Reunited (3 page)

“Dad, calm down.” Alice kept her hand on the tuner. She scrolled past a Spanish talk radio show, then up through a long,
staticky no-man’s-land. She was about to lose all hope when she finally stumbled on a signal. The familiar song rang out loud and clear.

THE THINGS WE WISHED WE DIDN’T SAY

WE WENT AND SAID THEM ANYWAY

NO SAVING FOR A RAINY DAY

THAT’S THE WAY IT WAS

Of course, it was Level3. Who else could it be? Being in the Pea Pod had somehow channeled their music into existence.

“Hang a right,” her dad said, pointing to the street up ahead.

Alice might have laughed out loud at the coincidence if it wasn’t the one Level3 song that always made her cringe. Back before that disastrous night at the freshman winter dance, “Heyday” used to be one of her favorites. Now it just brought back ugly memories.

IT’S A ROAD I CAN’T GO DOWN AGAIN

A STREET CALLED I REMEMBER WHEN

IF WE COULD DO IT ALL AGAIN, WE WOULD

WE WOULD . . .

Alice took the turn a little too fast. At the same exact moment, the song changed into its thumping chorus.

IT WAS OUR HEYDAY, HEY DAY, HEY!

OUR HEYDAY, HEY DAY, HEY!

“Slow down!” her dad yelled as Alice jerked the wheel seconds before hitting a mailbox. She stomped on the brakes as the Pea Pod lurched forward with a loud grinding noise, then immediately stalled out.

WHY DID WE REFUSE TO STAY, ANYWAY?

Her dad drove the rest of the way home. By the time he pulled into the driveway, Alice practically leaped out of the van while it was still in motion. Clearly the universe was trying to send her a message. First, there was the canceled road trip, then her “gift” of the Pea Pod, and now “Heyday.”

She hurried inside to the den, desperate to soothe herself with some junk food and mindless TV. That’s when she saw it: the photo of Level3, right there on the TV screen. And unless the van had somehow transported her back in time—which she was pretty sure it hadn’t—she had no choice but to believe that the image was real. It had to be real; the old guy from
MTV News
was talking about it. She hit the TiVo rewind button three times just to make sure she’d heard Kurt Loder (
that
was his name!) correctly.

“Level3, the pop-rock trio that broke up at the height of their success nearly four years ago, has announced they will be getting back together for
a one-night-only benefit concert next Friday in their hometown of Austin, Texas. Tickets go on sale at noon and are expected to sell out within minutes. According to lead singer Travis Wyland, ‘A reunion show is the fastest and most effective way to raise money for a cause we all firmly believe in and which has affected my family personally: finding a cure for Duchenne muscular dystrophy.’ The band has denied rumors they will be permanently getting back together.”

Alice shoved a handful of Doritos in her mouth and crunched them up without even tasting them. How could one day be this crazy? And yet, it was how everything had always been with her old favorite band—meant to be. Tiernan used to have a Yiddish word for all the coincidences between Level3 and the girls.
Beshert.
And when something was
beshert
, you didn’t tune it out. When something was
beshert
, you went with it. It was all you
could
do.

It was 11:56 a.m. Four minutes from now, the ticket website would be a feeding frenzy. Alice ran to her bedroom and turned on her computer, the thrill of a new plan formulating as the screen tingled to life. So what if Austin, Texas, was two thousand miles away from Walford, Massachusetts? Or that tickets started at two hundred dollars apiece? Alice was going.
They
were going. How could they not? Especially now that they had the Pea Pod to get them there. But how could she justify spending six hundred dollars on tickets without even knowing if her old friends would agree to go along with her?

She and Tiernan were at least civil to each other. But Summer would pass by in the halls and barely make eye contact. Still, this was Level3, and however Summer and Tiernan felt about her now could never take away the fact that they’d once considered themselves the band’s biggest fans. And what was the worst-case scenario? If Summer and Tiernan said no, she’d just sell the tickets on eBay.

Alice rifled through her desk drawer for the credit card she’d borrowed from her mom two months ago and “accidentally” forgotten to give back.
Whoops
. After a few clicks of the mouse, she was on the ticket site. A photo of the band appeared above the words, “Reunited—for one night only!”

She carefully typed in the numbers on her mom’s Visa. At the bottom of the screen, an ominous line of text read: “By clicking continue, you agree that your credit card will be charged and your nonrefundable ticket(s) will be processed.” If she didn’t buy the tickets now, there’d be no other chance.

Well
, Alice thought to herself as she clicked the button,
if you guys can get back together for a one-time reunion, why can’t we?

Now she just needed to convince her ex–best friends to join her.

SUMMER SQUISHED A MOSQUITO ON HER ARM AS SHE WATCHED
Alice Miller cross the stage to take her diploma.
Ugh, they were only on the
M
’s.
She lifted her thick strawberry blond hair from her neck, wiping away the sweat with the back of her hand. At this rate, it would be at least another hour before she could ditch this yawn-fest and dive into Jace’s pool. Up in the grandstands, her parents were laughing and talking with their old high school friends like a bunch of rowdy teenagers. If she and Jace were back here with their kids in twenty years, somebody might as well just shoot her now.

“Heads up!” a voice shouted at the exact same moment a beach ball slammed into the head of a nerdy boy sitting in front of her. Summer picked the ball up off the grass. From a few rows back, she could hear Maz’s obnoxious laugh.
Typical.

Summer looked at the boy who’d been hit, the pink flush of embarrassment rising up his neck. She wished she had the nerve to say something to him. To tell him that high school would probably be the pinnacle of Maz’s pathetic life. But before she had the chance, the boy turned around and shot her a dirty look, as if the ball in her lap made her guilty by association.

