In Real Life (26 page)

My hands are full of coffee and snacks for Lo, and I grumble at my sister for texting me when she's right outside the door. But when I put everything down on the counter and pull out my phone, it's not Grace with a snack food wish list at all.

B4 U GO HOME U SHUD COME 2 BBQ @ OUR HOUSE. BAND PLAYIN @ 4.-ALEX

Followed by a Henderson address.

Nick's address.

I blink at my phone in disbelief with so many questions running through my head. Why would I want to go see the band play at a party? And why is Alex texting me this?

I consider ignoring it, but I don't want to be rude.

SORRY, ALREADY ON THE ROAD.

I want to ask him what this is all about—but honestly, I don't think I want to know. If Nick wanted me at this party, if he had something to say to me, he would've texted me. Not his brother.

TURN AROUND.

I pay for all the food and walk back to the car. “Sweet Jesus, thank you,” Lo says as I hand her a coffee, a huge water, and a plastic bag of carbs ranging from cereal bars to chips to powdered doughnuts. “You are a god to me right now.”

“Well, I don't want you puking all over Grace's car when we have a four-hour drive ahead of us. We'd all have to live with that.” I leave a water bottle and a cereal bar in the center console for Grace. When she's done filling up the gas tank, she climbs into the driver's seat, opens the water and chugs it, then starts the car and heads out without even a word of thanks.

We're on the freeway in dead silence for about five minutes, and during that five minutes, I wonder if I should say anything to Grace about Alex's text. I don't want to go to this party; I want to see Las Vegas in my rearview mirror and never think about it again. But I am curious if Alex gave her any clue about this party and why he thinks I should be there. And I think about what Frankie said to me last night. Am I running away again? Like Lo said, for someone who always wants to be in control, I don't seem to do anything to change my life. Maybe this is my chance. Maybe it's less about breaking rules and more about taking charge of the things I have control over. The prickly silence quickly becomes too much for me to take, and I can't come up with any answers on my own.

“Alex texted me,” I say quietly.

“What? When?” Grace tries to keep her obvious interest and something else, maybe jealousy, out of her voice, but she fails miserably. I know her too well.

“Right now. He said the band was playing a party at his house this afternoon, and that I should stop by before we left Vegas.” I clear my throat, trying to make sure I sound nonchalant. “Any idea why?”

Grace shakes her head. “He said they were playing at some afternoon birthday party today, but that's all I know. It didn't sound like it was a big deal.” She stares ahead at the long stretch of freeway in front of us. “How did he get your number?”

I know what that means. It means, why did he text you and not me? I don't know how to answer that.

“Maybe he got it from Nick's phone? I don't know.”

Now I stare at the freeway and try to use the bleak flatness of the desert landscape to clear my mind. None of us say anything for a long time, until Grace breaks the silence. “So, you don't want to go?”

“We're already on our way home,” I say. “And I don't think Nick wants to see me anyway. Not after last night.” If Nick had been the one to text me, then I would have been at that party as fast as Grace's car would take us. But what does Alex's invitation mean? I hardly spoke to the guy all night.

“What happened last night?” Grace asks.

Oh, yeah. Grace missed pretty much everything, since she was running around with Alex. I turn to the window with a long sigh. I don't want to share anything with her, since I'm still mad. But my need to have someone else's opinion on this is outweighing my anger, so I fill her in on everything that happened between Nick and me, including the talk I had with Frankie over blackjack.

Grace doesn't say anything for a long time, and she keeps staring out the window. I want to bug her for a response, but I don't really want to know what she has to say, so I stare, too.

“Why did you do that?” Lo squeaks out from the backseat. “Why did you tell Frankie to keep Nick for herself?”

“Well,” I snap, “last night, she was the only friend I had, so I couldn't exactly be awful to her. At least
she
wanted to spend time with me.”

Lo ignores my dig at her. “I think you should go to the party.”

