“Good thing you were there,” Emily agreed, her smile fixed in place.
Emily was saying all the right things, but they were all wrong in a way that was so subtle, I wasn’t sure if she was trying to make a good first impression on Sam, or it was just that we hadn’t seen each other in almost a month.
“You all set?” Sam nodded at the bag Emily had dropped on the ground next to us.
“I’d take it but…” I held up my left crutch and shrugged. “I’m sort of useless these days.”
“He is, really,” Sam agreed. “The car’s over here.”
Emily didn’t move. “Um, I’m going to run into the terminal for a sec. Be right back.”
“You want me to go with you?” I offered.
“No, I’m fine. You guys head to the car, I’ll meet you there.”
“Okay, it’s the red Jeep with the top down.” I pointed over to our parking spot.
Emily swung her bag over her shoulder and practically raced up the steps to the terminal. “Be right back!”
Sam waited until Emily was out of earshot to say anything. “So that’s Emily.”
“Yep, that’s Emily.”
“She’s not exactly what I expected,” Sam admitted.
“And what was that?”
“Seriously? Well, based on what you told me, someone a little less…” Sam paused and tried to find the right word. “Nice. Normal.”
I knew I’d regret it. It was so stupid to tell Sam about Emily and what happened with the notebook.
“Come on, give her a break.” I started hobbling back toward the car and Sam followed behind me.
“If you say so,” Sam reluctantly agreed, but without even looking at her, I could tell she wasn’t very convinced.
Long-Distance Relationship Tip #13
View your long-distance relationship as an opportunity.
Go somewhere he never wanted to go.
See the silly rom-com you know he’d hate.
This is your Nike moment.
Just do it.
Sam was a girl.
As we walked toward the car, I tried to think if I’d missed something, some allusion to Sam not being a guy. Some comment about how the Sam who rescued Luke from drowning was, in fact, not the unshaven, muscled guy I’d imagined would be capable of pulling my six-foot tall, lacrosse playing boyfriend to shore.
I splashed cold water from the bathroom faucet onto my cheeks. I knew my mom would suggest using water from a public restroom sink probably wasn’t the best way to ensure unclogged pores, but I wasn’t looking for a dewy glow. I was trying to figure out why Luke hadn’t told me that the person he had decided to live with for the summer was a girl. With sun-streaked blond hair and a body that looked perfect in a tank top and torn, faded jean shorts, which meant she probably looked even better in a bathing suit.
I tried to channel the voices of my best friends and their calm reassurances, as ferry passengers shot me dirty looks for blocking their access to the paper towel dispenser.
“Excuse me,” I apologized, and moved over against the opposite wall so I could pretend to hear Lucy and Josie’s voices while avoiding the wrath of disgruntled ferry passengers with dripping wet hands.
First, I heard Lucy’s calm, practical explanation: If Luke was remotely attracted to Sam, he wouldn’t have invited me to visit, right? And he wouldn’t have had me travel all the way to the island to tell me he’d decided he wanted the hot girl he’d known forever instead of the girl he’d only been with a few months. He didn’t bother pointing out that Sam was a girl because it didn’t matter. To Luke, she was just a girl he’d known his whole life.
Then I listened to Josie’s voice: Get over it.
So that’s what I resolved to do. I ripped a paper towel from the dispenser and dried my hands and face. Then I used the damp paper towel to pull open the bathroom door before tossing it into the trash, because, if I learned anything on my mom’s book tour, it was that the last thing I needed, in addition to a girl living with my boyfriend for the summer, was a handful of festering bathroom bacteria.
Luke and Sam were waiting for me, the Jeep already idling as a line of cars impatiently waited to take our parking space. Luke was sitting behind Sam, his tan arm draped across the seatback as he twisted around looking for me.
I wove my way through the cars maneuvering for parking spots and tossed my bag onto the back floormat.
