I looked down and saw Lucy making her way up the hill. But even from far above her, I could see that she was clapping.
“Shh,” I reminded Lucy as I kicked off my flip-flops on the porch and crossed to the door, taking my key out of my pocket.
“I know,” she said, stifling another yawn. “Don’t worry.”
I turned the knob slowly, and pushed open the door an inch at a time, hoping it wouldn’t squeak. I glanced at the clock on the microwave as we stepped inside and saw that it was 3:05 a.m.—not a time I wanted to be waking up either of my parents.
“Wow,” Lucy said, not as quietly as I would have liked, looking around, “it looks just the same.”
I eased the door shut behind us. “I know,” I whispered as I crept past her, motioning her down the hall to my room. “Come on.”
“No, I mean it looks exactly the same,” she repeated, even a little louder. In his basket by the window, one of Murphy’s ears twitched, and I realized the last thing I needed was the dog waking up and starting to bark. “It’s weird.” Her eyes fell to the ground, and the sleeping dog. “When did you guys get a dog?” she asked, now not even whispering at all, but just talking in a normal volume.
“Today,” I murmured. “It’s a long story.” I took another step toward my bedroom, hoping that she would follow me. But Lucy was still looking around, her mouth hanging slightly open. I realized as I watched her that she must have been feeling the same thing I had when I’d come back—like entering an odd sort of time machine, where nothing had changed in the last five years. If we’d been coming up here all this time, undoubtedly the house would have changed with us. But instead, it was perfectly preserved from the last time she’d been in it—when we’d been very young, and best friends. “Lucy,” I said again, a little louder, and this seemed to snap her out of whatever reverie she’d been in.
She nodded and followed me down the hall, but stopped short halfway to my room. “You’re kidding me,” she murmured. She pointed at one of the framed pictures hung along the hall, where Lucy and I, at ten, smiled out at the camera, our mouths stained red and purple, respectively, from the popsicles we’d no doubt just consumed.
“I know,” I said quietly, standing next to her. “It was a long time ago.”
“It was,” she replied. “God. Wow.”
I looked at the two of us in the picture, standing so close, our arms so casually thrown over each other’s shoulders. And in the glass of the frame, I could see us reflected as we were now, seven years older, standing several feet apart. After looking at it for another minute, Lucy continued walking down the hall again. And not until she opened my door did I realize that of course she didn’t need me to show her the way—that at one point, she’d known my house as well as her own.
Lucy changed into the T-shirt and shorts I found for her, and I made the trundle bed with the extra sheets from our linen closet. When she came back from the bathroom, I had changed for bed as well and was experiencing a very strong sense of déjà vu. I had spent years in this same spot, with Lucy in the trundle bed looking up at me, as we talked for hours, long after we were supposed to have gone to sleep. And now here she was again, exactly the same, except for the fact that everything had changed. “This is weird,” I whispered as she climbed into the trundle bed, pulling the covers up around her.
She rolled on her side to face me, hugging her pillow the same way she’d done when she was twelve. “I know,” she said.
I stared up at the ceiling, feeling strangely uncomfortable in my own room, all too aware of every movement I made.
“Thanks for tonight, Taylor,” Lucy said around a huge yawn. I peered over the edge of my bed to see that her eyes were drifting closed, her dark hair fanned out across the white pillowcase. “You saved my butt.”
“Sure,” I said. I waited a second longer, to see if she wanted to talk—about the disappointing Stephen, or the circumstances of the night. But then I heard her breathing grow slow and even, and I remembered that Lucy had usually fallen asleep before me. I’d always envied the way she could fall asleep at the drop of a hat, while it sometimes took me what felt like hours to drift off. I lay back down on my pillow and closed my eyes, even though I had a suspicion that I wouldn’t be falling asleep anytime soon.
