“So,” I said, grasping for something to say, but not coming up with much. “Ice cream, huh?” I felt my cheeks get hot as soon as I said it, and I glanced toward the car, wondering if my dad was finished at Henson’s and I’d be able to use this as an excuse to leave.
“Don’t tell me,” Henry said, nodding at my rapidly melting cone. “Raspberry and coconut? Still?”
I stared at him. “I can’t believe you remember that.”
“Elephant,” he said. “I told you.”
“Ah,” I said. I felt the first cold drip hit my fingers clutching the cone. My ice cream was melting fast, and since I was holding my dad’s ice cream in my other hand, I couldn’t do anything to stop it. But somehow, I felt weird about licking my cone in front of Henry, especially since he didn’t have any ice cream himself. “So,” I said, trying to ignore the second, then third drips, “how did that even start? Who first thought that elephants would be good at remembering things?”
“I don’t know,” Henry said with a shrug and a small smile. “Who decided owls were wise?”
“My brother could probably tell you that,” I said. “I’ll ask him.”
“Great,” Henry said with a small laugh. “Sounds like a plan.” He stuck his hands in his pockets, and I felt my eyes drawn to his arm, and sure enough, I could see it—the faint white scar by his wrist. I knew it well—he’d scraped it against the daggerboard when he’d swum under my boat, in the boys vs. girls tipping war that had raged the summer we were eleven. I’d touched it the first time he held my hand, in the darkness of the Outpost’s movie theater.
With this memory flooding through me, I looked at him, and took a breath to say what I should have said right away. That I was sorry, that I had never meant to hurt him, that I shouldn’t have left with no explanation. “So,” I said, as my heart started to beat a little harder and my sticky hand gripped my cone, “Henry. I—”
“Sorry about that! Parking took forever.” A very pretty blond girl, about my age, was walking up to Henry. Her hair was up in one of those perfectly messy knots, and she was already deeply tan. I suddenly realized that this must have been the blond girl my mother was talking about. Henry’s girlfriend. I knew that there was absolutely no logic in me feeling proprietary toward someone who I had dated when I was twelve. But even so, I felt a hot stab of jealousy in my chest as I watched her hand the car keys to him, their fingers brushing briefly.
“I want moose tracks!” Davy Crosby was running up, wearing the same moccasins I’d noticed in the woods. He spotted me and his exuberant expression turned sullen. Clearly, he was still holding a grudge about the bird-scaring.
The girl smiled at Davy and rested her hand on his shoulder before he wriggled away. I watched this interaction, trying to keep my expression neutral. So she was close with Henry’s brother, too. Not that I cared. Why should I?
“Did you know your ice cream’s melting?” Davy asked me. I looked down at my cone and saw that, in fact, things were getting a little dire, and melted raspberry—of course, it really couldn’t have been the coconut—was covering my hand.
“Right,” I said, lifting up the cone, which actually just let the ice cream run down my wrist. “I caught that, actually.”
“Sorry, Taylor—were you saying something?” Henry asked.
I looked at him and just thought about doing it now, saying I was sorry and getting it over with. Since we’d come back, I was feeling guilty about that summer in a way I’d never really had to face when we were in Connecticut. I’d even had to turn the stuffed penguin around in my closet, since it always seemed to be looking at me accusingly. “I was just going to say that… that I was really…” I trailed off, well aware that I had two extra audience members. I tried to go on, but found that I’d lost my nerve. “Nothing,” I finally said. “Never mind.” I felt the girl’s eyes on me, and I saw her gaze travel to my arm, where the drips had gotten even worse, forming a small puddle next to my feet where they were landing on the ground. “I should go,” I said, not waiting—or wanting—to be introduced to this girl who was clearly with Henry, and who was probably wondering why I was intruding on their time.
Henry took a breath, like he was about to say something, but then just glanced at the girl and remained silent.
