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“Here’s to one more year older,” Sam said.
“And one more year together,” Bronte added.
“And life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Laney threw back her drink and then waited, watching as the rest of us finished ours.
Sam sputtered a cough as Bronte smacked her lips. I swiped my hand over mouth, shimmying as the liquor settled in my belly. “Round two?”
“Yeah, but first, for posterity…” Laney stood up and leaned over to the booth next to us where a group of guys sat. They all gazed at her with cartoon heart eyes, nodding at whatever she said, and raised their hands to her, fighting over who would take her cell phone.
Laney handed it off to the one on the end, and he stood, grinning as if she’d knighted him, then waved to us. “Come on. Picture.”
We scooched out of the booth and rounded to the front of the table.
“Looking good, ladies,” the guy said, turning the phone sideways as the four of us linked arms.
“Happy birthday on three,” Sam chirped, from her position at the end. “One.”
Bronte kissed my cheek. “It’s going to be a good year for you, I know it.”
“Two.”
“It’s going to be a good night!” Laney said with a big laugh, dipping her head down to reduce the height difference between us.
“Three! Happy birthday, Gemma!”
After a lot of drinks courtesy of the guy Laney had wrapped around her finger, we staggered, giggled, and danced our way back to my apartment, arm in arm, where we fell asleep huddled together on the floor in a heap of blankets and pillows.
The next day, Bronte forced everyone up. She and Sam were both nerds who liked visiting museums, so they had an “education-forward” week-long road trip planned for their summer vacation, and Laney had a flight to catch.
Once everyone was gone, and I was left alone, my phone buzzed with a text. I barked out a laugh at the picture Laney sent from last night—all of us in various drunk poses—with the captionTHE FOUR HORSEWOMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE.
Bronte
??
Sam
?? ??
Miss you clowns already
I wasn’t so much hungover as lonely without my girls. Needing some water, I trudged to the kitchen to fill up a glass then checked in on the boys. My pet turtle, Leonardo, crunched on some lettuce. Spot, the goldfish, completed yet another circle in its bowl. George sunbathed in the slanted light from the window, and I bent to pet him as Bronte’s words repeated in my ears.
It’s going to be a good year for you, I know it.
I huffed and stood back up, the browning leaves of my plants silently heckling me.
It’s going to be a good year for you.
It wasn’t as if last year had been so bad; it just hadn’t been great. Here I was at twenty-five, trailing after my best friends, who all seemed to be so far ahead of me in life. I had nothing but a few dollars in savings and a permanent fear of commitment, while they had boyfriends and jobs with benefits andplans.
Staring down the barrel of a quarter-life crisis, what was a girl to do?
CHAPTERTWO
Gem
The sun set into an orange and purple haze, but the August heat still simmered in the air. I rolled my bicycle into a driveway at the end of a large suburban development and rested it on the kickstand before removing my helmet to study the home in front of me. It dwarfed the rest of the houses in the cul-de-sac. Between the tall pillars casting long, dark shadows on the lawn, the carefully carved wood porch, pristine white paint, and high windows surrounded by dark-green shutters, the house looked like something out of a television show where house hunters who walked dogs for a living bought.