“Sorry, I pretty much take up the whole thing.” Luke pointed to his outstretched leg laying across both seats. I took that to mean I was supposed to sit up front with Sam.
I slipped into the passenger seat, and before I even reached for my seat belt, Sam was backing out of our spot.
I turned around so I could face Luke, even though that meant the seat belt was cutting very unattractively across my boobs.
“Does it still hurt?” I asked, nodding at Luke’s knee.
“Yeah.” His voice was raised as he shouted into the wind beating against his face as we drove. “We’ll see what happens in seven weeks, right? Hopefully it heals and I won’t need surgery.”
“Right,” I assured him, then turned around to face the road. I thought Sam would try to have a conversation with me, ask a few questions or just make small talk considering we were seated two feet away from one another. But she just mouthed the words to the song playing on the radio and kept her eyes straight ahead.
I couldn’t tell if Sam was so perfectly comfortable around Luke that she didn’t need to make small talk to fill the silence, or so uncomfortable with me that she didn’t want to.
Sam was a girl. I still had a hard time wrapping my head around that change in events. Since I returned from my mom’s tour, I’d heard about Charlie and Sam every day. Luke didn’t elaborate about the family friends he would be staying with all summer, but their names found their way into our conversations and, in my mind, they were always two guys. One of them did not have long, chunky curls that caught the wind as she drove a convertible. And I never pictured Sam as someone so petite I’d feel positively Amazonian in comparison.
Twenty silent minutes later, we were winding our way through the narrow one-way streets of Edgartown until we finally pulled into the short, grassy driveway of a white clapboard house. A wooden plaque next to the front door noted it was built in 1726, and the uneven, sagging steps leading up to the front porch made me think that, unlike Josie’s home in Branford, this house hadn’t been touched by an interior designer.
Sam barely hesitated long enough to pull the keys out of the ignition before leaving Luke and me in the driveway to fend for ourselves.
“This place is historic?” I asked as I grabbed my tote bag from the back seat, helped Luke out of the Jeep, and handed him his crutches.
“Charlie is convinced it’s haunted, but the only noises I hear in the middle of the night are Marvel having dreams about chasing squirrels. There he is now.”
A brown, floppy dog galloped down the porch steps toward us. I dropped to my knees and let him sniff me while I ran my hand along his back. “He’s a cutie!”
“That’s Marvel. He loves me, probably because he’s the only one around here who’ll fetch a lacrosse ball. Come on, I’ll show you around.” Luke led me through the front screened door and pointed out the rooms to our left and right as we made our way toward the back of the house.
“They only live here in the summer?” I asked.
“Melanie is a college professor, so she spends her summers here, mostly writing research articles and stuff. Come on, you can meet her.”
Luke led me to the entrance of a screened-in porch running along the side of the house. Luke’s mom and Melanie, who were eating lunch around a white wicker table, stopped talking when they saw us.
“Emily!” Mrs. Preston stood up and reached her arms out for me. “You made it!”
She hugged me and then turned me to face Melanie. “This is Emily.”
“Hi, it’s nice to meet you.” I reached into my bag and handed Mela
nie the small box of scented soaps my mom had given me. “It’s just a little something for having me here.”
“Thank you, that wasn’t necessary.” Melanie held the box up to her nose and inhaled, closing her eyes and grinning. “Mmm, gardenias, my favorite. I’ve heard a lot about you, Emily. All good, of course. You two want to join us?”
I hadn’t eaten since my mom and I stopped for blueberry muffins on our way to Josie’s house. But before I could accept the offer and dig into the pasta salad in a bowl on the table, Luke spoke up.
“I’m going to show Em around,” Luke told Melanie. “We’ll grab something in a little while.”
I hoped a little while meant sooner rather than later. I followed Luke outside into the backyard, where Marvel was waiting for us with a saliva-coated lacrosse ball in his mouth.
“Did you bring me a present, too?” Luke asked me.
“It’s just soap.”
“Soap?”
