Page 3 of Meet Me Under the Lights

“Haven’t you heard, Princess? Old Man Fulton put together his own team this year, and he and your stubborn-ass father made a bet on the side. Our team has to have a better record than theirs or…” He took a swig of soda then looked at the can in confusion.

I smacked his arm. “Or what?”

“Or it’s bye-bye, stadium.”

“WHAT? Why would he—”

“I still can’t believe he put it up for grabs. And for what? A dumbass feud from thirty years ago? Freaking Fultons always know how to weasel their way in…” He rambled off a string of curse words and disappeared into the haze of smoke and bass.

What the actual hell? Dad made a bet with the stadium as a prize?

I whipped out my phone and started texting him a flurry of angry, all-caps messages, but Lauryn took it away and closed the message out.

“I don’t buy it. There’s no way.” Lauryn gave my phone back to me but held my hand and squeezed it. “TJ probably exaggerated. You know how he is when he’s been drinking.”

“Right.” The room started pushing in on me from all sides. “Exaggerated.”

But my gut told me TJ wasn’t making this up. It was too big of a story to craft, even for him.

Lauryn crouched down a little so her face was directly in front of mine. “I’ll see what I can find out, okay?”

“Okay.”

True, I hated the way Diamond Boys invaded our town every summer, but baseball helped keep the town going. Small businesses were unpredictable, constantly having to adjust and change with the weather. Baseball wasn’t. Was Dad really that prideful, to not only put our family at risk but the entire town too?

Or was it something else I had been too busy to notice?

A “nurse” sauntered by with a tray of shooters. I swiped one before I could think twice and squeezed the Jell-O out of the small Dixie cup into my mouth, immediately regretting it.

This crap tasted worse than cough syrup.

I hunted down a hard lemonade—one more drink wouldn’t hurt, right?—and then scanned the house for a quiet place to hide. Opposite the dining room, two French doors stood open, and a small desk lamp illuminated an office. Keeping my back pressed to the wall, I inched my way around the awkward grinding, slinking into the office before anyone noticed.

It wasn’t that I didn’t like most of the people here; it was just easier to let only a few of them in at a time. My brother called it self-preservation, because with a last name like ours, we found that most people wanted to be our friends for the wrong reasons—popularity, favors, etc. I could count on one hand the number of real friends I’d had over the years, and that had always been enough for me. Like Grandma had taught me: quality over quantity.

Lauryn’s laughter pealed across the house. She now danced with one of the new guys who currently twirled her around while singing—horribly off-key—at the top of his lungs. Lauryn was loud, but at least she wasn’t on a table, so I took a slow sip of my hard lemonade, the tanginess numbing me all the way down as I settled into a high-backed armchair. Drawing my legs up underneath me, I pulled out my phone, then opened the PDF manual of the new light board for the community theater. The first tech rehearsal for Romeo and Juliet was in two days, and I needed to be ready.

I made notes with my ideas for how to light the stage for the opening sequences, the shading patterns I wanted to use for the two families. A brand-new ChamSys light board waited for me in the booth of the Lyric. With over twenty execute buttons and more color options than the paint swatches at Mom and Dad’s hardware store, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it.

I added another note to check on the follow spot bulbs since they were notorious for being too weak when the noise outside the office grew louder. The new Diamond Boys, apparently Fulton’s crew, yelled at some of the guys from my school. “Yankees” and “Red Sox” were dropped a couple of times.

Pathetic.

Couldn’t they find something else to argue about?

And what was the point? The Yankees would always be better than the Red Sox.

The argument grew louder, and a dozen or so costumed players spilled into the office like a mosh pit at a concert.

Someone yelled from the opposite end of the room, and the crowd shifted. A tall boy with a golden crown over dark hair fell backward, one of his hands above his head, the other holding a spilling red Solo cup as he stumbled after something.

“I got it! I got it!” he yelled.

Oh crap. “Watch it!” I stuck out my leg to stop him from crashing into me. But it was too late.

He dropped the ball, tripped, and fell onto my lap, his beer splashing all over me.

Warm, pee-smelling liquid dripped off my chin. I shoved the idiot to the floor. “Are you freakin’ kidding me?”