Beckoners by Carrie Mac Page A

as he picked up the glass. He looked so pathetically embarrassed and wilted, Zoe wanted to steer him out of there and take him home and keep him until he was big enough to punch Heather in the face and do some real, lasting damage that would require reconstructive surgery that could be conveniently botched.
    Zoe swallowed back all the nasties she had to say.
    â€œHappy birthday, Beck,” she managed. If only she’d said no on the first day of school. No to the invitation to sit down. No to the cigarette. If only she’d left the smoke hole before that wide gulf had been bridged between her and the Beckoners.
    Zoe glumly handed Beck the card she and Cassy had made for her. She’d glued stars in the corners and framed it in baby blue fun fur. Beck held it in front of her face and peered at it. She fumbled to open it.
    â€œIt doesn’t open,” Zoe said.
    Brady handed Zoe a drink. She assumed it was vodka, but she didn’t particularly care. She downed it in one go. Yup. Vodka. One thing she knew from booze was that it made moments like these slightly more bearable, and that’s what she wanted more than anything, for this moment to be even
slightly
more bearable.
    â€œIs this supposed to be abstract art or something?” Beck was still trying to open the card. “‘Cuz if it is, you kind of suck at it.”
    â€œMy little sister—”
    â€œYeah, that’s what they all say.” Beck gave up trying to open it. She tossed it across the room like a hockey card.
    â€œWhat’s it supposed to be?” Jazz picked it up. She turned it upside down and then on its side. “If you look at it this way it looks like two giraffes fucking.”
    â€œLet me see!” Lindsay held up her hand. Jazz sent it into the air, but it fell short, into the whiskey on the floor. Lindsay picked it up by the corner and studied it. The paint bled down the paper.
    â€œNow it looks like
four
giraffes fucking!” Lindsay howled. Everyone laughed harder, especially Beck, whose laugh grew shrill when she drank.
    Zoe stood there with a mouthwash-ad grin on her face like she was able to handle being the butt of the joke. Her smile ached, but she couldn’t make it go away, it was as if the alcohol had fixed it, like chemicals fix a photograph. She felt her cheek with the back of her hand; her face was on fire. She reached for another drink and downed it too, waiting for it all to be even just a little bit more bearable.
    â€œI’m going to show this to Trevor.” Brady grabbed the card as he headed out of the room. “He’ll piss himself.”
    â€œI know where he is.” Jazz pushed herself off the counter. “I’ll come with you.”
    Fresh air, please, somebody take me outside! Nobody came to her rescue. They just laughed and laughed, like some twisted mental warp scene from a Hitchcock movie. Hadn’t Zoe screamed those words out loud? Hadn’t she? Apparently not.
    Zoe backtracked through the sweaty dancers pretending they were at a rave and out the front door. She went around the back of the house, past a patio crammed with smokers, over a bridge spanning a little pond and along a sandy path lined with fairy lights. The property went way back, at least as long as a football field, but narrower. All along the outer edges of the lawn were little groups of people smoking whatever they were smoking and drinking whatever they were drinking.
    Zoe walked further, past a small circle of wannabe flower children swaying to some retro-hippie guy’s sad attempt at “Stairway to Heaven,” past the last of the lights and into a dark grove of trees at the very back of the property. She sat on a tire swing and looked back at the party. The night was punctuatedby the glow of cigarette ends, like lazy fireflies hovering here and there. Heather’s house, more a mansion really, looked like a dollhouse from that distance, lavishly lit up, little dolls