“Believe me, when someone comes in that hard and fast, you don’t forget. But I still like to think of the other one as our first kiss.”
“Why?” she wanted to know.
I shrugged as if I didn’t have an answer, but I did. It was because, right after the second kiss, Emily had felt her lips with her finger, like she was trying to trace exactly where we’d touched. It was because, when I got in my car, I saw that she was still standing in the doorway exactly where I’d left her, like she didn’t want to move until I was gone.
“Because instead of pulling me by the collar and accosting me like you had a job to do, that time I surprised you. And you just stood there looking stunned while you watched me leave.”
“Oh my god, I can’t believe you remember all that.”
She was almost to the ferry, but I didn’t let it end there. “Or maybe it’s just because that first kiss was really, really bad, and I want to block it from my memory.”
“Not funny,” she yelled, but she was laughing. “Just so we’re on the same page, let’s go with your first kiss.”
“That works,” I yelled back, because it did, and because Josie and Lucy were pulling her onto the boat and we’d run out of time.
Long-Distance Relationship Tip #27:
Boring conversations.
They’ll happen. More than you ever thought.
Silence may be golden, but not when you’re on the phone.
Always have topics in your back pocket ready to go.
I’d dropped Nolan’s name on purpose. As soon as I did it, I’d wanted to take it back—inhale the word and keep it from escaping. But I couldn’t do that, and even if my initial reaction to hearing that Luke had confided in Sam about his knee was to dangle Nolan in front of him and see if he took the bait, I instantly regretted it. When he’d mentioned that Sam was driving him to physical therapy, I didn’t react, but when he brought up talking to her, it was different. That time, Sam wasn’t just solving a logistical issue; she was stepping into a role I was supposed to play.
I’d wanted to level the playing field. He had Sam, and I wanted him to know that I had Nolan. But instead of feeling better by making Luke experience how I felt when Sam’s name was mentioned in conversation as naturally as he’d talk about Owen or any of his friends, I felt like a jerk, which was why I’d immediately tried to play it off like the conversation hadn’t been about Sam at all. I’d pretended she was just a sidenote.
Was it jealousy? Partly, yes, but it was also something more. When Luke talked about Sam, he made me feel less. Less important. Less special. I knew Luke hadn’t done that purposely, but that almost made it worse, as if his relationship with Sam was second nature, as instinctive as breathing, a pairing that was uncomplicated and easy.
I don’t know why I asked Luke if he remembered our first kiss. It wasn’t something I’d planned, but as I was leaving for the ferry, I suddenly wanted to find out if we saw us the same way. Funny, we’d both been there that night I was babysitting for the Brocks and yet we chose to remember it differently, which made me wonder if he’d look back at today and only recall how we’d laughed about the whale tail while Josie took our picture, our walk through town, the way I’d rubbed his knee on my lap while he explained how afraid he was that he’d never play again.
I knew what Luke was really saying when he told me lacrosse made him him. What he meant was that lacrosse made him feel special. It made him feel like he mattered, it was something that gave him a place that felt right. I understood because, when I thought about what made me feel special, what made me feel like I was in the right place, that I was exactly where I belonged, the answer was mistakable: with Luke.
Josie and Lucy chose seats on the top deck of the ferry, which meant the sun beat down on our backs as the boat made its way toward Falmouth. None of us tried to have a conversation, and I think we all wanted to pretend it was the churning of the ferry’s engine that kept us from talking. It was a convenient excuse, though, to give us time to figure out how to bring up the two topics that had started and ended our trip.
“So how was the beach?” I finally asked when I realized neither Josie nor Lucy was going to bring it up.
“We met her,” Lucy said.
“I figured that. Did you get to talk to her?”
“Yeah, her and her lifeguard friend Becca.”
I waited for Josie to say something—to chime in with her impressions of Sam, of which I was sure she had plenty. Josie reached into her bag and pulled out her camera as if Lucy and I weren’t even there.
“Do you think they clone lifeguards?” Lucy asked. “Sam’s friend Becca looks exactly like her. Same blonde beachy hair, same sunglasses. They even sat the same way up in their lifeguard chair, with one foot tucked under them and the other one on the platform, waiting to run into the waves and save lives.”
“I doubt scientific advancements in cloning would start with lifeguards. What did you think?” I turned toward Josie, who had the camera’s lens pointed at the waves fluttering out behind the boat.
She moved the camera down onto her lap and started clicking through the photos she’d taken, each one appearing on the small digital color screen for a few seconds before she moved onto the next. “She was fine.”
“Fine? That’s all I get?”
Josie stopped clicking and looked up at us. “We only talked to her for a few minutes, but she seemed normal enough.”
Normal. Josie had swapped work shifts, paid for a ferry ride to Martha’s Vineyard, and finally got to meet Sam, and her reaction was normal?
No. There was nothing normal about this at all.
“Okay, what happened? You were totally fine until you went into the house with Charlie.”
Now even Lucy was watching Josie for an answer. Whatever had happened, Josie hadn’t let Lucy in on it, either.
