inches from me.
I glanced over at her, and she quickly looked away, studying her blank bingo board as if it held the meaning of life. Had she been trying to sneak a peek at my phone? What had she seen? Loretta was a lot of things, but I had never pegged her for a snoop.
“Is that your sister? Is everything all right?” she asked.
So she hadn’t seen anything. And her question made me pause. A tiny tingle of adrenaline raced up my spine. Lauren may have ditched me, but was it possible she could still get me out of Campfire Bingo?
“Actually, yeah, that was her,” I lied through my teeth. “She wants to talk. Is it okay if I go?”
I shoved my phone away in case she decided she wanted to see the messages. Loretta started to speak, but then the shouting on the other side of the fire got louder. A lot louder.
“I don’t want another board! I want my prize!” Ethan was shouting.
“You got a prize. Just say thank you and let’s go,” his mother begged.
“I want a good prize!”
Ethan dove into the huge box, wrapped up like a present, that held the prizes, and started flinging smaller boxes out onto the ground. All of which held the exact same Bluetooth speaker he’d just won.
Loretta looked torn for half a second, then said, “I should deal with this. Yes, go. I’ll see you girls in the morning.”
Then she shoved herself out of her Adirondack chair with surprising dexterity and marched around the fire to deal—diplomatically, I was sure—with young Ethan.
And I was free!
To sing in front of a room full of people.
Gulp.
“Next up, please welcome to the stage, Tess Sachs, singing…‘Wonderful Christmastime’!”
My body completely shut down. I’d been waiting for this moment ever since I’d walked into the room almost an hour ago—hell, I’d been waiting for it all day. But somehow, hearing the cheesy DJ dude in the comically oversized sunglasses call my name was still a total shock to my system. Also, “Wonderful Christmastime”? What was Christopher thinking?
I looked over my shoulder at him—we were seated at the tiniest round two-top table I’d ever seen—and he shrugged. “I figured it was seasonal and easy to carry,” he said. “You’re the one who wouldn’t answer your texts.”
“It’s fine,” I said. At least I knew the song. It was one of my mom’s favorite Christmas classics. Plus, it was really more talking than singing. It was kind of a genius choice, actually. “Thanks for getting me on the list.” I hoped I sounded sincere. At the moment I really had zero clue what I was feeling. Faint, mostly.
“Tess Sachs, are you still out there?” The DJ put his iPad over his eyes, as if he was using it to shade the sun, and slowly scanned the crowd. “Going once…”
Christopher leaned across the small tabletop, where each of us had been nursing root beers while we waited for my ultimate demise. “You can do this, Tess. Come on.”