“Luke wanted to come over to try and fix things with you,” Sam reminded me.
“He’s been lying to me all summer,” I shouted, thinking it was my turn to remind them what Luke had done. “Every time we talked, every time I left my friends to visit him, he was lying.”
“You think that’s what he’s been doing? Really, Emily?” Sam raised her voice so it met mine, completely unafraid and not backing down no matter how many times I laid it out for them—Luke cheated on me, not once, but twice. “Let me tell you what he’s really been doing. First of all, he’s been missing you. It’s all we have to listen to, how he can’t be with you, how he wishes he could go to Falmouth to see you instead of always making you go to him. And you know what else? There was the small matter of his knee, the possibility that he wouldn’t be able to play lacrosse, that he’d need surgery, that everything he ever looked forward to was over. So trying to repair his knee and thinking about you. That’s what he’s been doing, Emily.”
“Wait.” Something Sam said stopped me, and I realized that Luke hadn’t hobbled away from me. He’d walked. “When did he stop using his crutches?”
“Two days ago. You’d know that if you would have talked to him.”
Nothing was making sense. Sam and Charlie had an answer for everything, a reason, an explanation that didn’t line up with the stories I’d heard or what I’d seen through the boathouse window.
I was done talking to Sam and Charlie. I needed to hear it from Luke.
I started to push past Sam, but she reached for my arm and held it, her fingers tight against my skin. “Don’t, Emily.”
I shook her hand free, but then Charlie stepped in front of me, blocking my path. “He’s really pissed, Emily. I think you should just let him go.”
For a second, I thought he was talking about now—that I should let Luke go away and cool off before trying to talk to him. But then I realized he meant more than that. Charlie was telling me to let Luke go for good. There was no repairing the damage this time.
“I told him you’d do this, when I found out about that notebook you kept and what you did to him last time. I said you’d do it again.” Sam shook her head at me. “And you know what he said? He told me you wouldn’t.”
“You don’t know me, Sam, and you sure as hell don’t know me and Luke.”
“What I know, Emily, is that you just blew it.” Sam spun around, turning her back to me as she walked up the beach to the party, Charlie and Becca following close behind.
“Let me guess,” Nolan said, stepping next to me as we watched them all fade into the crowd. “That was Luke.”
I sank down into the cool, damp sand and wrapped my arms around my knees, holding them tight against my chest as I rocked back and forth. I squeezed my eyes shut and let the sound of the rolling waves wash over me—push me away and then pull me toward the water’s edge, again and again, drowning out the voices from the party and dulling the steely edge in Sam’s voice before she’d turned her back on me.
It wasn’t the words, or who spoke them. It wasn’t what I’d heard that I couldn’t shake as I curled into myself like a shell, trying to blend in with the sand and disappear. It was what I’d seen—what I couldn’t forget no matter how hard I tried to remove myself from what had just happened.
Even the lull of the waves crawling toward me couldn’t quiet the image of Luke, the look of confusion and disbelief as he tried to make sense of me, of what I was doing on the beach with Nolan. And then I’d seen it, the almost imperceptible stiffening of his shoulders, a stillness in his expression that, although at first it had appeared reluctant, could only mean one thing.
It wasn’t anger or hate, or even hurt. No, what I glimpsed was worse. Something that, in all of our time together, I’d never experienced, even after he found out about the guide: acceptance. Acknowledgment. And a recognition that, this time, the only thing left for him to do was walk away for good.
Long-Distance Relationship Tip #47:
Even if you’ve run out of things to talk about, don’t think that a play-by-play of your day will make your conversation any more exciting. Unless you’re a professional sportscaster. And, most likely, you’re not.
I didn’t cry. My mind didn’t race through best-case scenarios and play out what could happen next. There was no next.
There was a party raging behind me. A guy sitting next to me who looked like he wished he could disappear into thin air. And somewhere out in the night, four people who’d traveled all the way from Martha’s Vineyard had all their worst thoughts about me confirmed. One of them actually mattered.
Luke cheated on me, maybe not when I thought he did, but he did. What made it worse was that he kept it from me, and yet all I could think of was how I’d done the very same thing. I lied for months to keep him from finding out the truth about me, about the notebook, about our plans for the time capsule. When I realized he was more than just an experiment, I could have told him. I should have destroyed the notebook weeks, even months, before I did, and instead I lied every time we were together. Every time I let him believe we were more than a set-up. Because I was afraid of what he’d think of me, but also because I was scared of losing him if he discovered the truth.
“Is there anything I can do?” Nolan ventured. Given he’d been dropped in the middle of my mess, it was nice of him to offer, especially since, a few minutes ago, I’d had my tongue in his mouth.
“About what just happened between you and me,” I started, but Nolan held his hand up to stop me from continuing.
“Look, I don’t know if I did something to make you think that should happen.” Nolan spoke slowly as he struggled to just come out and say what he meant. “I’m sorry if I did, but I don’t—”
“Just stop,” I told him. “Please stop. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have kissed you. It was totally fucked up. I’m fucked up.”
It was a perfect opportunity for Nolan to say, no, I wasn’t fucked up at all.
