My parents were standing near the school entrance, across the parking lot from us. Even from that distance, I could see that they were furious. My mom looked like she could send herself into the air and fly over to us like she was Iron Man, that’s how angry she was.
Even Caro noticed. “Whoa,” she said softly.
“Yeah,” I said. “Whoa.” My knees started to feel wobbly and I glanced over at Drew and Kevin, who were still hugging but both looking in my parents’ direction.
“I think I have to go,” I said.
“Emmy, now!” I heard my mom yell again.
“Uh, yeah, you do,” Drew said. “Are they going to lock you in a tower or something? What’d you do?”
“Nothing that they should know about,” I said, and then I realized with a sobering rush that I had done a lot of things my parents shouldn’t know about, and maybe that wasn’t the case anymore.
“I’ll go with you,” Oliver said, untangling my arm from his so he could hold my hand instead. “You might need a witness.”
“Are you going to be okay?” I asked Drew, who just nodded and then buried his face back into Kevin’s shoulder. Kevin, for his part, just closed his eyes and hugged him back, and I knew that they’d be fine. Kevin wasn’t going to break up with Drew. They’d be okay.
It was suddenly me that I was worried about.
Oliver and I hustled across the parking lot toward my parents. My mom’s arms were crossed now and my dad had the deep wrinkle between his eyes that he always gets whenever he frowns a lot. “What’s wrong?” I asked as soon as we were close enough. I thought it was a good idea to sound like we were all on the same side, like I wasn’t the person who may or may not be responsible for all of the fury that seemed to be coming off them in waves.
“Oliver, your mom’s inside,” my dad said. “Go inside and find her, okay? We need to talk to Emmy.”
“Oh. Um, okay. Yeah, I just—” Oliver let go of my hand reluctantly and I felt our fingertips slip apart. “You’re okay?”
“She’s fine,” my mom said, and the way she said it didn’t leave me feeling exactly reassured. It sounded like I was about to be the opposite of fine, like I would be one of those bodies that always seem to turn up in the first five minutes of those Law & Order episodes that Caro always watched. They’re never fine.
“Oliver,” my dad said, and Oliver shot one quick glance back at me before hurrying off. I was glad he didn’t try to kiss me.
“In the car,” my mom said, and I followed them, trying to think of something that would set them off. No one would tell them about my surfing. I hadn’t mentioned UCSD to anyone except Caro and Drew and Oliver and none of them would spill my secret. All of my teachers liked me and I was doing fine in school. I had used my phone in calculus last week to text Caro—was that what this was about? I didn’t think the teacher had even seen me do that.
As soon as we got in the car and my dad started the engine, I finally leaned forward between the seats. “Um, can you please tell me what’s going on?”
“Isn’t that an interesting question,” my mom said. “That’s my question, too, Emily. Just what is going on?”
“I—I have no idea,” I said. “Dad?”
He just drove, though. My dad always did the silent “we are so disappointed” routine, while my mom was the one who did the shouting and the “what were you thinking?” histrionics. They worked well as a team, except when they were teamed up against me. Then it was a problem.
We drove home in a quiet cloud of anger (them) and confusion (me) and fear (me again). By the time we pulled into the driveway, I couldn’t get out of the car fast enough. I even took a few deep breaths of the cool night air, suddenly aware of how suffocating the car had been.
“Inside,” my mom said, pointing toward the garage door, and I followed her through the door, the laundry room, and into the kitchen, where she threw her purse down onto the table and then turned to look at me.
“We saw your guidance counselor today,” she finally said once my dad was in the room. “And do you know what she said?”
“I don’t even know the guidance counselor’s name,” I said.
“Don’t try to be funny,” my dad told me. “That’s not going to help you.”
“I’m not!” I cried. “I genuinely don’t know who she is! I’ve never met with her in my life.”
“Well, she knows who you are,” my mom said. She was banging around the kitchen now, pulling a wineglass out of the cabinet and a half-full bottle of Chardonnay out of the refrigerator. “Apparently, Oliver pointed you out to her one day.”
