24. Mina

Caplan and I wait on the stairs in silence. After a minute, he holds out his flask to me.

"Are you trying to be funny?" I shift away from him and pinch the inside of my upper arm to keep myself from unraveling.

When Hollis returns with Quinn, he looks exhausted. His eye is already swelling. He looks at us, sitting on the stairs like children. "Your mom's looking for you," he says to Caplan's knees.

"He can go in a minute," Hollis says. "Why did you end things with Mina? Did you do it because of Caplan?"

"Yeah," he says.

"What did he say to you?" Hollis asks.

"He didn't have to say anything. It's just obvious."

A sob crawls up my throat. As a person with a long list of fears, this is my greatest—that other people can tell. They can sense the broken part. They can smell it on me.

"What?" says Hollis, looking right at me. "What's obvious?"

Quinn takes a deep breath. "That even if they don't know it, they're eternally in love with each other and shit, and I'm bowing out, okay? I can't handle it. It's too much for me. This vibe is, like, not normal at all, I want you guys to know. This soap opera shit. It's completely wack. And I'm sorry, I really am sorry, Mina, cause I think you're so cool, but you guys just need to shut up and be together because you're making everyone around you miserable, including yourselves, and I can't be part of it anymore, okay? Maybe you were right. Maybe I just want to go to prom alone in a clown suit. Fucking sue me."

A long silence greets his words.

"I'm sorry about your face," Quinn says to Caplan. "And I'm sorry for laughing when the guys said gross things about you," he says to me.

"What did they say?" I ask.

"You don't want to know," Hollis says. "Trust me. From experience."

"They were saying, well, pretty graphically, that you'd be a good fuck."

"And you were doing what, exactly?" I stand up to better look down at Caplan. "Defending my honor? Well, maybe I would be a good fuck."

I have no idea what makes me say this, but now I'm really going to cry. I feel it rising in me, and I have no sense of what else will come pouring out.

They call after me as I run away, but I throw myself out the front door and across the street, into my own house, up the stairs, and under the covers, where I sob and sob and sob until there is nothing left in me. I cry like I did when I was small, when you can't speak yet, so you just make noise—animal sounds, as loud as I can, because no one can hear me. Everyone is across the street, a world away, at a beautiful party for my oldest friend. My only friend, who knows too much about me; who knows everything and cannot help but want to shield me from the rest of the world, from regular people—or more likely, shield them from me.

I roll over hours later, feeling soggy and pathetic and all wrung out, to my phone buzzing somewhere in the blankets. I ignore it, and then it starts ringing again. When I dig it out, I see Hollis's name lighting up the screen.

"Hi?"

"Hey, I'm sorry, but I need your help."

"What's wrong?"

"I couldn't think who else to call," she says.

"Are you okay?"

"Yes, I'm fine. It's Caplan. Can you come outside? We're down the street."

"I'll be right there."

I put a sweatshirt on over my dress and don't even bother with shoes.

They're not hard to find, because Caplan is making horrible gagging sounds. When I get to them, I realize nothing is even coming up. Hollis is behind him, trying to keep him sitting up with both her hands under his armpits. She looks awful. Her dress is covered in vomit. Caplan's head rolls around on his neck. I kneel in front of him and try to help her keep him upright. His eyelids flutter, and when he sees me, he starts crying. His head falls forward onto my shoulder, and he's heaving all over me, incoherent.

I look at Hollis and she looks at me. "What happened?"

"I don't know," she says. "After you left, I told him to put on a clean shirt, and come back to the party, and keep it together."

Caplan cries harder on me, pushing into me so that I almost fall back into the street.

"And?"

"And he did the first two things, and then I guess he drank that whole stupid flask Quinn's brother gave him. I found him in the bushes, throwing up on himself, but he was still sort of with it at that point, and I got him to walk down the street with me so his mom wouldn't see him. But now it's past his curfew and she keeps calling his phone, but I can't get him to stand up."

Caplan is dry-heaving again, on his hands and knees.

"Okay," I say. "Okay." I get on one side of him, and Hollis gets on the other, and we pull him to his feet. We sway for a minute.

"I'm sorry," Hollis says.

"Don't be," I say.

