Sean retreated in horror. “Wait a minute. You’re only with me because this other guy dumped you?”
“He did not dump me,” Summer said, offended.
“You, Summer Smith, are with me, Sean Valletti, because some other guy might dump you? Like I’m some kind of…of…” He was so outraged he couldn’t speak. “Who is this guy? Are you telling me he’s better-looking than me? Are you trying to tell me he kisses better than me? Who do you think you are?”
Summer leaned against a lamppost and considered going to sleep.
“Oh, man,” Sean raved. “I told my sister I was going with you. She’s probably told everyone by now. Okay, look, let me just make one thing clear here. I’m dumping you. All right? Listen to me! I am officially dumping you, so don’t even think about telling anyone that you blew me off, because that would be a total lie.”
“What?” Summer said.
“That does it. You are on your own,” Sean said. He turned on his heel and disappeared back in the direction of town.
Summer used the lamppost to lever herself to her feet. Where was she? Not far from downtown. Maybe she could go and sleep in the restaurant. Home was way, way too far.
Then she saw a house she recognized. Just half a block down the street. She could make it that far.
Marquez paced a circle, staring all the while at the floor of her room, the area in front of the counter. Yes, it was time to start it. It would be a totally new challenge. She would have to paint it from the center out, otherwise she’d leave footprints, and that would ruin everything.
She could see the picture in her mind, the way it would grow over time, till it met up with the walls and everything came together as one vast mural.
She heard the pounding on her window, insistent, persistent. It had been going on for a while, she knew, maybe as long as half an hour, maybe more. But she wasn’t going to react. She’d removed the extra key from its hiding place.
The floor would be an aerial scene. First the Bacchanal as if you were looking at it from above, all those dancing, gyrating, partying bodies. She’d paint that first, then over that paint a framework, and it would look as if you were walking on a glass floor, looking down through it at the town. Perspective, that would be the challenge.
The pounding at the window continued, varying in rhythm, each shift distracting her just a little.
“What?” she suddenly yelled. She stomped to the door and threw it open. “What? What? What?”
J.T. smiled, as if he had not been standing there pounding till his knuckles were raw. “Oh, hi, Marquez,” he said. “Can I come in?” He stepped past her without waiting for an answer. He noted the paints lined up ready on the counter, and noted the fact that she had cleared everything off a large part of the floor.
“What do you want?” Marquez demanded.
“I just came by to see you,” he said.
“Well, I’m busy.”
“Doing the floor, huh? Good. It’s about time. I knew you’d be painting,” he said smugly.
Marquez calmed herself enough to talk reasonably. “J.T., look, I’m sorry I ran out on you and Summer. Okay? Now can you just leave?”
“Yeah, I knew you’d be painting,” he said. “You always do when you get upset. Or when you’re hurt. Or even when someone you love is hurting.”
“Don’t psychoanalyze me, J.T. You’re the one with the messed-up head.”
“True, true,” he said equably. “Although I’m feeling a lot clearer now. How about you?”
“I’m fine. Thanks for asking. I’ll see you at work tomorrow. Afterward I’ll do whatever you want. Just go away now.”
“I love you, Marquez,” he said.
This tack unsettled her a little. “I know. You said that the other night.”
“And you love me,” he said.
“Okay, so everything is happy happy, joy joy,” Marquez said. “I love you. Now go away.”
Instead he sat on the edge of her bed. “It wasn’t what any of us thought,” he began. “I was right about my parents not being my parents. About not having a birth certificate around anywhere, just a baptismal paper from when I was two.”
Marquez fretted impatiently. She really wanted to be painting now. And J.T. was just distracting her.
“But all the reasons I’d worked out were wrong,” he said. “I’m not Jonathan. I’m not some little kid who was kidnapped.”
To Marquez’s surprise, he started to leave.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“Why do you care?” he said coyly.
“Look, just tell me the stupid story. You started it, now finish it.”
