Caleb swung his feet to the ground and stood. “Hell yeah. I’ll meet you there, though. Gotta go see a guy about a thing.” He winked and strolled out. Archer had an immediate sense of relief without Caleb’s presence in the room. The man was intense.

“Go where?” Archer asked, eyeing his bed. It had been an awfully long day.

Betty laughed. “You’re not actually thinking about going to bed right now, are you?”

“No?”

“Archer! Holy shit! The entire point of coming to work at Shady Queens for the summer is the partying! You two are up for it, right?” she asked Ben and Beau.

They looked at each other. “Sure,” they said together.

“Archie, darling, it’s time to get our drink on.”

Betty led them down a path that curled around the west side of the lake. The setting sun had turned the trees around the lake black, while the sky was soft and purple. Music and shrieking laughter reached them before the light flickering through the maples. “Is this not a guest cabin down here?” he asked, dodging under some low-hanging leaves.

“Nope. It’s sort of the employee lounge, and a few of the more senior staff have private rooms upstairs. Everyone calls it ‘the cabin.’ I think Mateo stays here,” Betty replied.

One more curve of the path, then a large, faded cabin was visible, hunkered down only a few feet back from the shore. A weathered dock jutted into the lake, where a handful of silhouetted bodies hurled themselves into the darkening water, hooting and hollering, spurred on by cheers from the rest. The porch of the cabin seethed with bodies, flashes of color and skin.

Ben and Beau went to check out the dock while Betty took Archer by the hand and pulled him up the steps to the house, smiling and nodding as she went. Inside was one big, low-ceilinged room with a kitchen in the corner and the rest of it old, beaten-up couches and tables, plus a foosball table in another corner. There was a hall in the back where Archer could make out a set of stairs.

“Well, stop standing there like you carried a watermelon. Grab a beer,” Betty said, nodding at the fridge.

“I didn’t bring anything with me.”

“It’s fine, there’s a beer fund you can contribute to. Go ahead.”

Archer took one of the cheapest cans by habit, added a twenty to the jar on top of the fridge, and popped the top, taking a nervous sip as he looked around.