Dreamland(16)

She laughed, knowing exactly what I’d done. “While you were singing, I kept thinking about you in your high school band days. I find it hard to imagine you with long hair.”

“My aunt and uncle weren’t too fond of it. The few occasions when my sister saw it on FaceTime, she absolutely hated it. More than once, she threatened to drive back home and cut it all off when I was sleeping. And the scary thing is, I was afraid she was actually going to do it.”

“Really?”

“When she gets something in her head, it’s sometimes impossible to change her mind.”

Just then, I heard someone calling Morgan’s name. Glancing up, I saw Stacy, Holly, and Maria stepping off the low wooden deck onto the sand, making a beeline for us.

“I think they think they’re coming to rescue me,” Morgan whispered.

“Do you need rescuing?”

“No. But they don’t know that.”

When they reached us, I watched them quickly assess the situation, no doubt still trying to figure out why a girl who was as pretty as Morgan would have left with a guy like me.

“Were you just singing out here?” Holly asked.

Morgan jumped in to answer. “I insisted. He wrote a new song and I wanted to hear it. How did it go at MacDinton’s?”

They gave a unified bored shrug. “It was all right,” Stacy said. “Once the band took a break, we could actually hear ourselves and that was nice, but then they started up again, so we figured it was time to call it. It’s getting late.”

There was something almost parental in the way she said it, and when Morgan didn’t respond right away, I cleared my throat.

“I should probably get going, too.”

I started to put away my guitar, regretting the end of the evening. If Morgan and I had more time alone, I might have tried for a kiss, but Morgan’s friends seemed to read my mind and had no intention of allowing us a final moment of privacy.

“That was fun tonight,” Morgan said.

“Definitely,” I agreed.

She turned toward her friends. “You ready?”

“Don’t forget your boots.”

She seemed amused that I’d remembered, offering up a brief wave before starting toward the hotel with her friends. I waited for them to reach the deck, where Morgan retrieved her boots, slinging them over her arm. In time, I heard their voices fade as they disappeared into the hotel.

Once they were gone, I headed in the same direction but quickly realized my mistake. The door was locked—it needed a room key to unlock—so I went back to the beach and eventually found a small path that led around the side of the hotel, then finally to the parking lot.

On the drive back to the apartment, I thought about Morgan. She was rich, classy, intelligent, driven, popular, and obviously gorgeous. Like her friends, I wondered what she could possibly see in a guy like me. On the surface, we weren’t alike in the slightest. Our lives were entirely different, and yet, somehow, we just seemed to click. Not necessarily in a romantic way, but spending time with her had been easier than even my comfortable routines with Michelle.

Later, while lying in bed, I found myself wondering what Paige would think of her. I suspected they’d hit it off—I was pretty sure Morgan got along with everyone—but Paige always had uncanny instincts about people. It was clear why I was attracted to Morgan, but I kept coming back to the mystery of why, despite our vastly different lives, spending time with her felt almost like coming home.





When she was young—eight or nine, she guessed—Beverly and her mom rode the bus to New York City. Most of the ride took place at night, and Beverly slept with her head in her mom’s lap, waking to the sight of buildings that were taller than anything that she’d imagined. The bus station was thronged—more people than Beverly had ever seen at once—and that was just the beginning of a trip that remained vivid in her memory despite the passage of time. Her mom wanted the trip to be special, so she arranged for Things to Do. They saw The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh at the MoMA, which was an Important Painting by a Famous Artist, and afterward each of them had a slice of pizza for lunch. In the afternoon, they visited the American Museum of Natural History, where she stared at the re-created skeletons of various creatures, including a blue whale and a Tyrannosaurus rex that had teeth larger than bananas. She saw craggy meteorites and diamonds and rubies and they visited the planetarium, where she stared upward at a computer-generated sky with lines that depicted the constellations. It was just the two of them—a Girls’ Trip, her mom had called it—and it had taken her mom more than a year to save up the money to do the things that rich people did when they went to the Big City. Though Beverly didn’t know it, it would be the only trip they would ever take together. There would come a time when Beverly and her mom didn’t speak at all, but on that trip, her mom talked practically nonstop, and Beverly found comfort in the warm palm of her mom’s hand as they left the museum and walked to Central Park, where leaves flamed in oranges, reds, and yellows. It was autumn, the temperature more winter than summer, and the chilly breeze made the tip of Beverly’s nose turn red. Her mom carried tissues in her handbag, and Beverly used them one by one until they were gone. Afterward, they had dinner at a place where the waiter was dressed as though he were about to get married. The words in the menu made no sense to Beverly. Her mom told her it was a Real Restaurant, and though the food was all right, Beverly wished she’d had another slice of pizza instead. Later, to get to their hotel, they had to walk almost an hour. Standing near the lobby entrance were two shifty-eyed men smoking cigarettes, and once they were inside, her mom paid cash for the room to a man in a dirty T-shirt who stood behind the counter. Their room had two beds with stains on the covers and it smelled funny, like a sink that had backed up, but her mom remained as excited as ever and said it was important to experience the Real New York. Beverly was so tired she fell asleep almost immediately.