Free Dangerous Girls by Abigail Haas Page A

the girl on the outside of everything. But here, away from it all, we’re just ourselves.
    Back inside, we do lime Jell-o shots together, quivering and half-solid in tiny paper cups. The music plays on, loud, and soon we’re dancing, lost in the sea of bodies, hot and sweating. He’s solid against me, his eyes bright, and then Elise is nearby with some college guy, and Lamar too, wrapped around a pretty coed. We drink and dance until our feet hurt and our throats scratch dry, until it’s three a.m. and the cops come and shut the party down, and we flee, laughing, down the stairs and out into the empty streets. We wind up in a red vinyl booth at some twenty-four-hour diner down the street, sharing cheese-covered fries and thick, icy shakes, Elise and I squeezed in the middle of the group like it belongs to us.
    Nothing happens with Tate that night, but looking across the crowded diner booth, I see the spark of something in his blue eyes, and I know it’s the start. The last few weeks before summer, he stays friendly in school—chatting in the hallways sometimes, or discussing an assignment after class. Elise keeps dragging me out to party and meet guys, worried I’m pining away over him, but I’m not. I’ve got a certainty about it, like we’re fact, even if it hasn’t happened yet.
    Even if I want to pine, Elise doesn’t give me the time. Our summer is a whirl of beach days and road trips, driving through the western Massachusetts country out to explore quaint college towns and hidden-away bookstores and cafés. It’s not always just the two of us. Elise’s parents insist onintroducing her to the kids of an old college friend of theirs, just moved to town from California. Max and his twin sister, Chelsea, turn out to be our age, set to attend Hillcrest in the fall. Max is equal parts surfer and comic-book nerd, Chelsea a laid-back artist-type with a baggie of weed hidden under her paintbrushes. We run into Lamar at a couple more college parties, and soon he and Chelsea are inseparable. Elise’s old friend, Melanie, starts hopefully showing up at the coffee shop—regretting her decision to take Lindsay’s side now that the queen bitch is off in Europe for the summer—and just like that, Elise and I have our own group, to hang out together in that back booth at the diner after a late night, to drive upstate to her vacation home in New Hampshire, or to just sprawl in one of our big, empty houses, sneaking liquor and smoking weed and watching school loom closer like a jail sentence at the end of summer.
    And then Tate is there at a party one night, and just as simple, he’s mine; slipping into the place I had waiting for him. Elise on one side, Tate on the other: my hand linked through hers, his arm slung over my shoulder. After so many years drifting, not connected to anything, I’m finally tethered. Safe and loved, in the middle.
    We start senior year like kings, like nothing can ever tear us apart.
    We’re wrong.

AFTER
    Our parents arrive on the island by lunchtime the next day, and with them comes every American news team and TV crew within a thousand-mile radius.
    They lay siege on the street outside, lining up news vans and portable satellites, snaking electrical wires across the parking lot. The hotel posts security on every entrance, and sets us up in a suite on the fourth floor with full-length windows overlooking the sparkling sands and perversely blue waters of the beach below. I begin to understand the shock of the staff in the police station last night, their dazed tears and murmured apologies. Ugly things shouldn’t happen in a place this beautiful.
    “Anna.”
    I turn. Our parents are being shown in by the hotel manager. Elise’s mother crosses the room straight to me, her arms outstretched. “Anna, sweetheart.” Her face is pale and bleak, and I register somehow that this is the first time I’ve ever seen her without makeup.
    “Judy.” My voice breaks, and she collapses against me,