Chapter One: The Birthday Anchor

Every single birthday of my life, for as long as I could remember, my parents threw a party in our backyard. Not a party in the depressing balloon-arch-and-Costco-cake way — an actual party, string lights zigzagging between the oak trees, a folding table doing its best impression of an open bar, half the neighborhood showing up in real outfits because they knew better than to underdress a Vance function.

And every single year, at some point in the night, my mom would grab my hand out of whatever conversation I was mid-sentence in, drag me to the middle of the yard, and "September" by Earth, Wind & Fire would come blasting out of the speakers, because it had been our song since I was seven years old and neither of us had the authority to retire it since. She'd spin me out, pull me back in, sing every word directly into my face off-key on purpose, and my dad would stand by the grill filming it on a phone he still hadn't figured out how to hold horizontally.

It was, hands down, the most consistent tradition in my entire nineteen years on this earth. Malachi Vance's brisket. My mother's off-key singing. Me, laughing so hard I usually ruined at least one good photo.

This year, though, the party wasn't happening in the backyard. It was happening in our kitchen, at nine at night, because I was leaving for Ashcroft University in about fourteen hours and apparently my mother had decided a birthday dinner was a fair trade for the fact that her only child was about to live four hours away for the first time ever.

"I still don't understand why we couldn't do the real party," I said, watching her set an unlit cake down in front of me, nineteen candles standing at attention like they were waiting for permission.

"Baby, half the yard is packed in boxes in the garage right now. You want me to do the electric slide around your suitcases?"

"I mean. Kind of."

My dad, from the counter, phone already up: "She's not wrong, Commitment is admirable."

"Nobody's blowing anything out yet," my mom said, swatting his hand down. "We're waiting."

"Waiting for what?"

"You'll see."

I didn't have to wait long. The doorbell rang three times fast, then twice slow, then three times fast again — a code so specific and so stupid that only one person on planet Earth still used it.

"That better not be—"

It was.

Talia Hayes was standing on my porch with a duffel bag over one shoulder and a speaker already blasting from her phone before I'd even gotten the door fully open.

"HAPPY BIRTHDAY, YOU ANCIENT WOMAN," she screamed, loud enough that Mrs. Densis's porch light flicked on next door in immediate judgment.

"You said tomorrow!"

"I lied. Obviously. You really thought I'd let your mother blow out candles without me? Move."

She swept past me into the house the way she always did, like the front door existed purely for her convenience. Talia had this effect on rooms — she was petite, barely clearing five-foot-four next to my five-nine, but she took up space like she'd been built at scale for someone much taller. Her hair was that perfect kind of light brown that never seemed to frizz or misbehave, currently pulled back in a headband studded with tiny rhinestones that had no business looking as expensive as they did. Her eyes were wide and pale brown, doll-like in a way that made every teacher we'd ever had trust her instantly and made every boy we'd ever known underestimate her completely. She had on a cropped emerald-green blazer over a slip dress, gold hoops the size of bangles, and the kind of confident, don't-test-me smirk that told you exactly how much thought had gone into an outfit she'd claim she "just threw on."

She was sweet. She was also, unmistakably, a little bit terrifying, and I loved her more than almost anyone on earth for both reasons equally.

"Okay, okay, cake, now, immediately," she said, already pulling out a chair. "I did not drive fifteen minutes with a bag full of my entire life to miss the candles."

My mom laughed and finally lit the nineteen candles, the whole kitchen glowing gold for a second, and then — because apparently we weren't skipping tradition just because the yard was in boxes — she grabbed the phone off the counter, hit play, and "September" came blasting out tinny and bright, and she pulled me straight up out of my chair mid-blow.

"Mom, I didn't even make my wish—"

"You'll wish while you dance. Efficient."

So I did both at once, laughing too hard to actually focus on wishing for anything specific, spinning under my mother's arm in a kitchen that smelled like rosemary chicken and burnt candle wax, my dad narrating like a sports commentator, Talia standing on a chair filming the whole thing and shouting encouragement like she was courtside at a championship game. For the length of one song, I forgot that tomorrow I was leaving the only house I'd ever lived in, in the only town I'd ever known, to go be a completely different version of myself somewhere I'd never set foot.

Brookhaven does that to you, though. It's small enough that everybody's mother knows everybody's business, but big enough that you can still convince yourself you're mysterious. I'd spent nineteen years there being decidedly not mysterious — prom queen sophomore year on a technicality nobody ever let me forget, two boyfriends across four years of high school with two breakups dramatic enough that people still brought them up unprompted, the girl who could not, under any circumstances, sit quietly at a party when there was a speaker within a hundred feet of her. I was starting a psychology degree at Ashcroft mostly because I'd spent my whole life being the friend everyone cried to at two in the morning, and figured I might as well get a diploma out of it.

We ended up on my bedroom floor the way we always did, surrounded by suitcases instead of homework this time, because tomorrow at eleven a.m. I was officially leaving Brookhaven for good — four hours north, to a campus we'd both spent an embarrassing number of hours obsessing over online before either of us ever got accepted.

"Okay, final check," Talia said, holding up her phone like a clipboard, already kicked back against my headboard like she paid rent there. "Fairy lights?"

"Packed."

"The corkboard?"

"Packed. Still says OUR PEOPLE and nothing else, by the way, you never actually pinned anything to it."

"That's because I'm saving it. We haven't met our people yet. You can't pin strangers, Kelsey, that's how you jinx it." She flopped backward dramatically onto my stripped mattress. "We're gonna have so many people on that board. Like, an unreasonable amount. People are going to beg to be our friends. And if they don't, I'll simply make it a problem for them."

"You say that like it's already decided."

"It is already decided. I decided it in the eighth grade. You just weren't consulted." She said it without even opening her eyes, which was the most Talia sentence structure that existed — sweet delivery, zero negotiation underneath.

I laughed so hard I knocked over an entire box of shoes, and we spent the next twenty minutes picking them up in the half-dark because neither of us wanted to turn the overhead light back on, like the whole night might crack if we moved too fast.

Somewhere around midnight, my mom knocked once and cracked the door open, silhouetted in the hallway light, looking at the two of us surrounded by suitcases and shoeboxes and one very sad, half-eaten cupcake.

"You girls are going to be fine," she said. Not a question. Not really even to anyone in particular. Just something she needed to say out loud.

"Obviously," Talia mumbled, already half asleep.

My mom looked at me a beat longer than that. "Nineteen's going to be a good year, Kels. I can feel it."

I believed her completely. Why wouldn't I? She had never once been wrong about anything that mattered.

Tonight I just closed my eyes, listened to Talia's breathing even out on the mattress beside me, and let myself feel exactly as lucky as I was.

Nineteen was going to be the best year of my life.