Infinite in Between (14 page)

“KYRA AND SCOTT
did it on a
waterbed
last night,” Autumn told Whitney as they waited with their pom-poms near the bleachers.

Whitney shaded her eyes with her hands. It felt strange to hear that Kyra, her former best friend, had lost her virginity. But so far
everything
about this summer was strange. For one, she and Autumn had been cast as cheerleading extras in a movie that was being filmed in Hankinson. It was called
This Is My Life
. It was low budget and sappy, and they weren't even being paid. But it wasn't like Whitney had anything better going on. She'd thought about lifeguarding this summer, but she was still recovering from pneumonia when they taught the Red Cross course in the high school pool.

“A waterbed is so cheesy,” Autumn said. “Can you imagine them sloshing all over the place?”

“How do you know about this? Did Kyra call you?” Whitney stretched her legs in front of her and crossed one ankle over the other. The cheerleading skirts were seriously short. Every morning she woke up early to shave. When Lucas picked her up on the way to the stadium, he would run his hand up her calf for a stubble check.

That was another strange thing about this summer. Lucas
Bauersmith was eighteen and had just graduated from Fayette High, about twenty minutes from Hankinson. He also happened to be Kyra's cousin. He wasn't Whitney's boyfriend, but they'd been hooking up. The fact that Whitney was fooling around with Lucas had gotten her and Kyra talking again. They weren't best friends, but at least they were being civil.

“Kyra called me right after she did it,” Autumn said. She buried her fingers into one of her pom-poms. “I mean, after Scott drove her home.”

“Filming in two minutes . . . Quiet on the set!” a production assistant shouted into a megaphone. They weren't using the extras for this scene, so all the cheerleaders were hanging out on the grass.

“Why did Kyra call
you
after she did it?” Whitney whispered, leaning in to Autumn. When Kyra and Whitney had broken up, Kyra got custody of Laurel, and
Whitney
got Autumn. Whitney didn't even know Kyra and Autumn liked each other.

Autumn shrugged. “I guess Kyra needed someone to confide in, like, to process the whole thing.”

A techie glared at them and held his finger to his lips. As they began filming, Whitney studied Autumn, with her white sunglasses and heart-shaped lips and reddish curls tied back in a ponytail. Why on earth would Kyra call
Autumn
to tell her she'd had sex? Something was up. Whitney could sense it.

“And . . . cut!” the director called out.

“Also,” Autumn said, leaning in close. Her breath smelled like Altoids. “Kyra and I are going through the same thing right now.”

Whitney stared at Autumn. Yet one more strange thing about this summer was that Autumn was together with Zach. Yes,
Whitney's
ex-boyfriend Zach. He was in the movie too, and he and Autumn couldn't keep their hands off each other. To Autumn's credit, she'd asked for Whitney's blessing before they got together.
God.
Sometimes Hankinson gave her a headache.

“
You and Zach
did it?” Whitney's throat was tight. She and Zach had been together for over four months.
Autumn
was the one who told her that Zach had been cheating on her with that girl Allegra and some other girls too.

Autumn pushed her sunglasses up on her head. “Uh-huh,” she said, grinning. “Zach and I did it last week for the first time. And then . . . let's just say it's
happening
.”

Whitney shook her head. It was one thing for Autumn to be fooling around with her ex-boyfriend, but another entirely for them to be having
sex
. Also, why didn't Autumn tell
her
last week? Why did she tell Kyra first?

“So what about you?” Autumn asked.

“Me what?”

“You and Lucas. He's eighteen. How long do you think he's going to wait? You've heard of blue balls, right?”

Among their friends, Whitney and Laurel were both holding off. Laurel was planning to have sex once she was in college. Whitney wasn't so definite. She figured she'd know when she got there.

“You're saying I should do it with Lucas because he's sexually frustrated?” Across the field, Lucas was guzzling water with the other football extras and then they were spitting it at each other. No way was he going to be her first.

“Don't you want to?” Autumn asked. “Aren't you ready to get it over with?”

“Filming in one!” the production assistant called into his megaphone.

Whitney whispered to Autumn, “Have you ever heard of
coup de coeur
?”

