Free If You're Lucky by Yvonne Prinz

shook her head but Fin kept talking and eventually she nodded. I knew that they must be planning to meet up later. I felt cast aside. He caught my eye as I was leaving and smiled but I gave him my stoniest expression. How did he
think
I would feel?
    Sonia was preoccupied as she drove through the darkness.
    â€œDid you tell Fin where you were going tonight?” I asked.
    She looked at me. “I’m not sure. I guess I may have.”
    â€œI wonder why he wouldn’t tell you he was playing with those guys.”
    â€œI dunno. Maybe he wanted to surprise us.”
    â€œYou. Maybe he wanted to surprise
you
.”
    She looked over at me. “Okay.”
    â€œYou seem totally into him.”
    â€œDo I?” She looked flustered. “It’s just the music, I think. It got to me.”
    â€œDid you know he could play like that?”
    She paused. I’d started noticing that whenever she answered a question about Fin, she seemed to choose her words very carefully.
    â€œI guess I knew he could play, not like that, though.”
    I sat back in my seat and looked at my reflection in the window. Sure, lots of surfers play guitar. But players like I saw tonight are the kind of people who practice for hours a day and study under virtuosos. Players like that think of little else but their playing. And why didn’t he play at Lucky’s party, I wondered.
    Sonia dropped me at my house. I felt very much like the little sister, sent home so the big kids could play. I had feelings for Fin that I probably shouldn’t have, but so what? Maybe he was just a welcome distraction from the gloom that had descended on me since Lucky died. Maybe I was hungry for that kind of attention. It felt nice for a minute.
    I poked my head into the living room. My mom was curled up on the sofa reading a book. She looked up at me and smiled. My dad dozed in front of the TV. Rocket lifted his head for a second and went immediately back to sleep on the braided rug. Even though everything looked perfectly normal, something about that scene made me feel unbearably sad. There was a hole in my family I could never fix by myself.
    I went to my room and checked my e-mail before I pulled off my clothes. There was a message from Jesse. I clicked it open even though I felt a bit guilty, poking around like this. But I couldn’t get the image of Fin up there onstage out of my head.
    Georgia,
    Of course I remember Fin. He was part of our merry throng. Hell of a nice bloke. You could ask Sonia about him if you’re in touch with her. I think she and Lucky and Fin might have taken a road trip down to Sydney to do some surfing there together. I reckon she could tell you all about it if you asked her.
    Cheers, Jesse
    I stared at my computer screen. So . . . Sonia, Lucky, and Fin had gone on a road trip together? Why hadn’t Sonia mentioned it to me? And hadn’t Sonia told me that they barely knew each other?
    I opened up my laptop and started sifting through all of Lucky’s e-mails again, dragging all the letters that contained an attachment into a folder. The only attachments he ever sent were photos. Once I’d divided them up I started clicking on them, one at a time. Fin’s face started popping up a couple of months after Lucky had arrived in Australia. In the photos he didn’t look much like the Fin from tonight at all. He fit right in with the rest of the surfers. There were lots of photos of him standing on a beach with a bunch of Lucky’s surfer friends. I stopped on one of those and zoomed in. Fin looked disheveled. His chin was sprinkled with beard stubble and his hair was pulled into a hasty ponytail. I zoomed back out. It must have been the end of the day. Everyone had their wetsuits peeled down to their waists and they looked sunburned and spent and each of them held a can of beer. This was the sort of thing I envied most about Lucky, this talent for making friends. Fin stood on the far left