The Stepping Off Place Read online

“You’re ridiculous.” But picturing Fiona’s clear eyes and uncomplicated smile, I had to admit Hattie might be right. As for Emma Rose, she’d probably hit on my dad if she had the chance. What did my eyes give away? I held my breath and rolled into the water.

  “You should consider doing it too, Reddi-wip,” she said when I surfaced next to her float. During a seventh-grade ice-cream-sundae-making session, she contorted my name, Reid, into Reddi-wip when she discovered you only had to flip two letters and double the d. “That’s you, Reddi for Action!” she’d said. It used to be ironic. As far as she knew, it still was.

  My cheeks flushed and I splashed water on them in what I hoped was a nonchalant way. Hattie didn’t know I’d lost my virginity already, with Jay Seavers at the junior-senior prom about a month earlier. I felt guilty not telling her all this time. We both knew he was an ass. How could I explain it to her? I couldn’t even explain it to myself. When Jay looked at me with his way-too-hot-for-me eyes, I threw caution and my awesome green prom dress to the wind. And we did it. On the sixteenth hole of Howebrook Country Club golf course. He wasn’t even my date.

  It was reckless, and I was never reckless—of my own accord, that is. Admittedly, this was a pretty big exception. And I was surprised by how exhilarating it was. Not the sex itself. I mean being so un-me. The sex was, well, uncomfortable if not painful. But the kissing part? The gateway drug to my fast, hard fall.

  At first, I couldn’t wait to tell Hattie. But she slept all Sunday after the prom and bagged school on Monday and Tuesday—which she had done a lot this year. I don’t know how she talked her mom into so many excused days. Twelve times since September. That’s three more than Ferris Bueller, and he’s from a movie about skipping school. As it turned out, I was glad she wasn’t with me in the cafeteria that Monday, for what I now know was the most humiliating moment of my life thus far. Here’s the thing: when Captain Dickhead saw me smiling at him from my lunch table, he averted his gaze and walked right past me. Like I didn’t exist. I feel sick even recounting it in my head. It was so mean, and made him an even bigger asshole than I already knew him to be, yet clearly I was the one feeling like a loser. How had I done this to myself? I tried not to think about it, let alone talk about it. But it snuck up on me at weird moments and gutted me anew, this feeling that I was an embarrassment. With Hattie, I could get my bearings again and know it was him, not me. Most of the time.

  “You might surprise yourself,” Hattie was saying, “and find you’re a real tiger in the sack.” She added a growl.

  We laughed and I tried to flip over her raft, but she paddled water at me.

  I pulled myself to sit on the pool edge. “Meanwhile, let me push your thinking here.”

  “Go ahead, but my mind’s made up.” She rolled over and looked into the sky. “Hey, a school of fish,” she said.

  “Focus!” I said, hiding my awe at our synchronized imaginations. “First off, there’s trouble with your reasoning. I completely agree that there are no Mr. Rights in Scofield—besides Gib Soule maybe—but this party is in Scofield, and is, therefore, bound to be populated by only Scofield guys.”

  “And your point?”

  I didn’t know what my point was, so I changed tack. “Why don’t you wait till you’re in Maine and fulfill your destiny with Santi?”

  “That’s incestuous.”

  Lie. The Family Herrera shared The Thimble with the Family Darrow. The Darrows came from Boston. The Herreras came from Valparaíso, Chile. Mr. Herrera and Mr. Darrow rowed crew together at Princeton or prep school or maybe both. Santiago was our age and definitely not a relative of Hattie’s.

  “I call BS.”

  “Gross,” she said flatly.

  It was pointless to argue—she’d never cave—so I said, “Wait, you’re just going to pick up someone random?”

  “Probably,” she said, as if not having all the kinks worked out of her scheme was perfectly okay. “I leave tomorrow, so it’s not like I have to face him anytime soon.” She paused. “I’ll aim for someone I kind of like.”

  “Someone like who?” I asked.

  Just then my brother Scott came out from the house. Scott played lacrosse at Colgate. He got the lion’s share of MacGregory athletic genes.

  “Reid, where’d you put the keys?” he said, then noticed Hattie. “Hey, Darrow. Where’s it at, puddy tat?”

  “On the fly, porkie pie.”

  “Don’t I know it, GI Joe-it.”

  They laughed. They’d done variations of this routine since forever.

  “GI Joe-it?” I repeated.