Autumn shrugged. “Is that French?”

“Yeah . . . it means ‘falling in love.' But it's more than that. It's like falling in love instantly. A shock of love.”

“And?”

“Maybe it's stupid . . . but that's what I'm waiting for.”

Whitney lay on her stomach to watch the scene being filmed. Back when she was really sick with pneumonia, someone had anonymously delivered a small red teddy bear to the hospital. The bear had the words
Coup de Couer
across its belly. Her dad, who had flown in from Chicago, translated it for her.

Later that day Whitney's fever broke. Deep down she thought it was the bear that saved her life. She still slept with it every night.

AVA LOCKED THE
door of her dorm room and then pulled off her striped sundress. Underneath, she was naked.

Gregor felt stirring between his legs and also an icy terror in his gut.

Ava was seventeen, played viola, and was a counselor-in-training at the summer music conservatory. On the first morning, Ava had flirted with him in the dining hall. That night they'd clandestinely held hands on the lawn during the outdoor movie, and they'd been fooling around ever since. They had to keep things on the down low, since Ava was a CIT and Gregor was a senior camper. Mostly, it was making out when Ava's roommate was away, but a few times they'd taken off their shirts and her bra and pressed their bare torsos together. Even when he was playing cello, all Gregor could think about was Ava's long brown hair, the way her skin smelled like sunblock and tasted like salt, her legs in those short shorts she always wore.

“Do you want to do it?” Ava asked. She set her glasses on her desk and pulled a box of condoms out of her dresser drawer.

Gregor glanced at the condoms and then at Ava again. Her head
was tipped to one side, and she was smiling. Just looking at her made his stomach scramble.

He gestured to her roommate's side of the room. “She won't come back, will she?”

“She drove to Ann Arbor,” Ava said. “She's not getting back until tonight.”

The shade was pulled, but there was enough light for Gregor to see the hair between Ava's legs. It was in the shape of a rectangle. As he stepped closer to her, she wrapped her arms around him.

“Are you sure?” Gregor asked as Ava pulled his T-shirt over his head and led him to her twin bed.

“Sure, I'm sure.”

They tumbled onto the sheets and started kissing. Ava had done it before. She'd told Gregor a few days ago. She also knew that Gregor was still a virgin.

Once he had his boxers off, she helped him roll a condom on. So this was really happening. He was really here.

Ava positioned him between her legs. “Now you just, sort of, move,” she whispered.

Gregor thrust his hips forward. He was on top of Ava, and his cheek was pressed into her shoulder. He wasn't sure how much he was supposed to push, though. He didn't want to hurt her.

“You can do it harder,” Ava said, clasping her hands on his lower back.

After a little shimmying back and forth, Gregor came. It was so intense that he saw swirls of colors behind his eyes.

“Was that okay?” he asked Ava. He was out of breath.

“Definitely. What about you?”

“It was good,” Gregor said.

Who was he kidding? That was freaking awesome.

The next morning Ava rapped on the door to Gregor's practice room. Gregor was so immersed in Bach's Suite No. 6 that at first he didn't hear her. When she knocked again, he spotted her through the glass. He leaned his cello against the piano and waved her in.

“Hey,” she said, pushing her glasses up on her nose. “There's a call for you in the main office. Roger says it's urgent.”

Roger was the camp director. Gregor had only talked to him a few times. He picked up his phone from the piano stool. No missed calls.

“We should probably go right now,” Ava said. “Let's leave your cello. We can lock the room and get it later.”

Ava didn't say anything as they walked up the stairs to Roger's office, but Gregor could sense something was wrong. Probably Nana Margaret had another fall. She'd broken her hip last February, and the doctor warned them it could happen again.

Gregor watched Ava's legs, smooth and thin, and her flip-flops slapping against the stairs. He wondered if they were going to have sex again today. He hoped he wouldn't have to fly home early because of Nana Margaret.

“I PICKED SOME
blueberries for you,” Mona Lisa said as she skipped onto Jake's front deck. She set a pint of blueberries onto the picnic table and flopped into a chair, kicking off her sandals.

