“Ash.”
Ashley turned just in time for a thick wall of lake water to crash over her face. Bug stood knee deep only a few feet away wearing a mischievous smile. She stooped to splash again, but Ashley buckled her knees and ducked under the surface, turning the world to nothing more than the sound of churning waves.
When she came up, Bug was standing next to her.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” Ashley exhaled. She wrung out her ponytail. “I’m fine.”
She wasn’t, but it wasn’t worth explaining anymore. The world since Tristan’s disappearance was like a fist pressed into wet clay. She felt the impression of him in her chest. Her new version of okay would just be this. It was a hard thing to swallow.
She hadn’t really wanted to come out tonight, but she’d spent weeks trying to get the search party to this side of the lake. A piece of her thought, once she got here, she would feel Tristan’s presence. She would know where to look. The answer would fall into her lap. But she’d been here for hours and she felt nothing.
On the lakeshore, John Paris hunched over a pile of juniper brambles. His bright red swim trunks glared in the cool dark, massive shoulders bobbing as he attempted to start a fire. They’d packed kindling and a lighter in the back of the truck, but as usual, John was determined to do it like the movies. Just a stick and furious motion. Fran and Paul sat behind him on the picnic table only halfway paying attention.
“I thought we were supposed to be swimming,” Ashley said.
Bug shrugged. “Guess they changed their mind.”
“You can go hang out with them if you want.” Ashley popped her neck. “Maybe you and Paul can talk about his dad some more.”
“Oh my god, no thanks,” Bug said. “If he—”
Before she could finish, John’s fire roared to life. He sprung backward, tumbling to his back. Fran and Paul jumped up behind him with a cheer. Ashley and Bug made their way toward shore.
While the others settled, John sat on the log next to Ashley. For a moment, he stared into the dirt between his feet in silence. “How’re you holding up?”
Ashley blinked. “Oh. You know.”
“Yeah.” John wiped his nose. “I know.”
Ashley nodded. Compared to her friendships with Fran and Bug, she and John had only ever been as close as two people raised in the same pocket-sized town. But on nights like this, when Ashley looked into John Paris’s face, it was like he was the only one who got it. He was the only other person with a Tristan-shaped impression in his chest. The only one who looked out at the black horizon and wondered if Tristan was looking back. The emptiness was suffocating him. It was suffocating Ashley, too.
In a way, it was nice to know she wasn’t alone.
Usually, there were six of them. There was a gap in their circle, just between Ashley and John. She hadn’t expected the empty air to feel so cold.
Eventually, the night softened into a blurry semblance of the way things used to be. Fran playfully fed s’mores to John, wiping stringy bits of marshmallow on his swim trunks. Bug slipped on her favorite green hoodie and buried her fists in the front pouch. Paul grasped at the dark, trying to catch flecks of ash between his fingers. It was almost right.
“I wish I could see their faces when they find it.” Paul laughed, part of a conversation Ashley had long since tuned out. He nudged John.
“I don’t care about their faces. I just want them to admit it,” John said.
“That, too,” Paul relented.
Over the last year, all of them had changed. But John Paris had changed the most. Instead of the scrawny pale boy he’d been junior year, he was now six feet tall with shoulders as wide as a horse’s and a square jaw that made him look just like his father. He was colder now, too. He wasn’t the boy who rode ATVs around the hills all summer with Paul and Tristan. He was more serious, like over the course of a single school year he’d turned into an adult. In a few years, he’d either be at Barton Lumber or training to join the police like his dad.