“Count on it, Emily.”
I glanced at the clock and subtracted five minutes. “I should go. I still have to pick up Josie’s car in Woods Hole.”
I took a final look around the office and turned to leave one last time. “You know, I never thought I’d be sad to say good-bye to this place, or you,” I added. “But I am.”
“Consider yourself lucky,” Nolan said. “Would you rather you just left and were glad it’s over?”
He was right. I was glad it was hard. It should be. Otherwise, how would I know that it was special? “Not at all.”
My bike waited for me outside, like it always did, but so much was different now. In a couple weeks, I’d be sharing my room with Kaitlin Fleur, my new roommate. I’d start filling up my phone with new names and numbers, just like I’d done with Nolan. And a few months from now, the marina would have a new owner and maybe a new name. The boats would be gone, the trees would be bare, and the Scoop Shack would be sealed up for the season.
I’d had it all wrong. Changing wasn’t hard. Not changing was.
Long-Distance Relationship Tip #56:
Read each other’s horoscopes every day.
Just because they can be fun. Not because you actually believe them.
At least, I hope not.
My roommate was a mermaid in her previous life.
I learned this fascinating little fact as I slipped the elastic corners of my brand new cushioned mattress pad onto the barren twin bed against the wall. The fresh bedding still smelled like fabric softener. My mother believed that everything was better with fabric softener, as if the scent of cotton meadow was a magic elixir against the unpleasantness of everyday life. Her next book was going to contain an entire chapter on scent etiquette—What Your Nose Knows.
The only thing my nose knew right then was that, if the musty, stagnant aroma of my new dorm room was any indication, the college facilities manager could benefit from the olfactory etiquette tips in the next installment of my mother’s bestselling series of books.
The girl who I would spend the next nine months waking up to had already unpacked and was in the process of decorating the opposite side of the room. Her mother obviously subscribed to the motto fend for yourself, because while I stretched my freshly laundered, meadow-scented linens across my bed, my new roommate pounded nails into the wall with an improvised hammer—the heel of a faded black combat boot.
My mom could have suggested a less destructive hanging method, as well as the correct tools and ergonomic technique. But my parents were already on the highway heading home, and in an hour and forty minutes, they’d walk into our house and probably find TJ had already turned my old bedroom into a man cave for his friends.
“Why don’t you try something in here?” I offered, handing my roommate a small box of various supplies my mom had packed for me. “I think there are tacks or hooks or something that might be easier.”
Kaitlin took the box and started rummaging through the various sheets of Sticky Tack and plastic hooks with easy to remove, non-damaging adhesive backing.
“What do you think you were?” my new roommate asked after selecting the plastic-coated pushpins.
“When?” I asked, focused more on making my bed than the voice coming from across the room, which, thankfully, was no longer punctuated by the sound of crumbling plaster.
“In your previous life,” she explained. “My boyfriend, Mark, was a dolphin.”
My mermaid roommate was dating a dolphin. How perfect.
“I’m not sure I ever thought about reincarnation before,” I told Kaitlin, although I was sure that I had started to think, in this life, my roommate might be a wack job. She looked pretty normal—no fish scales or tail hidden in her jeans as far as I could tell. With her long, dark cornrows gathered into a high ponytail and smoky, almond-shaped eyes, she was almost exotic looking, and nothing like the pale redhead I’d come to think of as the quintessential mermaid, thanks to Disney.
When I’d found out my roommate would be Kaitlin Fleur from New Jersey, there was no mention of her previous aquatic existence, or that of her marine mammal boyfriend. Still, Kaitlin brought a refrigerator stocked with snacks and cans of Starbucks Doubleshot energy drinks, which she offered to share with me without hesitating or asking if I drank coffee (I don’t). In the thirty-seven minutes we’d lived together, she seemed nice enough, which was more than I could say for Josie’s roommate at Skidmore, a militant vegan who wore Lobsters Have Feelings Too and Cows Love Vegans T-shirts and attempted to vegucate Josie on the finer points of slaughterhouse injustices. I gave their living situation no more than a month before they each requested a new roommate.
