Summerland: A Novel (46 page)

H
e skipped the first week of school. This was surprising. All he’d wanted was to leave Australia and get home. Together his parents had jumped through all kinds of hoops to get him home in time, and yet when the morning of the first day arrived, he found himself unable to go. He worried that his father might have been right after all; maybe he should have stayed in Fremantle and finished up at the American School there. Because the thought of returning to the halls of Nantucket High School without Penny spooked him. He had been many things—an honors student, president of the Student Council, editor of the newspaper, star of the annual musical—but none of these things mattered or made sense without Penny. It was his senior year, he had to endure it, he didn’t have a choice, and yet what he kept thinking was, Why bother?

What he thought was that there would be memories of Penny everywhere. Every single kid at that school would know about his loss. He would have to face people like Winnie Potts and Annabel Wright and Anders Peashway. He would have to face Hobby.

Australia, he thought, would be better. Anonymity and loneliness would be better.

To his father, he punted. “I don’t know how to explain it,” he said. “I’m just not ready.”

“They’re expecting you,” Jordan said. “I brought you all the way home for this. You told your mother this was the only thing you wanted.”

“I know. I’m going to do it. Just not yet.”

“I’ll give you a week,” Jordan said. “One week. Then you go. Am I understood?”

“You are understood,” Jake said.

He went to the cemetery and sat by Penny’s grave. As he’d predicted, grass had grown in over the rich, dark soil. Her headstone had been erected:
Penelope Caroline Alistair.
March 8, 1995–June 17, 2012. Beloved daughter, sister, friend.

Headstones, Jake decided, were stupid and pointless. They told you nothing. When you looked at this headstone, you didn’t know that Penny had bluebell eyes or that she had perfect pitch or that her favorite word in French was
parapluie.
You didn’t know that her favorite color was lavender or that she wore flip-flops right up until Christmas because shoes made her feet feel trapped, or that she’d had her first orgasm on the catwalk of the auditorium their sophomore year, during a break in a rehearsal for
Guys and Dolls.

Jake sat at Penny’s grave and thought about how, in many ways, Australia had been like a dream—Hawk and the ferals around the bonfire and the gurgling fountain in the backyard and his half-Aboriginal cousins and his mother’s happily dousing her fish and chips with vinegar and ogling the statue of Bon Scott. Had any of that been
real?
Real enough, he supposed, because his mother had stayed behind. She was keeping the Ute and the rental house on Charles Street, and she was adopting a baby girl from China. She and his father were getting divorced. It was weird to think about, his parents’ being
divorced;
they had been miserable together, but the thought of their splitting hadn’t seemed feasible. But his parents had been cool and unified in their decision; this would be better for everyone, and Jake would go back and visit Ava at Christmas.

Jake had learned something about love just from saying good-bye to Ava at the Perth airport. He’d learned that when you loved someone purely enough, all you wanted was for that person to be happy. Jake knew that his mother was making a tremendous sacrifice in letting him go home. She wanted him to be happy.

There were things about being back on Nantucket that Jake
loved: the familiar streets of downtown, the Bean (where he got a cup of American coffee), the flag snapping at Caton Circle, the peppermint stick of the Sankaty lighthouse, the offices of the
Nantucket Standard,
which smelled familiarly of ink and dusty paper. The Jeep was totaled, and there wouldn’t be another car for Jake, so he’d been riding his bicycle. He’d biked past the Alistair house the day before. Zoe’s car was in the driveway and the front door was open and Jake could hear music playing and he remembered all the times he’d driven up to the house and heard Penny singing inside. Sometimes she sang scales or vocal exercises (“Red leather, yellow leather!”), but other times it was “Fee” by Phish (“In the cool shade of the banana tree…”), or Motown (“Stop! In the Name of Love”), or something folksy, like “If I Had a Hammer,” which was the song she was singing at age eight when Mrs. Yurick first discovered her voice. The thing Jake always thought when he heard Penny singing was that he could listen to her forever, and it would always feel like a privilege.

It had been a privilege. That was painfully obvious now.