“I’ll see you,” I said quickly, and to nobody in particular. I walked away from Jane’s fast, not meeting Henry’s eye, and headed down the street toward the car. I hadn’t made it very far when my dad came out of Henson’s and started down the street toward me, a paper sack under one arm.
“Hey,” he said when we got within earshot of each other. “I thought I was meeting you there.”
“No,” I said quickly, since the last thing I wanted to do was eat ice cream on the Jane’s benches next to Henry and his girlfriend and his brother, especially after I’d so thoroughly embarrassed myself. “Why don’t we eat it in the car? Jane’s is pretty busy right now.”
My dad glanced over at Jane’s—which couldn’t have been more obviously empty—and then at me, where I saw him taking in the dripping mess I had turned into. “I’ve got a better idea,” he said.
We ended up at the beach, which was only a few minutes’ drive from Main Street, sitting at one of the picnic tables, and looking out at the water. I’d cleaned myself up with the paper towels in the backseat of the car, and some hand sanitizer I found in the glove compartment, and now I no longer looked like I was going to pose an ice-cream hazard to everything I came in contact with. Despite the fact it was getting late, the beach was crowded, a line forming at the snack bar.
As I looked over, I found myself wondering if it was just Lucy working, or if Elliot was on duty as well. As though sensing this, my dad rotated his cup, searching for the ideal bite, as he asked me, “How are you liking it, working here?”
I realized this was my opening, the moment to tell him that while I’d really given it a shot, it just wasn’t going to be a great fit. And maybe after I mentioned it to him, I could go over to the administrative offices, quit, and have this whole thing resolved before dinner. “So here’s the thing,” I said. My dad raised his eyebrows and took a bite of his (nearly finished) ice cream. “I’m sure that working at the beach is a great experience. But I just don’t think it’s necessarily the right fit for me now. And maybe, like Warren, I should really be focusing on academics….” I trailed off as I ran out of excuses and realized that I didn’t have any siblings or distractions to interrupt me—just my dad, looking at me with a level gaze, like he was seeing right through me.
“Tell me, kid,” he said after finishing his last bite and setting his cup aside, “did I ever tell you how much I hated law school when I first started?”
“No,” I said, not even having to think about it. My dad rarely talked about himself, so most of the personal stories I’d heard either came from my mom, or my grandfather, when he was visiting.
“I did,” he said. He reached across with his spoon for what was left of my ice cream, and I tilted my cone toward him. “I’m not like your brother. Things didn’t come so easily to me in school. I had to work like hell just to get in to law school. And once I was there, I thought I’d made the biggest mistake of my life. Wanted to get out of there as soon as possible.”
“But you stuck it out,” I said, feeling like I knew where the story was going.
“I stuck it out,” he confirmed. “And it turned out I really loved the law, once I stopped being scared I was going to make a mistake. And if I hadn’t stayed with it, I never would have met your mom.”
That was one story I did know—how my parents had met at a diner on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, my dad a third-year student at Columbia Law, my mom having just finished a performance of The Nutcracker.
“Right,” I said, feeling like my window to get out of the job was rapidly closing. “But in this case…”
“Is there something wrong with the job? A real problem you have with it?” My dad reached toward the cone with his spoon a
gain, and I just handed it to him to finish, having lost my appetite for ice cream. It wasn’t like I could really tell my dad that it was because my former BFF was being mean to me.
“No,” I finally said.
My dad smiled at me, his blue eyes—the ones I’d gotten from him, the ones nobody else in our family had—crinkling at the corners. “In that case,” he said, like the matter had been decided, “you’ll stick it out. And maybe something good will come of it.”
I doubted that entirely, but I also knew when I’d been beat. I looked at the snack bar for a moment, dreading the fact that I’d now have to return there tomorrow. “Maybe so,” I said trying to sound as enthusiastic as possible—which, even I could hear, wasn’t all that enthusiastic.
My dad laughed and ruffled my hair with his hand, the way he always used to do when I was little. “Come on,” he said. He stood up, wincing slightly, and tossed away the ice-cream cup. “Let’s go home.”
