Alexis throws a big party and everyone’s invited. She lives a half-hour drive from her childhood home, the one with the big bay window and the basement where we had sleepovers every other weekend for most of high school. 

I imagine she’s done well for herself. Her new townhome is in the affluent suburb that kids in our marginally less affluent suburb used to mock. Her Instagram is all pictures of her rescue corgi. Her Facebook is all tagged photos of her at friends’ weddings and thirtieth birthdays, but she’s not thinking about any of them right now. Tonight, she’s fifteen again, and she’s worried I won’t show.

It’s a cool summer evening in Minnesota. From the street I can see the glow of the string lights crisscrossing her treeless backyard. Citronella wafts through the air. I imagine there are two coolers on the concrete patio. The one on the right is stocked with beer and sparkling water. The one on the left is full of Monster Energy Drinks, the Zero Ultra flavor we were obsessed with in tenth grade. Alexis used to buy them two-for-three on her way to our 7 a.m. social studies class. She’s wearing a bracelet made from the can tabs we saved.

Teo’s the first guest to arrive. He pedals down the sidewalk on his childhood mountain bike. I crouch in my car when he passes by. Alexis notices the Jersey in his accent. She asks him, as she will ask everyone, how he knows me. 

He says we met Thanksgiving weekend twenty-five years ago, oh, maybe twenty-two. I was in town visiting my cousins. We were playing basketball in the driveway when he rode up and asked if we wanted to play Nintendo. I loved Nintendo and I hated my cousins, but they were older than me, and they hated Teo. They said he was weird, and when I asked why, they said I was weird too. I’d heard this before. I thought if I could make them like me then it wouldn’t be true.

Michaela comes in as Teo’s finishing his story. She carries her sharpie-covered JanSport on one shoulder, all cool and casual. She shrugs it off to dig for the mix CD she burned for the evening. 

Michaela and I—we shared a cabin at summer camp. We bonded over emo music and the art of tie-dye. We exchanged numbers. She called my house twice that August. I let the phone ring as I tried and failed to conjure a voice full of carefree enthusiasm, the self I could be away from myself. She couldn’t know that the real me was awkward and uncertain, that camp-me was a façade. This was years before I knew to call it fear, not fraud. Michaela left a couple of voicemails. She shrugs like, what are you gonna do?

Alexis nods. That is so like me.

The fashionably late arrive in clusters. Coworkers from my first full-time job sit on the kitchen counter sipping PBRs. Some of my sisters’ friends make friends with my brothers’ friends and share the wisdom I was too awkward to ask for: how to print in pretty bubble letters; how to tell when someone like-likes you, how to tell when someone likes you at all. 

The nice busboy from my short-lived waitressing career is using chunks of cheese to teach Alexis’ corgi to sit. He tells her about the time I got awful hives from the wool scarf I wore to work. He brought Benadryl, just in case. He asks if I RVSPed. Alexis lies and says I texted her to say I’m running late. She doesn’t want people to give up on me just yet.

The biochem TA offers charcuterie to the cute librarian who works the closing shift. The rec league volleyball team I quit after two practices arrives in two consecutive carpools. They dance ironically, and then, a few drinks in, it’s not ironic anymore.

And then they hear it: the drumline’s cadence, the drum major’s whistle. The crowd flows into the front yard to see my high school marching band chair-stepping up the street. Their teenage bodies carry the muscle memory of these instruments, and some of them are really, really good. Someone jumps on the upright piano and leads the living room in a singalong of “Don’t Stop Believing.” The party is in full swing. All that’s missing is me.

I’m still outside, sure I’m about to go home but not ready to admit it yet. I’ll wait in my car five more minutes, and then I’ll go in. I’ll walk through the front door and everyone will cheer, like I’m a fan favorite in a sitcom. There’ll be a big sheet cake decorated with loopy icing in the shape of my name. Everyone will want to know what I’ve been up to, how I’ve been. No one will be mad at me for not calling or texting them back.

I have a minute left when Alexis steps into the front yard, carrying a corner slice of cake on a paper plate. I watch over the steering wheel as she tiptoes between the instruments scattered on the grass. She finds a clear spot to sit cross-legged with the plate in her lap. She looks down the street, down the way I came, and waits for me.

We had every one of our sleepovers at her place, every other weekend for about three years. Then one day, we didn’t. A month went by, and then another. Growing up I often felt, sometimes I still feel, there had been a lesson in kindergarten about how to be a person in the world on a day that I, and only I, had missed. I had wanted to invite Alexis over and return the favor. For a long time, I didn’t know how.

Now everyone inside is getting to know each other and having a good time. Alexis should be inside having a good time. Someone should ask her how she knows me. She was kind enough to host, after all.

I shut the car door behind me. Alexis’ ponytail whips around at the sound. She waves me over and says she’s so glad I’m here, even if the part of the party that was for me is over. The cake has been cut; the end time on the invitation has come and gone. The music is louder than ever. Colored lights flash in the windows. That party, she says, has taken on a life of its own.

She doesn’t ask me to go inside. We sit in the grass and split the slice, taking turns taking bites. The can tab bracelet shushes softly on her wrist. It’s just how I remember it—two of the tabs face the wrong way, their silver underbellies exposed. We watch as guests slowly trickle home in new configurations of designated drivers and rideshares. For each one she says, look. They came here for you. Isn’t that nice? Everyone together, here tonight, and it’s all because of you.

Mackenzie McGee is a winner of the 2021 Pen/Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Her fiction can be found in Nat. Brut, Alaska Quarterly Review, Cease, Cows, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA from the University of Arkansas, and she’s currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Kansas.