I paused. “I’m in trouble because Oliver told the guidance counselor about me?” I asked.
“No, Emily!” my mom yelled.
“Then what?” I yelled back. “Will someone just tell me what I did already?”
“Don’t use that tone,” my dad said.
My mom, though, had enough “tone” for both of us. “Your guidance counselor,” she said as she poured the wine, “congratulated us on your acceptance to the University of California, San Diego.” She took a sip of wine and looked at me over the rim of the glass.
I suddenly felt nervous all over. “I—I was going to tell you.”
“Oh, were you?” my mom said. My dad was standing next to her now, not saying a word. He didn’t have to. The frustration was evident on his face. “When, exactly?”
“Wait,” I said. “How did the counselor even know?”
“The school is notified of admissions,” my dad said quietly. Oh, he was really disappointed in me. This was worse than my mom yelling. “Your name was on that list. Did you really apply?”
I nodded hesitantly, like there was still some confusion in the matter and the acceptance letter that I had printed out wasn’t shoved between the pages of my old copy of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm on my bookshelf. “I did?” I said. “I mean, I did. And I got in. And I was going to tell you, I swear, but I didn’t know if I—”
“We had a plan, Emmy!” my mom cried. “You were going to go to community college for two years and work and live here and save some money and then go to school somewhere—”
Hearing “live here” made me snap. “No, you decided that!” I yelled, and both of my parents looked temporarily shocked. “You decided that, not me! That was your plan for me and you never asked me what I wanted to do or what I wanted! That’s what you want, it’s not what I want! I want to go to San Diego!”
There it was. The decision. I had been on the fence up until that moment, but having college dangled in front of me and then taken away was more than I could handle. Suddenly, I wanted to go more than anything in the world, even if it meant leaving Oliver behind. “Oh, why, Emmy?” my mom cried, her sarcasm heavy. “Why? Is your life so horrible here? You don’t pay for a thing except gas for your car—which, by the way, we bought for you and is no longer yours—”
“What?!” I was furious. “That’s not fair! You’re taking away my car because I applied to college? Who does that?”
“You lied to us,” my mom shot back. “Lying is not allowed in this household. Not to mention that we were humiliated tonight. Absolutely humiliated!”
The fury that was building inside my chest was starting to scare me a little. No car meant no surfing. I could handle being grounded, whatever, but after nearly a year of having the freedom to go to the beach whenever I could, I couldn’t stand not having it anymore.
“You want to know why I applied to UCSD?” I asked, and now my voice was low and cold.
“Enlighten me,” my mom said, taking another sip of her wine.
I turned, grabbed my car keys out of my backpack before anyone could stop me, then ran out to my car. I came back a minute later, my sandy wet suit in my hand.
“Here!” I said, throwing it on the floor. “This is why! Guess what, there’s something else you don’t know! I’ve been surfing for the past three years!”
The shock from both my parents rendered them tempora
rily mute. Even my mom didn’t say anything at first. Luckily, I had a lot of words to fill the silence. “Drew’s brother, Kane, taught me when we were fourteen! We were at the beach and I was good and I loved it. I loved it more than any of those stupid ballet or gym or karate classes, all those things you made me do! So I kept going and I got better and now I’m really, really good! They think I can try out for the surf team at UCSD, that’s how good.”
My dad was the first to recover.
“Where did you get that?” he asked.
“Craigslist,” I told him. “And it doesn’t fit well at all and it lets in a ton of water and it’s freezing every time I wear it but I don’t care because I still love it. It’s mine!” Somewhere in between my words, I had started crying. My heart felt so broken, so shattered. I had gotten so close to so many things and now they were being pulled away so, so fast.
“You could have drowned!” my mom cried. “You could have hit your head! You could have gotten caught in a riptide, oh my God!”