He didn’t.
“Am I?” I asked weakly.
Nolan seemed to be contemplating how to answer.
“The truth,” I insisted, even if it wasn’t lost on me that I’d once promised the same thing to Luke. No secrets. To be honest, no matter how hard that was.
“A little?” Nolan leaned away from me, as if he wanted to be able to quickly escape if I didn’t like his answer.
With the fire lighting her shadow, I could see Josie stomping toward us, zigzagging back and forth as she tried to avoid stepping on the mounds of dried seaweed in her path. “What’s going on?”
Nolan looked at me and then up at Josie, silently asking my permission to tell her. “Luke was here.”
“I thought that looked like him, but he wasn’t on crutches. What was he doing here?”
Nolan stood up and held his hand out to me, waiting for me to take it. “Come on, I’ll take you home.”
Josie kneeled down beside me and gently squeezed my shoulder. “It’s okay, I got it,” she said, because even though she didn’t know exactly what just happened, she knew this was when best friends stepped in to take over.
“Is it okay if I head back to the party?” Nolan asked me, and when I nodded, he turned to Josie. “Let me know if I can help.”
Nolan left us alone, just me and Josie suspended in some weird middle ground between bursts of laughter and the pops of the crackling bonfire, and the lazy, rhythmic rolling of the waves as they slithered toward us and then backed away.
I didn’t know if Sam and Charlie and Becca were still at the party, but I was pretty sure Luke was gone.
“Are you going to be okay?” Josie finally asked.
I started to say yes, but a question came out instead. “Why’d you tell me that Luke cheated on me when I was on tour with my mom?”
“I didn’t at first.” Josie’s hand slid off my shoulder and landed in the sand between us. She raked her fingers through the grains, front to back, creating rows that went deeper and deeper as she spoke.
“I knew, but I didn’t say anything, and then you caught him again and I hated seeing you feel like that. I mean, it was the second time he cheated on you, Emily.”
“He didn’t,” I corrected her.
Josie stopped raking, but she’d already dug a small moat between us, the kind I used to build around sandcastles when I was younger—a protective barrier from the waves that never actually saved my hours of work, because it was just sand and, no matter how hard I tried, a single wave was all it took to destroy it.
“But you said you saw him,” she reminded me. “You were there.”
“No.” My voice was steady as I watched the waves crawling closer to our feet, almost touching them before retreating. “What I saw was Luke and a girl I thought was Sam, but I didn’t know what was really going on. Sam told me that Luke didn’t do anything.”
“And you believe her?”
“I do,” I told Josie, and then I almost laughed. I believed Sam, of all people. “What I don’t get is why you finally told me.”
Josie jumped, startled by the water that tumbled over her bare feet. “Because you’re my best friend and he hurt you. You said you were done with him.”
“Is that all Charlie told you? That Luke kissed someone else? Or did he tell you more?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Did he also tell you that Luke regretted doing it and felt terrible? Did you know that Luke wanted to tell me, but Charlie convinced him not to?”
Josie shrugged. “Yes? So?”
“You left that part out, and I guess I’m wondering why,”
“Because you’d just caught your boyfriend kissing some girl and you felt horrible, and I wanted to help.”
I wanted to believe her, I really did. But there was something I couldn’t shake, a feeling that the residual effects of what happened months before continued to linger—a barely perceptible film of doubt that had coated our relationship ever since that day I’d admitted to Josie and Lucy that Luke was more than just an experiment. Josie had felt betrayed by me, by the way I’d kept my feelings for Luke a secret from her and Lucy. But now I wondered if what really bothered her was that she’d had him first. Even though she’d told me it didn’t matter, that our friendship was more important than some guy she’d dated for a few weeks. Luke had broken up with Josie and ended up with me, even if the way we got there wasn’t as simple as that. What was starting to feel simple, though, was the explanation for Josie’s decision to tell me. The way she glanced at Lucy when I’d leave to go visit Luke, the slight shaking of her head when she knew I was talking to him on the phone—it all added up to one answer.
“You know what it feels like?” I asked Josie, not even waiting for her to answer before rushing on. “It feels like you wanted us to break up. Like you’ve wanted that for a long time now, and the only reason I can come up with is that you still hate that I ended up with Luke and you didn’t.”
I waited for Josie to defend herself, to lash out at me and tell me I was crazy. But instead, I watched as my words diluted her, like milk swirling in a cup of coffee until it transforms the dark, stormy color into something paler and less potent. “Seriously? That’s what you think of me?”
“I don’t know what I think anymore, Josie.”
“You still don’t get it, do you?” She cast her eyes down at the sand as if she couldn’t even look at me anymore—like she was looking for something she dropped and knew how slim the chances were that she’d ever find it.
“Get what?”
Josie shook her head at me, like she couldn’t believe I didn’t see something that was so obvious. “It’s never been about you taking Luke away from me. It was about Luke taking you away from me.”
I let her words sink in as a wave slipped over my feet and covered my ankles.
“You moved away, and when you came back, Lucy and I had our best friend again, only it’s always about Luke—first with the guide, and then because you two were together, even this summer.”
