I wondered what it would have been like if Morgan would have been in her room that day my mom left, if I would have found her instead of Tyler, if nothing would have ever changed between us.
I stopped dancing, my arms falling to my sides, eyes fluttering open as the bar came into focus again.
I’d missed so much with Morgan.
I didn’t know why it hit me at that moment, but it did.
Sure, she’d visited me in California, and we’d met up on girls’ trips, but we hadn’t gone to the same college like we’d always dreamed of. After what happened between me and Tyler, I’d fished out an acceptance letter for the summer session at San Francisco State University that I hadn’t thought twice about once I got accepted into BU. Lucky for me, they accepted, and though Morgan begged and pleaded with me to reconsider, she said she understood when I told her I wanted to get out of this town, out of this state, out of this area of the country and start anew.
But because of that choice, we hadn’t been in the same sorority like we always thought we would be, or danced at the same parties, or stumbled home from the same college bars. We hadn’t come home to New Hampshire to visit her parents and my aunt for the holidays. Tyler was a year ahead of us, already a sophomore at Boston when Morgan was a freshman.
I was supposed to be with her.
With both of them.
What would have happened in that alternate life? Would Tyler have shown us around, gotten us into the best parties, warned us about the worst professors? Would it have been just like it had been in high school — the Wagner Kids —Plus One?
Would we have been us?
It was like that day had severed my life, sending me down a completely different path than the one I’d always seen laid out. The future I’d envisioned where my mom came back for me, where she got a house in Bridgechester and I went to college in Boston with my two best friends… it was all gone overnight.
In the blink of an eye.
And now, here I was on the other side of the path I never saw coming, the one I surely never imagined taking.
Maybe it was the alcohol that made it all hit me at once.
Maybe it was being back home, back at Lobster Larry’s, the bar we used to come to back when we were underage and couldn’t even try to drink on a fake ID because nearly everyone in town knew us. Back then, all we did was eat the lobster rolls and watch her parents get drunk while we sang karaoke. And my stomach curled again at that realization, that we missed out on coming here once we turned twenty-one.
Together.
So, maybe it was that. Or maybe it was dancing with my best friend, singing our favorite karaoke songs and celebrating the fact that she was getting married.
Maybe it was that on this day seven years ago, my mother left me for her new boyfriend, and I hadn’t seen her since.
Maybe it was all of it, all at once.
Whatever it was, it was too much, and I closed my eyes, forcing a long breath to try to clear my head. This was not the place to be sad.
I started moving again slowly, shaking it off, my hands floating up above me once more as I moved my hips and plastered on a smile.
Then Morgan bumped into me again — hard this time — and my eyes shot open.
But not before my foot slid off the edge of the bar, and the rest of me went down before I could even scream.
My entire body tensed, eyes squeezed shut as I prepared myself for the impact. I heard the distant gasps of those who saw what happened, and I knew any second now, those gasps would turn into ooh’s once my body slammed into the floor.
Except it didn’t.
I hit something hard — hard enough that I knew I’d wake up with a few bruises and I grunted at the impact — but not hard enough for a fall off of a bar and onto the floor. I winced, opening my eyes and holding fast to the thing that broke my crash, trying to orient myself.
And when my vision came into focus, so did Tyler’s furrowed brows.
He didn’t ask me if I was okay. He didn’t say a single word. Instead, he held me in his arms, righting me until I was standing okay. But even then, his hands didn’t move from where they held me.
And his eyes didn’t leave me either.
It was the first time I’d been close to him since last night, when I’d kept my eyes away from him and refused to look at his bare, glistening body after he’d lifted himself out of the pool. But now, I was in his arms, chest to chest, close enough to smell the faint scent of beer on his breath as he stared down his nose at me.
And when I looked at him, every thought I’d been trying to shake off came back full force.
I looked into the eyes of the man I didn’t know, of the boy I used to know better than anyone, of the friend I’d lost.
Of the friend who’d hurt me.
Emotion warped my face, and Tyler frowned more, his hands gripping me a little tighter. His eyes were like lasers jumping back and forth between mine, and he opened his mouth like he was going to say something.
But he stopped himself.
Instead, he released his grip once I was standing on my own, and then he grabbed his beer off the bar and turned his back on me, making his way to the corner where he’d been sitting before.
“Oh! I love this song!” Morgan said, jumping down from the bar when one of our friends from high school started singing “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” by Whitney Houston.
My eyes were still on Tyler’s back, my heart still in my throat.
But Morgan grabbed my hand and tugged me toward the stage, ripping one of the microphones off the stand for herself and thrusting the other unoccupied one into my hand.
By the chorus, I was singing and dancing again.
And Tyler was nowhere to be found.
The hot, white flames of the bonfire licked at the cool night sky as I wrapped my jacket tighter around me, trying to sip on the beer in my hand, but grimacing every time I managed a gulp. I’d gone too hard, too fast at the karaoke bar, and now I was dancing between being too drunk or being hungover way too early — depending on how the rest of this night went.
I’d had a blast at the bar, but once we’d loaded back on the party bus to head back to the Wagner’s for the afterparty, I’d started slipping.
And I kept going back to my earlier thoughts about me and Morgan and Tyler and the day that everything changed.
I sighed, taking a sip of the bitter beer in my hand as I stared at the fire like it held all the answers. Only about half of the people who’d been at the bar made it to the fire, the other half surrendering early because they were too tired or too drunk or a combination of both. Aunt Laura had been the latter, which was a sight for me to see since she’d always been so careful and restrained while I was growing up. She was so young when she took me in, and I wondered if she felt like she had to grow up faster to be a good example for me.
She was asleep upstairs in one of the many guest rooms, along with the others who couldn’t drive. Morgan’s parents had turned in after one beer around the fire, and now it was just a small group of us, mostly Morgan’s friends from college and Oliver’s handful of buddies who’d shown up early for the pre-wedding shenanigans.
Morgan was telling an animated story about the first time she and Oliver got into an argument — over which jelly was better, strawberry or grape — when a yawn stretched my mouth open wide. I covered it with my hand, shaking my head against the growing fatigue, and then there was a chuckle behind me.