“But I didn’t!” I yelled back. “Just stop, okay, Mom? Just stop! Stop pretending like all of this is for me, because really? It’s all for you.”
It was like I had pulled the pin out of a grenade. No one in the room moved for a few seconds. “Right?” I said, because once the pin is pulled, you can’t exactly put it back in. “That’s what it is, isn’t it? You don’t want me to leave because you saw the bad thing happen ten years ago to Maureen and you freaked out.”
“Don’t you dare—” my mom started to say, but her eyes were filling with tears.
“It’s like when Oliver came home!” I yelled. “Maureen was expecting him to somehow be the same seven-year-old kid that he was when he left, but actually, you’ve been expecting me to be that way the whole time! And that’s not fair!” I wiped at my eyes fast, too upset to stop talking, and I remembered Oliver’s words so clearly from the week before. “I’m tired of paying the price for something I didn’t even do!”
Both of my parents stood, shell-shocked, and I stared right back at them, my chest heaving with sobs. “So you can take away surfing,” I said. “Or college. Or my car. Whatever you want, but you cannot stop me from growing up and moving out and finally moving on!”
“She’s right,” my dad murmured.
“What?” I asked.
“What?” my mom said. “We—”
“We panicked,” my dad said. He sounded tired all of a sudden, and the crease between his eyebrows now seemed borne out of exhaustion, rather than anger. “We’ve been panicking for ten years.”
“We were protecting you!” my mom protested, looking at my dad like he had just crossed into enemy territory.
“But you can’t do that all the time!” I said.
“When we saw Maureen . . .” my mom started to say, but her tears spilled over, one falling down past her jaw before she could catch it. “When we saw her after,” she started again once she got control of her voice, “that pain, how she was so . . .” The words failed her again.
“We love you more than you can imagine,” my dad said, and even he sounded a little croaky now. “And watching Maureen spend ten years wondering what had happened to her son terrified us.”
“I get it,” I said. “I do. You were scared. Scary things happened. But I’m tired of lying to you, okay? It sucks. It’s not fun. But I have to because you won’t let me do anything! Do you know how many times I could have joined the surf team at school? But I couldn’t, actually, because I needed a parent’s permission.”
“You never even asked!” my mom cried.
“Would you have said yes?” I shot back, and her silence was all I needed. “Look,” I said. “You can keep being scared. Both of you, that’s fine. But I’m done.”
“You’re done, all right,” my mom said. “You’re grounded. No car, no Oliver, absolutely no surfing, obviously, no phone, computer only for schoolwork.”
“I’m seriously the only kid who gets grounded for applying to college,” I muttered.
“You’re grounded for lying,” my mom said.
“We’ll talk about college later,” my dad added, and he sounded as tired as I felt. “Just go upstairs, get ready for bed.”
“It’s eight thirty!”
“Emily.”
“Fine. But who’s picking me up from school tomorrow?”
My parents looked blank.
“No car,” I reminded them, knowing that I was seriously pushing my luck. “If I can’t drive myself to school, I can’t bring myself home, either. Plus, Oliver needs a ride now, too, since I’ve been driving him every morning.”
“You take the car only to school.” My mom quickly amended her earlier rule. “And you come straight home afterward.”
“Fine,” I said. “So nothing I said made any impact on you, I take it.”
My mom pointed at the stairs. “Go.”
“We’ll discuss it,” my dad said.
My mom threw him a look that very clearly said she was done discussing things, but I didn’t see or hear his response as I stormed up the stairs. I was tempted to slam my bedroom door behind me, but if I did, I was pretty sure my mom would start a bonfire in the backyard and use my surfboard as kindling, so I just shut it and then threw my history textbook onto my bed instead. It helped a little, but nothing is as satisfying as slamming a door.
