My father’s doctors in Connecticut had given him permission to spend the summer in Lake Phoenix under the condition that he see an oncologist twice a month to check his progress, and when the time came, that he bring in nursing care if he didn’t want to go into hospice. The cancer had been found late enough that there apparently wasn’t anything that could be done. I hadn’t been able to get my head around it at first. In all the medical dramas I’d ever seen, there was always some solution, some last-minute, miraculously undiscovered remedy. Nobody ever just gave up on a patient. But it seemed like in real life, they did.
I met Gelsey’s eye for a moment before looking down at the floor and the jumbled pile of toys that had landed there. None of us said anything about the hospital, and what that meant, but I wasn’t expecting us to. We hadn’t talked about what was happening with our dad. We tended to avoid discussing emotional things in our family, and sometimes hanging around with my friends, and seeing the way they interacted with their families—hugging, talking about their feelings—I would feel not so much envious as uncomfortable.
And the three of us had never been close. It probably didn’t help that we were so different. Warren had been brilliant from preschool, and it had come as a surprise to no one that he’d been the class valedictorian. My five-year age gap with Gelsey—not to mention the fact that she was capable of being the world’s biggest brat—meant we didn’t have one of those superclose sister relationships. Gelsey also spent as much time as possible dancing, which I had no interest in. And it wasn’t like Warren and Gelsey were close with each other either. We had just never been a unit. I might have once wished things were different, especially when I was younger and had just read the Narnia series, or The Boxcar Children, where the brothers and sisters are all best friends and look out for one another. But I’d long since accepted that this wasn’t going to happen. It wasn’t necessarily bad—just the way things were, and something that wasn’t going to change.
Just like it wasn’t going to change that I was the unexceptional one in the family. It had been that way as long as I could remember—Warren was smart and Gelsey was talented, and I was just Taylor, not particularly skilled at anything.
Gelsey went back to throwing the stuffed animals into the hallway, and I was about to go into my own room, feeling like I’d spent far too much time as it was with my siblings that day, when a flash of orange caught my eye.
“Hey,” I said, bending down to pick up a stuffed animal I thought I recognized. “I think that’s mine.” In fact, it was a stuffed animal I knew very well: a small plush penguin, wearing an orange-and-white-striped scarf. It wasn’t the finest stuffed animal ever constructed—I could tell now that the felt was fairly cheap, and the stuffing was threatening to come out in several places. But the night of the carnival when I was twelve, the night I’d gotten my first kiss, the night Henry Crosby had won it for me, I’d thought it was the most wonderful thing in the world.
“I remember that,” Warren said, a look coming into his eyes that I didn’t like one bit. “Wasn’t that the one you got at the carnival?” My brother had a photographic memory, but usually used it to memorize obscure facts, and not to torment me.
“Yeah,” I muttered, starting to take a step away.
“Wasn’t it the one Henry won for you?” Warren put a special spin on his name. I had a feeling that I was being punished for making fun of Warren’s fear of small, harmless dogs. I glared at my brother. Gelsey was looking between the two of us, interested.
“Henry who?” she asked.
“You know,” Warren said, a small smile starting to take form on his face. “Henry Crosby. He had a little brother, Derek or something. Henry was Taylor’s boyfriend.”
Davy, I silently corrected Warren. I could feel my cheeks get hot, which was ridiculous, and I found myself looking for an escape. If there was a way that I could have walked away from the conversation without it being totally obvious that I was uncomfortable, I would have.
“Oh, yeah,” Gelsey said slowly. “I think I remember him. He was nice to me. And he used to know the names of all the trees.”
“And—” Warren started, but I interrupted him before he could continue, not sure I could take any more.
“Anyway, you should get that cleaned up before Mom gets here,” I said loudly, knowing even as I said it that it was highly unlikely my mother would yell at Gelsey for anything. But I tried to pretend it was true as I left with all the dignity one can muster while holding a stuffed penguin, and went to the kitchen for no reason whatsoever.
Henry Crosby. The name reverberated in my head as I put the penguin on the kitchen counter and opened and shut one of the cabinet doors. He was someone I had consciously tried not to think about too much over the years. He’d become reduced, shortened to a slumber-party anecdote when the inevitable question—Who was your first boyfriend?—would arise. I had the Henry story down perfectly now, so that I barely had to even think about it:
Oh, that was Henry. We’d been friends, up at my summer house. And the summer we were twelve, we started going out. He gave me my first kiss at the summer carnival…. This was when everyone would sigh, and if someone asked me what happened, I would just smile and shrug and say something along the lines of “Well, we were twelve, so it became pretty clear there weren’t exactly long-term prospects there.” And everyone would laugh and I would nod and smile, but really I would be turning over what I’d just said. Because it wasn’t that any of those facts had been technically incorrect. But none of them—especially about why it hadn’t worked out—had been the truth. And I would push thoughts of that summer out of my head and rejoin the conversation, relegating what had happened—with Henry, and Lucy, and what I’d done—back to the anecdote that I pretended was all it was.