"All right," she says. "Come on, Cap. Let's walk."

His knees buckle, and we prop him back up.

"He didn't even answer," he moans.

"It's okay," Hollis says. "You're okay."

We inch down the street, basically carrying him.

"When in god's name"—I'm completely out of breath, though we've only walked twenty feet—"did he get so huge?"

"This is why boys don't get to be damsels in distress," Hollis says, panting. "It's an issue of physics."

"He didn't come," Caplan says again.

We get him up the steps, and his feet seem to be working slightly better.

"It'll be open," I say, "if Julia knows Caplan isn't in his bed."

But Hollis is already reaching for the knob. I realize she'd know that. Of course she would. She knows this house, its rhythms, and this boy more intimately than I do.

We get him over the threshold, shushing him and regaining our bearings, when a light at the top of the stairs flips on. Julia stands there in her pajamas, looking down at the three of us. She takes in the scene, Caplan barely conscious, Hollis and me struggling to hold him up. Hollis opens her mouth to say something, and Julia holds up a hand. She comes down the stairs and takes him from us. He falls into her arms, giving her all his weight.

"Dad," he cries. "Dad never answered. He never even answered."

Somehow, superhumanly, she leads him up the stairs.

At the top, Julia turns back to us.

"We're so—" Hollis says. "Can we—"

"Thank you," she says. "Go home, now. Your own mothers are probably worried."

When we get to the curb, Hollis collapses and puts her head between her knees. At first, I think she's crying, but then I realize she's laughing. I sit down next to her.

"As if my own mother is worried," she says. "They lock the door at midnight whether I'm home or not."

"Where will you sleep?"

She shrugs. "I'll call one of the girls till they wake up. Or I'll bang on my door till someone gets me. What are they gonna do, ground me? We graduate next week, and then I'm gone."

"You could sleep at mine?"

She looks at me. "Really?"

"Yeah," I say. "I mean, you're already here. And you could take a shower. You stink."

"Well. You look like you cried yourself to sleep."

"No shit."

"Could I really shower at two in the morning?"

"Sure," I say. "My mother isn't up worrying, either."

"June of senior year is like Neverland," Hollis says, once we're lying in my bed.

"How so?" I feel awake, even though it's 3:00 a.m. I guess because I took a nap at 10:00.

"Well, it's magical, obviously. All warm and sparkling."

"Sparkling?"

"Suddenly we're allowed to drink champagne. But it makes everyone act like they're never gonna grow up. When obviously that's exactly what we're all about to have to do."

I don't say anything for a moment. I feel ashamed. To think I've spent my entire conscious life observing Hollis, and I actually thought I knew her.

"You don't agree?"

"No, you're right," I say. "All the lost boys, dumping everyone and drinking too much and crying when it's not their turn to cry."

"Exactly."

"That would make you Wendy," I say.

"No, Mina," she sighs. "Try as I might, wish on whatever star, you're Wendy, and I'm fucking Tinker Bell."

I laugh.

She rolls over to face me, but her eyes are closing. "Peter Pan was my favorite growing up," she says. "What was yours?"

"Um. Harry Potter?"

"No, you and Cap shared that. What's one that was just yours?"

"Maybe Cinderella."

"Fucking classic."

We're quiet for a little.

"Her dad died, too," I say. "I think that's why I liked it. Which is corny."

"It's not," Hollis says. Then: "I wanted to say sorry, for saying that thing about your shoes in fourth grade."

"What?"

"When you used to wear the black Chucks every day and I said that thing about it being because your dad died—well, yeah, I'm sorry."

"That was you?"

"I mean, I really wasn't trying to be a bitch, for once. I had just read in a book, I think, that people wore black when they were in mourning, and so I was trying to tell the other girls to stop calling them boy shoes, but you heard me, and then you cried, and I felt terrible."

"That's okay," I say. "That's really sweet, actually."

"Yeah, that's me," she mumbles, "sweetest girl we know."

We lie there for a while.

I think she has fallen asleep, but then she says, "Okay. Now that we're friends—"

"Are we friends?"

"Yes, and now that we are—"

"Are you going to start singing ‘Popular'?"

"Shut up and tell me a secret."

