“Yeah,” I admit.
“I also have more bad news,” she says, taking another sip of her drink.
“Go on,” I say.
“I think everyone might know,” she says.
There’s a spiky ball somewhere in the vicinity of my stomach, sharp points dulled by whiskey but still vicious enough to be felt.
“You think,” I repeat.
“Mindy Drake was pestering me about it maybe ten minutes ago,” she says, making an apologetic face. “She’d had, like, two margaritas but she was saying something about having open arms when he inevitably left you for your cousin? Though she shouted that last part at someone else, it seemed like it wasn’t meant for me.”
She takes another sip. I think I’m not the only drunk person here right now.
My mind is racing, but it’s useless, just people know, Mindy knows people know, oh shit Mindy knows over and over again.
I’m in no state for this.
“I don’t think I have any cousins he could leave me for,” I finally say. “Though I don’t really know, my mom didn’t talk to her sister anymore and my dad, I mean, who the fuck knows where he got to. You could be my cousin.”
“If your dad got around you’d be my half-sister, not my cousin,” she points out.
“Whatever.”
“Right, so everyone in your trailer park knows that Eli’s Bronco has been parked outside your house, like, every night for a month,” she says.
The simplicity of it smacks me in the face.
Of course everyone knows. We would have had to practically build underground tunnels for this to actually be a secret. Sprucevale is a tiny, incestuous, gossipy town and I really should have known better.
“Fuck,” I say.
“And Mindy was trying to get me to tell her details and I will have you know that I gave her nothing. Even though she was being super weird. So technically it’s all still speculation because even though I know you two are fucking like bunnies, I haven’t said a thing.”
She looks very pleased with herself.
I hold out one fist. She bumps it with hers.
Everyone knows, I think again. The spiky ball gets pricklier. I swallow, trying to ignore it.
“I think she had a thing with Seth for a while,” I tell Adeline. “Does that sound familiar? And she might still be mad about it?”
Adeline rolls her eyes dramatically.
“Who hasn’t had a thing with Seth?” she says.
“Me,” I say.
“Well, also me,” she says. “But I think it’s just us. Should we be offended?”
“No,” I say. “I’d claim that we prefer a better class of men, but the other residents of my trailer park totally just busted my fuckbuddy and you set me up with Todd in the first place, so I think he’s just not our type.”
“I’ll take it,” she says, shrugging.
I close my eyes for a second. Things are… unsteady.
“I just agreed to go to his family dinner, didn’t I?” I ask.* * *A few more hours go by. I don’t get drunker, but I do maintain my current level. I know where the couches are at Bramblebush, and I can crash on one for a while tonight, at least until I sober up.
Apparently all of Sprucevale knows about Eli and me. Apparently they’ve known for quite a while now and tonight’s the first time anyone has bothered to tell me that my secret is, in fact, not even slightly secret.
If Mindy knows, I have to assume that everyone knows. His brothers. His mom. Lydia and Kevin. Zane and Brandon. The cashier at the grocery store. The driver who waved me through an intersection this morning.
Probably even Montgomery, though he doesn’t live in Sprucevale itself like the rest of us so there’s a slim possibility that he doesn’t know yet.
My solution is to avoid Eli for the next hour, like that’ll keep people from talking.
“I wish they’d widen thirty-nine,” I say to Lydia. We’re drinking by the fire pit at the far edge of the lawn, the party slowly switching over from ‘family fun’ to ‘after dark drinking.’
“You know they never will,” she says, leaning back in her Adirondack chair.
“Every time I drive down it I swear I get stuck behind an eighteen-wheeler doing fifty-five,” I say. “It’s such a pain.”
“Write a letter,” she says lazily.
“I’d rather just complain,” I say, leaning back into the bench I’m sitting on.
There’s a shadow across the fire, a dark space that slowly takes shape.
The second I see it I know it’s Eli. I know how he moves, how he walks. I know how he stands, the way he runs his hands through his rumpled hair when he’s got something he wants to say and is trying to figure out how to say it.
“I don’t think letters work,” Lydia admits.
Eli comes around the fire. My stomach twists, flips, excitement charging through me at his mere presence. A knot pops and sparks fly past his face, his eyes never moving from mine, the heated look in them pooling somewhere inside me.