Chapter 7

Then

Justin Lashaway lived in a deck house in the woods on the outskirts of Kennewick Village. The long driveway was jammed with cars, kids milling around drinking cans of beer. Justin’s parents were home, but they’d offered up the entire bottom floor, a large rec room, for the party. They’d put out tons of food, and buckets filled with soft drinks, but the majority of the kids at the party—almost the entire graduating class—had spilled out into the surrounding pine forest, where most of the drinking and pot smoking was taking place. After checking out the rec room, Gina eating two cookies and a piece of cake, they headed out to the edge of the woods and found Justin manning a keg. Alice knew that Justin had a crush on her, had had a crush on her for at least two years now. He’d asked her to the senior prom, and she’d let him down easy by telling him that if she had any interest in that sort of thing, he’d be the guy she’d want to go with.

“Alice! No way,” he said. He was filling plastic cups for the swarm of students.

“You got a keg?” Gina asked.

“My brother’s home and got it for me. My parents are pretending they don’t know.”

Justin got them both a cup of beer that seemed to Alice to be mainly foam. She drank it while Gina went to find her boyfriend. When she was finished with the beer she told Justin that she was heading home, that she really just came by to say hello.

“Aw, man. Don’t go,” Justin said. “Besides, how’re you getting home?”

“I’ll call my stepdad from inside. He’ll come pick me up.”

“I can drive you. At least let me drive you.”

Alice agreed, and Justin took off to try and borrow a car: “My car’s buried, but Brad’s around here somewhere.” Alice thought about trying to find Gina and saying good-bye, but knew that Gina would give her a hard time for leaving so soon. Justin returned, breathless, holding up keys. “Brad’s Mustang. I had to fight him for these.”

Justin drove slowly, cutting over to Kennewick Harbor, then driving along the shore. At first Alice thought Justin was driving slow because he’d been drinking and was worried about being pulled over, but then she figured out that he just wanted to spend more time with her. He was asking constant questions, wanting to know how she felt about graduating, what classes she was going to take at MCC, why he never saw her at high school parties. She answered as best she could, and laughed when he drove right past her condo. “I thought you might want to go out to the lighthouse, take a little walk,” he said, shrugging.