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Once the dam has been broken, the awkward pleasantries squared away, and the metaphorical elephants in Julie’s very real dining room slaughtered and stuffed, it becomes entirely too easy to see where Trevor Wilson once fit into Sunset Curve.
It’s not the same, obviously. He is now a forty-two-year-old man joshing around with his high school buddies who are both seventeen and dead. The movements they would have made to toss an arm around Bobby’s shoulder or drag him into a hug go aborted and unfinished now that he’s taller and broader than he used to be. The looks they give him—of exasperation at themselves, each other, or the world at large—go unshared, or met with wide-eyed blankness, because where they’ve had practice exchanging conspiratorial looks with Bobby in only the last year or so, Trevor hasn’t exchanged any with them in two and a half decades.
It’s obvious to Julie—to anyone who might have the misfortune of watching Trevor, Luke, Alex, and Reggie attempt to have a conversation over Julie’s dad’s dairy-free lasagna—where the cracks still lie, where twenty-five years and a whole lot of hurt have taken part of who they were as a group and thrown it away.
But Julie can see, more subtle though it might be, where the pieces fit together still, too. She can see how they used to be friends.
“So!” Luke says partway through dinner, leg visibly bouncing beneath the table. “Trevor.”
He gives him this look—quintessential Luke—like he needs Trevor to know he’s using his name as an insult, but instead of shying away, Trevor meets it head-on with a piercing look of his own—flat, unimpressed, one eyebrow raised just enough to draw attention.
It must be a quintessential Bobby look, because all three ghosts’ jaws drop, and Luke mutters something half-intelligible about forgetting what he was gonna say.
Later, Julie’s dad asks who wants dessert, and Alex deadpans, “Don’t let Bobby have any. Reggie’s only got one pair of pants.”
Dad goes still, and Julie watches Trevor with the same hesitation. He’s touchy around food as it is—for obvious reasons, though Julie still finds it a little funny that the boys who actually died from bad food have never once appeared to share the same reservations—and it must be weird to hear the ghosts of his bandmates call him by his old name.
But instead of getting upset, Trevor snorts and puts a hand over his face, shoulders shaking. Alex’s subtle smile turns a little more self-satisfied as Reggie enthusiastically launches into a story about his Bar Mitzvah suit and a poorly-placed tray of cream puffs.
When they’re cleaning up from dinner, Dad and Trevor end up at the sink together, elbow to elbow as Dad washes dishes and Trevor dries. Julie pauses in wiping down the table to watch them over the kitchen island for a moment. Dad says something low and Trevor laughs, leaning into his side and back again. They look happy.
“I hear wedding bells,” Reggie teases, appearing next to her.
After all this time, she doesn’t jump. She could feel him coming even before he poofed. Still, she says, “I thought you guys were cleaning up the studio.”
“We are,” Reggie says. “Well, Luke and Alex are. I’m apparently ‘too much of a distraction’ and ‘too likely to break things’ so they told me to see if I could help in here.”
Julie laughs softly, reaching up to ruffle Reggie’s hair. “Well, I appreciate the offer, but I think we’ve got it handled.” She nods toward the kitchen, and only then fully registers what Reggie said when he came in. “Wait, did you say wedding bells?”
Reggie grins. “Oh, yeah. It might have been twenty-five years, Julie, but I still know Bobby. And that—” He points just as Trevor snaps a dishtowel at her dad’s butt— “is Bobby with a crush.”
“Oh my god,” Julie whispers. She turns around. She doesn’t want to see that. She doesn’t even want to think about it.
God, but the way Reggie just knew. It’s not just a best friend thing—Julie doesn’t think she’d be able to pick up on flirty Flynn that quickly, not if they hadn’t seen each other in a while.
It’s like Sunset Curve speaks its own language, one of looks and inside jokes and old stories and knowing each other more deeply than they know themselves. Julie doesn’t think she could learn it all if she tried.
But she thinks she’d like to.