“But I’m here. I came here to be with you.”
Josie frowned. “You arrived four weeks after Lucy and I got here, and you didn’t even bother showing up for your first night of work. You should have been there—not because you were afraid of getting fired, but because we were waiting for you. Then you get a job that doesn’t even let you be with us, and finally, when you’re free, you just want to be with Luke.”
“That’s not fair,” I told her.
“You know what’s not fair? That Lucy and I were nothing more than your fallback position—your safety net if things didn’t work out with Luke. Besides, if I wanted to break you and Luke up, then I could’ve told you weeks ago, when Charlie first told me.” She paused, letting that fact sink in. “I don’t know if I ever would’ve told you if you hadn’t found him in the boathouse. I didn’t share everything Charlie told me because I didn’t want Luke to get another chance to screw you over again. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe you’re right, and a part of me wanted to spend our last weeks of summer together without having to share you with him. But I’m not the one who cheated on you, Emily. Luke is.”
Boom.
If Josie had a microphone, she could have dropped it right then and walked away.
No matter how many explanations Sam and Charlie offered, Josie was right. That’s all she could see—what Luke had done to me, how he’d hurt me. And that’s all I’d seen, too, but I wasn’t sure I only wanted to see it that way anymore. I just didn’t know how not to.
“You’re right,” I told her. “I know you are, and I’m sorry.”
“For what? For thinking I went out of my way to screw you over, or for being a shitty friend?”
I couldn’t help thinking that they were one and the same. “Both?”
Josie almost cracked a smile.
“Both,” I repeated. “I’m sorry I’m such a freaking mess.”
She picked up a shell and turned it over and over in her hand, alternating between rubbing the pearly smooth inside and the ribbed outside. “You’re not a mess.” This time, she did smile when I rolled my eyes at her. “Okay, maybe a little, but mostly you’re just in a mess right now.”
“So what can I do?” I asked, hoping she knew how to fix things.
“About you and Luke?” she asked.
“About you and me,” I answered. “I want to make things right with us.”
“We’re best friends, Em. That doesn’t change just because you—or even I—screw up every once in a while.”
“I’m still waiting for you to screw up. Maybe then I’ll feel better.”
Josie laughed.
“I’m really going to miss you.” I reached for her hand and we held the shell pressed between our palms. “Who else am I going to find to put up with my crazy?”
“Probably nobody,” she teased, and then turned serious again. “Seriously, though. What about what Sam told you? What about Luke?”
“He cheated on me. Even if he didn’t do it this time, he did do it.”
“You made him the test subject for a guide to change shitty guys—and lied about it for months while pretending to be his girlfriend.” She managed to summarize our relationship’s less than optimal beginning into a single sentence. “It’s not like you didn’t make any mistakes you wish you hadn’t.”
I dropped my head back and looked at the sky, hoping there would be an answer written up there, a sign telling me what to do. Maybe there was a constellation exactly for this situation, something the ancient Greeks had discovered and named the answer because that’s what it provided to the confused people looking for it.
It was hard to even believe that this was the same sky Luke and I had shared weeks ago, when fireworks lit up the space between us.
But this time, there were no eruptions of color, no flares lighting up the sky with trails we could follow to one another. I couldn’t even make out the big or little dipper. All I saw was a haphazard smattering of random white spots.
“Luke knows he made
a mistake, and he regrets it,” she reminded me. “And he would’ve been brave enough to tell you about it if Charlie hadn’t convinced him not to.” I listened to Josie tick off three reasons why I should be able to move past Luke’s mistake. “I’d never tell you it was no big deal, but is it bigger than how you felt about each other?”
Felt. It was as if a jellyfish landed on my chest, the use of the past tense stinging me as I realized that was the only thing Luke and I might share ever again—a past.
After everything we went through to be together, I never would’ve thought I’d have to choose which was more important to me—feeling hurt and angry, or being with someone who could make me feel that way but make me feel a million amazing, wonderful ways, as well. I wasn’t sure I knew how to come to terms with the coexistence of those feelings, or whether I could accept that if it was either/or, all or nothing, I’d probably end up with nothing.
“I don’t know how to answer that,” I admitted.
“Maybe you should just talk with him. Give yourselves a chance to figure it out before you decide how you want to answer.”
“I think it’s probably too late for that.”
Josie swiped her phone and the screen lit up. “Maybe, maybe not. The last ferry out of Woods Hole is at nine forty-five. You have twenty-five minutes.”
“What if he’s already on the boat?”
“And what if he’s eating a stale pretzel at the Steamship Authority while he waits for the nine forty-five back?”
“You’ll drive me?” I asked, hopeful. I’d never make it if I had to go back to the house and get my bike.
Josie stood up and dug her hand into her pocket. “Take my phone. Alyssa’s number is in there—call if you need me. And here.” She tossed her car keys in the air, and I grabbed them before they landed on the sand. “You can drive yourself. I think it’s time you earned four wheels.”
Long-Distance Relationship Tip #50:
If he’s annoying you when he’s far away, consider yourself lucky.