  “Some day you’ll be a hepcat, too, Reid,” Scott said.

  “She’s a closet hepcat. It’s in there somewhere, right, Reddi-wip?” Hattie said, climbing the pool ladder. Scott was unable to resist a full visual sweep of her body. She was getting really beautiful in a way that made me feel happy and left behind at the same time.

  I squinted at Scott. “Busted,” I whispered.

  In middle school, Hattie and I had been the last girls to hit puberty. Boys noticed her for her hijinks and because she won every damn sport she played, but they didn’t crush on her. We did eventually catch up, sort of, but it was this year that Hattie emerged from the pasty winter months like one of those iridescent-blue rain forest butterflies. Suddenly, we were included at all the parties, and not because of me. I was jealous at first, but I hated that shallow part of me and willed it away.

  Scott rolled his eyes. “Keys?” he said too loudly.

  “Dining room table.”

  “Catch ya on the flip side,” he called, disappearing into the house.

  “Jim jam in the double-wide,” Hattie replied. She wrapped the towel under her armpits, grinning.

  I stared at her.

  “What?” Sometimes she laughs while she’s talking, like her words and her laughter are competing for air time. It’s contagious. Usually.

  “You were going to tell me who the lucky guy is tonight.” My voice was sharp, for me, and I wasn’t sure why her plan irritated me so much. Because I had blown my chance to lose my virginity in such a power move? Or because I’d never have the guts?

  “I’ll decide at the party,” she said.

  “What if people find out?” I said. I’d worried the same about me and Captain D. A lot. My pulse thudded in my neck and I brought my hand up to smooth the skin.

  She made a “duh” face.

  I stared again.

  She shook her head. “Reid, you can choose not to give a shit.”

  I didn’t know how to respond. How was that a choice?

  She patted my shoulder on her way to the screen door. “You want to go on a run before dinner?”

  It was eight o’clock when we left for Sabrina Bradley’s, and the June sky had only just begun to turn pearly. Besides the Post Road, Scofield’s roads are residential, winding and thick with trees—all-around intoxicating to drive on with the windows down to the first party of summer, even in a bomber like the Fiesta. “How about Shunsuke, your crew buddy? He seems undemanding,” I offered. Since I couldn’t conjure a good reason, any reason, why Hattie’s little operation was a flawed plan—and I tried during our run and then again while we got ready for tonight—I jumped on board. It was fun, actually, since it was ridiculous and I risked nothing. In her mind, neither did she.

  “Shunsuke, yes. I do like his shoulders,” she said, just as that obnoxious Cake Pops song came on the radio. “Oh my God!” she squawked, cranking the volume. She rocked out from the waist up. “I can have it!” A raspy voice is pure gold for many singers—from Etta James to Adele. Not so much for Hattie. She sounds like a bagpiper’s warm-up: off-key and desperate. In middle school chorus, the music teacher’s aide privately asked her to lip sync during the concert. It’s the only time I’ve seen Hattie wounded by someone’s opinion. Probably because it’s the only thing she truly sucks at. Now she considers it hilarious and uses her singing to torture me.

  “My ears are bleeding,” I said.


  She chuckled and turned it down, still humming. Even that was off tune.

  “So Shunsuke’s an option,” I said. “Or you could pick a guy who just graduated. Then he’d be gone next year.” It was like shopping for a new outfit, one that would look better on Hattie than on me, which was more or less every outfit.

  “Good idea.”

  “Or Hammy. He’s always loved you.” I waited. She’d ramped up the dancing for Cake Pops’ final chorus. I realized I was avoiding looking at her, which in general is a good thing while driving, but my motives were more mysterious. I felt strangely protective of Hammy—officially named Sam Stanwich, but dubbed Ham Sandwich, the Sandwich, or Hammy in fourth grade.

  “Nah,” she said. “I thought about it at the prom, but Hammy knows me too well.” We rolled to a four-way stop. “Plus, he’s so skinny.”

  True, Hammy’d had a recent growth spurt. He was six feet and virtually invisible when he turned sideways. Think Flat Stanley. Still, I’d witnessed the thinly veiled, unrequited crush he had on her, and it kind of made me love him. For her. Not for me. Which is really sad—developing a vicarious crush on someone because you like the way he likes your best friend? I guess I just wished she was nicer to him.

  I shook my head, secretly talking to both of us when I said, “This is complicated.”

