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Emma closed her eyes and rested her head against one of the pillars. Garrett’s expression had shattered her good mood, and she suddenly felt sober.
Then she heard it. A soft rustle, the sound of someone moving nearby. She froze, rooted to the spot. Someone was on the porch with her.
“Mom?” she whispered, peering into the shadows where the noise had come from.
“Go back inside!” I hissed at her. “Hurry!”
But it was too late. A tall form moved out from the darkness, laughing softly. Both Emma and I screamed, my voice inaudible to everyone but me, hers swallowed by the noise from inside.
No one would hear us.
27
A VOICE IN THE DARK
Emma scurried backward into a terra-cotta planter. Her pulse thudded loudly in her ears. Should she run out toward the street, or back inside? The alcohol slowed her thoughts, keeping her in dangerous indecision. She took another step backward. This was it. She was about to die.
“I didn’t mean to scare you, Sutton. It’s just me,” said a male voice from the shadows.
Thayer stepped forward into the light. He looked gorgeous in a blue Hugo Boss button-down and khaki shorts.
Emma exhaled in relief.
I watched enviously as he reached out to take Emma’s arm and led her over to the porch swing. They sat down next to each other in friendly silence.
“What were you doing out here?” Emma finally asked. Her heart still hadn’t slowed down to its resting rate.
Thayer smiled sadly, holding up his Coke can. “Turns out being in recovery makes you kind of a buzzkill.”
Emma thought about what it must be like for Thayer, showing up to a party like this. It wasn’t easy resisting that kind of pressure, listening to drunken teenagers wreaking havoc inside, knowing he couldn’t really be one of them.
Thayer pushed them gently back and forth on the swing, his feet on the floor. Overhead Emma could hear the squeaking call of hunting bats. The slow rocking of the swing calmed her nerves. She had to get a grip. What if he had been Becky? Screaming and tripping over furniture wouldn’t exactly do her any good. She needed to always be ready for anything. She shouldn’t have let her guard down, even for one night. She sighed. It just wasn’t fair. She was so tired of being constantly alert. She wanted to be vulnerable, to be normal, just once.
“You feeling okay?” Thayer asked.
“Everyone keeps asking me that tonight,” Emma said. “Don’t I look okay?”
“You look perfect, as always. I asked how you felt.”
She turned toward Thayer. It struck her that he was probably the only person who would have pressed her on that point, forcing her to distinguish between appearance and reality. He gazed back at her seriously, his eyes bright against his tanned skin. She didn’t know how to begin to answer. She hadn’t felt like herself in weeks. Or maybe she had never felt so much like herself? The alcohol softened the edges of all her thoughts, so she wasn’t quite sure what she meant until she said it out loud. Nothing made sense anyway tonight—not her and Thayer, sitting here on this bench in the cool November evening; not her friends; not even Ethan. Especially not Ethan.
She tucked a lock of hair behind her ears. “Do you ever feel like no one is really what they seem?”
Thayer’s lips twisted ironically. “All the time. Why do you think I didn’t tell people I went to rehab? I knew half of the people I thought were my friends would turn their backs on me.” He gave a short bark of laughter. “I knew I’d end up alone on the porch drinking soda while almost everyone I knew pretended they hadn’t seen me there.”
Emma suddenly felt self-conscious. Here she was, smelling like beer while she sat next to a boy who’d won a hard-fought battle for sobriety. She fidgeted with Sutton’s clutch, opening and closing the clasp.
“I just don’t know who I can count on anymore,” she said softly. “I keep getting hurt by people I think I know.”
Thayer looked out over the wrought-iron porch railing. The Chamberlains’ sprawling front lawn looked like an elephant graveyard in the darkness, cars parked haphazardly across it. Someone had angled their Miata right into one of Mrs. Chamberlain’s prize rosebushes. Emma wondered distantly how Charlotte would talk her way out of that one.
“That sucks,” Thayer said, playing with the pop-top on his Coke can. It broke off in his fingers and he set it on the swing’s armrest. “Maybe you need some new people in your life.”
Emma bit her lip and gave an awkward little laugh. “The problem is some of them are related to me.”
“Ah,” he said. “Yeah, I know that story, too. Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could pick your family?”
“I’ll take Steve Carell for a dad and Tina Fey for a mom,” she joked.
“Bart Simpson for a brother.”
“Wednesday Addams for a sister.”
Thayer smiled. He leaned back into the porch swing, his expression thoughtful. “You know, one of the things I learned in rehab that turned out not to be a total cliché is that you can’t control other people. The best you can do is be honest with the people you love and hope that they’ll care enough about you to listen. But you can’t make someone be something they’re not.”
“That sounds very … adult,” Emma said.
“Well, a lot of addicts act like children,” he said, shrugging. “I’m just saying—you can’t prevent other people from disappointing you. It’s bound to happen at some point. We’re all only human. What you can do is decide how you’re going to respond to it, how you’re going to deal with it.”
