Page 215 of Wild Card 13

Graduation felt less like an ending and more like somebody had opened every door in my life at once and expected me to know which way the wind was coming from.

For two days, Northbend had been full of congratulations. Balloons tied to mailboxes. Signs in front yards. Parents taking pictures until their kids threatened to leave the state early out of self-defense. Every grocery store checkout line came with someone clapping me on the shoulder and telling me Fargo was lucky, like Fargo was not a place with weather, expectations, and older guys who would happily staple me into the boards if I showed up acting like being good in high school meant anything.

I said thank you. I grinned. I let people be proud because being proud was easier for them than being scared.

My bedroom at home looked like I had started packing and then lost a fight with every version of myself. Hockey bags sat open on the floor. A stack of clean T-shirts leaned against the dresser. Mom had folded my jeans into neat piles I immediately felt guilty for disturbing. A Fargo Force packet lay on my desk beside my graduation tassel, both of them looking too official for a room that still had a cracked mini-stick blade under the bed from sophomore year.

My phone buzzed against my thigh.

Mase: Keller lake house tonight. Do not be weird and say no.

I looked at the text, then out the window.

The evening was warm enough that the glass had fogged faintly near the bottom from the AC working too hard inside. Across the street, someone’s sprinkler ticked over a lawn already smelling like summer. The whole neighborhood had shifted into that strange June mood where everything felt too bright and loose, like school had been the only thing holding us together and now we were all scattering.

What if I want to be weird and say no

Mase: Then I’ll come get you.

That feels illegal

Mase: Then come willingly.

I tossed the phone onto my bed and ran both hands through my hair. I was supposed to want to go. Mase’s parents were gone for the weekend. Simon had been talking about the party since before finals. Half the team would be there, along with half of Northbend High’s graduating class and probably some people who had graduated two years ago but still somehow appeared whenever someone mentioned a cooler near a body of water.

It was exactly the kind of night I was built for. Music. Lake. Friends. Summer starting. The last big, stupid thing before jobs and camps and college orientations and whatever came after.

I did not want to go without Lucy. Which was a problem, because Lucy had already said no yesterday while we were sitting in Betsy outside her house, her bare knees turned toward me on the bench seat, her Aldenmere hoodie pulled over the shorts she wore when she was pretending not to be cold.

“My mom asked if I wanted to get dinner Saturday,” she had explained, looking at her hands instead of me.

I had gone still in the stupidest, smallest way. “Your mom?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s good, right?”

Lucy had shrugged one shoulder. “Maybe.”

I had wanted to say the right thing. Something mature. Something that sounded like I understood what it meant that her mother had called first, that she had asked, that Lucy had not immediately said no.

Instead, I had said, “You should go.”

Her eyes had flicked to mine. “You think?”

“Yeah.” I had reached for her hand between us and tried to make my voice easy. “I mean, if you want to. Mase’s party is not exactly a once-in-a-lifetime cultural event.”

“It might be. Simon is apparently making punch.”

“Simon should not be trusted with liquids.”

That had gotten me a smile. Small, but real.

I had asked her again that morning anyway.

Then again after graduation, while our families were still taking pictures and Simon was loudly accusing his mom of blinding him with the camera flash. “You sure you don’t want to come later?” I had asked, my fingers hooked gently around Lucy’s.

She had looked pretty in a white dress beneath her gown, her curls pinned back on one side, her face tired from smiling for too many pictures. “I’m sure.”