Summerland: A Novel (33 page)

She responded to his text:

Of course.

Of course she would be his date for the prom. Hobby got that text just before lunch, and he grinned and thought, Excellent. He ate two meatball subs draped in gooey, melted mozzarella cheese, and he thought again, Excellent!

One reason Hobby hadn’t asked Claire in person was that he feared she might say no. There had been a time—in late fall, between Thanksgiving and Christmas—when he and Claire were seeing each other every day. Basketball season had just started, and they were both in and around the gym all the time. Claire had a car, and she often offered Hobby a ride home. There had been one time when the moon was coming up over Miacomet Pond, big and round and shining a cool gold color. It looked like a giant sugar cookie, Hobby thought, but that was a stupid thing to say, so he kept it to himself. Claire pulled over on the dirt road that led to Hobby’s house so they could properly ogle this moon, and the next thing he knew, they were kissing and he was really turned on and so was she and he thought they might and she thought they might—but they were two good kids, and they didn’t want their first time having sex to be in Claire’s car on the side of the road, and so they stopped. Caught their breath. Stared out the window at the moon and the reflection of the moon on the pond.

The kissing and getting all worked up had subsequently continued—on one occasion, Hobby’s pants were around his knees, and Claire was sitting on his lap, but no, they
still
didn’t. Then Claire got sick with bronchitis, then Hobby went away for the weekend for a basketball tournament, then they were both busy studying for their SATs, then the boys’ team made it into the playoffs but the girls’ team didn’t, and Claire and Hobby lost the momentum that had been building between them.

And then Hobby heard a rumor that Claire had hooked up with Luke Browning, whose brother, Larry, was in the correctional facility in Walpole, which was exactly where Luke was destined to wind up too. Luke was known as something of a ladies’ man, but Claire Buckley was too smart to fall prey to his obvious charms. Right?
Right?
Hobby saw Claire in class and around the halls, and she was nice to him, but then again she was nice to everybody. She wasn’t going out of her way to start a conversation with him, and she didn’t offer him any more rides home. The good thing was that when he saw her out—at the second night of the school musical,
Grease,
for example—she was always with her girlfriends. So he thought maybe the rumor about Luke Browning had been just stupid Nantucket gossip, which bit its victims like a pit bull and shook them until there was no life left.

Hobby decided to ask Claire to the prom because he didn’t want to go with anyone else.

Of course,
she said. As though it were a given.

Claire and Hobby had sex for the first time on the Wednesday morning before prom. They were supposed to be at school, but Hobby’s American History teacher had called in sick and the front office couldn’t find a sub, so he had a free period. He decided to work out in the gym, and he bumped into Claire by herself in the hallway in front of the locker rooms. She said she had been planning on working out, but it was such a beautiful spring day that she thought she might ditch for one period and drive to the beach. Ditch? thought Hobby. Seniors were allowed to leave school during their study halls and lunch period, but nobody else was. Still, Claire was right, it was springtime, the janitors had just cut the grass, and the scent wafted in through the windows. And they were
practically
seniors.

Hobby said, “I’ll go with you.”

They climbed into Claire’s car, and without their exchanging a
word, Claire knew to drive right to Hobby’s house. He jiggled his leg; he couldn’t be misreading any cues. This was it.

Claire shut off the ignition in his driveway. “Your mother’s at work?”

“All day,” he said. He couldn’t stop his leg from doing its own dance.

“Are you nervous?” she asked him.

The cool answer would be no. Hobson Alistair Jr., who had scored the winning touchdown in a Hail Mary against the Vineyard with thirteen seconds left in the game, nervous?

“Yes,” he said. He was nervous about many things: he had never skipped school before, and he was afraid of getting into trouble. If he got caught, Coach might not let him pitch in the game against Dennis-Yarmouth, and it might go down on his school record, and what if some admissions director at Stanford or Duke noticed it? He was nervous that his mother might show up for some reason. Hobby’s bedroom door didn’t lock; Zoe would feel no compunction about barging right in, even if she did recognize Claire Buckley’s car in the driveway. And finally, he was nervous because he wanted this to go well. He wanted her to enjoy it. Probably this was her virginity they were talking about, and if it wasn’t, then Hobby wanted to be better than the other guy. That was just his competitive nature.

