The Last Song

3 Ronnie

The fair was crowded. Or rather, Ronnie corrected herself, the Wrightsville Beach Seafood Festival was crowded. As she paid for a soda from one of the concession stands, she could see cars parked bumper to bumper along both roads leading to the pier and even noted a few enterprising teenagers renting out their driveways near the action.

So far, though, the action was boring. She supposed she’d been hoping that the Ferris wheel was a permanent fixture and that the pier offered shops and stores like the boardwalk in Atlantic City. In other words, she hoped it would be the kind of place she could see herself hanging out in the summer. No such luck. The festival was temporarily located in the parking lot at the head of the pier, and it mostly resembled a small county fair. The rickety rides were part of a traveling carnival, and the parking lot was lined with overpriced game booths and greasy food concessions. The whole place was kind of… gross.

Not that anyone else seemed to share her opinion. The place was packed. Old and young, families, groups of middle-schoolers ogling one another. No matter which way she went, she always seemed to be fighting against the tide of bodies. Sweaty bodies. Big, sweaty bodies, two of whom were squashing her between them as the crowd came to an inexplicable stop. No doubt they’d had both the fried hot dog and fried Snickers bar she’d seen at the concession stand. She wrinkled her nose. So gross.

Spying an opening, she slipped away from the rides and carnival game booths and headed toward the pier. Fortunately, the crowd continued to thin as she moved down the pier, past booths offering homemade crafts for sale. Nothing she could ever imagine herself buying-who on earth would want a gnome constructed entirely from seashells? But obviously someone was buying the stuff or the booths wouldn’t exist.

Distracted, she bumped into a table manned by an elderly woman seated on a folding chair. Wearing a shirt emblazoned with the logo SPCA, she had white hair and an open, cheerful face-the type of grandmother who probably spent all day baking cookies before Christmas Eve, Ronnie guessed. On the table in front of her were pamphlets and a donation jar, along with a large cardboard box. Inside the box were four gray puppies, one of which hopped up on its hind legs to peer over the side at her.

“Hi, little guy,” she said.

The elderly woman smiled. “Do you want to hold him? He’s the fun one. I call him Seinfeld.”

The puppy gave a high-pitched whine.

“No, that’s okay.” He was cute, though. Really cute, even if she didn’t think the name suited him. And she did sort of want to hold him, but she knew she wouldn’t want to put him down if she did. She was a sucker for animals in general, especially abandoned ones. Like these little guys. “They’re going to be okay, right? You’re not going to have them put to sleep, are you?”

“They’ll be fine,” the woman answered. “That’s why we set up the table. So people would adopt them. Last year, we found homes for over thirty animals, and these four have already been claimed. I’m just waiting for the new owners to pick them up on their way out. But there are more at the shelter if you’re interested.”

“I’m only visiting,” Ronnie answered, just as a roar erupted from the beach. She craned her neck, trying to see. “What’s going on? A concert?”

The woman shook her head. “Beach volleyball. They’ve been playing for hours-some kind of tournament. You should go watch. I’ve heard the cheering all day, so the games must be pretty exciting.”

Ronnie thought about it, figuring, Why not? It couldn’t be any worse than what was happening up here. She threw a couple of dollars into the donation jar before heading toward the steps.

The sun was descending, giving the ocean a sheen like liquid gold. On the beach, a few remaining families were congregated on towels near the water, along with a couple of sand castles about to be swept away in the rising tide. Terns darted in and out, hunting for crabs.

It didn’t take long to reach the source of the action. As she inched her way to the edge of the court, she noticed that the other girls in the audience seemed fixated on the two players on the right. No surprise there. The two guys-her age? older?-were the kind that her friend Kayla routinely described as “eye candy.” Though neither of them was exactly Ronnie’s type, it was impossible not to admire their lanky, muscular physiques and the fluid way they moved through the sand.

Especially the taller one, with dark brown hair and the macramé bracelet on his wrist. Kayla would have definitely zeroed in on him-she always went for the tall ones-in the same way the bikini-clad blonde across the court was obviously zeroing in on him. Ronnie had noticed the blonde and her friend right away. They were both thin and pretty, with blindingly white teeth, and obviously used to being the center of attention and having boys drool all over them. They held themselves apart from the crowd and cheered daintily, probably so they wouldn’t mess up their hair. They might as well have been billboards proclaiming it was okay to admire them from a distance, but don’t get too close. Ronnie didn’t know them, but she already didn’t like them.