Warren came into the kitchen a moment later and beelined for a large cardboard box sitting on the counter. “Sorry,” he said after a moment, opening the top. “I was just kidding around.”
I shrugged, as though I couldn’t have cared less. “It’s nothing,” I said. “It’s ancient history.” Which was true. But as soon as we’d crossed the line that separated Lake Phoenix from the rest of the world, Henry had been circling around in my thoughts, even as I’d tried to turn up the volume on my iPod to drown them out. I’d even found myself watching for his house. And I had seen, to my surprise, the house that had been a soft white was now painted a bright blue, and the sign out front that had always read CAMP CROSBY now read MARYANNE’S HAPPY HOURS, decorated with a silhouette of a martini glass—all proof that new owners had taken over. That Henry wasn’t there any longer. I had kept my eyes on the house even as it faded from view, realizing that I might really never see him again, which the presence of Maryanne, whoever she was, seemed to cement. This realization caused a strange mix of feelings—nostalgia coupled with disappointment. But mostly I had felt the cool, heart-pounding sensation of relief that comes when you know you’ve gotten away with something.
Warren began unpacking his box, lining up row after row of plastic ketchup squeeze bottles on the counter in perfectly straight lines, as though there might be some sort of epic condiment battle looming on the horizon.
I stared at them. “Is Pennsylvania having some sort of ketchup shortage that I’m not aware of?”
Warren shook his head without looking up from his unpacking. “I’m just taking precautions,” he said. “You remember what happened last time.”
In fact, I did. My brother wasn’t at all picky about food, unlike Gelsey, who seemed to live on pasta and pizza and refused to eat anything moderately spicy—but his one exception was ketchup. Warren put it on almost everything, would eat only Heinz, and preferred it chilled, not room temperature. He claimed he could tell the difference between the brands, something that he’d proved once at a mall food court when we were younger and extremely bored. So he had been traumatized five years ago, when we first arrived in Lake Phoenix and the store had had a run on Heinz and was down to the generic br
and. Warren had refused to even try it and had used my father’s corporate card to have a case of Heinz shipped overnight to him, something my father—not to mention the company accountant—had not been too happy to find out about.
Now, fortified against such tragedy, Warren placed two bottles in the nearly-empty fridge and started transferring the rest into the cupboard. “Do you want me to tell you how ketchup was invented?” he asked, with an expression that I, unfortunately, knew all too well. Warren was very into facts, and had been since he was little and some probably well-meaning, but now much-despised, relative gave him Discovered by Accident!—a book on famous inventions that had been discovered by accident. After that, you couldn’t have a conversation with Warren without him dropping some fact or another into it. This quest for useless knowledge (thanks to his equally fun obscure-vocabulary-word kick, I knew this was also called “arcana”) had only grown with time. Finally, we’d complained so much that Warren no longer told us the facts, but now just told us he could tell us the facts, which wasn’t, in my opinion, all that much better.
“Maybe later,” I said, even though I was admittedly slightly curious as to the accidental origin of ketchup, and hoping it wasn’t something terribly disgusting or disturbing—like Coca-Cola, which, it turned out, had been the result of a failed attempt to make aspirin. I looked around for an escape and saw the lake through the kitchen window. And, suddenly, I knew that it was the only place I wanted to be.
I pushed through to our screened-in porch, then out the side door, heading for our dock. As I stepped outside, I turned my face up to the sun. Five wooden steps led down to a small grassy hill, and below that, the dock. Even though it was directly behind our house, we had always shared it with the houses on either side of us. The dock wasn’t particularly long or impressive, but had always seemed to me to be the perfect length for getting a running start to cannonball into the lake, and the water was deep enough that you didn’t have to worry about hitting the bottom.
There were some kayaks and a canoe stacked on the grass by the side of the dock, but I barely noticed them as I got closer. You weren’t allowed to have any motorized watercraft on the lake, so there was no roar of engines disturbing the late afternoon quiet, just a lone kayaker paddling past in the distance. Lake Phoenix was big, with three small islands scattered across it, and surrounded on all sides by pine trees. Despite the size of the rest of the lake, our dock occupied one side of a narrow passage, the other side close enough that you could see the docks across the water and the people on them.
I looked across the lake to the dock opposite ours, which had always been the Marino family’s. Lucy Marino had been my best friend in Lake Phoenix for twelve summers, and there had been a time when I’d known her house as well as my own. We’d slept over at each other’s houses almost every night, alternating, our families so used to it that my mother started stocking Lucy’s favorite cereal. I usually tried not to think about Lucy, but it hadn’t escaped my notice, especially recently, that she had been my last tell-everything-to friend. Nobody at school seemed to know how to react to the news about my father, and overnight, it was like I didn’t know how to talk to anyone about it. And since I’d been thoroughly cast out of my old group of friends, I found myself, as the school year ended and preparations for our summer up here began, pretty much alone, without anyone to talk to. But at one time, I had told everything to Lucy, until we, like everything else, had fallen apart that last summer.
