Stay Sweet(81)

The girl looks up at Amelia and whispers, “Thanks,” gratefully and also nervously. As if she doesn’t want to be seen fraternizing with Amelia.

Liz and Mansi don’t acknowledge Amelia.

Sides have been taken in this battle.

Amelia steps away, embarrassed.

The stand looks like hell after the rainstorm. Amelia does her best to ignore the discomfort and awkwardness, focusing instead on cleaning, trying to get the stand back to the way it’s supposed to be, appearance-wise anyway. She wipes down every surface, mops the floor, drains the milk jugs and buckets and empty ice cream drums of cloudy rainwater.

Cate stays in the office the whole time.

It’s near closing when Amelia is finishing up in the bathroom. She’s gone through an entire roll of paper towels and is well into her second. In the last hour, she’s heard lots of whispering discussion inside the office, and she’s hopeful that Cate will eventually call her inside to talk.

But those hopes are dashed when she hears Cate’s truck start up outside. Amelia checks her phone for the time—it’s barely a minute after closing. Ducking her head outside, she sees that the exterior lights have already been turned off and the girls are already in Cate’s truck—Liz riding shotgun, Mansi and the newbie in the back.

She watches, almost dumbfounded, as Cate calls out to her, “Lock up when you’re done, okay?” before driving away.

At Meade Creamery, Amelia’s always felt like one of the girls, among her sisters. Now she feels like an outsider.

Or worse. A traitor.

Though it hurts, she knows that being left behind tonight is something she probably deserves. After all, Cate wasn’t the only one she let down.

And, looking back, Amelia knows there were plenty of times when she could have been down at the stand with the girls and instead chose to help Grady. What good was trying to save the stand if she neglected the girls to do it?

One thing Molly said, over and over again in those early diary entries, was that it was never supposed to be about the ice cream. It was supposed to be about the girls.

How could Amelia have forgotten?

This is bigger than just her and Cate. If Amelia really wants to make things right, she’s going to have to reckon with all the girls.





CHAPTER FORTY-ONE


AMELIA IS THE FIRST ONE at the stand the next morning. She arrives with a Tupperware full of sweet corn muffins, which she stress-baked the night before, a tub of butter, and a container of orange juice. Her plan is to call all the girls into the stand for a staff meeting and lay herself bare, tell them everything that’s been going on, share Molly’s diary with them. Try to explain her feelings for Grady and her reasons for hiding them. And, most of all, she’ll voice her regret over losing sight of the most important tenet of being a Meade Creamery girl—that the relationships created here are the most important thing.

She already has the text written in her phone, but she needs the newbies’ phone numbers, which she’s hoping to find somewhere in the office.

As soon as she unlocks the stand door, a strange, foreign smell hits her. Like something’s been burning. She worries at first that the walk-in freezer has shorted out, and she rushes in to check on it, knocking over something made of glass. She stoops and sees an overturned Meade Dairy bottle. Inside is a sludge of sooty water with several waterlogged cigarette butts.

Amelia flicks on the lights. Though she cleaned the entire stand yesterday, it’s been turned upside down: couch cushions damp and in a circle on the main floor, pictures crooked, and the radio off the shelf, dangling upside down by its black cord.

She opens the bathroom and recoils at the smell of vomit.

Back outside, she lifts the heavy plastic lid on the dumpster. Inside is a pile of beer bottles and crushed beer cans.

She finds more beer cans inside the walk-in freezer. These were left behind, and they have exploded. Icy beer has splattered all over the drums of ice cream Amelia made earlier in the week. The whole freezer smells yeasty.

Amelia goes back into the office and pulls out her phone. She’s shaking, she’s so angry. After a bit of scrolling, she comes across several pictures from the party here. The girls having fun together. Playing cards on the office desk. A dance party in the stand. Running through the trees in the dark.

That last picture makes Amelia remember once coming home late from her grandmother’s house on a summer night, when she was just a kid. It was past midnight; her mother was asleep against the car window. They drove past the stand, long closed to customers, but the girls were still there, sitting around the picnic tables, talking, their voices a streak of sound that came and went as the car passed by.

But last night’s party was not just stand girls. There were other people here from the high school, too. Pictures of Dane Zapotowsky and Christopher Win feeding each other ice cream straight from the scoop. A Boomerang of Zoe Metcalf throwing fistfuls of sprinkles in the air on repeat. Three of Cate’s Academic Decathlon teammates lying stacked like a sandwich across the office couch. John Stislow sticking his hand straight into the vat of chocolate dip.

Amelia hears Cate’s truck pull up outside. All three newbies are in her truck. They look totally worse for wear, green and unsteady.

Cate comes in. Amelia knows she’s surprised to see her, because Cate avoids her eyes as she passes her.

“Looks like you had some party here last night,” Amelia says, trying to keep her emotions in check.