“Why? So Nick can yell at me some more? So I can humiliate myself further? What would the point be?”

“Alex thinks there's a point,” Grace says.

“Yeah, well, Alex and Nick don't even get along.” I think about the moment I had with Nick, how he said his brother had been interested in Frankie originally. I don't mention that to my sister, but I think it's a pretty good reason to doubt Alex's intentions for getting me to this party.

“Well,” Grace says, turning her head slightly to look at me. “I think you should go, too.”

But we keep on driving on the freeway, putting more and more distance between our car and Vegas.

As soon as we leave the Greater Las Vegas area, the scenery is nothing but rocks and dirt. But ahead of us looms a small cluster of buildings, and I realize we're already approaching the California–Nevada state line.

And the three random casinos right there on the border.

I watch as the buildings get closer and closer and I can see it, the huge yellow track snaking its way around the Buffalo Bill's hotel and casino.

Hitting the state line means we're leaving Nevada, and I'm officially running away from Nick and ignoring Alex's invitation. I don't want to see Nick, because I think everything is ruined, but I don't even know for sure. I'm letting myself get scared of something that could possibly be fixed because I'm afraid fixing it is going to be scary.

That's stupid,
I tell myself.
I don't want to live like that.

So I decide not to.

“Pull over,” I say to Grace. “I'm going to ride the roller coaster.”

 

CHAPTER

27

We're sitting in the expansive parking lot of Buffalo Bill's Resort & Casino, and it is surprisingly quite full. I'd wondered who would bother coming to a casino on the state line when Vegas is a short forty-minute drive away, but apparently the answer is everyone. Dozens of tour buses line the far side of the parking lot, and we have to circle the lot a couple of times to find a spot to pull into.

Now we're parked, and the yellow roller coaster tracks are much closer and much scarier than they were all the way from the freeway. I don't know what I was thinking when I told Grace to pull over. I must've had a stroke or something.

“Never mind,” I say. “I was only kidding. I don't want to do this.”

Lo groans from the backseat and rolls over.

Grace shifts in her seat so she can face me. “Look,” she says. “I know you're mad at me right now, and I get it. I do. But I need you to take a break from hating me and listen to some big-sisterly advice, okay?”

Listening to advice from Grace isn't what I want to do right now, but I guess the alternative would be getting on that roller coaster, so I let her talk.

“You don't have to wait until college for your life to start, you know? You can start it now.”

I stare at her, silent.

“You've spent the past four years of your life not doing anything. You study, you get good grades, but you haven't been living. You've dated guys you didn't even like much so you would never feel anything real for them. You've been falling for Nick and not even admitting it to yourself. You always say you'll do this or that in college, but it's an excuse.”

“It is not.”

“Yes, it is. It's a lame excuse to stay safe and stay in control. What do you think is going to happen in college? You're still going to have to study and get good grades, you know? It's going to be harder, to be honest. You'll have to work, too. Will you still put living your life on hold? Will you keep making excuses?”

I let visions of life at UCLA next year float into my head. Even though Grace tells me about her papers and exams, I let college party movies dominate my imagination when it comes to the next four years. The truth is, as much as I like to imagine partying it up and YOLO-ing, I want to do well in college. I want to study and pass my classes and keep up a solid GPA.

If I'm doing all of that, when will I have time for a life? When I graduate? What about grad school? Or a job? Will I have time for fun then? Or will I put work first and everything else second?

If I keep waiting to have fun, running away from new things, until I have my life under control, will that ever happen?

“I'm never going to have fun, am I?”

“You don't have to choose, Hannah. It's not success or fun. It's not life or love. You don't have to just pick one door to walk through.” She runs her hands through her hair and looks at me. Really looks at me. “You can have both. It's okay. You just have to go out and do something about it. Don't sit back and let life happen to you. Go grab what you want, whatever it is.”