“Did you and Charlie…” Lucy didn’t finish her question, but we all knew what she was asking. Did Josie do something with Charlie.
“God no,” Josie burst out, seeming like herself again.
“You were gone a long time, and then you came back and suddenly we had to leave.”
“I wasn’t about to take any chances we’d miss the last ferry,” Josie explained, matter of fact. “And no, I did not do anything with Charlie. Believe me.”
I looked over Josie’s shoulder at the photos she was once again viewing in reverse order. I recognized a few shots of Melanie’s chicken coop and the exterior of the boathouse, and then imagined their time on South Beach as Josie clicked through images of little kids building sand castles with bright pink and yellow plastic pails.
“Wait, stop there,” I told her and held out my hand. “Can I see those?”
She hesitated, which I didn’t take personally, because asking to hold Josie’s camera was like asking a mother to hand her newborn to a hyena.
“I’ll be careful,” I promised.
Josie reluctantly gave me the camera, and I clicked through the photos she’d taken in front of the whale tail.
“Can I have this one?” I asked, showing her the last photo in the sequence, where Luke and I were laughing, our heads bent together with my hair swirling around us in the wind. We weren’t looking at Josie or the camera, and it was as if she’d caught us frozen in a moment of time.
“Really? You like that one?” Josie frowned at me and took the camera back.
“I love it. You’re amazing. Can you print it out for me?” Josie didn’t have a dark room at the Cape house, but she did have a new mega-pixel color printer designed especially for photographs.
“I’m not sure I have any photo paper left.” She pressed a button and the digital screen went dark.
“Regular paper is fine.”
“Sure, if that’s what you want,” she agreed, and placed the camera back in its bag.
Josie really was an amazing photographer, the way she made my hair look like delicate strands of spun sugar frozen around us, creating a cocoon that hid our fa
ces except for our mouths, which were open and so animated you could almost hear us laughing. That’s what I wanted to remember about today. That moment when it still felt possible to have a perfect day together.
“I’m going to head down and get a seat out of the sun, you want to come?” Josie stood up.
“No,” Lucy said, tipping her head back and closing her eyes. “I’m enjoying the cool breeze up here.”
I had been about to go with Josie, but decided to stay with Lucy instead. Once Josie was down the stairs, I took out my phone and typed some words into Google.
“What do you think really happened when Josie went in the house with Charlie?” Lucy asked me, her eyes still closed and her head resting against the seat back.
“You don’t believe her?”
“Part of me does, but she was being really weird, and Charlie was definitely acting like he wanted something to happen. I mean, that pool match was painful—I can’t imagine anyone doing that unless he thought he had a shot. Maybe she doesn’t want us to know because Charlie’s still in high school.”
It was possible Josie was just embarrassed. Lucy had spent more time with her this summer than I had, but even I had a hard time believing Josie would be all that excited to admit she got together with a guy who was still in high school, especially when that guy was a friend of Luke’s.
I continued to search on my phone, scanning articles that seemed to have the information I was looking for until I found what I needed. I tapped Lucy on the shoulder.
“Hey, Luce, can I ask you something?” She opened her eyes but kept her head tipped back, so she was almost looking down at me. “What would happen if you couldn’t play soccer at Duke?”
Now she sat up. “I guess I’d be going somewhere else. It was basically all about the best offer. If another school offered a better scholarship, I’d have gone there.”
“I meant what if you couldn’t play. Period. Anywhere.”
“If I couldn’t play at all? Anywhere?” she repeated, like the thought had never even occurred to her.
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know. I’d probably feel like it was all a big waste of time.”
“What was?” I said.
“Twelve years of practicing, giving up my weekends for tournaments, staying in on Friday nights during the season so I wasn’t too tired to play the next day, summers spent doing three-a-days, shin splints, a dislocated finger, and a broken nose.”
“You broke your nose?”
“Yeah, junior year in a game against St. Mike’s, their player’s head collided with my face.”
I squinted, trying to see if Lucy’s nose looked any different than I remembered from freshman year. “It looks the same.”
Lucy pinched her nose and ran her fingers along the bridge, from the tip to between her eyes. “Maybe not exactly the same, but it’s fine.”
“Luke is really worried he won’t be able to play this season.”
“I don’t blame him.”
“I Googled MCL tears, and there’s a really good possibility that Luke will be fine after his physical therapy.” I may have spent more time trying to understand abnormal valgus laxity than I’d intended, but that’s what I’d concluded.
Lucy smirked, tipped her head back again and closed her eyes. “Well, as long as you Googled it, I’m sure he’ll be fine.”
“I know, I’m not a doctor, but neither is he.”
“True, but it’s his knee.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning… remember how you felt when you didn’t get into Brown after you had your heart set on it for, like, years?”
How could I forget? I could still picture the director of admissions, Ronald Parker, with his name badge and his gold wire-rim glasses. “Yeah.”