The pushpins must have worked because, when I turned around, Kaitlin’s entire wall was covered with purple, turquoise, and gold jewel-toned tapestries. They looked like they belonged in a subtitled movie with belly dancers and snake charmers coaxing pythons out of wicker baskets, not a dorm room in Western Massachusetts. Kaitlin stood back and admired her handiwork before turning to me.
“Want to see him?” She reached for a silver filigreed picture frame that had been propped on the nightstand she’d constructed from a stack of plastic milk crates. “This is Mark.”
She came over to my side of the room and held out the photograph of Kaitlin and her boyfriend sitting on a beach, her head resting on his shoulder.
I stared longer than I should have.
“We were at St. Germain’s together,” she told me, although I already knew she’d gone to boarding school; it was one of the first things she’d told me when we were texting. “He’s a year younger, so he’s a senior now.”
“He’s really cute,” I offered, because he was, and because I figured if I kept the conversation on Mark, she wouldn’t ask why my voice suddenly sounded funny.
“Yeah, he is.” Kaitlin ran a finger slowly across the frame’s glass, as if attempting to brush away the sand in the photo. “We were on the Jersey Shore, in Stone Harbor. Ever been there?” she asked.
I shook my head, not trusting myself to speak. I’d had my own photograph. My own summer day melting around me and my boyfriend. Only instead of resting my head on the shoulder beside me, I was laughing in front of a man-made whale tail.
I looked away. “A dolphin, huh?”
“Yeah, what about you? Is there a guy? Or girl?” she added.
I slipped my pillow into the crisp, cotton case my mom had neatly folded around a lavender-scented sachet—a little aromatherapy to help me relax and sleep soundly in my new bed.
I shook my head. “My fish got away.”
Kaitlin shrugged and gave me a wide smile. “That’s okay.”
“There’s more fish in the sea?” My attempt to make her laugh only made the smile fade and be replaced by what looked like genuine concern.
Kaitlin set the picture frame down on the milk crate nightstand and angled it toward her bed. “Look, Emily, I have Mark, but I need to focus on classes if I’m going to get into a top grad school program. We don’t need guys, but if you want them, there are a billion out there when you’re ready.” She emphasized the B in billion, as if I’d be disappointed by mere millions. “There are four other colleges within fifteen square miles of us, and they’re all a twenty-minute bus ride away. And the bus is free!” Kaitlin continued, reciting our college’s website with startling accuracy.
I didn’t know what freaked me out more—Kaitlin’s ability to see right through my attempt to make light of my situation, or the fact that I was about four years behind Kaitlin in planning for post-college life. I mean, it was our first day. Our first hour. And here I was already lagging in just about everything, from room décor to future career plans.
“It’s not a big deal, really,” I assured Kaitlin. “A guy is the last thing I need right now.”
Kaitlin nodded her agreement and then changed the subject. “Do you know what classes you’re going to take?”
There had to be at least two hundred different cours
es listed in the catalog. How could I possibly pick four? Unlike those people who knew exactly what they wanted to study and precisely what they’d do the day they graduated, I was a classic undecided. As well as a procrastinator. At least that’s what I’d been telling myself, because I figured procrastinating was acceptable for a first-year college student. What wasn’t acceptable? Trying to figure out what was going on in your ex-boyfriend’s head every time you read the course description for Psychology 101.
“I haven’t narrowed it down yet,” I told Kaitlin, and then, in an attempt to once again divert my thoughts to a totally innocuous topic, added, “What about you?”
I figured someone who believed she’d spent her previous life with a single finned tail instead of two human legs would be into studio art or philosophy. Maybe even dance (she had to be almost six feet tall and was definitely thin enough to be mistaken for a ballerina, although after our brief conversation, I could already tell she was more likely an improvised dance kind of girl).
