“Abby!” Lacey said when she answered the door. “And Elliot. Did you come together?” She raised her eyebrows.

“Yes,” Elliot said. “Thanks for having us.”

She moved aside and held her arm out. “There’s food and drinks in the kitchen and my dad is barbecuing out back.”

Her house was full of people. “Just a small barbecue, huh?” I asked, with a smirk. I already knew she didn’t do small parties.

She shrugged. “Yeah . . . it got a little bigger. Let me greet a few more people and I’ll meet you out back.”

Elliot and I walked through the house, which wasn’t as big as I had imagined it would be from all the talk at school, but it was nicely decorated and updated. A lot of people we passed I recognized from school, but a lot I didn’t. I saw Cooper across the pool, in a group of people, talking animatedly, his hands flying all around him. He must have been trying to convince his audience of whatever he was saying—that’s when he’d get super animated like that.

“Do you want anything to eat?” Elliot asked, nodding his head toward the barbecue off to our right. Smoke filled the air above it, accompanied by the smell of cooking meat.

“I’m okay for now. Do you want something?”

“I’m good. Look, there’s Cooper. Should we go say hi?”

“Sure.”

“Abby!” Cooper yelled in excitement when he saw me. Iris was by his side, and she waved at me. I smiled back.

“Everyone,” Cooper announced loudly, “this is Abby and Elliot.”

A few people said their own names. The others I already knew.

“Abby, remember that one time I pushed you into the pool at that hotel where they had the art you wanted to check out?” Cooper laughed. He’d pushed me in after we looked at their ballroom full of paintings. We’d been on our way home anyway. Then he jumped in after me, probably knowing how mad I was going to be. But we ended up splashing each other until hotel management came and kicked us out.

“Yes, and if you do that tonight, you are dead to me.”

“Someone needs to be pushed in.” He looked at Iris with a flirty eyebrow raise.

“No way,” she said. “I agree with Abby. Death.”

We smiled at each other.

Lacey joined our group by hooking her arm in mine and laying her head on my shoulder. “I didn’t know you were bringing a date tonight,” she said under her breath. “I was under the impression that you and Cooper . . .”

“Nope.” I said just as softly back.

“By choice?”

She must have caught more of my rambling confession at the theater than she’d let on. “Nope,” I said.

She was quiet for a moment and I couldn’t see her eyes, but I assumed she had been studying Cooper when she said, “Well, he smiles too much and doesn’t know how to dress anyway.”

I held in a laugh. Those were both things I liked about him.

“And Elliot is a cutie.”

We had mumbled this exchange quietly, but definitely not subtly, and when I glanced across at Cooper, he gave me a questioning stare.

I shook my head.

Then his eyes went to Lacey’s arm still linked in mine, and I knew what his expression was asking—what is that all about?

“Do you want a burger?” Lacey asked me, louder this time. “I want a burger.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Come on, Elliot, let’s go get food.”

He followed after us. At a long table on the patio, we each filled our plates with chips and watermelon and burgers.

“Let’s take this over there,” Lacey said, pointing to a lounge chair under a tree that was miraculously empty.

I sat at the top end of the lounge chair, and Lacey gestured for Elliot to sit on the foot end, facing me. She dragged a chair from the pool area and sat alongside us.

“Thanks for coming, you guys.”

“Thanks for the invite. How did your auditions go?” I asked.

“They went well. But that’s always how I feel, so we’ll see.”

“Auditions?” Elliot asked.

She waved off his question. “It was nothing. I should check on my guests,” Lacey said. “You two have fun.” Her conspiratorial voice was back, and I knew she had planned this. Then she was gone, leaving me alone with Elliot.

TWENTY

Complete awkward silence followed Lacey’s departure. I took several big bites of burger to try and justify it. After swallowing my mouthful, I panicked. Could I really not hold a normal conversation outside my friend group? The image of that lone fish swimming toward my foot crept into my mind, and I wasn’t sure why. But then I realized I was feeling the same anxiousness now. Once I had let it happen, I was fine. Just give this a chance, I told myself.

Crickets literally chirped in a nearby bush and Elliot’s eyes were drawn to the sound. Then he smiled. “And the crickets break the silence.”

I immediately relaxed with a laugh. “Kind of ironic.”

He nodded to where Lacey had retreated. “For an actress, she’s not very subtle, is she?”

“I don’t think she was trying to be. Subtle is not necessarily her thing.”

“She got me over here alone with you, so I shouldn’t be complaining.”

My cheeks went pink, and his statement was followed by a long silence that I thought we had already conquered but was apparently back for round two. I tapped on the plastic arm of the lounge chair, then ate some watermelon. “What is your favorite thing to sculpt? What do you always go back to?”

“My favorite?” he asked. “I don’t know that it’s my favorite, but I sculpt a lot of trees. I think I’m trying to make the perfect one.”

“Do you sculpt with clay or stone?”

“Clay.”

“I’ve never painted a tree. Well, I mean, not as the sole subject. I’ve painted them as background or part of a scene. I should try a tree.”

“What’s your favorite thing to paint?” he asked.

“I don’t really have a favorite. I painted a sunrise recently, and that was fun.”

“I didn’t see a sunrise in the living room.”

“The living room just has some of my paintings. I have a back room full of my stuff.”

“Why didn’t you show me that?”

“Weren’t you the one who talked about pretension?”

“There’s a fine line between feeling like a show-off and wanting people to see your work, isn’t there?”

“For sure,” I said.

“Well, I want to see it.”

I smiled.

“Abby!” I heard my name called from a distance. I looked over to see Cooper standing by an ice chest, holding up a can of Dr Pepper. The patio lights were on now, and white lights were strung around trees and posts and lit the otherwise dark backyard. When had it gotten so dark?

I nodded. Then he pointed at Elliot.

“Do you want a soda? Cooper wants to know.”

Elliot cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “Coke!”

Cooper jogged around the pool and presented us with our two cans. “Coke might be a deal breaker for Abby. She hates Coke.”