I Was Already Gone novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Table for Three
Elliott walks into Laney's birthday dinner with two concert tickets and finds forty guests, phones up, and Laney and Brecken announcing they're together.
At eight o'clock on Laney's twenty-first birthday, forty people in the back room of Fenwick's stood up and clapped, and I was the only one holding a gift.
Brecken had texted me at noon.
"Relax, buddy. It's just the three of us tonight. Nothing is going to change, I swear."
He had never needed to swear to me before.
I read it again in the doorway, with two tickets in my coat pocket and a photo strip in my hand.
Then I saw the banner.
HAPPY 21ST LANEY, in gold letters, over a long table of people I barely knew.
Half of them were holding up phones.
Laney stood at the head of the table in a green dress, laughing, and Brecken stood behind her with one hand flat on her back.
He held her the way you hold something that is already yours.
"There he is!" Laney said. "Elliott, come here. Everybody, this is him, be nice."
I walked down the whole length of the room while they watched me.
Every year I write Laney a birthday card, and every year Brecken carries it in to her, because when she looks straight at me I forget how to hand over paper.
This year I wanted to give her something myself.
I had bought two tickets to The Lanterns, the band she had played through her bedroom wall since we were ten.
The photo strip was meant to go with them.
It was from the arcade booth the weekend we graduated high school, the three of us squashed together, Brecken pulling a face, Laney looking at the camera, and me looking at her.
Brecken hugged me hard and slapped my back.
Then he tapped his glass with a fork.
"Since the whole crew is here," he said.
The room went quiet, and the phones rose higher.
"Laney and I are together. Since August."
Everyone cheered.
Laney held up both hands and grinned. "Surprise!"
I stood there with my coat still on.
"We wanted to tell you in person," she said. "Then Brecken said you'd go silent for a week, so we made it a party."
Behind me a girl whispered, "Is that him? Is that the slow one?"
A guy by the wall, one of Brecken's friends, kept his phone pointed right at my face.
"Dude, say something," he said. "Look at him. He's buffering."
People laughed.
I opened my mouth, and the words came the way they always do, about ten seconds after the room has moved on.
"August," I said. "That's four months. Everybody here knew."
"Only the close people," Brecken said. "You know how you get."
Laney tilted her head at me.
"Elliott, you never said anything. Not once, in all these years. What was I supposed to do, wait for you?"
She said it gently.
I couldn't answer her, because she was right that I had never said it.
"You're not mad, right?" Brecken asked, and he grinned at the room. "It's not like you were ever going to do anything about it."
The whole table laughed.
Laney laughed too.
It wasn't a big laugh, but I heard it.
I took the tickets out of my pocket and laid them next to her plate.
"Happy birthday," I said. "Take whoever you want."
She picked them up and read them, and her whole face lit.
"The Lanterns! Oh, that's so sweet, Elliott." She glanced at Brecken. "Though Brecken already got us tickets for March."
Brecken smiled at me over her shoulder, and his phone friend zoomed in.
I looked down at the photo strip in my hand.
Three kids in a booth, and one of them was already looking at the wrong person.
I put the strip back in my pocket.
So I stepped out.
I didn't slam the door, and nobody followed me.
The cold hit my face on the sidewalk, and my phone buzzed in my hand.
It was Brecken's account, a post from earlier that evening.
"Watch my best friend find out in 20 minutes. Bet he takes a full minute to get it."
It had been posted at 7:41, seventeen minutes before I walked in.
Under it, a live badge was still counting.
Thirty-one thousand strangers had been watching Fenwick's back room, and the newest comment had been typed ten seconds ago.
"He actually left. Poor guy."
Brecken had told them all what time to tune in to watch my face.
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