Weston thinks it a bummer that his mother has landed a job in Baker, a washed-out miner’s town that somehow appears to be in worse shape than the one he was born (and figured would one day die) in. That is until he meets Selena during PA on his second week in Baker, a scrawny girl who’s two years his junior and who can talk faster than an auctioneer on caffeine. Who manages to insult and befriend a person in the same breath.
Weston and Selena become fast friends, on-and-off friends, blur-the-line / talk-till-2-a.m. friends the very year Selena’s mother declares at a parent-teacher meeting, apropos of nothing, that because she fears her daughter is not “the straightest duck in the pond” the teachers should keep an eye on her. In the following months, Selena makes it her mission to prove her mother wrong: she kisses and makes out with boys in public, an obsolete amount of them—everyone except Weston. Over time it becomes the one unspoken rule between them: everyone is fair game except each other.
Weston is convinced he and Selena will remain friends forever. By which he means he’ll forever be friend-zoned. Still, years later, when they each return home for the holidays, he agrees to meet up with her at the burger joint down by the beach and reminisce about “the good old days.” They have conflicting accounts of certain memories, but Weston doesn’t mind. They spend the night telling each other some well-covered lies and half-baked truths. Though Weston lives with two older boys in Princeton, he makes it out as if he’s living together with a couple of hot girls; Selena salutes a drink to her mother who has recently passed away. She says she still stays at her mother’s house every time she comes back home, screaming at bare walls to “even the score after all these years.” Weston accompanies her home to witness her fury firsthand.
When Weston visits town for the last time, Selena phones him shortly after midnight to tell him that she misses him. Her voice is slurred yet steady, like she’s at once slightly intoxicated and painfully sober. She says it’s been three years today since her mother passed away, and three days since she herself went to the hospital for the same breast that had taken her mother. Weston drives over to hug her, hold her, and then suggests they take a walk together. The whole time they are down the beach, his hands are tucked in his jacket pockets to hide the trembling. He never dares ask what the doctor actually told her, and she never volunteers the details.
These days, Weston tells whoever cares to listen that he imagines Selena living in a cabin in the woods all by herself, befriending raccoons and scaring off hikers with her stories. Maybe she’s running a cult somewhere uptown or just picking fights with strangers about politics for fun. Either way, she’s far from Baker for sure, far from all this madness, buzzing like a queen bee in exile. She didn’t just go and choose to fade into nothing.