“I don’t know, Marquez,” he said dryly. “It’s got all these emotional parts, people getting hurt, people with problems. Like me. Complications. You wouldn’t want to have to feel any of that, would you?”
“Fine, then go,” she said. “No, wait. Listen to me, J.T., you think you have me all figured out, but you’re wrong. I have a right to decide stuff for myself. I have a right to stay away from people who are going to drag me down, because I don’t want to be dragged down. Go talk to Diana—she gets off on being depressed. I don’t. I’m not an emotional person. What is that, a crime?”
J.T. just laughed. “You’re not an emotional person? Marquez, you are so pathetic. You’re the most emotional person I know. You feel everything, that’s your problem. You feel and then you can’t stand it, so you run away. You run away and put it all up there, on the wall. You didn’t run away from my parents’ house today because you’re some coldhearted, unfeeling person. A person like that wouldn’t have minded a little family tragedy. That’s why I wasn’t mad at you. That’s why I knew you’d be here, trying to get it all out of your head and your heart and putting it on the walls, where it would be safe.”
“Oh, yeah?” Marquez said, unable to think up any better comeback.
“Yeah.”
“That’s a bunch of crap,” Marquez said without conviction. She sat down on the bed, and J.T. moved beside her.
“You’re right,” J.T. said kindly. “Just a bunch of crap. But don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone that underneath it all you’re a warm, sweet, generous person who really cares about her friends.”
Marquez shuddered. “You’re making me sick.”
J.T. kissed her hand. “You want to hear the rest?”
Marquez sighed dramatically. “Like I have a choice?”
“It was my dad’s sister. She was my mother.”
“Excuse me?”
“She got pregnant—no one is exactly sure who the father was, or is. Anyway, my dad’s sister got pregnant. But when I was being born, there were problems. She died in childbirth.” J.T. shook his head in wonder. “She died because of childbirth. My folks didn’t want me growing up with that kind of burden. I knew my dad had a sister who died, but I never knew she was my biological mother. That’s why they never had a birth certificate around—it would have shown my real mother’s name. Then I would have known, and I guess I would have grown up feeling as if I had been responsible for my mother’s death.” He gave her a rueful smile. “You think I’m messed up now? Just imagine how messed up I might have been.”
“I don’t know,” Marquez said. “It might have been good. If you were even more messed up, I might have gotten the floor painted before now. So…” Her face grew sad. “So Summer’s brother really is dead.”
“Or at least he isn’t me,” J.T. said. “She tried to hide it, but I think she was kind of upset.”
“She was,” Marquez agreed. “I saw her at the Bacch. She was drinking punch.”
“Summer? Drinking?”
“She was bummed. So naturally I took off,” Marquez said unhappily.
J.T. squeezed her hand. “She’ll be okay. Know how you’re not as tough as you think you are? Well, she’s tougher than everyone thinks she is.”
18
Only a Miracle Can Cure a Hangover.
Summer woke very suddenly.
>
She opened her eyes. She was in the stilt house, in her own bed. Her head hurt. Her eyes hurt. Her mouth was dry and gluey. Everything around her was buzzing. Her stomach…
She jumped up, cried out in pain, and raced for the bathroom. She spent several minutes on her knees in overly close contact with her toilet.
When she got up at last, she was trembling, her knees were shaky, and she was feeling rotten and filthy and disgusting. The face in the mirror made her groan.
“How did I get here?” she wondered.
She remembered the lamppost. She remembered telling Sean Valletti something…she couldn’t recall the exact word, but he hadn’t liked it, she was sure of that.
Then she remembered Seth. The way he had seen her kissing Sean. The look in his eyes.
She threw up some more. Afterward she took a shower and brushed her teeth twice, gulping water as if she’d been in the desert for a week.
“Why do people drink?” she muttered. “This isn’t fun. This isn’t even anything like fun. This is the worst feeling in the world.” What a total idiot she was for gulping down two glasses of that disgusting pink punch without even thinking about what was in it.