I lay there in the dark for a long time, alternating between seething and panicking. Spending the next however many weeks being landlocked felt like a death sentence, and then I imagined spending two more years that way, my parents still huddled over my every move, and my chest felt tight. I’d be eighteen in a few months, though. I could move out on my own, maybe get an apartment with Caro after all, but I knew that wasn’t a real solution. It’d be like putting a Band-Aid on an arterial wound. It wouldn’t solve the bigger problem.
Around nine thirty, right when I was starting to fall asleep in my clothes, a light suddenly flashed on and flashed off. I sat up, wiping the hair out of my face, and went over to the window. I could see Oliver’s silhouette outlined against the light in his bedroom, his hair hanging in his face as he leaned against the sill.
I did the same, crossing my arms over my waist and wishing they were his arms instead, that he was there instead of a house away. It felt odd to be missing him even though I was looking right at him, when I had spent the past ten years missing him and never knowing where he was. I guess the more you start to love someone, the more you ache when they’re gone, and maybe it’s that middle ground that hurts the most, when you can see them and still not feel like you’re near enough. So close and yet so far.
He turned his light on and off again, our signal. I didn’t dare call out to him lest my parents hear me yelling out the second-floor window (wouldn’t that just be a stellar way to end the day?) so I flicked my own lamp on, then off again. It blinded me for a minute, but when I blinked again, he was still there. My phone was downstairs so I couldn’t send him one last text before it got confiscated, so we just sat in the darkness, all the sadness and loss and fresh starts binding us together until I got confused about where Oliver’s life stopped and where mine started.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The next day at lunch, Caro was sitting in the quad by herself, holding a bag from Del Taco and sucking on a huge straw. I thought about avoiding her entirely since I wasn’t exactly sure if we were friends again, but then she saw me and I walked over. “Can I sit?” I asked.
She moved her backpack over in response and I plopped down next to her. “So your parents didn’t kill you,” she said.
“No,” I said. “But honestly, I wish they had.” I tossed my backpack on the ground and groaned. “I’m so tired.”
Caro passed me her soda. “Oh, thanks,” I said, taking it from her.
“Friends share caffeine,” she replied, her voice quiet. It was the first conversation we had had since our fight last week and I knew a peace offering when I saw one. (Plus, any peace offering that involved a
carbonated, caffeinated beverage was definitely going to be accepted by me.)
“So what the hell happened?” she asked. “And where’s Oliver?”
I nodded toward the main school building and took a sip of Caro’s drink. “He had a meeting,” I said. I didn’t mention that it was with the school counselor, that he was talking to her twice a week, still adjusting to normal school life. “He’ll be out in a few minutes. He already heard the story this morning, though. I drove him to school, which is pretty much all I’m allowed to do anymore.”
“You’re grounded?” Caro guessed.
“I’m, like, beyond grounded,” I said. “My parents found out last night that I got into UCSD.”
Caro let out a short, sharp laugh. “You’re the only kid who gets grounded for getting into college, I swear.”
“I know, right?” I cried. “That’s what I said! But yeah, they’re mad not because I got it, but because I lied. And then they wanted to know why I did it—”
“Oh no,” Caro said.
“Oh yeah,” I said.
“Wait, what—oh no.” Caro covered her mouth with her hand. “Did you—?”
“Oh, I did.” I sighed. “I actually got my wet suit out of my car and threw it on the floor in front of them.”
Caro giggled a little. “I kind of wish I had seen your mom’s face when you did that.”
“No, you don’t, because she would have melted you with her eyes.” I sighed and shook the soda, the ice rattling. “It was really bad. And then we started yelling about Oliver and how I’m not him and just because he was kidnapped doesn’t mean that I’m just going to disappear into thin air, too.”
“Whoa.” Caro took the soda from me and took a sip. “It sounds like Real Housewives. So . . . what now?”
“Well, I’m grounded until I die, I guess. No surfing, no phone, no computer, no Oliver. And possibly no college, I don’t know. My dad thinks I should go, though.”
Caro was twirling a lock of hair around her finger, letting it unravel, then twirling it up again. “I think you should go, too,” she said quietly.