  “Not really,” she said. “I’m just not into him. Padiddle!” She tried to thump me on the arm—protocol when you see a car with one headlight—but I beat her to it.

  “Ow.” She rubbed the spot.

  “That’s my third win,” I said. “I’m posing a challenge to the Padiddle Queen.”

  “Never,” she said.

  I snickered. “You are so competitive.”

  I slowed when we got to Maywood Road, turning onto the street. The homes, like most in Scofield, were large and very expensive, landscaped to perfection. It’s pretty easy to hide a big party like this here. Cops would either have to be alerted or stumble upon it.

  Sabrina herself was on the very edge of the ruling clique of seniors who’d just graduated. She’d been the kind of senior who flirted with the junior boys and made the junior girls, Hattie aside, feel like they owed her a favor for being alive. Word was her parents flew to a wedding in California and left her older sister, Eve, in charge. Eve was “taking a year off” from Boston University and really shouldn’t have been in charge of anything, let alone a house on two acres and Sabrina, but the cluelessness of some parents knows no bounds. In any case, I had to wedge the Fiesta between two willow trees to park.

  “Well, this is the place to be,” Hattie said as we squeezed out our doors. She started across the moonlit lawn. It stretched around the immense house like a moat. People clustered on the terrace, bathed in yellow light. “What’s that quote about moths and whispers and champagne in The Great Gatsby?” I asked. I was stalling, suddenly overwhelmed by the energy it would require for me to appear like I belonged here.

  “I didn’t read it,” she said. She glanced at me standing there and stopped walking. Hattie belonged. Naturally. I only belonged by virtue of her. “It’ll be fun,” she said quietly, coaxing me with her eyes.

  “I know,” I lied. The summer ahead already felt like an eternity. Ever since the ill-fated golf course sex romp, I’d been having waves of the kind of social anxiety I had back in fourth and fifth grade, pre-Hattie. The humiliation had a life of its own in my imagination sometimes. Like now.

  “You sell yourself short, Reddi MacGregory,” she said, reading my mind without knowing it. “PS, I’m not going in without you.” She linked her arm through mine, humming the Disney movie Brave theme song. This was a long-standing joke based on the fact that I do resemble the main character more than a little—especially after we frizzed my wet hair by twisting it into dozens of braids and then unbraiding it. Hattie broke into the lyrics with an attempted Scottish brogue as she twirled me around by the elbow.

  I laughed. “Your voice is so bad!” But she got me over the hump, and we ran to the hedge shadows to spy.

  “Damn,” she marveled.

  Holding the keg nozzle: Gib Soule. I could actually see his perfect white teeth from here. Dark hair swept across his forehead as if to say, “Behold! The masterpiece of Gibson Soule’s blue eyes.” Smoking hot, this boy. He could have had any girl at SHS, probably repeatedly, but he kept one girlfriend at a time for months on end, loyal as my dog Boomer. This made hearts everywhere stir all the more fervently, of course.

  Until his dad died in fifth grade, Gib lived in my neighborhood, and we’d played in the same games of flashlight tag. In those days I full-on loved him, in spite of the fact I never raised the nerve to say more than “Not it!” to him. Eventually I recognized my futility and moved on. Now he lived downtown with his mom and her new wife. Next to Gib stood Max Silverman and Hammy. The usual suspects populated the rest of the patio, mixed with older friends of Sabrina’s sister, Eve, the supposed babysitter here.

  “What about Max?” I whispered with fake innocence. As if on cue, Max punctuated some story he was telling by commencing a weird hip-thrusting dance. Gib and Hammy cracked up.

  She laugh-said, “No thanks! The arm hair—he’s like Chewbacca.”

  “It’s settled, then,” I said. “Gib’s your man.”

  “Yep,” she said. “I guess I have no choice.”

  “I’ll tell him.” I rushed ahead, but she passed me and broke into the pool of light as if stepping into her scene onstage. I watched all the faces turn, then followed.

  “Hey, look.” Max nodded to us. “Batman and Robin.” He threw his head back, laughing at his own joke.

  “Shut up,” Hattie said, slugging his arm.

  “And it’s Gumby and Pokey,” I said, meaning Max and Hammy, but there were three of them standing there, so it didn’t really make sense and I felt myself blush. Thankfully, everyone chuckled.

  “Hi, Gib,” Hattie said. I echoed her, sounding stupid.