The week went by, then the weekend. Jordan had gone back to work at the paper, and he came home with two pieces of startling news: first, he told Jake that Demeter Castle was spending thirty days in a facility off-island where she was being treated for alcoholism. Then, two days later, he came home to say that Hobby had gotten Claire Buckley
pregnant,
and the two of them were having a
baby
in March.

Jake accepted these bulletins with close-lipped, wide-eyed wonder. He’d been away for less than two months: was it really possible that things could have changed so dramatically in his absence?

On Monday Jake had to go to school. That was the deal.

“I’ll drop you off,” Jordan said.

“I’ll ride my bike,” Jake said.

“Jake.”

“I’m serious. I’ll ride my bike. I’ll be fine.”

“Hey,” Jordan said. He clapped Jake’s shoulder, and Jake thought, Oh no, not the shoulder thing again. “I know you’ll be fine,” Jordan told him.

He wore a pair of the jeans that Penny had written on, and he wore the sneakers that Penny had written on. His father regarded the jeans and the shoes with suspicion, and Jake saw his point and thought about changing into something else, but he couldn’t make himself do it. He wanted to wear Penny + Jake 4ever because his reality would, in some way known only to his heart, always be Penny + Jake 4ever, even when he was an old man, married to someone else for decades, with children and grandchildren. He decided it was better just to announce this, as if he were a walking billboard, than to hide it away.

He locked his bike at the rack in front of the school. Kids were clustered together, he could hear them talking, and as he swung his backpack over his shoulder and headed for the front door, he heard the conversations stall, then quiet down, then completely stop. He was wearing a pair of his father’s sunglasses, Ray-Ban Wayfarers, so he looked like Tom Cruise or some other old-time movie star, and he figured it probably took people a few minutes to realize it was him. He didn’t look at anyone directly. He just wanted to get inside, see Mrs. Hanson in the front office, get his locker assignment and his class schedule, and go to school.

He was about ten steps from the front door when he heard a shriek.

“Jake?”

He turned, despite the time he had put in at home rehearsing not reacting to this kind of thing. It was Winnie Potts. Of course. She’d straightened her brown curly hair, and it had blond highlights now. She was wearing a white top that pushed her boobs up
and out. She looked older and sexier. It was her senior year, and Penny Alistair was no longer an obstacle to Winnie’s goal of being the Queen Bee of Nantucket High School. Jake thought about how high school was two things. It was
school—
he would learn calculus and read
Macbeth
and
The Canterbury Tales—
but it was also a social universe with its own rules and hierarchy. How he would have loved to get a hall pass from this second aspect, how he would have relished just being able to go inside and learn and then, at the end of the day, go home, eat pizza with his dad, talk about current events, read his assignments, and go to bed!

But this just wasn’t possible.

“Hey, Winnie,” he said.

“Oh. My.
God!
” she said. “I thought you were never coming back. I thought you’d moved away for good. I mean, you moved to Australia, right?”

“I did, sort of,” he said. “But we’re back now.”

She crushed him in a bear hug that she executed with her elbow and her bosom. “I. Am. So. Psyched. You’re. Back.” She pulled away and eyeballed him. “Are you doing okay?”

“Sort of, yeah,” he said, though already he felt his eyes burning, and he was grateful for the sunglasses.

“So you’re still pretty hung up, then?” Winnie said. She pulled away and sniffed. “I see you’re wearing the jeans.”

Still pretty hung up, Jake thought. Well, Penny hadn’t been dead for even three months yet. Maybe Winnie had forgotten about her, maybe she had come to terms with the accident, maybe Winnie, like so many other teenagers, had been cursed, or blessed, with a short attention span. She had been saddened by Penny’s death, but it was old news now, and she was moving on.

Jake pulled away from Winnie, but she didn’t seem to notice. She whipped out her phone and began madly texting. Probably broadcasting the news of his return. In ten seconds everyone would know.

There was a song that Zoe used to play on the cassette deck of her Karmann Ghia called “Uncle John’s Band,” and the first line went like this:
Well the first days are the hardest days, don’t you worry any more.
Jake sang this to himself as he moved through the halls, fielding amazed and inquisitive
Hey man
’s from his classmates. Some kids’ names he’d completely forgotten. He tried to focus on the school part of school—the Calc, the Physics, the A.P. European History. The teachers, at least, did their best to act professional and nonchalant—or possibly they really
were
professional and nonchalant. They, after all, were adults, with mortgages and children, and aging parents, and water heaters that needed replacing. They were nice people and good citizens; they all knew that Penny had died and that Penny had been Jake’s girlfriend, and maybe they even knew that Jake had spent the summer/winter in Australia, but they didn’t feel inclined to take Jake’s emotional temperature—they were too busy and consumed with their own worries to meddle much in others’ lives—and for that, Jake was grateful.