But the next thing I knew, light was streaming in through my windows, and when I sat up, I saw that the clothes I’d lent Lucy were neatly folded on the trundle bed. On top of them was the bag of Skittles, the top rolled over. And when I opened it, I saw that it contained only the flavors that had always been mine.
chapter twenty-one
Five summers earlier
I WOKE UP WITH MY ARMS AROUND THE STUFFED PENGUIN, WHO still smelled slightly of funnel cakes and cotton candy. I smoothed his scarf down, running the soft felt across my fingers, feeling myself smile as I opened my eyes, replaying the scenes from last night in my head. It had been a perfect night, and I didn’t want to forget a single moment of it.
I’d been going to the Lake Phoenix carnival since I could remember. It lasted the entire weekend, and Henry and I had gone to the first night of it. That was the night I’d always liked best. Before the grass became muddy and trampled, before you got queasy at the sight of the Slurpee booths, before you saw how few people actually won at the carnival games. When everything was still shiny and magical, the way it had been last night.
Since our movie date, Henry and I had continued to spend our days together, but things had definitely changed from the easy, race-you-to-the-snack-bar friendship we’d had before. Things were more complicated now, but also infinitely more exciting, and I’d return home every night, barely even paying attention to my dinner, instead turning over in my mind a thousand little moments with Henry—the dimple in his cheek when he smiled, the way he’d brushed my hand when he handed me my ice-cream sandwich. He hadn’t made any move to kiss me yet, but the possibility seemed to infuse every day, and I found myself wondering when it would be—when he took my hand to pull me up to the raft, and I yanked him into the water instead, and we surfaced at the same time, so close that I could see the water droplets on his eyelashes? When he biked me home, and then paused, clearing his throat and looking at the ground, like he was trying to gather the courage? Neither of these had been the moment, but that didn’t stop them from being that much more exciting, and making me feel like after spending my whole life reading about things happening to people in Seventeen, things were finally happening to me.
The only thing that dimmed the perfection of it was Lucy, who was insistent on knowing if I’d asked Henry about her. I was vague whenever she asked me about this, and found myself trying to get off the phone with her as soon as possible, once she brought it up.
But I tried to push Lucy out of my thoughts as I sat up in bed and propped the penguin on my knees. Henry and I had spent the carnival together, just the two of us. This hadn’t been easy to arrange, especially with Gelsey trying to follow me wherever I went, but I was able to bribe Warren into looking after her for the night with five dollars of the ride money my dad had given me, as well as promising to buy him ice cream the next time we went to Jane’s.
After finishing the protracted negotiations with Warren, I’d headed across the carnival in search of Henry, feeling my heart pound hard with excitement. It was early yet—the sun hadn’t totally set, and the neon on the rides and along the sides of the booths was just starting to glow. The clank of the machinery mixed with the shrieks from the people on the rides, and the yells of the workers in the booths, calling for people to step right up, test their luck, take a chance.
The funnel cake stand was almost at the opposite end from the entrance, and as soon as you got close, you could smell the scent of fried dough and powdered sugar, a combination that always made my mouth water. The sign that advertised FUNNEL CAKES/SOFT DRINKS/LEMONADE was in spelled out in pink and yellow neon, and standing under it, the glow from the sign reflecting on his dark hair, was Henry.
“You look
really nice,” he said when I finally reached him.
“Thanks,” I said, smiling wide at him. Even without Lucy’s help in the getting-ready department, I felt like I had been able to do an okay job with my hair and was wearing my new T-shirt. “You too.” I noticed that his normally shaggy hair had somehow gotten much neater, and I could see the comb tracks through it.
The air all around us smelled sweet, and Henry reached over and took my hand, threading his fingers through mine, and smiled at me. “Where do you want to start?” he asked.
We started with the Scrambler, then went to the Round-Up, then the Ferris wheel (we rocked the car as much as we could before the attendant yelled at us to settle down up there). Then, after we’d gotten most of the stomach-churning out of the way, we split funnel cakes and popcorn, and then shared a bright-blue cotton candy that stained our teeth and made our fingers sticky.