“Don’t ask. Is that a chicken coop over there?” I pointed to the small, fenced-in area toward the left corner of the yard.
“Yeah, Melanie likes fresh eggs. She swears they taste better.” Luke bent down and tugged the ball loose from Marvel’s clenched jaws. “Gotta be honest with you, though, I can’t tell the difference.”
Luke threw the ball in a high arc toward the coop, giving Marvel time to follow it with his eyes and then race to retrieve it.
“Usually he just drops the ball into the net of my stick so I can avoid this,” he told me, wiping his hand down the side of his shorts.
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing toward the opposite corner of the yard. I thought maybe it was a shed for a lawn mower and gardening equipment, but it actually had a window and a real front door.
Luke tipped his head toward the shed, indicating I should follow him. “Come on, I’ll show you.”
As we got closer, it looked more like a guest house than a shed. The white-painted shingles hadn’t weathered the winter so well, and while some paint had blistered up in puffy pockets, in other places, the paint was peeling back like skin after a bad sunburn. The roof was coated in mounds of green moss, but the front door still shone a glossy red, which made it seem too nice for just a shed filled with Weed Wackers and fertilizer.
“This is the boathouse, which isn’t really a boathouse at all because, obviously, we’re not on the water.” Luke pushed open the door and hopped back to give me enough room to enter. “But for some reason, we’ve always called it that.”
“Ping pong?” I asked when I saw the table. Lined up beside the ping pong table, there was also a pool table, a faded pink and blue floral couch pushed against the far wall, and a dart board on the side wall. A wobbly bookcase was stacked with board games in faded, warped cardboard boxes. The boathouse was more like a well-worn game room, with scuffed wooden floors and sheer, almost transparent blue checked curtains that had seen better days. There was also barely enough room to navigate around, which meant we had to walk along the perimeter of the boathouse to even get to the sofa.
“Yep, and so far, I’ve taken Charlie for over fifty bucks.”
“You talking about me?” A guy who I assumed was Charlie stood in the open doorway. I could immediately see the resemblance to his sister, which meant he also looked like he stepped out of a J.Crew catalog. “Don’t let him fool you, I take it easy on him.”
“Yeah, right.” Luke shook his head. “Charlie, this is Emily.”
Charlie picked up a ping pong paddle and bounced a ball over the net toward me. “You play?”
I caught the ball and held it. “A few times.”
“Don’t do it,” Luke warned me. “We’ll never get out of here.”
“Just one game,” Charlie insisted. “It’ll be quick.”
I glanced over at Luke, who looked like he was about to continue protesting, but instead he nodded.
“Okay, fine, just one,” he reluctantly agreed.
Charlie clapped his paddle against the table. “Cool, you can serve first.”
“You sure?” I asked, picking up my paddle and spinning it against the palm of my hand to get a feel for the grip.
Charlie laughed at me. “Yeah, I’m sure.”
Luke hopped over to the couch and sat down on the far end so he could rest his leg across the sagging cushions.
“You ready?” I asked when he’d finished settling in.
Luke gave me a thumbs-up. “When you are.”
I can play ping pong. Well. Actually, really, really well, thanks to an insanely humid and rainy six weeks spent at a summer sleepaway camp with a single air-conditioned activity room—the one with three ping pong tables.
Luke hadn’t told me a lot about Charlie, other than his aversion to working and ability to drive Sam nuts. I had to admit, after a car ride that made me feel like I’d entered the cone of silence, I’d been hoping for a warmer reception from Charlie than I got from his sister. I was pretty sure kicking his ass in ping pong wouldn’t be the surest way to make him like me. I had a choice to make: let him win, make it a close game, or show Charlie I knew how to play.
Honestly, it probably should have been a tougher decision. I tossed the ball in the air, let it bounce once on the table, and smacked it across the net.
Charlie returned my first serve, barely, but after that, he had a hard time keeping a volley going. He may have underestimated me, but Charlie was right about one thing—it was a quick game. I won eleven to two.
