He and Gabe had been friends as kids, I learned, until Gabe moved to Colorado their sophomore year of high school and they lost touch.
“I didn’t even know he went to Devon until the first day of that Writers of the Beat Generation class I took last semester,” Gabe said as we sat around the living room on our first night there. “Isn’t that crazy?”
“Crazy,” Laurel repeated before she turned to Everett. “Are you a big fan of the Beats?”
Everett shrugged. “I don’t hate them.”
“On a scale of one to ten, though,how muchdo you want to be like Jack Kerouac?”
Everett scratched at the back of his head. “I’ve never really considered it.”
“That’s a good answer,” Laurel said, picking up her wineglass again. We’d made our way through most of a box and were all on the far side of tipsy, save for Everett, who staunchly followed his water-between-drinks rule and was only half as slaphappy as the rest of us. At Laurel’s comment, he glanced at me where I sat across from him, like I might clarify.
“Laurel has certain red flags,” I said, and ticked some of them off on my fingers. “If they’re too into any male-dominated artistic movements, if they think they could be president, if they’re too into the ocean.”
“Toointo the ocean,” Everett repeated.
“Like, do you want to explore areas you probably don’t need to, not do you want to save it.”
“Do you want to save the oceans, Everett?” Laurel asked, pivoting a wobbly finger his way.
“Of course.”
“Good.”
He smiled at me then, and I smiled back, then glanced quickly around, afraid it was too familiar, but no one was paying attention.
It wasn’t until later that Gabe started to freak out. “Zoey and I were going to get married,” he said. He had a bottle of some expensive rye whiskey his father had given him as a graduation present next to him and kept tipping more into his glass. He was the drunkest of anyone, but none of us were stopping him that night. He looked up at us: Davi in the armchair behind me while I sat on the floor like Gabe. Everett was on the couch over Gabe’s shoulder, Laurel on the other end. “We talked about it. I was going to propose to her after we’d lived in Denver for a year. After we were more settled. Fuck.” He put his head in his palms, raking his fingers through his hair. “We were moving to Denver so we could be closer to my family when we hadkids.”
“Oh, sweetie,” Laurel said, sinking down onto the floor and wrapping her arms around Gabe’s wide shoulders. “You’ll have kids with someone else. Someone who won’t cheat on you with a guy from her biology seminar.”
Gabe looked up. “But you and Sutton would have been in the wedding,” he said. “Davi too. I don’t know—” He waved a hand in the air toward Everett. “If you and I had started hanging out again, maybe you would have been too.”
“I’m honored,” Everett replied.
“It’s okay,” Davi said. “We’ll still be in your wedding, no matter who you marry. We’ll all be in each other’s weddings. Well, except mine.”
“The point is, you were also supposed to be inZoey’swedding, and now she isn’t even here.” Gabe glanced morosely around at all of us. “I fucked up the whole group.”
“You didnot,” I protested.
“I did.”
“Zoey did,” I said. “When she cheated on you.”
“But just on me,” Gabe said. “Not all of you.”
“She broke our trust, though,” I argued. “That’s the point. We don’t do that. We choose each other. Zoey could have broken up with you andthenslept with someone else. She could have talked to you, or any of us, if she was having doubts about your relationship.”
“But wouldn’t that have been just as bad?” Gabe asked. “It still would have changed things between all of us.”
We looked around at each other then. Davi, behind me, shrugged, while Laurel sat back against the couch, thinking.
“Okay,” she finally said, grabbing the bottle from in front of Gabe and pouring some into each of our glasses before she raised hers. “From here on out, to maintain the sanctity of our friendship and preserve the family we’ve chosen for ourselves, we will promise not to date or otherwise fornicate with each other.”
“You didn’t need to use the wordfornicate,” Davi said. “You never need to use the wordfornicate.”
“Oh my god, you get it, though,” Laurel said. “Gabe is right. Dating each other opens the door for things to get messy, no matter how sure a thing you think something is. And we’re all too important to each other to risk it.”
