Page 77 of Songs of Summer

“What comes next?”Seyfried asks.

“Good question!” Jason joked.

Maggie didn’t find it funny. She instructed him to wait in the back as she navigated her way through the crowd, carefully avoiding blankets and limbs. From that point in the movie, she knew she had less than a minute until the crowd would burst into song.Mamma Mia!came out her senior year of high school and she couldn’t count the times she’d seen it. She had played the soundtrack in the shop so often after school that her father forbade her doing so ever again.

She found Matt up front, asleep next to Dylan. People were waving their hands at her, and she looked down to see the film playing across her chest.

“Ugh,” she mumbled as she scrunched down onto their blanket.

“He’s sleeping,” Dylan said, stating the obvious.

“I don’t care.”

She shook his shoulder, and he opened his eyes. She didn’t wait for him to get his bearings.

“Why didn’t you tell me that the bartender was my father?”

The crowd united in song.

Gimme, gimme, gimme a man after midnight.

Won’t somebody help me chase the shadows away?

“Not here,” Matt managed, above the Greek chorus.

The three of them slithered through the crowd, picking up Jason on the way out. No one spoke till they got to Matt’s house.

As soon as they were safely inside his bedroom, Maggie repeated the question.

“Why didn’t you tell me that the bartender was my father?”

“Because you were already soured on Beatrix. If I told you that the bartender was your father, I worried you would have been on the first ferry out. Plus, I was following your lead. You were looking for your mother.”

“Her mother?” Dylan asked.

They both shushed her. She took a step back. Jason whispered in her ear, “Beatrix is Maggie’s birth mother.”

“Oh my God!” Dylan said, before repeating it again in a tempered volume. “Oh my God.”

“You told me to trust you and you lied to me,” Maggie continued.

“I didn’t lie. You read that chapter in the book and didn’t say a thing. I wasn’t about to force him on you.”

Now Jason looked confused. Dylan grabbed the copy ofOn Fire Islandfrom Matt’s shelf, tapped on the cover, and handed it to him.

“C’mon, Maggie. You didn’t ask me one question about him,” Matt continued.

“What question should I have asked?”

“The obvious one—do you know who my father is?”

“OK, Matt. I didn’t know you needed so much direction. Do you know who my father is?”

“Yes.”

“Then who?!”

“Chase Logan. The lifeguard turned bartender at the Salty Pelican—ergo why I was worried he would hit on you.”

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