She fingers her key necklace as she talks, and it turns my mind to what she's been through with Gabe. What she gave up for that relationship, and how she's now left with nothing. But she doesn't have nothing. She has the other parts of herself. Gabe wasn't everything there was to Grace. She's UCLA and
Rocker
and my sister. She has all those things, and that's why losing her relationship broke her, but only temporarily. She has the rest of the things in her life to put her back together.

I rest my elbows on my knees and lean my head forward onto my hands. “I've been doing this all wrong.” Letting good things pass me by because I don't know how to multitask. Because I'm too afraid to fail.

“You'll be okay,” Grace says, reaching her arm around me and pulling me into her. My instinct is to pull away; after the past few hours we've had, I don't want her to comfort me. But instead I let myself sink into her hug, and she squeezes me tight.

“Fine,” I say, straightening back up in my seat. “I'll do this. I'll go on the roller coaster. But let's hurry before I change my mind.”

“I don't have to go on this thing with you, do I?” Lo moans.

I hop out of the car. “You sure do.” I swing the backseat door open, reach in, and pull her up to a sitting position. “This is your penance for last night's shenanigans, you Mistress of the Night. You owe me a ride on this death trap.”

“Hannah. I'm totally going to barf.”

“Don't care. Get out.”

Lo struggles to get out of the backseat, and the three of us walk into Buffalo Bill's in search of the entrance to the roller coaster.

There aren't enough words in the English language to describe how different Buffalo Bill's is from the casinos we visited in Vegas. While Planet Hollywood was all white and red and sparkly, Buffalo Bill's is brown and dingy and decorated like the Old West. It smells like an ashtray, and we are far and away the youngest people in the joint. By many, many decades.

“This obviously isn't the place for us to find dudes,” Grace whispers as we walk through the doors and into the dimly lit casino.

“This isn't the place for us to find anything except lung cancer,” I reply, trying not to inhale the scent of cigarette smoke and body odor. People smoked in the casinos in Vegas, but I guess the ventilation in there was better because I hardly noticed. Here the smoke seeps down into my bloodstream.

“Can we make this fast?” Lo's face looks even greener as we walk through Buffalo Bill's, and I didn't think that was humanly possible. “This place is not doing anything to lower my desire to puke.”

“Boom!” Grace says, pointing to sign that says
ROLLER COASTER
. “This way.”

“There are a lot of cowboy boots here,” I say to Grace as she pulls us through the casino floor. She's in the lead, holding my wrist while I hang on to Lo's, a human chain of miserable girls.

“It's like the country music version of People of Walmart,” Grace says.

Finding the ticket counter for the roller coaster is nowhere near as complicated as it was last night at New York–New York, mainly because good ol' Buffalo Bill's doesn't seem to have quite so much to offer. I'm holding on to my secret hope the coaster is closed, which isn't too ridiculous, given that we haven't ever seen it running. But we follow the roller coaster signs—it's called the Desperado—and we see someone sitting behind the ticket counter, a bored-looking guy in his midtwenties, one earbud in his ear and playing on his phone.

“Hey,” Grace says as we walk up. “Is the roller coaster running?”

“It'll run if you guys wanna ride it,” he says. “It'd give me something to do.” His voice cracks like he hasn't spoken in hours.

“You'll run it for just the three of us?” I'm hoping he'll say we have to wait around for all the cars to fill up, and clearly that's not going to happen.

“Sure. I have nothing else going on right now.” He rings us up for three tickets and points us down the way to the entrance to the coaster.

“Hannah should go in the front,” Lo says. She looks like she's going to collapse right there on the ground, and she's using the bar that would form the roller coaster line, if there were anyone here, to hold her upright. I shouldn't delight so much in her misery, but I can't help it.

I'm delighted.

“Yeah,” Grace says. “Hannah in front. We'll sit right behind you.”

I stare at the car. It's a long roller coaster car, and we're the only ones who are going to ride it. This whole death trap all to ourselves.