Ellie are beside her, and I’m tackled by all three as soon as I step off the escalator.
They start talking at once and I try to keep up. Lucy’s telling me about the condo we’ll be living in together, Zora’s admiring my shorts, and Ellie’s asking whether some hot guy she just saw getting off the escalator was on my flight.
I’m trying to keep up when I spot a fourth girl who looks vaguely familiar.
“Hey, I’m Sydney.” She puts her hand out. “Thanks for introducing us, guys,” she scolds the others.
“Right! I’ve heard a lot about you. It must be fun to be home for the summer with these crazy girls.”
Lucy loops her arm through mine and starts guiding me toward baggage claim. I actually haven’t heard a ton about Sydney, only that she’d been their other close friend from Newdale, a town not far from Summerside. They’d mentioned her a couple times this summer over the phone. Lucy had a picture of all four of them at high school graduation as her computer background picture for a while, and that’s how I recognize her.
As Ellie contemplates approaching the guy she’d spotted, who was apparently on my flight because he’s waiting at the same baggage claim area, I hold back my questions about Taylor. She broke up with him a couple of months ago, but I never got much of an explanation.
“So where do you want to go first?” Lucy asks.
“I’ll go wherever you guys want. You all took the day off to hang with me.” I assumed they’d have a plan, and apparently I wasn’t wrong.
“Good, because we already promised Naomi and Summer we’d visit them at Stargaze on the way back from the airport.”
That makes me grin. I love that my college friends have taken my high school skater girls under their wings. While I was gone this past semester, they’d all hang out sometimes together without me.
“Since I can’t ditch you to skateboard just yet, I guess that’s second best,” I tease with a dramatic sigh. I’m back to skateboarding every day, the addiction as strong as ever. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have some hesitancy about hitting my old spots around here.
“Yeah, yeah. We know as soon as Beck gets back in town you’ll be ditching us left and right.”
My timing on returning to Summerside might have been slightly strategic. I just finished up my online classes, but I could have come back sooner and stayed with one of the girls until our new place was ready. I figured coming out a few days before Beck’s return was ideal. I’ll get some time to hang and catch up with just the girls, and then, like Lucy said, I won’t feel quite so bad about ditching them.
We pull up to Stargaze and for an instant I’m brought back to the night of my eighteenth birthday. I’d been so confused about Beck and what he wanted from me. I get it now, he had plenty of reasons for the way he acted then, and the inner conflict he experienced isn’t totally foreign to me anymore. It’s always been clear we want each other, that’s not the problem. But now I’m the one uncertain if it’s so simple. At least, I was a few months ago. I thought long distance would make us grow further apart, but somehow it’s made me more confident we can make this work. When I broke up with Beck all those months ago, I told him I needed to grow up a little bit, and I’m starting to think I might have at least been right about that. Or, I needed to get more comfortable with who I’m growing up to be, maybe that’s more accurate.
The scene inside the rink’s a little different from that Saturday night at the beginning of freshman year. It’s late afternoon on a Thursday, and an eight-year-old’s birthday party is finishing up.
“Jordan!” Summer calls my name and I catch a flash of blonde hair before she comes around the desk and greets me with a hug.
“We’ve missed you so much!”
“And I’ve missed you. Naomi’s here too?”
“Yep. We get off in an hour. Do you guys want to skate and then maybe we can get dinner?”
I glance at my friends, who are already taking off their shoes. “That’s the plan!” Ellie confirms.
Naomi comes through the doors from the rink and I get another tight hug. “We don’t even get to keep up with you on social