Page 79 of Fun at Parties
Once we’re through the line, we duck through a dark doorway and emerge into a scene that feels disturbingly familiar after the last couple weeks: a crowd, a bar, drunk people dancing. Another bar across the room, near the neon green sign from the photo.
Perhaps the most familiar part: Logan is here, supposedly, but nowhere to be seen.
Chapter 26
The club is densely packed,with a lot of nooks and crannies that make it difficult to search. We drift toward the weirdly empty dance floor to survey the scene.
“Why is no one out here?” Nate asks, stretching out his arms.
The club answers. With no warning, an air horn sounds and a deluge of glitter rains down from the ceiling, coating us from head to toe like bread crumbs.
“Ow,” Nate says, slapping a palm over his right eye. When he moves his hand away, tears stream down one side of his face. My eyes are okay, but there’s glitter in my ear, and it’s itching like crazy.
This should be a felony. And Ilikeglitter.
“Are you okay?” I shout.
He crouches, trying to shield his face from the glitter still floating in the air. When he pops back up, blinking furiously, his hair and eyelashes and skin glimmer, alien-like, under the multicolored lights. I’m sure I look similar.
No Uber driver will ever pick us up in this condition. We’re going to have to walk back.
“This is the worst,” he says.
A server walks by wearing a clear plastic poncho with the hood up and rolls her eyes. “It happens every ten minutes. Stay off the dance floor if you don’t like it.”
I brace myself for what Nate’s probably going to say next. “You want to leave?”
He wipes his eye with the back of his hand and straightens fully. “No. No, this ends here.”
A streak of delight—and also, weirdly, desire—runs through me at the determination in his voice. He crosses the dance floor and I scamper after him.
“I have a plan,” he says over his shoulder. “I’m going to do something that will definitely get him out here. Can you wait by that pillar, so we have both sides covered?”
I do as he asks, waiting the length of one full song, wondering how I’m supposed to know when the plan is in motion.
And then the music changes, and I do know, because emanating from the speakers is the voice of Hilary Duff. It’s the song that never fails to take me back to my first Seapoint trip. To Bailey’s third-grade-birthday theme party, and the playlist that helped me bond with the people who would become my closest friends.
This is what dreams are made of: the song “What Dreams Are Made Of.”
Hilary hasn’t quite reached the first chorus when a bouncy figure zips onto the dance floor like an out-of-control toy car, glow stick necklaces flying around as he bops to the beat. I can only see him from the back. He’s ditched the cowboy hat and his normally brown hair looks silver due to several hours’ worth of sparkle showers, but it can only be Logan.
He’s trailed by a puzzled-but-game-looking woman with a bleached pixie cut, wearing a pair of low-rise jeans and a white tank top that is either from the dollar store or Rag & Bone. Breanne. My fingertips tingle when I recognize her, but now’s not the time to focus on my own reason for being here.
I step forward, ready to grab Logan’s arm and cling to him like a barnacle until I can flag down Nate, but Nate gets there first. He strides toward Logan from the other side of the dance floor, stopping in front of him, his face solemn. Logan’s arms drop to his sides and his body goes still.
The moment stretches. Hilary sings. Nate says something, and Logan shrugs, and I have to force myself to stay where I am. Breanne is hanging back too, her eyes flicking between them curiously.Don’t say a word,I order her telepathically. And then Logan wraps Nate in a hug and they slap each other’s backs and rock from side to side, and relief courses through me. The chase is over.
I can’t resist stepping closer to hear their conversation. “I think we can do something incredible with it, if we can just make it happen,” Nate says. “I can’t imagine usnottrying to do it together. But I need to know what you want.”
I can’t see Logan’s face, but he shakes his head. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the right thing for me to do next. It’s been tough. I wish we could’ve talked about this earlier.”
Nate lets out a weak laugh. “Is that why you’ve been running away from me?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Sunflower Sound? We saw you on Friday, but you sprinted off.”
Logan slaps his thigh. “That was real? Dude, I thought I was hallucinating. I mean, I kind of was hallucinating. I also thought I saw a unicorn.”