After dinner, out of nowhere, it started to rain. It caught me off guard, and seeing the world that had only been sunny and warm transformed by a sudden thunderstorm was jarring, a reminder of just how quickly things could change.
I ducked under the screened-in porch gratefully, wiping the droplets from my face and kicking off my flip-flops in the pile of sandals that inevitably accumulated by the door. I had taken the trash out to the bearbox, thinking that with an umbrella I wouldn’t get too wet, only to have the rain pick up in intensity and the wind pick up in speed the second I stepped outside.
“You okay?” Warren asked from his seat at the table, looking up from his book at me.
“Just half-drowned,” I said, taking the seat across from him. It was the two of us on the porch. My parents were inside reading, and Gelsey, who always denied emphatically that she was afraid of thunderstorms, had nevertheless left for her bedroom at the first crack of thunder and was apparently in for the night, wearing my dad’s noise-canceling headphones that were much too big for her.
Warren went back to his book and I pulled my knees up, hugging them as I looked at the rain coming down in sheets. I’d never minded thunderstorms, and had always liked watching them from the screened-in porch—you were inside but also outside, able to see each flash of lightning and hear each crack of thunder, but were also dry and covered. As I listened to the rain on the roof, I suddenly worried about the dog, who I hadn’t seen in a few days. I hoped that he was back where he belonged, and if not, that he’d had the sense to take shelter from the rain. Somehow I doubted it. I’d gotten used to the little dog, and I didn’t like to think about him caught out in a storm.
“Mom said that the Crosbys are living next door,” Warren said, carefully highlighting a passage and looking up at me. “Henry and Derek.”
“Davy,” I corrected automatically.
“You didn’t mention that,” Warren said, his tone of voice singsong, designed, I knew, to bait me. I was suddenly very envious of Gelsey and her noise-canceling headphones.
“So?” I said, as I crossed and then uncrossed my legs, wondering why we were even talking about this.
“Have you seen him yet?” Warren was continuing to highlight, and if you didn’t know him, you’d think he had no idea that he was torturing me, and enjoying it, which he absolutely was.
“A couple times,” I said, raking my fingers through my wet hair. “I don’t know. It’s been weird,” I said, thinking of all our encounters, not one of them suited for a real conversation or an apology.
“Weird?” Warren repeated. “Because you two dated when you were… twelve?” He smirked, shaking his head.
“Because—” I started. A huge crash of thunder sounded, making both of us jump. Warren dropped his highlighter, and as it rolled across the table, I reached out and grabbed it, twirling it between my fingers.
“Because?” Warren prompted, glancing over at me. He motioned for me to give him his highlighter back, and I pretended not to see.
“I don’t know,” I said, a little irritably. I didn’t want to talk about this. And I certainly didn’t want to talk about it with my brother. “Why do you even care?” I finally asked. “And since when do we talk about stuff like this?”
“We don’t,” Warren said. He shrugged, and in a patronizing voice, he continued, “It’s just obviously an issue for you, so I was giving you an opening. That’s all.”
I knew that there was probably no point to this. I should just walk away and let it go. But there was something in my brother’s expression that seemed to indicate that he knew so much more than me. And about some—if not most—things, this was true. But not everything. Warren had never had much of a social life, preferring to spend weekends studying and working on his various projects. He’d never had a girlfriend, that I had been aware of. He had gone to his senior prom, but with his study partner, who was pretty much the female version of Warren. They’d said they wanted to examine the ritual as a cultural experiment. After the prom, they had had cowritten a paper on it for their A.P. Psychology class that had won a national award.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. My brother’s head swiveled over to me, probably because this was a sentence he was so unused to hearing. I knew I should stop, but even as I recognized this, I heard myself keep going, my voice with a snide edge to it that I hated. “You have to have been in a relationship to have a breakup.”
Even in the dim lighting of the screened-in porch, I could see my brother’s face flush a little, and, like I knew I would, I regretted saying it.