I’d gotten the penguin when we passed one of the game booths, and the attendant of the watergun-horse-race game had yelled out, “Hey, kid! Win a prize for your girlfriend!”
He’d said this last word with a smirk, and had probably intended to embarrass us, but Henry had just walked over to the booth, plunked down a dollar, and won (not the top prize level, but the one just underneath it) on his first try.
By the end of the evening, the neon was glowing brightly against the dark. My mom had arranged to meet me and my siblings at the entrance at nine thirty—my dad, who usually never missed coming to the carnival with us, had been working the whole weekend on some case. Henry was meeting his mom around the same time, and so we walked over together to the entrance. Just before we left, however, he took my hand and pulled me a few steps away, separate from the crowds, into the shadow of the ticket booth. And as I realized what was happening, Henry tilted his head and closed his eyes, and I closed mine just in time, and then he kissed me.
After all the articles I’d read that detailed how to kiss, I’d been worried that I wouldn’t know what to do. But the second his lips touched mine, I realized I hadn’t needed those articles. It had been easy.
I hugged the penguin tight, remembering. I’d been kissed. I was now a person who had been kissed. I rolled out of bed and practically danced out to the kitchen, though I quieted down when I saw my dad at the dining room table, on the phone, frowning at his laptop, piles of paper in front of him.
Feeling like I was full of more joy than the house could contain, I slipped out through the screened-in porch and ran down to the dock. I just wanted to lie in the sun and turn it all over in my mind, every moment of the night before. When I reached the end of the dock, though, I stopped short.
Across the water, I could see a pink bandanna tied to the leg of the dock opposite ours. Lucy was back.
chapter twenty-two
“AND DID YOU KNOW THAT THEY THINK THE FIRST VETERINARY records they can find date back to 9000 B.C.? And that the first veterinary school was founded in France in 1761?” I looked over at my brother and wished that I’d had the foresight to bring my iPod out to the dock with me. “Did you?” Warren persisted.
I just shook my head. I’d given up asking him not to tell me facts about vets twenty minutes before. “I know!” Warren enthused, looking down at the book on his lap. “It’s fascinating!”
It was my day off again, and I’d finally made it down to the dock, where I’d had plans to sunbathe the afternoon away. I hadn’t planned on the company of my brother, who had shown up not long after I’d arrived with my towel and cracked open my magazine. Now he was sitting on the edge of the dock with his feet dangling in the water, while I stretched out on my towel in my bikini, hoping I could pull a Lucy and just drop off to sleep. Ever since we’d gone into Doggone It!—four days ago—my brother hadn’t been able to stop talking about veterinarians, and what a fascinating field veterinary medicine was.
It became clear after only a day or two—despite my mother’s attempts to track down last year’s feckless, dog-abandoning renters—that we now had a dog. Murphy had settled in, to the delight of my sister. Surprisingly, though, it was my father that the dog really seemed to connect with. When I left for work—always biking now, unless it looked like rain—he was usually on my dad’s lap, looking at his computer screen as though he understood what was happening, and he usually reclaimed his spot after dinner as well. I’d even caught my mother patting Murphy’s head the other day when she thought that nobody was watching. And to an outside observer, Warren would appear to be the dog’s biggest fan—nearly every day he bought Murphy more treats, another squeaky toy, extra rawhide bones. But I knew that this, like his sudden love for the veterinary sciences, had nothing to do with affection for the dog and everything to do with Wendy, the girl who worked at Doggone It!.
“And—” Warren started, as I pushed myself up on my elbows and shook my head at him.
“No,” I said firmly, pushing my sunglasses up on top of my head. “No more vet facts. I’ve reached my limit. Go torment Gelsey.”
Warren looked offended for a second, but then just sighed and shook his head. “I can’t,” he said, kicking at the water’s surface. “She’s off with her other half.”