“Here’s what I was thinking.” Kaitlin showed me a page she’d obviously printed from a spreadsheet. It turned out my mermaid roommate was an engineering major. And she had already planned out her entire course load for the next four years—computer science and math classes, with East Asian Languages and Literature thrown in for good measure. She may have been a mermaid, but Kaitlin was also organized. And obviously brilliant. Despite the lack of a portable toolkit with an assortment of tapestry-hanging accessories, my mom would love her.
“I’m going to head over to the campus center, I’m starving.” Kaitlin set the page down on her desk. “Want to come?”
Her side of the room looked like she’d already been there for days, but my side remained pretty bleak, more prison cell chic than dorm hangout. My duffel bags still sat in lumps on the floor, their seams bulging as they waited for me to pull the zippers and let them spew my clothes out in a pile of wrinkles. Kaitlin had already put her personal touch on her half of our room décor and plotted out her college career in neat, evenly spaced spreadsheet cells that probably had some sort of sophisticated algorithm behind them to ensure her classes didn’t conflict with visits from her dolphin boyfriend. I was way behind the curve.
“I think I’m going to finish unpacking.”
“Okay, be back soon!” Kaitlin grabbed a ten dollar bill from the top of her dresser and stuffed it into her jeans pocket before heading out the door and leaving me in our new room.
I was alone for the first time all day. Just me, a tired and scuffed hardwood floor that had already impaled a splinter into my big toe (lesson learned, socks from now on), a blank wall pleading with me to do something as cool as Kaitlin’s exotic tapestries and stale dorm air that was starting to make me feel claustrophobic.
I went over to Kaitlin’s side of the room to open the window, but paused when I reached the silver frame on her nightstand Mark was really cute. I could see why she didn’t care if he was still a senior in high school.
Still, Kaitlin was obviously smart. She had to know that the odds of the mermaid and the dolphin living happily ever after were about a million to one. If they were even that high. My mother would tell me not to be such a cynic, but after this summer, I felt like I’d earned the right to crap on the fairy-tale garbage I’d been delusional enough to believe. Absence did not make the heart grow fonder. Sometimes it just made everything harder.
Kaitlin and Mark probably had another three months, tops, before their long-distance relationship hit the skids. Everything would change now that Kaitlin was away at college. High school was a lifetime ago. Even the summer already felt long gone.
I squeezed my eyes shut and shook my head, erasing the mental image of a calendar with that day circled in red, a vivid reminder of what had happened. That night. The image of Luke’s shadowy figure as he turned his back to me and left me standing alone on the ferry dock.
The picture of us on Martha’s Vineyard was still in one of my duffel bags, I knew that. It was facedown at the bottom, beneath my socks and sweatpants and all the new underwear my mom insisted on buying me, because who starts college with the same underwear they wore in high school? Not the daughter of an etiquette guru, apparently.
My breath caught in my throat, and as much as I wanted to believe the lack of a well-oxygenated environment was to blame, I knew that wasn’t true.
That photograph in my bag—I didn’t know why I even brought it to school with me. I should have left it at home with everything else I’d decided to leave behind. That had been my plan. But this morning, I was finally leaving for good, and my mom and dad were downstairs yelling to me that it was time to go. I’d glanced around my bedroom one last time to make sure I wasn’t forgetting anything important, and I’d spotted it. A blue, glossy triangle of color poking out from beneath my desk lamp. A corner of the ocean. I couldn’t see us—the rest of the photograph was hidden under the lamp base—but I knew we were there. Me and Luke. I’d grabbed the photo and stuffed it into the bottom of my bag before flipping off the light switch and heading downstairs.
I shouldn’t have taken the picture with me, but I couldn’t leave it behind. And the reason made my eyes sting and my chest constrict, like my heart was breaking open inside me and every muscle, every bone, was trying to keep it from shattering into a million pieces.
Breathe, I reminded myself. Just keep breathing.
I reached over and cracked open the window to let in fresh air. Already the breeze was different, more unsympathetic. Summer was definitely over.
And so were me and Luke.