“Nicely played.” Charlie acknowledged my win with an approving nod before turning to Luke. “You didn’t tell me your girlfriend was a ringer.”
“I didn’t know,” Luke admitted. “I’m just glad I figured that out before she whipped me.”
“Whipped? Really?” Charlie cringed. “I don’t know that I’d say she whipped me. Do you play on a varsity ping pong team or something?”
I spun the paddle in my hand once and laid it back on the table. “No, just lots of hours indoors avoiding blood-sucking mosquitoes.”
“I can acknowledge when I’ve been outplayed.” Charlie put his paddle down. “Just give me a chance to redeem myself before you leave.”
“She’s only here for the afternoon,” Luke told him.
“Well then.” Charlie paused and looked around the boathouse like he was trying to decide what to do next. “You play?” he asked me, pointing to the dart board on the wall.
“Okay, enough, I’m starving.” Luke reached for his crutches.
Charlie let out an exasperated breath. “Fine, but I want it noted that you owe me a rematch.”
“Noted,” I agreed.
“I was going to head into town. You guys want a ride?” Charlie offered.
Luke winced as he lifted himself off the couch. “No, I think we’ll just grab something here.”
I’d really been hoping to be alone with Luke, maybe walk around downtown and see the harbor, but the way he tentatively moved his braced leg to the floor made it clear he wasn’t up for going anywhere. The house wasn’t very big, and I knew Melanie and Mrs. Preston were still home and Sam was lurking somewhere inside. A ghost wandering the halls of the house, that I could handle. But Sam? At least a ghost would acknowledge my presence.
“Okay, your call.” Charlie turned to leave us, but then spun around and faced me, forking two fingers into a sort of peace sign and then pointing them at me as if casting a spell. “Later, you, me,” he said, rotating his hand back and forth between my eyes and then his.
It was official. Charlie was definitely my favorite sibling in the house. “You’re on.”
• • •
Melanie and Mrs. Preston actually weren’t inside the house, but they’d left us a note telling us they’d gone grocery shopping. They’d also left us two sandwiches, some pasta salad, and a bowl of grapes they’d put out on the kitchen counter. I grabbed the tray with our lunches, and Luke and I went out to the back patio.
“You never told me you could play ping pong,” Luke said between bites of
pasta salad.
“Luke, I can play ping pong.”
“Is that what you did when you lived in Chicago? Hustle people at ping pong?”
“Hardly.”
“I have to admit, it was pretty cool watching Charlie’s face when he realized he’d underestimated you.”
It had never occurred to me that Luke didn’t know I was a pretty fierce ping pong player, or that he had no idea I’d gone to summer camp in New Hampshire for a miserable two summers in elementary school. It wasn’t Earth shattering stuff—just small details and experiences I rarely ever thought about until it mattered, like today in the boathouse. Still, it was weird to think that there was so much Luke needed to learn about me. Which meant that, even though I felt like I knew Luke almost better than anyone else, there was also probably so much I didn’t know about him.
“What other talents are you hiding from me, Emily Abbott?” he asked.
“Hmm, let me think.” I took a bite of my sandwich and chewed until I came up with a few more obscure skills to share. “Did you know I can change a flat tire?”
“I did not,” Luke admitted. “Go on.”
“I can name the twelve major Greek gods,” I told him.
“Is one of them named Luke?” he ventured, and then waved his fork at me. “Never mind, continue.”
“I can do this.” I tossed a grape into the air and caught it in my mouth. “And I can open a Hyatt bathroom doorknob with my elbows.”
“That sounds vaguely useful.”
“Spoken like someone who didn’t spend three weeks living in hotel rooms. Not vaguely useful, very. Now what about you? What should I know that I don’t?”
“Let’s see… well, I can recite all the words to the theme song from SpongeBob SquarePants.”
“Talk about useful,” I agreed.