Since You've Been Gone

“What are you doing here?” I whispered back, even though we were in the kitchen now, a floor below where my parents were sleeping, and probably could have risked using something closer to full volume. I looked at her and took in, for the first time, what she was wearing. She was in a floor-length black gown with a neckline that dipped down and was gathered somewhere around her sternum with a rhinestone brooch. Over this, she wore a little fur capelet that I had no doubt had been found in one of her grandmothers’ extensive closets, or was from Twice Upon a Time, her favorite consignment shop, as it was clearly vintage. “Was there some dress code for tonight I wasn’t told about?”

“No,” she said, laughing. “I was at that party Milly and Anderson dragged me to, remember?”

“So how was it?” I asked. Something felt off, and I couldn’t put my finger on what, until I noticed that we were almost eye-to-eye, since I was barefoot and Sloane was in heels.

“Can we go upstairs?” she asked, yawning and covering her mouth with her hand. “I’m exhausted.”

I nodded and she turned and headed for the staircase, leading the way. She spent enough time in my house that she knew her way around and was finally comfortable enough to just reach into the fridge and take something if she was hungry. I followed a few steps behind, still not clear on why she’d come to my house after the party but happy to have her there nonetheless. She was walking a little more carefully than usual, her ankles wobbling just slightly in the heels, holding her dress out to the side so she wouldn’t trip on it.

When she made it into my room, she kicked off her heels and went right to the drawer where I kept my pajamas. Sure enough, she pulled out one at the bottom of the stack, the crew T-shirt from the disastrous Bug Juice movie. It had been beset by problems the whole way through, starting with the fact that the producers had changed the ages of the kids from eleven to sixteen, and the lead actress had been shipped off to rehab mid-shoot. The shirt read You Can’t Handle the Juice, a crew in-joke, and the first time Sloane had seen it, she had cracked up. She loved the shirt for some reason, and was always threatening to steal it.

“I swear,” she said, yawning again as she pulled the shirt on over her head and then wriggled out of her dress, dropping it into a pile at her feet and stepping out of it, “one of these days. This shirt will just disappear, and you’ll have no idea where it’s gone to.”

“I think I’ll have some idea,” I said. I went to the laundry pile on my dresser and saw my best pair of pajama pants was clean. “Want these?” I asked, holding them up. She nodded, I tossed them to her, and she pulled them on.

“Oh my god,” she said, yawning again as she beelined for my bed. My bed was old and the mattress sagged in the middle, but it was queen-size, and there was enough room that we could face each other and still have enough space to see each other and talk. She took the side she always took when she stayed over, nestled down under the blankets, then hugged her pillow and smiled at me. I knew when she had something to say, and I could tell that she had been waiting for this moment—quiet, with my full attention—since I’d opened the front door. “So I met a boy tonight.”

“You did?” I asked, getting into bed as well, pulling the blankets up and turning to her. “At the party?”

“Mmm-hmm,” she said. “He was there with his parents too.”

“Does he go to Stanwich?” I settled back, only to realize my pillow was still on the floor. I leaned half out of the bed to grab it, then plumped it once and settled into it, preparing to hear the story.

Boys had been besotted with Sloane since she’d shown up at Stanwich High, but she’d been picky. She’d dated a senior for a few weeks our sophomore year, then a fellow junior this past fall, and the summer before, had a brief fling with a guy who normally went to boarding school and was just in town for the summer. But none of these had lasted, and she hadn’t seemed particularly devastated when they didn’t—she was always the one who did the breaking up. But it had been a while since a guy had appeared on her radar—until tonight, apparently.

“No,” she said. “Stanwich Academy.” It was the private school in town, and while I vaguely knew some girls who went there, the two schools didn’t really have much overlap socially. “His name’s Sam. Sam Watkins.” She pronounced the name carefully, like it was a foreign word she wasn’t used to saying but nonetheless loved the sound of. She smiled, wide, and I saw in that moment that she really liked him.

“Oh my god,” I said. “You’re smitten already. I can tell.” She didn’t deny it, but buried her face in the pillow, so all I could see was her hair, the waves coaxed into curls for the evening. “So tell me about him.”

She turned her head toward me, yawning, but didn’t open up her eyes again when the yawn was finished. “He’s great,” she said, her words coming slower than before. “You’ll see.”

I waited for something else to come, an explanation of his greatness, when it occurred to me it was probably Sam who’d dropped Sloane at my house—Milly and Anderson would have just taken her back with them. Not because they would have cared if she slept over, but because they wouldn’t have wanted to make an extra trip. I tried to recall if there had been a car there when I’d opened the door, someone waiting to make sure she got in okay, but I just couldn’t remember.

“Hey,” I whispered. I nudged her ankle with my foot. “Did Sam—” I was about to ask her when I realized that she was breathing slow and regular, her mascaraed eyes firmly closed. Sloane could always drop off to sleep immediately, something she attributed to Milly and Anderson never giving her a set bedtime when she was little. “So you learn to sleep when you can,” she’d explained to me. “None of this story-reading, glass-of-water nonsense. I was always the one falling asleep on the pile of coats at a party.”

I waited to see if she was out for good, giving her one more gentle nudge. But she didn’t stir, so I figured I’d just ask her in the morning. I closed my eyes, and felt myself drift off, somehow comforted by the knowledge that when I woke up in the morning, Sloane would be there.

I woke up with a start. I looked around, trying to figure out why I wasn’t still sleeping. It wasn’t that the cat had fallen asleep on my head again, or that either of my parents were yelling at me to wake up. Pieces of the night before came back—delivering pizza with Dawn, Jamie Roarke, hugging mini-mart James—and I realized, with some surprise, these weren’t dream fragments. They had actually happened. I was about to try and go back to sleep, when the phone on my nightstand lit up.