Late to the Party - Kelly Quindlen Page 0,90
I knew how to handle.
My knock was too soft. If I tried any louder, I might wake up her parents. I nudged the door open slowly, sticking my head out so she’d see it was me right away.
Maritza was sitting on her bed, frozen with her hands around her laptop, her expression freaked out and pissed off at the same time.
“What the fuck?”
I closed the door and moved to stand in front of her bed. She kept looking at me like I’d gone crazy, like I was scaring her a little bit.
“JaKory’s meeting Daveon tonight,” I whispered.
She didn’t say anything. We looked at each other, waiting for something to happen.
“So?” she asked finally.
“So I’m going with him … and we want you to come, too.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You’re driving JaKory to Alabama? Right now?”
I tried to bite down on the answer, knowing she would hate it, but it rushed out of me anyway. “Technically, Ricky’s driving us.”
For a fraction of a second, she seemed to wilt—but then her eyes flashed and she snapped her laptop closed.
“Ricky,” she said, snorting meanly. “Of course. Your new best friend.”
“He’s not my best friend.”
“Oh, are you reserving that spot for your girlfriend now?”
“Maritza…” I began.
“You’re deluded if you think I’m about to go on this little adventure with you after you lied to me all summer.”
I was trying really, really hard to look at her, but at this point I had to turn away. I wasn’t sure what to say next. For about the millionth time that summer, I saw myself as if from far away, standing pathetically in the middle of my old friend’s room, wondering how things had gotten to this point.
“I know I messed up,” I said finally.
“Understatement.”
I took a deep breath. “Look. This isn’t about you and me right now, it’s about JaKory. He has one chance to meet Daveon, and we haven’t taken him seriously about it, and I think that’s really shitty of us. You can go back to hating me when we get back from Alabama, but for tonight, I think we should help him.”
Maritza stared me down for a long moment. Then her eyes flitted away. “I’m grounded right now.”
“So am I.”
“I have Mass in the morning.”
“I have a nine-o’clock shift.”
She looked away again, but I could see her calculating in her head, weighing the correct answer.
My phone started buzzing in my pocket. It was JaKory, yelling at me to hurry up.
“I know, I know, we’re coming,” I told him. “We’ll be right down.”
Maritza’s eyes were narrowed when I hung up.
“‘We,’” she said. “That’s presumptuous.”
I merely looked at her, waiting.
Finally, after a long pause, she rolled her eyes and threw the covers back.
“This is so dramatic,” she said, hopping in place as she pulled on her sneakers. “Leave it to JaKory to get his first kiss this way.”
* * *
It might have been the strangest car ride of my life.
Maritza and JaKory sat next to me in the back seat, neither one of them talking, JaKory fidgeting and checking his phone every minute. Ricky and Grant had gone quiet, sitting up front with the GPS illuminated between them. Grant kept his elbow on the console like Ricky did, and every few minutes he turned around and scanned our faces. He never once asked what we were going to Alabama for.
We took the downtown connector through the heart of Atlanta, past Georgia Tech and The Varsity, past the exit for Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, around the curving skyscrapers and golden-domed capitol building, the city lights real and beautiful and bright. There were cars speeding past us in either direction and I wondered where all these people were going, and what they would say about five teenagers sneaking off to Alabama so one of them could kiss the boy he’d been dreaming about all summer.
The interstate took us south of the city, past the airport, onto dark highway lanes with fewer cars and streetlights. We were somewhere between western Georgia and eastern Alabama, and there was nothing but trees and exit signs. I lowered my window and let the air brush my face, breezy and soft, still warm. I waited for the others to ask me to put the window back up, but they simply lowered theirs, too, and that’s how we drove for a whole rolling hour, no talking, no music, just the air rushing past our open windows.
After a while, JaKory checked his phone and leaned forward into the center of the truck. “He says