I’m about to respond with whatever I can come up with to refute that when I catch a glimpse of Jordi out of the corner of my eye. Her group’s moved into the backyard, too, and we lock eyes for just a moment before Marji starts complaining about Jax more and I have to do my best to defend my friend.
Ugh, how is Jax my friend? This summer so far has ceased to make sense.
Somehow the subject gets turned to Brooke’s family’s upcoming trip to Hawaii, and we’re all offering swimsuit opinions instead of viewpoints on Jax when there’s a burst of noise across the yard.
“Jordi,” I hear, and I may visibly perk up. I’m only so strong.
“It’s not a big deal,” someone else says.
“Shit,” Jordi mutters, but loudly. I didn’t even know Jordi’s voice could be that loud. “Shit. They’ll kill me.”
It sounds like a half dozen people chorus back again that whatever it is isn’t a big deal.
“You have no idea,” she says and pushes her way through the crowd. Nearly every single partygoer stares in her direction, but then the song changes from one hip-hop song to another and dancing is remembered and Jordi’s forgotten.
By everyone but me.
I try to trace her path, and end up catching up with her in the bathroom that’s connected to what appears to be Denny’s parents’ bedroom. I’m sure we aren’t supposed to be in here but rules don’t seem to matter right now.
I make my way over to Jordi and see that she’s splashing water from the sink onto her shirt. “Are you okay?”
“Some asshole spilled a beer on me,” she says. “No, not some asshole. One of my friends, and it was an accident, but …”
She keeps splashing and dabbing at her shirt with hand soap in a very un-Jordi-like manner.
“It’s easy to get stuff out of white clothes,” I say. “You can just bleach it once you’re home. It’ll look fine then.”
Her face crumples and she sinks to the tiled floor. I’m not sure what to do, but it seems impossible to top the awkwardness of towering over her, so I sit down, too.
“I have to be perfect this summer,” she says. “Which doesn’t include coming home smelling like beer.”
“It wasn’t your beer, though,” I say. “Will that matter?”
“Would it matter to your parents?”
“I guess not.”
She sniffs and leans over so that her face is completely hidden from me. “I got into huge trouble the last week of school. My parents almost made me turn down the internship as a punishment, but I promised they could trust me.”
“You seem really trustworthy,” I say. “I’ll vouch for you. Will that matter? Do I seem trustworthy?”
I hear, amid more sniffling, a little snort. It’s a relief that she sounds like herself again, though I guess the tears are also her being herself. No one’s only their happy side, even if that’s all we show the world whenever we can help it.
“Do you like Gaby Manzetti?” she asks.
“What? I mean, I don’t hate her? We’re not really friends.” I shrug and wonder why so many people this summer want to talk about Gaby Manzetti. She’s a nice person and all but doesn’t really seem like someone who should be a hot topic.
“I saw you guys talking,” she says.
“It’s a long story,” I say.
“Like everything with you,” she says, but she looks up and smiles. “Gaby and burgers.”
“They’re actually related,” I say. “My friend Jax likes her. I’m supposed to … be his hype man or something. And I’m pretty sure I’m terrible at it.”
“I can’t believe you’re terrible at anything,” she says.
“Oh my god,” I say. “Seriously? So many things.”
Her smile fades. “Did you drive here? Could you maybe take me home?”
“I don’t have my license,” I say. “Maliah brought all of us. But if you don’t mind waiting until later, you can totally catch a ride with us. And maybe if you use enough soap, your shirt will just smell like lavender or basil or whatever that is.”
Jordi sighs. “I hate this. My whole life has been fine and then one thing … I’m practically on probation.”
She totally went to juvie, and I totally do not care.
“They’ll understand,” I say, because Jordi’s dad makes her extra food for me, and the food doesn’t taste like Mom’s crisp and sterile solutions. Jordi’s dad’s food tastes like love. How couldn’t he understand a spilled drink?
“I was looking at sample portfolios online,” she says. “I want my photography portfolio to be as good as possible for my college applications. And a guy had this image of fire at the horizon and … I was obsessed with it.”
Arson, Abbs, I hear Maliah say.
“There’s this house a few streets behind yours,” she says. “It’s been for sale for months, and it has a tiny pool. It felt like a safe place to burn something. There’s water right there.”
I realize I’m holding my breath.
“I even bought my own fire extinguisher,” she says. “It felt really safe. So I lit some dried out grass and weeds, and … I got some good shots. It was starting to look like I’d imagined it would. And I was completely aware of how much was burning, and the extinguisher was literally leaning against me.”
“But then it spread too quickly and the house burned down?”
Jordi laughs. “No! Jesus, Abby. A cop showed up and accused me of trespassing and arson. The fire kept burning while he yelled at me, so by the time he took the extinguisher from me and put it out, it looked worse than I would have let it get. And even though I showed him my camera, I don’t think he believed me. He kept saying things like a cry for help and heartbreak is hard.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. So he made me get in the back of the cop car and I was sure I was getting arrested. But he just took me home and told my parents his
