The Promise of Paradise - By Allie Boniface Page 0,35
the speakers and laughter carrying up to the treetops. Ash looked around at the smiling faces: some regulars from the restaurant, a few of Eddie’s high school friends, and a couple of neighbors from around the corner.
Someone bumped her from behind, a burly man with a huge red beard. “Oops! Sorry, sweetheart. Great party, by the way.”
“Thanks.” Ash smiled at the crowd, so different from the people she’d grown up with, the snobby elite who threw cocktail parties and talked politics inside their gated communities. The conversations around her buzzed with baseball predictions and comments on the weather, news about the latest divorce and the shopping center scheduled to break ground next month. People cursed and laughed and wound their arms around each other; they tossed back shots of tequila and played cards in the corner.
It startled Ash to realize how comfortable she felt here after only a few weeks. How real people seemed when you peeled away layers of presumption, when you paid attention to each other for the things you cared about and not the things you had.
She pushed her way through the bodies clustered around the stereo and found a space near the porch railing. She knew only a fraction of the guests by name, but she didn’t really mind. She’d catch up with Eddie in a minute or two, see if they needed to make another run to the store for anything. But at the moment, she wanted a few minutes to breathe. July had snuck up on her when she wasn’t looking, and she knew that after the fireworks vanished, August would steal along in its place. Then September would round the corner, hand-in-hand with a life she wasn’t sure she wanted to meet.
“Ashton, please call home,” her mother had said on her voicemail last night. “We haven’t heard from you in weeks. Is everything okay? Please…”
She’d erased the message before her mother finished talking. What was she supposed to say? How could she begin to explain her decision? Funny how it became easier every day to pretend she belonged in Paradise, to pretend she came from a normal family and had no secrets to hide.
Ash turned up the stereo volume another notch and dug a cold beer from the bottom of the cooler. She stared across the street to the shadowed park that backed up to Helen’s house. It was quiet for a Saturday. Usually she and Eddie spied a few kids there on the weekends, sneaking joints, making out, talking loudly in that adolescent voice that cracked and wavered and flirted and bullied. She laughed at them, wondered about them. Sometimes she even envied them a little.
Everything is so exciting when you’re sixteen, so fresh and painful. Your skin aches with wanting, and every sunrise, every phone call, every heartbreak, cuts you a little deeper. As a grown-up, she’d almost forgotten how a mere breath of wind at the right moment could bring tears to her eyes.
Tonight, though, the swings hung unnaturally still, and only a stray cat wound its way through the legs of a picnic table before it disappeared behind Helen’s house. Ash wondered how many first kisses that park had seen, and how many goodbyes.
Someone leaned against the railing next to her. “Hi, stranger.” Eddie’s teeth were a wide white slash in the darkness. He glanced across the street. “Whatcha you looking at?”
“Nothing, really. Just the night, I guess.” His scars seemed less noticeable in the moonlight. Still, she wanted to know his secrets, even as she tried to ignore her own.
He finished his beer in a long, smooth gulp. “It’s a great one, isn’t it? Terrific party. Everyone’s having fun.”
“Good.” Ash leaned over the railing again, chin propped on one hand. The humidity had finally broken, and now the temperature hovered at a perfect seventy-five degrees. On the breezes that passed through every few minutes, the perfume of Helen’s gardenias floated up to them. She took a long breath and drank it all in, wishing she could bottle the night and make it last.
The song on the stereo changed, and Eddie nudged her. “Wanna dance?”
“Here?”
“Why not here?”
Ash hesitated. She didn’t need to take center stage with Paradise’s favorite son and have someone in the crowd start to wonder why her face looked familiar. Plus, she wasn’t sure she trusted herself to put one hand in Eddie’s and pretend it didn’t take her breath away.
“Ash?” The edge of a tattoo peeked out of a shirtsleeve, and she studied the familiar