On his way from European History to his elective, Personal Narrative, which was a sort of creative writing class (and one he was greatly looking forward to), he felt a hand on his shoulder. He feared for an instant that his father had popped into school to check on him, but when he turned, he saw the principal, Dr. Major.

“Jake,” Dr. Major said. “Welcome back.”

“Thanks, Dr. Major,” Jake said.

Dr, Major smiled at Jake kindly. His blue eyes watered behind his glasses. Was he going to
cry?
Dr. Major was known around school as the ultimate good guy, sometimes too good a guy to do some of the more difficult tasks his job required. Kids who got suspended often got their sentences commuted by Dr. Major. He believed that kids, more than anything, needed adults to listen to them. This openhearted approach worked out for the most part;
the students of Nantucket High School felt protective of Dr. Major and generally tried not to let him down.

“How was your trip?” Dr. Major asked.

“It was weird,” Jake said.

Dr. Major tilted his head. The head tilt was his signature gesture, a cue to let kids know he was listening. Jake didn’t want to be the recipient of Dr. Major’s head tilt. Kids were streaming past them like water around two rocks. This wasn’t the time or the place for Jake to detail the oddness of his time in Australia.

“I can’t explain it,” Jake said. “Not right now, anyway.”

“Fair enough,” Dr. Major said. “Well, I have to say, this school isn’t the same without Penelope.”

Jake nodded once, sharply. “Right. I know.”

Dr. Major clapped Jake’s shoulder again. “I just wanted to tell you…” Here he trailed off, and his eyes filled, and Jake had to look away rather than see the man cry. “… If you ever need a place to take a moment away from everyone, you’re welcome to sit in my office. As you know, I’m rarely there.”

Yes, Jake knew this; everyone knew this. Dr. Major roamed the school, no crevice or alcove was safe or private. Dr. Major was likely to appear out of nowhere. “Going about my rounds,” he called it. He stopped in to the junior Spanish class and learned how to conjugate irregular verbs, and he entered the art room and asked for a demonstration of the pottery wheel. He didn’t like to sit behind his desk, he said. Four or five times a day, Mrs. Hanson’s voice would come over the intercom, paging him for a phone call.

“Thank you,” Jake said. It was nice of Dr. Major to offer up his office for what amounted to Jake’s own personal crying room. “That’s very nice.”

Dr. Major smiled. His eyes were brimming, but no tears fell, thank God. “We’re all rooting for you,” he said. “And we’re glad to have you back.”

At lunchtime, Jake wasn’t sure what to do. Seniors were allowed to go off-property for lunch; it was one of the things he and Penny had been looking forward to. They had talked about how they would hit the burger shack at Surfside Beach in September while it was still warm, how they would go into town to the Brotherhood on Fridays in the winter, how they would sneak back to Penny’s house on days when Zoe was working. It was going to be forty-five minutes of daily bliss.

But what now?

There wouldn’t be a senior in sight in the cafeteria. That might be okay, Jake would be able to eat alone, none of the underclassmen would be brave enough to approach him. But the younger kids would talk about him, and the things they said would be half true and half false, and Jake didn’t feel like cutting the kind of tragic figure who sat alone and pretended to ignore the fact that everyone was discussing him. He needed to leave the building, but having only his bike left him few options. If he biked all the way home, he would have time only to drink a glass of water before he had to turn around and come right back. He could bike to the beach, he supposed, but he was fairly certain that Winnie Potts and Annabel Wright and company would all be there, and he sure as shit didn’t want to run into them. Or anyone. He needed forty-five minutes of quiet, of alone time, and it did occur to him that he could take Dr. Major up on the offer of his office, but even then, he worried that Mrs. Hanson or Mrs. Coffin or one of the other secretaries might fuss over him.