Now You See Her - Michael Ledwidge [2]
It started on spring break, of all things. In the spring of 1992 in Key West, Florida, I guess you could say a foolish girl went wild.
And stayed wild.
That foolish girl was me.
My name was Jeanine.
Book One
THE LAST SUNSET
Chapter 1
MARCH 12, 1992
Party till you drop, man!
Every time I think back to everything that happened, it’s that expression, that silly early-eighties cliché, that first comes to mind.
It was actually the first thing we heard when we arrived in Key West to start the last spring break of our college careers. As we were checking into our hotel, a very hairy and even drunker middle-aged man wearing goggles and an orange Speedo screamed, “Party till you drop, man!” as he ran, soaking wet, through the lobby.
From that hilariously random moment on, for the rest of our vacation it was our mantra, our boast, our dare to one another. My boyfriend at one point seriously suggested we should all get “Party till you drop, man!” tattoos.
Because we thought it was a joke.
It turned out to be a prophecy.
It actually happened.
First we partied.
Then someone dropped.
It happened on the last day. Our last afternoon found us just as the previous afternoons had, giddily hungover, lazily finishing up burgers under one of our hotel beach bar’s umbrellas.
Under the table, my boyfriend Alex’s bare foot was hooked around mine as his finger played with the string of my yellow bikini top. The Cars’ classic song “Touch and Go” was playing softly from the outdoor speakers as we watched an aging biker with a black leather vest and braided gray hair play catch with his dog off the bar’s sun-bleached dock. We laughed every time the collie in the red bandanna head-butted the wet tennis ball before belly flopping into the shallow blue waves.
As the huffing, drenched collie paddled back to shore, a stiff breeze off the water began jingling the bar’s hanging glasses like wind chimes. Listening to the unexpected musical sound, I sighed as a long, steady hit of vacation nirvana swept through me. For a tingling moment, everything—the coolness under the Jägermeister umbrella, the almost pulsating white sand of the beach, the blue-green water of the Gulf—became sharper, brighter, more vivid.
When Alex slipped his hand into mine, all the wonderful memories of how we fell in love freshman year played through my mind. The first nervous eye contact across the cavernous Geology classroom. The first time he haltingly asked me out. The first time we kissed.
As I squeezed his hand back, I thought how lucky we were to have found each other, how good we were together, how bright our future looked.
Then it happened.
The beginning of the end of my life.
Our wiry Australian waitress, Maggie, who was clearing the table, smiled as she raised an eyebrow. Then she casually asked what would turn out to be the most important yes-or-no question of my life.
“You motley mob need anything else?” she said in her terrific Aussie accent.
Alex, who was leaning so far back in his plastic deck chair that he was practically lying down, suddenly sat up with a wide, strangely infectious smile on his face. He was average-sized, slim, dark, almost delicate, so you wouldn’t guess that he was the place kicker for the nationally ranked University of Florida Gators football team.
I sat up myself when I realized that he was sporting the same slightly touched, let’s-get-fired-up smile that he wore before he took the field in front of seventy thousand people to drill a fifty-yarder.
Or to get us into a bar fight.
Our vacation had been everything the travel brochure headline—“Five Days, Four Nights in Key West!”—had promised. No school. No rules. Nothing but me and my friends, the beach, cold beer, Coppertone, loud music, and louder laughs. We’d all even managed to stay in one piece over the previous, hard-partying four days.
Uh-oh. What now? I thought.
Alex looked around the table at the four of us slowly, one by one, before he threw