It went well. Very well.

Despite the fact that Hobby was openly nervous and Claire was nervous but hiding it, they took their time. They kissed without touching each other until they couldn’t stand it anymore, and then they touched each other. Claire was wet to melting; the sound that escaped from her lips when Hobby touched her was so erotic that he nearly came in his underwear. He climbed on top of her.

She said, “Yes, I’m ready. I’m so ready.”

She had said this at the exact moment when Hobby was reaching for a condom. He had a box of three, as yet unopened, under
his bed. But when Claire said, “Yes, I’m ready, I’m so ready,” Hobby construed this to mean that it was okay for him to enter her right then, without a condom. He figured she must be on the pill. What he thought was, Okay, she’s on the pill, lots of girls are on the pill, it helps with acne or whatever. Heather was on the pill, even Penny is on the pill. Claire’s mother, Rasha, is cool, she must have made sure he daughter was on the pill, that’s what cool mothers do.

He entered her halfway—not wearing a condom—and checked with her. “You okay?”

“God, yes!” she said. “Go!”

So he went, slowly at first, gently, kissing Claire’s face, and then he went faster and faster, and Claire cried out and again the sound aroused him like nothing else had in his entire life, and he came all the way up inside her.

Eight days before graduation, on June 8, she was standing by his locker in the morning, and he knew. It was written all over her face. But maybe not, he thought. Maybe she just looked like that because she’d bombed her Chemistry final.

“Hey,” he said.

She dissolved. Tough Claire, cool Claire—she was a wreck. Hobby collected her in his arms. Claire was tall, but he was taller, tall enough to kiss the top of her head. To the rest of the runty adolescent population of their school, he supposed they looked like a couple of mating giraffes.

“Hey, it’s okay,” he said.

“It’s
not
okay,” she said. “I’m seventeen.”

Yes, that was something he could identify with. He was seventeen also. A daft seventeen-year-old boy. He’d assumed she was on the pill. Wasn’t she on the pill? he asked gently. And if she wasn’t on the pill, what had she thought they were using for birth control?

She’d thought he would pull out, she said. She had been with someone over the summer—not Luke Browning, but a summer guy by the name of Wils something or other—and Wils had pulled out and everything had been fine. Then, when Hobby came inside of her, she panicked a little, secretly, but not too much because she’d just finished her period, and anyway she went immediately on the pill—immediately as in later that same day. She’d had the pill pack sitting in her underwear drawer, she had gotten it back in December when things between her and Hobby were so intense, but then after things cooled off between them, she hadn’t seen any reason for birth control.

“It’s my fault,” she said.

“It’s
my
fault,” Hobby said. “I should have used a condom.”

“What are we going to do?” Claire said.

They were two good kids, among the best that Nantucket High School had to offer. Hobby was going to be given a free ride to a top-tier school. Claire would either shoot for the Ivy League or opt to play lacrosse someplace like Bucknell or Williams. They were rocket ships, side by side. A baby? A baby was unthinkable.

“Let’s wait a few days,” Hobby said. Just at that moment Patrick Loom walked by, slapping Hobby’s shoulder as he passed. Patrick Loom was headed to Georgetown in the fall. When Hobby looked at Patrick and thought about Georgetown, he saw everything he wanted for himself: brick buildings, manicured lawns, lectures and readings and film series and pretty girls in sweaters and crisp leaves underfoot and an indoor stadium packed to the rafters as Hobby jogged out onto the floor wearing a dove-gray Hoyas jersey, like Patrick Ewing.

“I heard there’s a guy on the Cape,” Claire said.

“On the Cape?” Hobby said. He had thought they were certainly looking at a trip to Boston, or possibly out of state. He didn’t know. He was daft. So fucking daft.

“It’s supposed to be quick,” Claire said. “They knock you out
and you wake up and it’s over and the guy gives you a prescription for Percocet.”

“That’s what you want to do?” Hobby said.

Claire nodded.

Yes, that was what Hobby wanted to do too. He wanted to fly to Hyannis—tomorrow wasn’t soon enough—and see this guy and have it taken care of quickly and painlessly. Relief flooded his chest cavity, but it was trailed by something unexpected and unwelcome: guilt. The course of action they had taken just thirty seconds to decide upon—say it out loud,
an abortion—
seemed so selfish. They were two good kids, but this decision felt sinister. And yet to decide otherwise would be to ruin two brilliant futures.