Her first thought was that she had to find Seth. And then the other memories began to trickle back into her mind. A dark jerky vision of herself staggering up a walkway, banging at a door, and collapsing.
Seth’s house.
“Oh, no,” she moaned.
He had brought her here. She vaguely recalled being in his truck. In the back. He had dumped her in the back of his truck. Like garbage or something.
He had carried her down here.
And someone…someone had gotten her out of the clothes she’d been wearing and into the boxers and baby-tee she wore to bed.
“Please, just let me die,” she said. It would be a relief from the endless explosions going off inside her head.
There was an obscenely loud banging noise at her door.
She grabbed her head and went over to open the door. Sunlight hit her with physical force that sent her reeling back, shielding her eyes and crying aloud.
“That’s the same reaction I had to your outfit, Marquez,” Diana said.
“It was you she saw first,” Marquez said. The two of them came in and, much to Summer’s relief, closed the door behind them.
“Not hung over, are you?” Marquez asked Summer.
“Shut up,” Summer growled.
“I think Summer may have been drinking,” Marquez said, laughing.
“No kidding. I was the one who had to change her clothes last night,” Diana said.
“You? Oh, man, thank you,” Summer said.
“Me and Seth and Diver and these three guys we met,” Diana said. Then, seeing Summer’s look of horror, she relented. “Just me, it was just me. Your chastity and purity are intact. Seth came and got me to help.”
“Seth brought me here? After…after what happened last night?”
Diana’s eyes darkened. “Yes, because Seth is a truly decent guy. You stab him through the heart, and he picks you up off the floor.”
“He’s upset?”
“No, why would he be?” Diana said sarcastically. “Just because he sees you swallowing half of that guy’s face?”
Summer felt the urge to throw up again. She struggled to get it under control. “I was upset,” she said.
“Did you trade Seth for that muscle-boy dweeb from Birdbrainburg?” Marquez said, making a disgusted face. “I guess you decided you really liked the hairy chest, huh?”
“You don’t understand,” Summer said. “I love Seth.”
“Oh, now I understand,” Marquez said. “That clears it up for me.”
“You’re the one who told me, Marquez—the end of summer. What about the end of summer? What am I supposed to do, just get closer and closer to Seth? Fall more and more in love, and then wham…Ohhh.” She grabbed her head in pain. “Look, I don’t live here. This isn’t my real life. You two aren’t even real. Reality is Bloomington. That’s where I live. That’s my life. And I don’t want to be there and go to bed every night crying because…” A sob escaped from her, but she was too dehydrated for tears. She took several deep breaths.
“Summer, all that stuff I said about the end of August—why would you listen to me? You know I’m full of it,” Marquez said.
“No, you’re not,” Summer said. “You were right. I’m sorry if I hurt Seth—”
“Just ripped his heart out, that’s all,” Diana said in a low voice.
“But it was never going to be for real. It was just a summer thing. And I’m not a person who can be in love for three months and then forget it and move on.”
“Summer,” Marquez protested, “you don’t know for sure what’s going to happen when the summer ends.”
“I know you guys are trying to be nice,” Summer said, “but I have to throw up.”
“Okay. We’ll, uh, get together later,” Marquez said, sounding relieved to have an excuse to leave.
When she was done in the bathroom, Summer drank a lot more water. And thanks to the water, when she began to cry, she was able to shed tears.
She slept most of the day, her hangover gradually easing into a more general depression. She got up only once, to eat a dry sandwich, call in sick at work, and stare blankly at Letterman for a while, surprised that he was on so early, and then slowly realizing that it was almost midnight.
She turned off the TV and lay there in the dark, listening to the sound of the water lapping against the pilings, barely noticing the creaking boards and soft shushing of waves against the shore.