Out of habit, I found myself looking to the leg of her dock. Over the years, Lucy and I had developed a very intricate system of communication from our respective docks that involved flashlights and our own version of Morse code if it was dark, and a very imprecise semaphore flag system if it was light. And if one of us needed to talk to the other desperately, we would tie one of the pair of pink bandannas we both had to the leg of our docks. Admittedly, this had not been the most efficient method of communication, and we’d usually end up talking on the phone before we happened to see the lights, or flags, or bandannas. But, of course, the leg of her dock was now bandanna-free.
I kicked off my flip-flops and walked across the sun-warmed planks of our dock barefoot. The dock had been walked on so much over the years that you never had to worry about splinters, like you sometimes did on our front porch. I started walking faster, almost running, wanting to get to the end, to breathe in the scent of water and pine trees, and curl my toes around the edge.
But when I was almost to the end, I stopped short. There was movement at the base of the dock. The kayak I had seen earlier was now tied up and bobbing in the water, and I could see the person who’d been in it—a guy—climbing up the ladder using one hand, holding the kayak paddle in the other. The sun was glancing off the water so that the glare was blocking his face as he stepped on to the dock, but I figured this was probably just a neighbor. He walked forward, out of the glare, then stopped abruptly, staring at me. I blinked in surprise, and found myself staring back.
Standing across from me, five years older, all grown up, and much cuter than I remembered him being, was Henry Crosby.
chapter three
I FELT MY JAW DROP, WHICH I HADN’T REALIZED UNTIL THAT moment was something that actually happened in real life. I closed it quickly, then blinked at him again, trying to regroup as my brain struggled to comprehend what all-grown-up Henry was doing standing in front of me.
He dropped the paddle on the dock, then took a small step forward and folded his arms across his chest. “Taylor Edwards,” he said. He didn’t phrase it as a question.
“Henry?” I asked, a little faintly, even though of course it was him. For one thing, he had known me, which some random kayaker probably wouldn’t have. And for another, he looked the same—except much, much better.
He was tall, and broad-shouldered, with the same brown hair, so dark it almost looked black, and cut short. I could no longer see the freckles he’d had when we were younger, but his eyes were still the same hazel, though they looked more green than brown now. His jaw also somehow seemed more defined, and his arms were muscular. I couldn’t make this fit with the last time I’d seen him, when he’d been shorter than me, and skinny, with scraped-up elbows and knees. All in all, Henry looked very cute. And very not happy to see me.
“Hi,” I said, just to say something to try and mask the fact that I had been staring.
“Hello,” he said, his voice cold. His voice was also deeper, and no longer cracking every other word, like it had been the last time I’d heard it. His eyes met mine, and I wondered suddenly what changes he could see in me, and what he thought of the way I looked now. Unfortunately, I’d looked pretty much the same since childhood, with blue eyes and straight, fine hair that fell somewhere between blond and brown. I was medium height, with a wiry build, and I certainly hadn’t gained many of the curves I’d been so desperately hoping for when I was twelve. I now wished I’d taken the time to do anything with my appearance that morning, as opposed to just rolling out of bed. Henry’s eyes traveled down to my outfit, and when I realized what I was wearing, I inwardly cursed myself. Not only was I running into someone who clearly hated me, but I was doing in it a T-shirt I’d stolen from him.
“So,” he said, and then a silence fell. My heart was pounding hard, and I suddenly wanted nothing more than to just turn and leave, get in the car and not stop driving until I got back to Connecticut. “What are you doing here?” he finally asked, a hard edge in his voice.
“I could ask you the same question,” I said, thinking back to only a few minutes earlier, when I’d told Warren so confidently that Henry was ancient history, sure that I’d never see him again. “I thought you’d left.”
“You thought I’d left?” he asked, with a short, humorless laugh. “Really.”
“Yes,” I said, a little testily. “We passed your house today, and it was all different. And apparently owned by some lush named Maryanne.”
“Well, a lot’s changed in five years, Taylor,” he
said, and I realized it was the second time he used my whole name. Before, Henry had only called me Taylor when he was mad at me—most of the time, he had called me Edwards, or Tay. “We’ve moved, for one.” He pointed to the house next to mine, the one so close that I could see a line of pots on the windowsill. “Right there.”
I just stared where he was pointing for a moment. That was the Morrisons’ house, and I’d just assumed they were still there, Mr. and Mrs. Morrison and their mean poodle. “You live next door to me?”
“We have for a few years now,” he said. “But since there were always renters at your place, I didn’t think you were ever coming back.”
“Me neither,” I admitted, “if you want to know the truth.”
“So what happened?” he asked, looking right at me and startling me with the greenness of his eyes. “Why are you back, all of a sudden?”
I felt my breath catch as the reason—never far from my thoughts—crashed into the front of my mind, seeming to dim the afternoon light a little. “Well,” I said slowly, looking away from him and out to the water, trying to think about how to explain it. It wasn’t even like it was that complicated. All I had to say was something along the lines of My dad’s sick. So we’re spending the summer together up here. That wasn’t the hard part. The hard part came with the follow-up questions. How sick? With what? Is it serious? And then the inevitable reaction when people realized how serious it actually was. And that what I meant, but hadn’t said, was that we were spending our last summer together.