She turned her attention back to the game just as the cute guys scored another point. And then another. And still another. She didn’t know what the score was, but they were obviously the better team. And yet, as she watched, she silently began to root for the other guys. It had less to do with the fact that she always rooted for the underdog-which she did-and more to do with the fact that the winning pair reminded her of the spoiled private school types she sometimes ran into at clubs, the Upper East Side boys from Dalton and Buckley who thought they were better than everyone else simply because their dads were investment bankers. She’d seen enough of the so-called privileged crowd to recognize a member when she saw one, and she’d bet her life that those two were definitely part of the popular crowd around here. Her suspicions were confirmed after the next point when the brown-haired guy’s partner winked at the blonde’s tanned, Barbie-doll friend as he got ready to serve. In this town, the pretty people clearly all knew one another.

Why wasn’t she surprised by that?

The game suddenly seemed less interesting, and she turned to leave just as another serve sailed over the net. She vaguely heard someone shouting as the opposing team returned the serve, but before she had taken more than a couple of steps, she felt the spectators around her beginning to jostle one another, knocking her off balance for just an instant.

An instant too long.

She turned just in time to see one of the players rushing toward her at full speed, his head craning to catch sight of the wayward ball. She didn’t have time to react before he slammed into her. She felt him grab her shoulders in a simultaneous attempt to stop his momentum and prevent her from falling. She felt her arm jerk on impact and watched almost in fascination as the lid flew off the Styrofoam cup, soda arcing through the air before drenching her face and shirt.

And then, just like that, it was over. Up close, she saw the brown-haired player staring at her, his eyes wide with shock.

“Are you okay?” he panted.

She could feel the soda dripping down her face and soaking through her shirt. Vaguely, she heard someone in the crowd begin to laugh. And why shouldn’t someone laugh? It had been such a fantastic day already.

“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.

“I hate you, you know,” she said.

“Yeah, I hate you, too. But it’s still gonna cost you ten bucks.”

“How about five?”

“You missed your chance. But your secret will be safe with me.”

Her dad still hadn’t seen them, but he was getting closer.

“Fine,” she hissed, digging through her pockets. She passed over a crumpled bill and Jonah pocketed the money. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw her father moving in her direction, his head still going from side to side, and she ducked around the booth. Surprising her, Blaze was leaning against the side of the booth, smoking a cigarette.

She smirked. “Problems with your dad?”

“How do I get out of here?”

“That’s up to you.” Blaze shrugged. “But he knows what shirt you’re wearing.”

An hour later, Ronnie was sitting beside Blaze on one of the benches near the end of the pier, still bored, but not quite as bored as she’d been before. Blaze turned out to be a good listener, with a quirky sense of humor-and best of all, she seemed to love New York as much as Ronnie did, even though she’d never been there. She asked questions about the basics: Times Square and the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty-tourist traps that Ronnie tried to avoid at all costs. But Ronnie humored her before describing the real New York: the clubs in Chelsea, the music scene in Brooklyn, and the street vendors in Chinatown, where it was possible to buy bootlegged recordings or fake Prada purses or pretty much anything else for pennies on the dollar.

Talking about those places made her absolutely long to be back home instead of here. Anywhere but here.

“I wouldn’t have wanted to come here either,” Blaze agreed. “Trust me. It’s boring.”

“How long have you lived here?”

“Just my whole life. But at least I’m dressed okay.”

Ronnie had bought the stupid Nemo shirt, knowing she looked ridiculous. The only size the booth had in stock was an extralarge, and the thing practically reached her knees. Its only redeeming feature was that once she donned it, she’d been able to slip unseen past her father. Blaze had been right about that.

“Someone told me Nemo was cool.”

“She was lying.”

“What are we still doing out here? My dad’s probably gone by now.”

Blaze turned. “Why? Do you want to go back to the carnival? Maybe go to the haunted house?”

“No. But there’s got to be something else going on.”

“Not yet. Later there will be. But for now, let’s just wait.”

“For what?”

Blaze didn’t answer. Instead, she stood and turned around, facing the blackened water. Her hair moved in the breeze, and she seemed to stare at the moon. “I saw you earlier, you know.”

“When?”

“When you were at the volleyball game.” She motioned down the pier. “I was standing over there.”

“And?”

“You seemed out of place.”

“So do you.”