“I’ll have you know,” Warren said stiffly, flipping the pages in his textbook much faster than he could read them, “that I have been putting most of my focus into my academics.”
“I know,” I said quickly, trying to smooth this over, wishing I hadn’t said anything.
“There’s no need to get involved with people who aren’t going to turn out to matter,” he continued in the same tone of voice.
I had been about to agree and head inside, but something that Warren had just said was bothering me. “But how do you know?” I asked.
He looked up at me and frowned. “Know what?”
“You said you didn’t want to waste your time on people who aren’t going to matter,” I said, and he nodded. “But how do you know they’re not going to matter? Unless you give it a shot?”
Warren opened his mouth to reply, but nothing followed. I could practically see his brain working furiously, his future-lawyer logic churning through answers. He took a breath to say something but then let it out. “I don’t know,” he finally said.
I had planned on going in, but I changed my mind as I looked at my brother, sitting in the semidarkness, reading books he wouldn’t even need for months or years. I slid the highlighter back across the table at him and he gave me a brief smile before picking it up. I settled back into my seat as he started slowly going through the book again, highlighting the relevant passages, making sure that he wasn’t missing anything important, as all around us, the rain continued to fall.
chapter thirteen
five summers earlier
IT WASN’T A DATE. THAT WAS WHAT I’D BEEN TELLING MYSELF EVER since Henry had asked me, the day we’d walked our bikes home from the pool with our wet towels slung around our shoulders. We were just seeing a movie together. It was not a big deal.
Which didn’t explain why I was so nervous now, sitting next to him in the dark of the Outpost theater. I was barely paying attention to the movie at all, because I was fully aware of his presence next to me, every time he shifted in the red velvet seat, every time he took a breath. I was more conscious than I ever had been in my life of the movie theater armrest between us—wondering if I should rest my arm on it, wondering if he would, wishing that he would reach across it and take my hand.
The summer without Lucy was turning out to be less painful than I’d expected, mostly because of Henry. We’d spent the first few weeks hanging out, long afternoons together at the beach or the pool, or
in the woods, when Henry needed to show me some rock or insect that he promised would “blow my mind.” Whenever it rained, and nobody was willing to take us to the Stroud Mall, or bowling at Pocono Lanes, we would hang out in his treehouse. Sometimes Elliott would come, and we’d play the three-person poker game he’d invented. I didn’t do as well at this as with other card games, because Henry, for whatever reason, always seemed to know when I was bluffing, and wouldn’t even reveal to me what my tell was. Unlike with Lucy, being friends with Henry meant that there wasn’t any makeup-swapping, watching of cheerleading movies, or candy-sharing going on. (Henry, I’d discovered, was ruthless, and claimed not to be able to taste the difference among any of the Skittle colors.) I also no longer had anyone to endlessly pore over the library’s back issues of Seventeen magazine with, studying each page carefully. Despite that, Henry and I had been having fun.
But something had started to change last week, on the lake’s wooden float. It was big enough across that almost ten people could be on it at once (although the lifeguards blew their whistles when more than five people were on it at a time, and always if you tried to push people in). We’d been challenging each other to races that had gotten more and more complicated as the afternoon went on. The last one—swim from the raft to shore, run across the beach, around the concession stand, back across the beach, and swim back to the raft—had left us both exhausted. We’d been lying on the raft, getting our breath back, but now I was pretty sure that Henry had fallen asleep.
To check, I’d been squeezing out the water from the bottom of my braid on him, trying to get him to wake up. And either he really was asleep, or he was really good at pretending, because he wasn’t moving. Since my braid was pretty well wrung out, I dipped my hand into the water and started letting the drops fall from my fingers onto him, but Henry didn’t even flinch. Figuring he must actually be sleeping, and feeling a little bad for tormenting him, I started to brush some of the water droplets off his face. I was brushing one off his forehead, when his eyes opened and he looked at me. We just froze that way for a moment, looking at each other, and I noticed for the first time what nice eyes he had. And suddenly, out of nowhere, I wanted him to kiss me.