LISA

Idiot. I was an idiot.

I shouldn’t be out here, for one. Out here in the country where there were no lights but my headlights playing off of the cornfields and the moon shining down from above.

I didn’t even know for sure where Donghyuk lived. All I knew was he was out here somewhere. His parties were out here somewhere.

I was about to give up and go home. That was the smart thing to do. That would be the right thing to do.

I had no right to be out here in the middle of nowhere looking for Jennie. She’d made it clear earlier she didn’t want anything to do with me.

I mean sure maybe that wasn’t entirely fair. So she’d made plans, but those plans broke a longstanding date we had going on every Friday for as far back as I could remember. And the reason she broke those plans was because she didn’t want to talk to me.

Yeah, that was pretty close to not wanting me around. My grip tightened on the steering wheel as I thought of everything that led to this moment.

And there was something else there as well. Worry. She was going out to a party at Donghyuk’s house. Everyone knew what happened at parties out at Donghyuk’s house.

What if she found someone and decided she wasn’t into me anymore? What if she got with a guy and decided that’s what she really wanted? That what she’d done with me was just an experiment she could tell guys about to turn them on when she got to college?

Damn it. Why did I have to be hit with so much anxiety over this? Why did love have to be so complicated?

Another sigh. Another turn down a country road that would probably go nowhere. All I knew was he lived in a big house somewhere west of town. Everyone knew that.

So I’d been driving up and down the roads aimlessly. It was a small county and the roads were set out in a grid. I figured it wouldn’t take me that much time to drive back and forth.

Yeah, okay, so maybe that was a little stalkerish. Maybe it was a lot stalkerish. Maybe I should’ve just called her and figured out where she was and tried to wrangle an invite, but I wasn’t exactly in my right mind.

And this ing county turned out to be a lot bigger than I thought. Sure it might seem like a small place looking at the map on my phone, but that was before I went up and down every road. Turns out that was a lot of ground to cover.

I stopped. Pulled off to the side of the road. Rested my head against the steering wheel. I was tempted to slam my head against the steering wheel, but that would hurt and it would leave a mark and that would cause all sorts of questions I wasn’t in the mood to answer right about now.

“What’s wrong with you Lisa?” I asked no one in particular. “You need to get this together. She’s not interested in you like that. She’s made that obvious.”

Only she hadn’t made it all that obvious. There was a week of not talking, but there was also the kiss earlier under the bleachers. She was blowing hot and cold and it drove me wild.

Not always in a good way.

“ it. I’m going home,” I muttered. “This is crazy even by the standards of crazy.”

I put the car back into drive and pulled onto the road again. It was just me and rows of corn on either side which didn’t make it all that easy to see things off in the distance. Just me, the stars and the moon above, and a glow off in the distance.

Wait.

A glow. There shouldn’t be anything glowing out here. There wasn’t another town for at least another half hour of driving, and that was a faint indistinct pink haze reflecting off the upper atmosphere off in the distance.

I could stand out in the countryside and pick out every town by those pink hazes.

This wasn’t one of those distant pink glows.

The despair and guilt that had been eating away at me changed to something else. Hope. And a little bit of worry.

Could that be it? What I’d been looking for? It was sure as hell too much light to be someone out here working on an illegal meth lab, that was for damn sure.

That could be a real worry out here these days. There were times when it seemed like meth had become this county’s principle export when the factory jobs dried up.

I kept driving in that direction. Told myself I was just checking things out and then I’d turn around and go home as soon as it turned out that glow wasn’t what I was looking for.

The only problem? Turns out that glow was exactly what I was looking for.

I saw the cars first. Actually I nearly ran into one parked on the side of the road. One moment there was nothing but road and darkness ahead of me and the next there was a tiny flash off of some brake lights that were the only warning there were cars parked ahead.

They formed a tunnel that would barely give me enough room to maneuver between the cars on either side.

I rolled down my window and listened. There was still corn as far as the eye could see, but that glow rose over the corn and I could hear the distinct sound of music and people laughing and having a good time now that I was closer.

Goose bumps rose across my skin and I felt a tingle running through me from the tip of my scalp