Nicholas Sparks: The Last Song

“I’m fine,” she snapped.

“Are you sure?” the guy gasped. For what it was worth, he seemed genuinely contrite. “I ran into you kind of hard.”

“Just… let me go,” she said through clenched teeth.

He hadn’t seemed to realize he was still gripping her shoulders, and his hands instantly released their pressure. He took a quick step back and automatically reached for his bracelet. He rotated it almost absently. “I’m really sorry about that. I was going for the ball and-”

“I know what you were doing,” she said. “I survived, okay?”

With that, she turned away, wanting nothing more than to get as far away from here as possible. Behind her, she heard someone call out, “C’mon, Will! Let’s get back to the game!” But as she pushed her way through the crowd, she was conscious somehow of his continuing gaze until she vanished from sight.

Her shirt wasn’t ruined, but that didn’t make her feel much better. She liked this shirt, a memento from the Fall Out Boy concert that she’d sneaked out to with Rick last year. Her mom had almost blown a gasket about that one, and it wasn’t simply because Rick had a tattoo of a spiderweb on his neck and more piercings in his ears than Kayla did; it was because she’d lied about where they were going, and she hadn’t made it home until the following afternoon, since they’d ended up crashing at Rick’s brother’s place in Philadelphia. Her mom forbade Ronnie from seeing or even speaking to Rick ever again, a rule that Ronnie broke the very next day.

It wasn’t that she loved Rick; frankly, she didn’t even like him that much. But she was angry at her mom, and it felt right at the time. But when she got to Rick’s place, he was already stoned and drunk again, just as he’d been at the concert, and she realized that if she continued to see him, he’d continue to pressure her to try whatever it was he was taking, just as he’d done the night before. She spent only a few minutes at his place before heading to Union Square for the rest of the afternoon, knowing it was over between them.

She wasn’t naive about drugs. Some of her friends smoked pot, a few did cocaine or ecstasy, and one even had a nasty meth habit. Everyone but her drank on the weekends. Every club and party she went to offered easy access to all of it. Still, it seemed that whenever her friends smoked or drank or popped the pills they swore made the evening worthwhile, they’d spend the rest of the night slurring their words or staggering or vomiting or losing control completely and doing something really stupid. Something usually involving a guy.

Ronnie didn’t want to go there. Not after what happened to Kayla last winter. Someone-Kayla never knew who-slipped some GHB into her drink, and though she had only a vague recollection of what happened next, she was pretty sure she remembered being in a room with three guys she’d met for the first time that night. When she woke the following morning, her clothes were strewn around the room. Kayla never said anything more-she preferred to pretend it had never happened at all and regretted having told Ronnie even that much-but it wasn’t hard to connect the dots.

When she reached the pier, Ronnie set down her half-empty drink cup and dabbed furiously at her shirt with her wet napkin. It seemed to be working, but the napkin was disintegrating into tiny white flakes that resembled dandruff.

Great.

She wished the guy had rammed into someone else. She was only there for what, ten minutes? What were the odds that she’d turn away at the same instant the ball came flying her way? And that she’d be holding a soda in a crowd at a volleyball game she didn’t even want to watch, in a place she didn’t want to be? In a million years, the same thing could probably never happen again. With odds like that, she should have bought a lottery ticket.

And then there was the guy who did it. Brown-haired, brown-eyed cute guy. Up close, she realized he was way better looking than cute, especially when he got that expression of… concern. He might have been part of the popular crowd, but in the nanosecond their eyes had met, she’d had the strangest sense that he was as real as they came.

Ronnie shook her head to clear her mind of such crazy thoughts. Clearly the sun was affecting her brain. Satisfied that she’d done the best she could with the napkin, she picked up the cup of soda. She planned to throw the rest away, but as she spun around, she felt the cup get jammed between her and someone else. This time, nothing happened in slow motion; the soda instantly covered the front of her shirt.

She froze, staring down at her shirt in disbelief. You’ve got to be kidding.

Standing before her was a girl her age holding a Slurpee, seemingly as surprised as she was. She was dressed in black, and her stringy dark hair hung in unruly curls framing her face. Like Kayla, she had at least half a dozen piercings in each ear, highlighted with a couple of miniature skulls that dangled from her earlobes, and her dark eye shadow and eyeliner gave her an almost feral appearance. As the remains of her soda soaked through Ronnie’s shirt, Goth-looking chick motioned with her Slurpee toward the spreading stain.

“Sucks being you,” she said.

“Ya think?”

“At least the other side matches now.”

“Oh, I get it. You’re trying to be funny.”

“‘Witty’ is more like it.”

“Then you might have said something like ‘Maybe you should stick with sippy-cups.’”

Goth-chick laughed, a surprisingly girlish sound. “You’re not from around here, are you?”

“No, I’m from New York. I’m here visiting my dad.”

“For the weekend?”

“No. For the summer.”

“It does suck being you.”

This time, it was Ronnie’s turn to laugh. “I’m Ronnie. It’s short for Veronica.”

“Call me Blaze.”

“Blaze?”

“My real name’s Galadriel. It’s from Lord of the Rings . My mom’s weird like that.”

“At least she didn’t name you Gollum.”

“Or Ronnie.” With a tilt of her head, she motioned over her shoulder. “If you want something dry, there are some Nemo shirts in the booth over there.”

“Nemo?”

“Yeah, Nemo. From the movie? Orange-and-white fish, gimpy flipper? Gets stuck in a fish tank and his dad goes to find him?”

“I don’t want a Nemo shirt, okay?”

“Nemo’s cool.”

“Maybe if you’re six,” Ronnie retorted.

“Suit yourself.”

Before Ronnie could respond, she spied three guys pushing their way through a parting mob. They stood out from the beach crowd with their torn shorts and tattoos, bare chests showing beneath heavy leather jackets. One had a pierced eyebrow and was carrying an old-fashioned boom box; another had a bleached Mohawk and arms completely covered with tattoos. The third, like Blaze, had long black hair offset by milky white skin. Ronnie turned instinctively to Blaze, only to realize that Blaze was gone. In her place stood Jonah.

“What did you spill on your shirt?” he asked. “You’re all wet and sticky.”

Ronnie searched for Blaze, wondering where she’d gone. And why. “Just go away, okay?”

“I can’t. Dad’s looking for you. I think he wants you to come home.”

“Where is he?”

“He stopped to go to the bathroom, but he should be here any minute.”

“Tell him you didn’t see me.”

Jonah thought about it. “Five bucks.”

“What?”

“Gimme five bucks and I’ll forget you were here.”

“Are you serious?”

“You don’t have much time,” he said. “Now it’s ten bucks.”

Over Jonah’s head, she spotted her dad searching the crowd around him. Instinctively she ducked, knowing there was no way she could sneak past him. She glared at her brother, the blackmailer, who’d obviously realized it as well. He was cute and she loved him and she respected his blackmailing abilities, but still, he was her little brother. In a perfect world, he would be on her side. But was he? Of course not.