  “Ladies,” he said, casually flashing the smile that stopped a thousand hearts. Deep down, he must have known he was hot, but he never let on.

  “Beer?” Max held up two cups, showcasing the Chewie arms. Hattie and I laughed with our eyes. I had to look at my sandals.

  “Sure,” Hattie said. “How much do we owe?”

  “Gratis for you, Harriet,” he said. “Of course.”

  I shifted my weight.

  “And you, too, Reid,” Hammy added. Sweet Hammy. “Max keeps telling the girls their beer is free, like he’s all generous, but Eva’s frat boy friends donated it.”

  Max grinned. “Cheers.”

  We clacked cups. I wasn’t a big drinker, but I appreciated the social lubricant a beer provided in moments like these. I wiped foam from my lip. “Where’s Charlie?” I asked. Charlie Bishop had been my own platonic prom date. I should’ve stuck with him instead of Captain Dickhead.

  “He’s here somewhere, with”—Hammy twirled his hands with a flourish—“Alesha.”

  “Ohhhhhh!” Hattie and I said at the same time. “Aleeeeeesha!”

  “They’re back together and the world is right again,” Gib said.

  We laughed. Charlie obsessed about Alesha, and everyone gave him crap about it. I found it kind of endearing.

  Just then, Gib’s recent ex-girlfriend, Priya Patel-Smith, came through the French doors from the kitchen. Priya had sleek black hair and moved like the world was her personal catwalk. She’d edited the school paper for three years and was off to Yale in the fall. It was unusual for a girl of her caliber to date a junior, but who wouldn’t break the rules for Gib Soule? So nobody was surprised when she dumped him, but for the Braeburn hockey goalie? It was excessively cruel, since Braeburn is Scofield’s biggest rival in all sports, especially hockey, and Gib was the star junior this year. Plus she had apparently been flinging with the guy for weeks, but waited until the day after prom to break up with Gib, just so she could go.

  Gib turned toward her before he possibly could have seen h
er, as if he sensed her presence intuitively. His face softened immediately and for a flash, all Gib’s vulnerabilities passed across his eyes. He demi-smiled. Priya nodded. Gib’s face tightened and he turned back toward us just in time to catch me watching him.

  Crap! Such a voyeur! I glued my sight line on Max and took an extra-long pull off my beer, hiding behind the cup.

  Max finished whatever story he was telling now and the three boys burst out laughing, Gib heartiest of all. That’s the spirit, Gib.

  A bunch of kids approached the keg, putting Max and the Sandwich to work. Hattie pointed over my shoulder. A small crowd had gathered around a pool table in the family room, including Shunsuke. She looked at me slyly. “Reid, may I challenge you to a game of billiards?”

  “You may,” I replied. We left the boys by the keg.

  On the way through the French doors, Sabrina collided with me, then muttered something like, “Whoamph.” Looking at me in a bleary-eyed, vaguely Quasimodo way, she straightened her jade miniskirt, flashing us a pretty sizable boob in the process.

  “Sor-ry, Reid.” Then she spotted Hattie. “Hey! Haaaattie!” She threw her arms around Hattie’s neck. “You’re here! That’s so . . . happy! You shoulda come early. Beer pong started at ten o’clock . . . or one. Whatever!” She kept hugging Hattie, or maybe using her for balance.

  I glanced around, hoping nobody saw the way Sabrina blew me off. She’d pretty much illustrated the Scofield pecking order right there in living color. And this feeling? This was what me without Hattie felt like. I crossed my arms in front of my chest, surprised by the sting of tears.

  Hattie smiled at me, and I forced a grin back. She patted Sabrina’s back. “Great,” she said. “Beer pong.”

  Sabrina straightened, a thick strand of brown hair stuck to her lip gloss. “I told’m you’d be heeere.”

  Hattie tilted her head. “What?”

  But Sabrina moved on.

  Hattie didn’t mention Sabrina’s complete dis of me, though of course she saw it. To mention it would be to validate it, and Hattie wouldn’t grant Sabrina Bradley’s opinions of me (or lack thereof) any power. She had my back that way; it was our unspoken code. She was silently coaching me in the Art of Cool. We also let Sabrina’s comment, “I told’m you’d be heeere,” slide. Did she mean them? Him? Hattie was becoming the It girl right before my eyes. The fact that nobody at SHS had less interest in being It than her exemplified a kind of irony that would bring tears of joy to the eyes of our English teacher, Mrs. Langhouser.