“Which is why I was standing on the pier.” She hopped up onto the railing and took a seat, facing Ronnie. “I know you don’t want to be here, but what did your dad do to make you so mad?”

Ronnie wiped her palms on her pants. “It’s a long story.”

“Does he live with his girlfriend?”

“I don’t think he has a girlfriend. Why?”

“Consider yourself lucky.”

“What are you talking about?”

“My dad lives with his girlfriend. This is his third one since the divorce, by the way, and she’s the worst by far. She’s only a few years older than I am and she dresses like a stripper. For all I know, she was a stripper. It makes me sick every time I have to go there. It’s like she doesn’t know how to act around me. One minute she tries to give me advice like she’s my mom, and the next minute she’s trying to be my best friend. I hate her.”

“And you live with your mom?”

“Yeah. But now she has a boyfriend, and he’s at the house all the time. And he’s a loser, too. He wears this ridiculous toupee because he went bald when he was like twenty or something, and he’s always telling me that I want to think about giving college a try. Like I care what he thinks. It’s just all screwed up, you know?”

Before Ronnie could answer, Blaze jumped back down. “C’mon. I think they’re getting ready to start. You’ve got to see this.”

Ronnie followed Blaze back up the pier, toward a crowd surrounding what seemed to be a street show. Startled, she realized that the performers were the three thuggish guys she’d spotted earlier. Two of them were break-dancing to music blaring from the boom box, while the one with long black hair stood in the center juggling what seemed to be flaming golf balls. Every now and then he would stop juggling and simply hold the ball, rotating it between his fingers or rolling it across the back of his hand or up one arm and down the other. Twice, he closed his fist over the fireball, nearly extinguishing it, only to move his hand, allowing the flames to escape out the tiny opening near his thumb.

“Do you know him?” Ronnie said.

Blaze nodded. “That’s Marcus.”

“Is he wearing some sort of protective coating on his hands?”

“No.”

“Doesn’t it hurt?”

“Not if you hold the fireball right. It’s awesome, though, isn’t it?”

Ronnie had to agree. Marcus extinguished two of the balls and then relit them again by touching them to the third. On the ground lay an upturned magician’s hat, and Ronnie watched as people began tossing money into it.

“Where does he get the fireballs?”

“He makes them. I can show you how. It’s not hard. All you need is a cotton T-shirt, needle and thread, and some lighter fluid.”

As the music continued to blare, Marcus tossed the three fireballs to the guy with the Mohawk and lit two more. They juggled them back and forth between each other like circus clowns using bowling pins, faster and faster, until one throw went awry.

Except that it didn’t. The guy with the pierced eyebrow caught it soccer-ball style and began bouncing it from foot to foot as though it were nothing more than a Hacky Sack. After extinguishing three of the fireballs, the other two followed suit, the entire troupe kicking the two fireballs back and forth between them. The crowd started to clap, and money rained into the hat as the music built to a crescendo. Then all at once, the remaining fireballs were caught and extinguished simultaneously as the song thundered to a close.

Ronnie had to admit she’d never seen anything like it. Marcus walked over to Blaze and folded her into a long, lingering kiss that seemed wildly inappropriate in public. He opened his eyes slowly, staring right at Ronnie before he pushed Blaze away.

“Who’s that?” he asked, motioning in Ronnie’s direction.

“That’s Ronnie,” Blaze said. “She’s from New York. I just met her.”

Mohawk and Pierced Eyebrow joined Marcus and Blaze in their scrutiny, making Ronnie feel distinctly uncomfortable.

“ New York, huh?” Marcus asked, pulling a lighter from his pocket and igniting one of the fireballs. He held the flaming orb motionless between his thumb and forefinger, making Ronnie wonder again how he could do that without getting burned.

“Do you like fire?” he called out.

Without waiting for an answer, he threw the fireball in her direction. Ronnie jumped out of the way, too startled to respond. The ball landed behind her just as a police officer rushed forward, stamping out the flame.

“You three,” he called out, pointing. “Out. Now. I’ve told you before that you can’t do your little show on the pier, and next time, I swear I’m gonna bring you in.”

Marcus held up his hands and took a step backward. “We were just leaving.”

The boys grabbed their coats and began moving up the pier, toward the carnival rides. Blaze followed, leaving Ronnie alone. Ronnie felt the officer’s gaze on her, but she ignored him. Instead, she hesitated only briefly before going after them.