Summer glared back at Maz, then opened the valve and squeezed. The ball collapsed in her hands, air whistling as it escaped.

“Chill out,” said Jace, giving her a finger flick to the neck. By some fluke, he was seated right behind her. Jace Fitzgerald and Summer Dalton, high school power couple extraordinaire. The way the girls in school treated her, you’d think being popular and having a cute boyfriend were the keys to eternal happiness.

Summer never understood what made her and her friends so “popular” anyway, considering half the school hated them. Not that there was any point in bringing this up. Every time she tried to talk about something other than:

1. Who was getting fat

2. Who hooked up with who

3. How wasted they were last weekend
her friends would accuse her of being a nerd.
As if.
Summer was pretty sure that she’d be the laughingstock of her Poetry 101 class in college. It hadn’t stopped her from signing up, but still, the fear was real. So far, the only person to read her poetry was Jace, and he’d said it was amazing. But how much could she trust a boy who considered
Maxim
magazine heavy reading?

And it wasn’t like her parents understood it any better. They could barely wrap their heads around the fact that she wasn’t going to school with all her friends at UMass Walford. But Summer couldn’t wait to go to Boston College in the fall. She wanted to hang out with people who had their own opinions; people who argued with her; people who weren’t so afraid to
just be who they were and live or die by the consequences.

“Tiernan O’Leary!” Principal Roberts’s voice boomed through the loudspeakers.
God, they were only on the
O
’s.

“Freak!” Maz shouted as Tiernan crossed the stage. Like a girl with blue hair, combat boots, and red day-glow lipstick would consider that an insult.

“Can you tell your monkey to shut up?” she whispered to Jace.

“You know I can’t control him,” Jace said, shrugging his shoulders.

On the stage, Tiernan curtseyed to the crowd, while raising her middle finger in Maz’s general direction.

Thankfully, Summer only had to deal with Maz for one more week. For the month of July, it was good-bye Walford, hello Martha’s Vineyard.

“Tell me again what your beach house is like,” Summer said, fanning Jace with her diploma. She needed to work up a good daydream if she was going to make it through the rest of commencement.

“Uh, it’s gray,” Jace replied. Vivid descriptions were never the boy’s strong point.

Not that it mattered. Summer had already painted the picture in her mind. Picnic dinners of boiled lobster and corn on the cob; sandy games of touch football on the beach; sunsets spent writing poetry in her journal.

Hopefully, Jace wouldn’t mind if she slipped away now and then to write. Knowing Jace, he’d probably be fine with it as
long as she didn’t miss out on any important beach activities—especially the kind that happened
after
dark. Summer closed her eyes, imagining the sunsets off of West Chop.

She must have drifted off because the next thing she knew, loud clapping and a chorus of “Woo hoos!” and “Hell, yeah, babies!” jolted her awake. She turned around to ask Jace why he hadn’t woken her—well, to yell at him, really—but he wasn’t there. Lately, he was always disappearing like that. Summer scanned the crowd. Her parents and their friends were still chatting away up in the bleachers, enjoying their own party too much to notice that graduation was actually over. But Jace was nowhere to be seen.

She headed toward the edge of the field, weaving her way through the throngs of people, dodging tossed caps and that infernal beach ball (reinflated courtesy of Maz).
Where on earth had Jace gone?
Summer was almost at the bleachers when a familiar hand tapped her on the shoulder. Only, it didn’t belong to the person she was looking for. It belonged to Alice Miller.

“Hey, there,” said Alice casually, as if it wasn’t the first time they’d spoken in nearly four years. “Happy graduation.”

“Happy graduation,” Summer answered by reflex. As far as Summer was concerned, she and Alice had drawn a line in the sand freshman year, one they’d both agreed never to cross. Now, for some unimaginable reason, Alice was acting like the line had never been there to begin with.

“Well, I know this might sound crazy . . . ,” Alice began. Then, without even taking a breath, Alice launched into a rambling
account of her last twenty-four hours—her parents giving her the newly refurbished Pea Pod, then learning the news of the Level3 reunion show. Since it was impossible to get a word in edgewise, Summer just stood there, trying her best to absorb Alice’s onslaught of information. It was hard to decide what bothered her more—that Alice had totally glossed over everything that had happened that night at the Winter Wonderland Dance or that she was dredging up the past in the first place.
Note to Alice: High school’s over.

“Sorry,” Summer said, “Jace and I are going to the Vineyard for all of July. But have fun, okay?”

For a second, Alice just stood there looking as if someone had let the air out of her, like the beach ball from before. “Well, if you change your mind . . . ,” she finally stammered, walking away before she even finished the sentence.

Summer was surprised Alice had the audacity to speak to her after all this time, let alone invite her to a concert halfway across the country. But even more shocking was how willingly she took no for an answer. Suddenly Alice stopped.

“He’s still got those dimples!” she shouted through the crowd.

Summer didn’t have to ask who “he” was. She had already googled Travis’s picture when she’d heard about the Level3 reunion on the radio. Not that she would admit it to anyone—especially not Alice Miller. What was more embarrassing than being eighteen and having a crush on some rock star she didn’t even know?

And why was she thinking about Travis’s dimples when she already had a boyfriend? A
real
one. Maybe Jace didn’t have the soul of a poet, but at least he wasn’t some adolescent fantasy. In fact, he was right in front of her.

“Where have
you
been?” Summer asked, flustered.

“I’ve been looking for
you
,” he said.