I spent a lot of time here last summer. Willow and I were practically roommates for all the time we spent together between here and Dad's house. Maybe this summer would have been the same had things played out differently. But last summer's stupid, drunken decisions brought my past back to haunt me, so instead I do everything I can to avoid long stretches in Champagne.
"How was your flight?" she asks as I toe off my shoes. "Have you seen your dad yet? What about your new stepmom? You said she's nice, but is it weird to know you're about to have a new stepmom when you're a grown-ass woman? Have you decided if you're going to call her Mom?"
I can only shake my head at the rampage of questions. We text incessantly, but Willow is nothing if not curious. "Good, yes, yes, kind of . . ." I struggle to remember the last question.
"Will you call her Mom?"
"Oh. No. I don't think so."
"I made us strawberry daiquiris," she says. "What do you say we have a proper slumber party?"
I look down at my clothes. It's raining so hard out there, I'm soaked just from the walk from the car. "If by ‘proper slumber party' you mean change into our PJs and drink too much, I'm in."
She cocks a hip to the side and arches a brow. I've always thought she matched her name-long, dark hair and limbs that go for miles. She's a goddess, I swear, with beauty inside and out. This girl is the light inside the darkness I feel when I'm here. "Is there another definition?"
I follow her upstairs to her bedroom, taking my overnight bag with me. Willow pulls a pair of fuzzy pants and a Wonder Woman T-shirt from her chest of drawers, and I grab my sleep shorts and tank from my backpack.
Willow's parents are the kind of people who spend more time traveling than they do in their own home, and right now they're in Rome, so I don't have to worry about her dad seeing me wandering around his house braless.
I use her bathroom to strip out of my wet clothes, and through the bathroom door I can hear Willow singing, "Reunited and it feels so good!"
Once we're changed, we head back downstairs and to the kitchen. We pour our daiquiris into tall pilsner glasses before settling into the overstuffed cushions of her living room sofa.
"To braless PJ parties," Willow says, raising her glass.
I tap it with mine. "I'm pretty sure that's the name of a porno, but I'll drink to it anyway." We take long pulls off our sugary, slushy drinks. My chest fills with a warmth that is partly due to the proximity of my best friend and partly due to the irresponsible rum-to-mixer ratio filling my glass.
"I can't believe you're going to live with your stepbrother this summer," she says.
I shrug. "There's nothing that could keep me in Champagne for a whole summer, since you'll be off living the glamorous life in London."
She snorts. "Oh yes, changing diapers and wiping noses is oh so glamorous. Do you think I should pack my diamonds?"
Willow's a few years older than me and just graduated from Baylor. She's putting her art degree to as good a use as any and spending the summer in London. She'll be the au pair for some Hollywood couple who's shooting a film there. The agency that vetted her and set her up with the job only told her the ages of the children and the length and location of the assignment. She won't find out who the celebrities are until she arrives.
"Think it's Brad and Angelina?" I ask.
"This couple only has two kids," she says. "Isn't Brangelina up to, like, forty-three kids or something by now?"
"Bummer. I was having fantasies of visiting you and getting to know Brad."
"Ha! I'm sure Angelina wouldn't let any nanny that close to her husband. Back to the stepbrother, please. What if he's a pervert or something?"
"Then I'll chop off his dick." I grin and take another drink. I can't imagine sweet Becky having a pervert for a son. "He sounds like a good guy. Becky says he volunteers with Big Brothers, Big Sisters and is a straight-A student. If he's anything like her, birds probably start singing when he walks outside."
"So you're saying your stepbrother is a Disney princess?"
I shrug. Maybe I should feel weird about committing to spend my summer living with some guy I've never met before, but I was already scrambling to find an excuse not to come back to Champagne between semesters. When Dad and Becky told me they wanted to travel around Europe for their honeymoon, I had the perfect excuse. Dad doesn't feel comfortable with me staying at his house alone-even if I am legally an adult now-so I jumped on the opportunity to live somewhere else.
I tried to talk my dad into paying for an apartment for me in New York, but since I couldn't secure an internship or a job more "educational" than my usual coffee shop gig, he wasn't having it. Apparently, the idea of me living alone in New York terrifies my father more than the idea of me living in Champagne without someone keeping an eye on me.
"Either way, he's giving me a room for the summer. I'll get a job and keep to myself. Dad's happy, and I'm not in Champagne. It'll work out fine."
"I guess." She frowns. "I still wish I had a chance to meet this guy so I could feel better about your arrangement."
"To hear Becky talk about him, he seems practically perfect in every way."
"Which is he? A princess or Mary Poppins?"
"He's a football player." I grimace at that unfortunate fact about my new roomie.
"Now I'm picturing Mary Poppins in a football helmet." She draws her legs onto the couch and tucks them under her. "What's his name again?"
"Dash." What the hell kind of a name is that, anyway? It's as if Becky knew her son would become a football player and named him accordingly.
Willow swishes her drink in her glass, watching the slush swirl. "Dash what?"
"Dupree."
"Have you looked him up on Facebook?"
I give her a pointed stare. "You know how I feel about social media."
"I keep telling you to make a fake account so you can spy on people."
I shudder. "I'll pass."
"Oh well. I'll look him up later myself. Dash Dupree." She says his name as if she's trying to place it, and shakes her head. "I'll have to ask Robbie if he knew him in high school."
"Could be. They both played football at Towers, but the name doesn't ring any bells for me." Willow went to Champagne's Catholic high school, so she didn't know any of the people who tortured me at Champagne Towers. I went there less than three months before we moved to Maine, but my time there certainly made an impression.
Willow and I met last summer after Dad moved back here and she and I both had gigs at the local coffee shop. She was the very best part of being stuck in this city, and when my otherwise carefree summer ended in a shitstorm of my own making, she was there for me in a way no one else could be.
"Not all football players are assholes," she says.
"I will agree that Robbie is an exception," I say. Willow's boyfriend plays ball at Baylor and is really sweet, if a little dense. I knew him during my brief stint at Champagne Towers High School, and he may not have registered my existence, but at least he never mocked my stutter by calling me "Juh-Juh-Gee-Gee" like half the other guys on the team. "Speaking of Robbie, how's he handling your impending departure?"
She sets her drink on the coffee table and sighs. "He still hates it, but I keep telling him the summer will go fast. He'll be busy with football, and I'll be back soon enough."
We talk about college and our plans for the fall, and when the pitcher of drinks is empty, she makes us another, and soon we're giggling without reason and she's telling me about the time she and Robbie had sex in the locker room at Baylor and she ended up with foot fungus and a bruise on her ass in the shape of a locker vent.
"It's depressing that I'm so sexually deprived that I'm even jealous of sex that ended in foot fungus," I tell her.
"What about that guy you were dating when I came to visit on spring break? The one with all the tattoos?"
I shake my head. "He was hot but there wasn't much going on upstairs." To be honest, I knew that when I started dating him, but I figured I could handle a lower IQ in exchange for hard abs and barrel-sized biceps. I know it's clichéd, but I have a serious weakness for muscle, which probably explains my history with football players.
She arches a brow. "You are so picky. A guy doesn't have to be a genius to treat you right."