"A secret?"

"Yeah," she says, "something no one else knows."

"Okay. Well. The Yale woman emailed me back."

"What did she say?"

"She asked me what my plans were for next year. I guess in the first email, she was asking if I'd be interested in editing my college essay and selling it. Like, to publish it."

Hollis sits straight up in bed. "What do you mean? How'd she read it?"

"Well, a while ago, some college board person reached out and asked me if they could include my essay in a sort of guide about how to write them. Like examples or—"

"And yours was, what? The primo example? What did you write about? Life and death?"

"It was about nothing. I kept waiting for someone to tell me it wasn't good common app material. It was just about helping Caplan learn to read in elementary school. So, whatever, I guess that's how she read it, and her wife works for a literary magazine and they want to publish it, but then after I said I wasn't going to Yale, she asked if I had any interest in interning—"

"Oh my god, what'd you say?"

"I haven't replied yet."

"What's the magazine called?"

I get out my phone. "The Nerve?"

She gets out hers. "Oh my god. Mina. Their office is in New York. This is perfect. It'll be just like Girls. Look at the street view—"

"I can't just skip college and go to New York," I say. "I've never been. And I've never watched Girls. And I don't know anyone there."

"You'd know me," she says, offended. "And you're not skipping. You're taking a gap year."

"You'd pretend not to know me," I say.

"I would not. You completely seem like someone who's gonna blossom after high school. Not that you're not like—in bloom, now. Or whatever." She yawns and scoots down a bit under the blankets. "Get your toes away from me. They're freezing cold." Then, after a minute or two, she says, "I'm leaving right after graduation. I'm getting the fuck out of Two Docks and starting my real life. Come."

"Come?"

"That's what I said."

"You'd want me to be part of your real life?"

"Yeah. You could borrow my clothes."

I laugh. "Cause my clothes are so bad."

"No, they're not. I just love when people borrow mine," she says, snuggling down more. "Because I'm very arrogant and have amazing taste. I think it's like my love language or something. What's yours?"

"I don't know. Recommending books, maybe?"

"Thank you, by the way, for my birthday present from Caplan. I loved it. I've already restarted it."

I just smile, but her eyes are closed again.

"You should come to New York, Mina."

I don't reply.

"Are you pretending to be asleep?" she says.

"No," I say, "I'm thinking. You tell me a secret."

"I've been assaulted, too," she says.

"Oh—"

"Not to, like—"

"How did you—"

"I just thought, the way you cried at my birthday, it just had a certain look to it. That I recognized. That kind of crying, the way you were holding your knees. And then tonight, you said that thing about… about something you thought Caplan told Quinn. Maybe that's fucked up of me. I shouldn't have—I shouldn't have assumed."

"No, that's okay," I say. "I was, I guess. Assaulted. Too. Do—do I know who—"

"No," she says, yawning, leaning her forehead against my shoulder, "it was two summers ago, at camp. He was a CIT. I had the biggest crush on him when I was younger. What a waste of a superhot person."

I snort. "God, I'm sorry—"

"No, please laugh," she says. "It makes me feel fucking invincible to laugh at it."

"I think you are invincible, honestly," I say. "I always have."

"I'm really sorry about what happened to you," she says.

I roll over toward her and close my eyes. "I'm really sorry to you, too."

"Did you take Plan B? That was the worst part for me. Like, facing the camp nurse. She didn't even have it on hand, which I think is totally delusional at a co-ed camp."

"Oh, no, I didn't need to."

"So, even monsters use condoms?"

"No," I say. "No, I mean, well, I hadn't gotten my period yet. So."

Hollis says nothing. She searches with her hand under the covers until she finds mine. She squeezes it, then lets it go. Then she says, "Have you thought about it yet? About New York?"

"No. I mean, that was sort of… sort of a big thing you just brought up."

"Well. I'm moving in for the summer with other NYU girls. They said they have two rooms. The other one might still be open."

"Oh."

"Don't freak out. Just consider it."

"Okay."

"Okay. Good night, Mina."

"Good night, Hollis."

"Mina?"

"Mm?"

"I think you're invincible, too. I wouldn't want you to come if I didn't."