Lucy sat up and turned to face me. She propped her knee up on the seat between us and hugged it. “But it was out of your hands, right? You took your SATs, wrote your essays, did your interview, sent in your application, and the rest was up to them.” Lucy ticked off each of these steps on her fingers, then took the first finger and bent it down again into her palm “Now what if you’d messed up? What if you overslept the morning of your SATs, what if you couldn’t figure out what to write and your essay sucked, or what if, during the interview, you let it slip that you only got an A in chemistry because you cheated off the guy who sat in the seat one row ahead of you.”
“I wouldn’t do that!”
“I know, but if you had, if you’d been responsible for ruining your one shot at something you’d worked your ass off for, how would that make you feel?” At this point, her fingers were all bent over and she held up a fist.
“Like shit.”
“Yep. So it isn’t just about whether or not Luke’s knee gets better or he needs surgery or he has to take a season on the bench. It’s that he’s the one who jumped from that bridge, and he has no one to blame but himself.” And on that note, Lucy simulated the sound of an explosion as she blew up her fist. “Is that what you guys were talking about in the boathouse when we showed up? You seemed kind of intense.”
“Sort of.”
Lucy could tell my sort of meant not really. “Is everything okay with you two?”
“I think so.”
“You think so? That’s not exactly a resounding endorsement for a guy you once told us you were totally in love with.”
I hadn’t actually told them that. Months ago, Josie had asked me if I really liked Luke, and I’d admitted I liked him, a lot. But I couldn’t quite bring myself to tell my best friends what I’d realized myself. Even though I didn’t say it, they knew what I meant.
“I thought it would be better with him being nearby, but it’s actually harder in some ways.”
“You knew it would only get harder after graduation,” Lucy reminded me. “If you think about it, it’s not going to get any easier.”
“I wasn’t expecting easier, I just… I don’t know. I didn’t think it would be so complicated.” Although I didn’t say it, I thought that, we’d figure it out, not because we were afraid of breaking up, but because we wanted to stay together.
When I’d left Chicago, when Sean was breaking up with me, I still thought I loved him. I’d told Sean I loved him, but looking back I know I didn’t. I think I wanted to, which isn’t the same thing. There are several definitions of love in the dictionary—I knew this because I looked it up when trying to figure out how I felt about Sean. I’d learned that the word originates from the Old English lufu, is of Germanic origin, and also comes from an Indo-European root shared by Sanskrit and Latin for desire. What I didn’t know? That the Latin root for love is also shared by the word leave.
According to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, when Sean and I were together I could answer yes to several definitions of love: A deep romantic or sexual attachment to someone. (Yes! Even if the sexual attachment hadn’t yet occurred, but had been planned for in my head a million times.) An intense feeling of deep affection. (Bingo!) A great interest and pleasure in something. (Absolutely! At least most of the time, if not when he was telling me our long-distance relationship was over before it even had a chance to begin.)
After four months together, I’d wanted to believe we were more—that we were on some sort of trajectory leading somewhere that didn’t end with him breaking up with me on the front walk of my now-former house in Chicago, as snowflakes fell onto the jacket I’d given him for Christmas and my family waited for me in an idling cab parked in our driveway. But he was right; there was no way we could have stayed together after I moved back to Branford. I can admit that now, even if I’d wanted to stab him with an icicle at the time. It wasn’t love, it was familiar, a sense of security, a way to have something and someone to hold onto when it felt like I was being forced to give up everything that mattered to me.
Maybe I was going about this all wrong. Maybe the real test of a relationship isn’t how hard you try to stay together, but how you stay together even when you aren’t trying re
ally hard.
Long-Distance Relationship Tip #29:
If you love something set it free.
They say that if it comes back it’s yours.
What is your boyfriend, a homing pigeon?
Ignore this nonsense.
“Want to earn some overtime?” George asked me two days later.
I was helping him scrub out the freezer, which he’d defrosted the night before. The freezer had a partition down the middle to keep the bags of ice separate from the cooler with the frozen bait, and, needless to say, George chose to scrub the side for the ice. I had the pleasure of scraping away the frozen, crusted fish juice that had leaked from the cooler into the bottom corners of the freezer.
“I’d love to,” I told him as I bent over at the waist, the upper half of my body submerged in the freezer. I shook a trail of baking soda out of the box with one hand while I ran a damp sponge over the white powder with the other. It was my idea, the baking soda. George had wanted me to use liquid dish soap, but I’d suggested that, while that may get the freezer clean, it wouldn’t remove the lingering fishy odor. When George gave me a skeptical look, I’d told him my mom did this sort of thing for a living and he could trust me. Already, I could tell my half of the freezer was smelling a lot better.
“I was hoping you’d say that. There’s a bluefish tournament, and a few of my buddies asked me to join them.” George patted a wad of dry paper towels inside his half of the freezer before starting to load the new bags of ice that had just been delivered. “It’s next Wednesday and Thursday.”
I stopped scrubbing. “My days off?”
“I’d pay you time and a half,” he reminded me.
The summer was slipping away and I needed the money. My parents were expecting me to come home with at least a thousand dollars saved, and at this rate, I wouldn’t come near that.