And yet, and yet.

Hobby kissed Claire gently on the lips, and she went to class. Hobby’s mother had asked him a few months earlier if he’d ever been in love, and then she’d asked about Claire specifically. Did Hobby love Claire? No. Hobby liked Claire, Hobby thought Claire was cool. He and Claire were friends, they’d been lovers, they had this situation now and they were going to deal with it together, like good business partners who wanted the same outcome.

And yet, and yet.

Hobby had learned most of what he knew about the adult world from listening to his mother and her friends—Al and Lynne Castle, Jordan and Ava Randolph—as they sat around the dinner table after the meal had been consumed, when all that was left was to finish the wine, watch the candles burn down to nubs, and talk.

He had once heard his mother describe what it had been like for her to get pregnant, unexpectedly, at the age of twenty-two. She had been in her final semester at the Culinary Institute, she was dating Hobby’s father, Hobson senior, they were in love and living together. Hobson senior was a master butcher, a professor
of Meats, and Zoe was a superstar, she had accepted an externship at Alison’s on Dominick, which at the time was the most sought-after job in the whole city. But then she discovered she was pregnant.

Zoe hadn’t seen Hobby lurking around the corner. She thought he was in bed, fast asleep.

She told her friends, “I’m not going to lie to you. I wanted an abortion. I had a life to live. A career to pursue. I was too young to have a baby. But Hobson talked me out of it. We got married at City Hall in Manhattan. We had been married six months when he died.”

There was silence around the table. Hobby could remember seeing Lynne Castle hold her face in her hands. She was staring at Zoe.

Zoe said, “Thank God I kept those babies. They are so precious to me. They are all I have, sure, but they’re also all I want.”

Those words weren’t lost on Hobby. His mother had had a choice to make. She could have gone to some guy and had the embryos growing inside her taken care of quickly and painlessly. She could have pursued a career, made a name for herself, opened her own restaurant; she might be as famous as Mario Batali by now. But she had chosen him and Penny instead.

Claire called and made an appointment with the guy on the Cape. It was for Tuesday morning; she would have to skip school. Hobby convinced her to postpone it for a week, to wait until school was out, until after graduation. He didn’t tell her that he was having second thoughts because he wasn’t sure what kind of influence he would have with her. It was, after all,
her
body. It was ultimately
her
senior year that would be affected, and possibly her chances for college. Hobby wasn’t prepared to
marry
Claire. God, if he asked her, she would laugh at him. But he wondered if he could convince her to have the baby, and then they could put it up for adoption.

He tried to talk with her about it on the night of graduation. She was at Patrick Loom’s party, and Hobby cornered her by the food table. Her expression was that of a trapped animal. Her eyes kept darting around the party; she was looking for someone to save her.

Hobby said, “Claire, listen, I don’t know about this.”

She said, “Next year, this is going to be us. It’s going to be
us
graduating, going away to school, all the parents thinking we hung the moon.”

“You don’t have any doubts?”

She looked at him. Her eyes held a wild light. “Of course I have doubts, Hobby. But I’m seventeen. My mother is a single parent, your mother is a single parent. I am not going to be a single parent, and especially not at seventeen.”

He said, “Well, there’s adoption. We haven’t talked about adoption.”

“Adoption?”
she said. Her voice was incredulous, as though he’d suggested doing bong hits in the steeple of the Congregational Church. She took a big sip of whatever was in her Solo cup—Hobby hoped it was seltzer—and excused herself to go to the bathroom.

He saw her later, at Steps Beach, where she was most definitely drinking beer. Or at least holding a beer. Hobby tried to discern how much of it she was actually drinking, but he was so smashed himself from swigging off the bottle of Jim Beam that Demeter had brought that he wasn’t turning out to be much of a detective. Claire was surrounded by her entire posse, and when Hobby approached, she glared at him. He knew he was being what his mother would call relentless, he knew he should wait and call Claire the next day, when their conversation would be both private and sober. But he had the nagging feeling that their decision had to be made that night.