The Birthday Trip Where Only I Came Back

I turned twenty-four on a Friday, and I spent the morning of it alone. Not truly alone. My boyfriend, Danny, was three feet away from me in our kitchen, cracking eggs into a bowl while he hummed something off-key. My best friend since seventh grade, Marisol, had already sent me a text at six in the morning that said Happy birthday, love you, details soon. And my other oldest friend, Teo, had left a voicemail that I listened to twice because his voice sounded strange, like he was reading a script. "Big surprise this weekend," he'd said. "Don't ask questions. Pack warm." I stood at the counter with my coffee going cold in my hands and watched Danny's back while he pretended not to notice me watching him. We had been together for two years. I knew the shape of his shoulders when he was hiding something, and that morning his shoulders were up near his ears. "Where are we going?" I asked. "You'll see." He didn't turn around. "It's a surprise." "All four of us together? That's new." "It's your birthday. We wanted to do something big." Danny and I lived in a two-bedroom apartment in a coastal town called Fallbrook, the kind of place where the fog rolls in at four in the afternoon and everyone complains about it and nobody leaves. He worked in sales for a medical software company. I worked in the records department of a hospital, eight hours a day of scanning and filing and answering calls from patients who were furious about bills they didn't understand. It wasn't glamorous, but it was steady, and I had been saving for a trip to Portugal for a year. The Portugal money was what paid for the van rental. I found out about that later. Marisol picked us up at noon. She drove a dented gray minivan that used to belong to her mother, and she pulled up with Teo riding shotgun and a woman I had never seen before sitting in the back, in the seat directly behind Danny's usual spot. "Happy birthday!" Marisol shouted through the open window. She had her sunglasses pushed up on her head and a smile that looked almost real. "Get in, we're losing daylight." I stood on the sidewalk with my duffel bag in one hand and looked at the stranger in the back seat. She was younger than me, maybe twenty-one, with long dark hair and a cropped denim jacket and a small silver ring in her nose. She gave me a little wave that felt more like an apology than a greeting. "Who's this?" I asked. Danny came up behind me and took my bag. "That's Sena. Teo's cousin. She needed a ride out of the city for the weekend, so we said she could come." "Teo's cousin," I repeated. "On my dad's side," Teo said, and he still sounded like he was reading a script. "She's going through some stuff. It's no big deal." I had known Teo since we were twelve years old, back when he still went by his full name and wore his hair in a bowl cut and got into fights with anyone who called him short. I knew he had a cousin named Renata who lived in Sacramento and a cousin named Paul who sold insurance. I had never heard of Sena. But it was my birthday. I wanted to believe the best. So I got in the van and sat in the middle row next to Danny and let the city slide past the window while Marisol drove north toward the mountains. The van had five seats. Five seats for five people. I did the math in my head and it was unremarkable, exactly the kind of thing that would make sense if everything else made sense. We drove for three hours. The highway wound up through pine forest and past signs for towns I had only ever seen on maps, names like Cedar Hollow and Cold Springs and Grand River Pass. Sena fell asleep in the back seat with her jacket balled up against the window. Marisol played a playlist that was supposed to be nostalgic, songs from high school that I had once loved, and every time one came on she turned the volume up and looked at me in the rearview mirror with an intensity that felt off, like she was waiting for me to cry. "What's the surprise?" I asked Danny again. "Tonight," he said. "I promise." He held my hand. His palm was sweaty and he kept his thumb moving in little circles over my knuckles, the way he did when he was nervous about a sales call. I told myself the surprise was just a party. Maybe they'd rented a cabin and invited everyone I knew, and the woman in the back was a friend of a friend, and I was being paranoid. The lodge sat at the end of a gravel road, six bedrooms and a stone fireplace and a wall of windows facing the peak. Marisol had booked it under her name. She told me that while she was carrying my bag up the steps, and she mentioned the price, and then she mentioned that we would all be splitting it. I stopped on the second step. "I thought this was a birthday surprise." "It's still a surprise," she said. "You just pay for part of it." I had eight hundred dollars in my Portugal fund. I gave six hundred that night, before dinner, before the news. I handed it to Marisol in the kitchen while the others unpacked, and she folded the bills and put them in her wallet without counting them, and I told myself it was fine. Dinner was chili from a can heated in a pot, and bread from a bakery they'd stopped at in Cedar Hollow. We ate at a long wooden table and Sena passed me the butter and said, "Thanks for letting me crash. I know it's weird." "It's not weird," I said, and I meant it for maybe another hour. Then Teo cleared his throat and stood up with a bottle of wine in his hand, and he said the toast. It lasted almost ninety seconds. He talked about how we'd been friends since middle school, about the summers we spent at the pool and the night we got lost in the city and had to walk five miles home, about Marisol and how she'd always been the glue, about me, briefly, and about Danny, at length. Then he raised his glass and said, "To new chapters." Everybody drank. I drank too, because I didn't know yet what the chapter was, and because it would be another three hours before I figured out that the toast wasn't for me.