***
The Delvecchios ended up letting me stay over for the rest of the week, and on New Year’s Eve, Jackson and I stayed home to hang out with his parents instead of going to a party. The holiday always made mystomach feel weird, because it was the first time I watched Jackson kiss someone else.
That evening Marie and Phil let us drink champagne with them, and we spent the night playing Monopoly before Jackson and I dug out the old game ofJeopardy!that Julie made for my sixteenth birthday. This time there wasn’t a single question that got answered wrong.
All of us had flushed cheeks and were a bit tipsy by the end of the night. When “Happy New Year” flashed across the screen and fireworks began exploding outside, Phil and Marie kissed while Jackson and I just stared at each other with awkward smiles while he rolled his eyes at his parents.
There was a split second where Jackson leaned toward me, and I thought he was about to kiss me right then and there in front of his parents. He hugged me instead, and it was so tight that I could feel his heart beating right against my own heart in a perfect rhythm. “Happy New Year, Addie,” he whispered into my ear. I couldn’t help the way my body leaned into him.
“Happy New Year, Jackson,” I said with my mouth pressed against his neck. A strangled sound escaped the back of his throat.
We separated without making eye contact.
Marie gave each of us a hug next, pressing a kiss to my cheek and then his.
“Happy New Year, my lovely children! May this new year bring you adventure, and life-long memories,” Marie announced dramatically. She didn’t drink often, and I could tell she was feeling the champagne by how she accidentally called me her child—but a part of me wondered if itwasn’tan accident.
This would be an important year. We would take the ACTs in the spring, finish junior year, Jackson would turn eighteen, and we would start senior year.
I never planned on it being the year that things started to fall apart.
Chapter 21
BEFORE
August, Eleven Years Ago
On Jackson’s eighteenth birthday, Marie and Phil planned to throw him a giant party to celebrate. Julie and her new girlfriend flew in from California, and most of the people invited were either about to start senior year like us, or had graduated in previous years. Everyone would be between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one, so there was going to be alcohol. It would be too hard to keep track of who was actually legally allowed to drink and who wasn’t, so the Delvecchios made a rule that if someone was driving home, they would have to check in with them to prove that they were sober first. Anyone could stay the night, and I already knew I’d be sleeping over since everyone I knew who could drive me home would be drinking.
Before the party, I went with Jackson to a tattoo parlor. I sat on a chair and watched the tattoo artist begin to write the D for Delvecchio on his forearm.
“I could never get a tattoo,” I said over the buzzing of the gun.
Jackson turned his head to face me.
“You don’t think so? Not even on your birthday?” he asked.
I shook my head. “It’s crazy how permanent it is. And your skin is so red—it looks like it hurts,” I added. I watched as the artist rubbed the ink with a paper towel before he continued spelling out Jackson’s last name. His arm looked even redder now.
“It really doesn’t. It’s more annoying than anything,” Jackson said.
The appointment was no more than thirty minutes. The tattoo looked good—he picked a nice cursive font that wasn’t too curly, so it was easy to read.
“Do I look tough?” Jackson asked as he held up his arm and pretended to kiss his bicep.
“You lookveryItalian,” I said as we got in his truck to drive to the party.
He chuckled. “I’m not supposed to swim with this. Jules is gonna be pissed. She set up a pool this morning.”
I let out a small laugh. “She’s so obsessed with her girlfriend I doubt she’ll care if you don’t swim with her.”
“True. You’ll have to hang around them, get the 411 on this chick. If she’s the reason Jules didn’t come home during Christmas, then it’s game over.”
I gave Jackson a small salute. “I’m on it.”
When we got back to the house, we helped Phil and Marie finish setting everything up for the party. Kids started arriving, and it was a huge mix of different groups. Julie had invited people she graduated with, and the booze was flying.
It was another hot August, and the last thing I wanted was to get sick from drinking, so I took it easy. Jackson, however, was not taking it easy; the last time I talked to him, he was at a beer pong table inside, completely intoxicated. He was laughing and goofing around, and I was so happy to see him like that. The last trimester of junior yearhad gone worse than the first, and just like Jackson had predicted, he didn’t do well on the ACT. He had already said he didn’t plan on going to college. He was in a weird head space right now, but today he was acting like his old self—something I’d barely seen in the past six months.
