Page 21 of The Party Plot

“I’m good for a lot of things. You’ll see.”

7.

Laurel had insisted on driving, but he didn’t look great. His face was a little greenish as he slumped over the wheel of the Land Rover, and there was razor burn on his neck, as if he’d shaved hastily. He reeked of Tom Ford’s Tobacco Vanille, which was aggressively cloying and didn’t go well on his skin. He’d probably just bought it because it was expensive.

“Rough night?” Casey asked. Outside, the bland, regimented neighborhoods and strip malls of suburbia were giving way to countryside, the sandy soil steaming as the day got hotter. Marshy inlets and glittering stretches of cordgrass turned into tangled greenery as they drove further inland, clapboard buildings and church signs with missing letters fighting against stands of bald cypress and tupelo. He had almost missed how ungovernable the landscape was in this part of the country, missed all of the plants whose names he had learned from that battered old seed catalog in his grandmother’s house. Missed how the heat and humidity seeped into the muscles and gave everything an almost luxurious air of lethargy.

“You could say that.” Laurel ran his tongue across his teeth. The hair at his temples was damp with sweat. “I don’t know what possessed me to drink half a bottle of Midori. It was the only thing left at the beach condo and I thought it might help me sleep.”

Casey didn’t know liquor names well enough to know what he was talking about. Whatever it was, it hadn’t treated Laurel nicely, and Casey felt a little bloom of pleasure that he was driving him to drink, causing him sleepless nights. It was what he deserved.

“I slept like a baby,” Casey said, though he hadn’t. Several times, he’d gotten up and started packing, throwing his clothes into garbage bags in a panic. But it wasn’t worth it. After paying all the deposits—after Laurel hadmadehim pay all of the deposits—his funds were depleted, and he didn’t have nearly enough to justify running. Casey had used an ice mask on his swollen under-eye area, so hopefully his own rough night wasn’t too noticeable. “I was dreaming of all the money I’m going to make.”

“Yeah, great,” Laurel said. “Glad to be of service.” He flicked on the turn signal. The sign for Abernathy Farms loomed large on the side of the road, advertising u-pick blueberries, fresh peaches, and a petting zoo. Casey had bought flowers from them wholesale for the dog wedding. It had been cheaper than hiring a florist, and he had liked putting the arrangements together himself. Like many nerdy kids in the early aughts, he and Jamie had gone through a Japan phase. Only one thing had really stuck with Casey to this day:ikebana, the art of flower arrangement. The word itself held a kind of elegance for him, a quiet sense of order. Casey liked the idea of it: treating a bouquet like a sculpture, the tactile sensation of flower stems between his fingers, the way you could build balance out of chaos by adding a bloom here or subtracting a leaf there. The symmetry of lines and the importance of negative space.

In fact, if there was anything good about Laurel’s idiotic idea to actually go through with the Halloween ball, it was that Casey already had the flowers planned. None of the tacky orange and black arrangements Denise had sent him from Pinterest would work, of course. It was going to be largely monochromatic, elegant and overwhelming and just a little bit eerie, black dahlias and black calla lilies and creeping trails of morning glory and jasmine to add contrast. Maybe some amaranthus for a bloody pop of crimson. He was so caught up in imagining how he’d drape the pillars and arches of Landry Hall in vines, making the whole event space look like some haunted castle half-reclaimed by the forest, that he didn’t notice for a moment that they had parked.

Laurel was staring at him. “Are we just going to sit in the car?”

Casey shook his head, annoyance cracking through him like a whip. He had almost forgotten that this whole thing was Laurel’s production now. His ideas for the flowers hardly mattered. Again, he thought about cutting his losses, leaving town. Gritting his teeth, he opened the car door and got out.

The air was full of the sweetness of fresh berries and corn, the green, earthy smell of the Lowcountry and an underlying barnyard odor from the petting zoo. Somewhere nearby, kids—human or goat or both—were yelling. A giant open-air barn had been turned into a fruit and vegetable market, lines of produce gleaming bright as Christmas ornaments in the sunshine. There were hay bales and scarecrows set up along the main path, and the fields behind the barn stretched off into the distance in rows of green. Casey shaded his eyes, looking down the drive. Alice and Gary Abernathy, the owners of the farm, were headed their way on a golf cart, gravel popping under the tires.

“Casey,” Alice called, her long box braids piled on top of her head, a visor shielding her eyes from the sun. “We’re glad to see you, honey. You had us worried you were going with someone else for the flowers.”

“No, no.” He waved a hand in the air, keeping his voice level. Tension lingered in his shoulders, the knowledge of Laurel at his back. “There was just a little confusion with the deposits, that’s all. But we’re ready to go now. And Laurel is helping me. You know Denise’s son?”

Gary, a potbellied white man with a face ruddy from years of sun, shook Laurel’s hand with eagerness. “Laurel, good to see you, man. It’s been years. Are you still singing?”

Laurel massaged the back of his neck, a self-deprecating smile on his face. “In the shower, maybe.”

“That’s a shame. You had a voice for the stage, I’m telling you.”

“Oh, no, I still kill it at karaoke, don’t worry.”

They all laughed, the Abernathys and Laurel, and Casey felt like he had just bitten into something sour. It was so easy for Laurel. He’d slid back into everyone’s lives like a missing puzzle piece, jostling Casey to the side. “I’d like to see that,” he said sweetly, fixing Laurel with a glare hotter than the sun bouncing off the windshield of the golf cart. “You doing karaoke. I’m sure it’s an unforgettable experience.”

Laurel’s smile widened. “Stick around. You might get lucky.”

Gary slapped the back seat of the golf cart. “Load ‘er up, boys. We’ll take y’all out to the flower fields.” He jumped up front next to Alice, and Casey resigned himself to being stuck next to Laurel on the shiny, sun-baked vinyl. As they wedged themselves in, thighs touching, Gary turned, handing a red solo cup to Laurel and then another one to Casey. “A little refreshment for the drive,” he explained. “It’s our fresh peach cider. We make it on-site.”

The liquid in the cup was bubbly and vaguely sour-smelling, so Casey knew it had alcohol in it. He took a small sip. It was sweet, and sweet things were always dangerous. Intoxicants, even more so. He’d seen his dad stumble around zombie-like on various cocktails of pills enough times to know that addiction ran in his blood. Casey wondered if the cider would help him relax, or just make him feel weird and disassociated. It was always a toss-up between hating how it made him feel and liking it way too much.

“It’s hard cider,” Laurel said unnecessarily, and Casey barely kept from sneering at him.

“I know that.”

“I’ll drink it if you don’t want to.”

Casey handed him the cup wordlessly, not offering any thanks.

*

A headache was percolating behind Laurel’s eyes, and he wanted to blame the heat and all the flower pollen, but it was probably the Midori, and the peach cider on top of it, candy-sweet, making the backs of his molars ache. Either that or all the cologne he’d put on in a fit of panic that morning. He didn’t really like it; it had smelled different in Heathrow, or else the whole airport had just reeked so strongly of the Burberry store that he’d been nose blind and had bought it sight unseen—scent unsmelled?

He dragged a hand over his face. His thoughts were especially imbecilic today, chittering around in his head. He looked down at his hands, clasped around the now-empty solo cups that he had stacked inside of each other. Casey’s thigh was glued to his, clammy heat building where their bodies touched. Laurel could feel every single rattle and vibration of the seat as the golf cart puttered around the farm.

“... and black calla lilies for a kind of alien-planet-feel,” Casey was saying. He’d been talking to Alice for the last half-hour, rattling off plant names that Laurel had never heard of.

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