• • •
The reincarnation theory notwithstanding, Kaitlin did turn out to be normal.
We’d been roommates for five weeks, and, so far, we actually got along. (As predicted, Josie and her vegan roommate, who preferred to go by the name Fern even though her real name was Doreen, lasted ten days before requesting that the director of housing step in and remove one of them. Josie threatened to hurl a vegan-friendly imitation leather boot at Fern’s head if she forced her to listen to one more grotesque fact about the exploitation at factory farms.) Lucy had texted that her triple at Duke was huge and her roommates seemed fine, except for the fact that they were twins and Lucy could never tell them apart. (Apparently, one of them had a distinctive birthmark on her left butt cheek, but Lucy was willing to guess at who was who without asking for dermatologic verification.)
As far as roommates went, I felt pretty lucky. Kaitlin’s nightly phone calls from Mark, who wasn’t supposed to be on the phone after eleven because St. Germain’s had a strict policy, were tolerable for the most part. Sometimes, when the calls were winding down, her voice would get all low and soft, and I’d conveniently find a reason to go to the bathroom or down the hall to the kitchenette. Listening to all the miss you’s was bad enough, but hearing Kaitlin profess her undying love was downright unbearable when the only I love you’s I was getting came from my mom, and were accompanied by reminders to separate my white and colored laundry before washing.
I tried not to think about Luke, but there were times, mostly at night, when I was laying on my bed studying, and something I’d read would trigger a memory or a thought, and suddenly it was as if I’d stumbled down a path and couldn’t find a way to turn around. My mind started backing up, like those scenes in movies where the film seems to run in reverse, the characters walking backward as dry, brown leaves lift from the ground until they’re pinned back to their branches and brilliantly green. Going back in time. Here I was, reading Plato’s Republic for my Government 100 class, and instead of taking notes on the historical influence of its Socratic dialogue, I kept imaging what Socrates would have to say about the justice of what had happened between me and Luke. The whole concept of people not being able to tell the difference between what’s real and what isn’t—how two people can think they’re seeing the same thing, only to discover that, in reality, it’s completely different.
I started to think that maybe Plato was on to some
thing, and, as one of the most pivotal philosophers in history, probably had it all figured out. Until I got to the big takeaway and realized even Plato didn’t have the answer, which meant I could have saved myself three hours of reading by just ordering Chinese food and reading the little slip of paper inside the fortune cookie. The big reveal from ancient Greece’s esteemed philosopher and the founder of the first institution of higher learning? We’re all human.
Modern day translation? We all fuck up.
In the days that followed that night on the ferry dock, I’d kept waiting for my phone to ring—to see Luke’s name appear on my screen. So many times, I wanted to pick up the phone and call him, ask if we could just forget what happened, forget who did what and who was wrong. But I couldn’t. It wasn’t that simple, untangling the snarled ball of missed expectations that had become us, unfurling the knots created by our mistakes. Because as much as I wanted to do that, I couldn’t help toying with those knots, running my fingers over them again and again, until they became so tight I didn’t know how to begin prying them loose.
I could have told Kaitlin the gory details about me and Luke from the start and avoided the seemingly innocuous questions that she’d pepper me with out of the blue—questions that only made me remember what I was trying so hard to forget: What was his last name? (Preston, Luke Preston.) What color eyes did he have? (A soft, gooey brown, like the caramel you pour on a sundae.) How’d you meet? (Umm…) Did your friends like him? (Double umm…)
But I didn’t tell Kaitlin any more than I had to. I’d barely told Josie and Lucy exactly what had happened that last night. With all the pre-college preparation, my meager explanation had been good enough for them. They were willing to accept my answers at face value. As long as I was okay, the details didn’t matter, they’d told me. Who said what, who was right or wrong—the answers didn’t change the outcome. Unlike Plato, my friends weren’t interested in theoretical conversations when the answer was so very clear: everyone else was ready to close the book on the story of Emily and Luke, and begin the next chapter of their lives. It was time I did the same.