I smiled as I lay back down on my towel. Gelsey and Nora had become a unit quickly, which seemed to make her parents very happy. They’d explained, one night as they came over to say hello and collect her, that they’d been working toward a script deadline and hadn’t been able to spend much time entertaining her. But this was no longer an issue. Gelsey and Nora had become pretty much inseparable after that first day. They’d arranged to be in the same tennis group, and when they weren’t tormenting their tennis instructors, they were riding their bikes in tandem, heading out in the morning, to the pool or the beach. Every night, Gelsey was burbling over with things that Nora had said, facts about Nora’s life in Los Angeles, reports of their adventures. As I listened at dinner, I realized that Gelsey finally had her first best friend. “Then go tell Mom or Dad,” I said to Warren, as I turned my head to the side and closed my eyes. “Because I’m done.”
The beep-beep-beep of a truck backing up sounded, and I sat up straight and looked back toward the driveway, even though not much of it could be seen through the screened-in porch. “FedEx?” I asked, as Warren turned and squinted.
“UPS,” he said, shaking his head. “FedEx was here this morning.”
In addition to his work packages, my father had started ordering things like crazy, and was getting a lot of deliveries. It seemed like every day, multiple packages arrived—books, DVDs, chocolates from Belgium, steaks from Omaha packed in dry ice. He’d continued to get up early, and we’d had two more diner breakfasts, complete with our question quiz. (I’d learned that he had dreamed of being an astronaut when he was little, that the food he hated most in the world was lima beans, and that he’d gone to a ballet every night for a month after meeting my mother, to catch up.) Every night after dinner, we all gathered in the family room and watched a movie, and he was usually still up by the time I went to bed, reading a book, surrounded by an ever-growing stack of them.
I’d been unable to fall asleep a few nights before, and had gone out to the kitchen to get a drink of water, more because I was bored than thirsty, and had found my dad stretched out on one of the couches, the embers of a dying fire still crackling a little in the fireplace. The dog was sleeping on his feet, and he had his reading glasses on and a thick book propped up against his chest.
“Hi,” I whispered, and my dad turned his head and smiled when he saw me, pulling his glasses off.
“Hi, kid,” he said quietly. “Can’t sleep?”
I shook my head and crossed to sit on the couch across from his, leaning forward to try to see his book. “What are you reading?” I asked.
“T.S. Eliot,” he said, holding it up for me. The cover showed a black-and-white photo of a mournful-looking man. “Ever read it?” I shook my head. He settled the book on his chest again. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” he said. “I remember
it was my favorite in college.” He settled his glasses on the bridge of his nose again and squinted at the text. “I can no longer remember why, exactly, it was my favorite in college.”
I smiled at that and curled up on the couch, resting my head on the decorative pillow that was scratchy against my cheek. It was so peaceful out here—the intermittent crackle of the dying fire, the dog’s breathing, interrupted by an occasional snort, the presence of my dad—that I had absolutely no desire to go back to my own room.
“Want to hear some of it?” my dad asked as he looked over the book at me. I nodded, trying to remember how many years it had been since someone had read to me. I’d always wanted my father to do it when I was little, even though most nights he wasn’t home until long past my bedtime. But when he was there, he was the only one I wanted to hear stories from—he added in details my mother didn’t, like the fact that Hansel and Gretel were guilty of trespassing and willful destruction of property, and that the Three Little Pigs could have pursued a harassment charge against the Big Bad Wolf. “Okay, here we go.” He cleared his throat and started to read in a voice that seemed somehow weaker than the big, booming baritone I’d always associated with him. I told myself it was just because he was trying to be quiet, and not wake the whole house. And I closed my eyes and let the words wash over me—about women talking of Michelangelo, and yellow fog, but mostly, a refrain about how there will be time, time for you and time for me. And these last words were echoing in my head as my eyes got heavier, and the last thing I remembered before falling asleep was my dad placing a blanket over me and turning out the light.
“I’m not sure what he got this time,” Warren said now as he looked back toward the driveway and the UPS truck. “Personally, I wouldn’t mind more steaks.”