Jake clapped his water shoes together over the ledge, trying to get the tiny pebbles out. He was leaving for sailing camp tomorrow and was getting everything organized.

“Thanks,” he said. “Awesome.”

“You should have seen me at the U-pick place,” Mona Lisa said. “I must have eaten four hundred blueberries. I was cramming them in my mouth. I bet I'll crap an enormous blueberry tonight.”

“Okay, that's disgusting.”

Mona Lisa giggled and reached toward Jake, tugging him onto her lap. “I love grossing you out,” she said, running her fingers through his hair. “And you love me for it, right?”

Jake rested his head on her shoulder. After nine years of being summer friends, he was used to how Mona Lisa acted all flirty and possessive with him.

“So you're going to sailing camp?” she asked, tugging at a thread on her cutoffs.

Jake got up off her lap and settled into the chair next to her. “Yeah, in the morning.”

“How cool. I bet there'll be a lot of cute guys at sailing camp. Preppy guys.”

“Here's hoping,” Jake said. “Maybe I'll even meet someone.”

Mona Lisa frowned and began picking at her toenails. They were painted bright orange.

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“For real?”

Mona Lisa shrugged.

“Truth or dare,” Jake said. They'd been playing an ongoing game of Truth or Dare since sixth grade, and it was their way of prying secrets out of each other. “And you have to pick truth.”

“Okay, truth,” Mona Lisa said. “If you get a boyfriend, I'll be jealous. I'll probably never talk to you again.”

Jake raised his eyebrows. “You're joking, right?”

“Maybe. Sort of. But seriously,
I'm
the one with the boyfriends. You're my loyal sidekick. If you have a boyfriend, then you won't need me anymore.”

“That's selfish,” Jake said.

“Whoever said I wasn't selfish?” Mona Lisa laughed, scooping up a handful of blueberries.

Four days later and a quarter mile out on Cayuga Lake, Jake capsized the Sunfish. If that wasn't bad enough, there were menacing clouds taking over the sky.

He was twenty minutes up the lake from his family's cabin. He
knew this lake well, knew how moody it could be. He shouldn't have been on the water, especially since he didn't sign out and didn't bring a buddy. If the counselors caught him, he was going to get hell for this. He'd probably be kicked out.

He wasn't even sure what had made the boat capsize. He'd been navigating the waves, but then the wake from a speedboat hit him, tipping the Sunfish to the right. Jake was chucked overboard, and the mast went upside down. The instructors had been hardcore about practicing how to right a boat. But it was one thing to flip a Sunfish in shallow water and another entirely to be two hundred feet deep.

Jake hoisted his chest up the side of the boat and reached for the dagger board, but then a wave splashed his face and he fell back down.

Damn Simon.

Simon was one of the reasons he ditched camp today. Simon came to sailing camp from a small town in North Carolina. Jake had no idea why he picked central New York. There were plenty of lakes down South.

Simon was cute in a Southern boy way with his polo shirts and short hair and
yes sirs
and
no ma'ams
. But as soon as he found out that Jake was gay, he wouldn't leave him alone. He kept signing up for chore shifts with him and asking him all these questions like
How did you come out?
and
What did your parents say?
and
Did people at school give you hell
? It was getting old. Especially since Simon was obviously queer but wasn't saying anything about
that
.

Also, it was bothering Jake the way everyone at sailing camp had bonded. It was like they were in a cult. They were always singing
campfire songs and dressing alike and walking with their elbows hooked together. They weren't leaving him out, but he wasn't into it at all. That was stressing him out too, like, why didn't he want to make friends? Maybe Mona Lisa had jinxed him by saying she'd be mad if he got a boyfriend.

Jake rested his head on the side of the boat. His arms were tired, and his swimsuit was slipping off his waist. For some reason he thought of that girl Mia from school and how she rang his doorbell last spring, crying hysterically. He thought about how he'd hugged her. It wasn't like she asked him to or even told him why she was crying. He'd just known it was the right thing to do. Maybe it was twisted, but Jake liked being able to help her. Even now, he liked how that made him feel.

Jake grabbed at the dagger board and hauled the boat upright. This time it worked. He pulled himself onto the Sunfish and sailed back to camp.