This was as bad as she had ever felt. She still felt sick. Worse by far, she felt heartsick. The thought of Seth hurting, in pain, feeling betrayed and abandoned by her…She couldn’t stand the images that came into her mind, and yet she couldn’t keep them from coming.
It doesn’t matter, she told herself. Now or later, it would have happened just the same. And later it would have hurt even more. Better that Seth just thinks I’m a worthless slut who would go with Sean Valletti. Better to make it quick and final, right now, than to let it drag out, let the dread build up day by day between now and three weeks from now.
She’d been stupid to let it get started. She had wanted to fall in love this summer, thinking that love was just another form of entertaining fun, like scuba diving or sunbathing. Another cool thing to do at the beach. But it wasn’t. It was dangerous. Without love you couldn’t have pain. Without love you couldn’t have loss. Grief. Emptiness. Love made it all possible.
If she had never loved Seth, she would be happy right now. Love. It was just like alcohol. A little fun followed by a long, painful hangover.
“Love is like alcohol,” she said, liking the sound of it, as sleep crept over her again. It sounded very deep. It sounded wise. She would get it printed on a T-shirt. No one would understand what it meant.
She dreamed. She was on the plane again, just arriving on Crab Claw Key. The tarot lady was beside her, just the way it had really happened. Only now the lady had turned over a card with a picture of a cup full of punch.
“That’s the love card, isn’t it?” Summer asked the lady.
“Huh?” the lady said.
“You told me there would be three guys,” Summer said. And then she was no longer on the plane, but back in the underwater cave, trapped in the dark with Seth. Seth was sleeping, and then the little boy appeared, dressed all in white. He was holding the red rubber ball.
“You again,” Summer said.
“Still here,” the little boy said.
“No. You’re not,” Summer said, feeling a terrible sadness. “You died. You’re gone.”
The little boy looked at her, his eyes uncertain.
“I’m sorry,” Summer said. “You’re just a dream.”
“Oh, that,” the boy said dismissively. “Everything is just a dream. So what?”
She closed her eyes, wishing him away, but when she opened them aga
in, they were standing in the grassy field.
“Jonathan, just leave me alone, okay?” Summer pleaded. “I don’t like it here.”
“I can’t. I keep dreaming you,” he said.
“No, I’m dreaming you,” Summer insisted.
“I don’t think so. You’re sunny. You keep showing up here.”
“I’m not sunny, I’m alcohol. No, no, I mean, I’m Summer,” she said.
“Don’t say that,” the little boy said, suddenly frightened. “You’re disturbing my wa.”
There were bright blue numbers. A five. A three. A two. Her clock.
She rubbed her eyes. It was 5:32. In the morning, she was pretty sure. Yes, it had to be morning. As for which day, who knew?
But she was awake. Awake and no longer sick. Groggy but alive. She would go watch the sunrise with Jonathan. No, with Diver. Go watch the sun come up with…
Every hair on Summer’s neck stood on end. She stopped breathing. Her skin was tingling, electric. Oh, my God.
In a flash she was outside, out in the clinging pre-dawn damp.
She looked up at him.
He was staring down at her with wide, awestruck eyes.
In his hand he held something. Without a word, he handed it to her.
Summer cradled it in her two hands. It looked as if it had been chewed by a dog. The rubber was dried and crumbly with age. In the faint, gray light it was impossible to tell its color, and yet Summer knew it had once been red.
“It’s the only thing I’ve kept all these years,” he said.
“I…I dreamed,” Summer said.
“Yes,” he said. “Sunny. I didn’t know who you were. There are so many things I don’t remember. Memories lost except in my dreams…”
“Yes. Me too,” Summer said, her voice choked.
He bent over and helped draw her up onto the deck.
“Jonathan?” she asked in a whisper.
Diver smiled. “I guess so. I’d forgotten. They gave me another name, but I knew all the time it wasn’t right.”
“Jonathan,” Summer said, definite now. “You’re not dead.”