Twenty Boy Summer (16 page)

twenty-three

It doesn't take long to reach the Vista, and when we arrive I recognize the view immediately. All of California's beach towns light up the coast like fireworks, just as I'd seen in Matt's picture-perfect postcards a thousand times.

"We used to come here a lot for picnics when I was a kid," Sam says, shaking out a blanket for us on the sand. "I haven't been here in a while."

I sit on the blanket next to him. "Tell me a story," I say. "I just want to listen."

"Sure. Come here." He lies down and pulls me against his chest, stroking my hair. He tells me about growing up in California, and how it's so hard to make friends because everyone you meet leaves at the end of the summer. His voice is low and soft, muffled through his chest against my ear.

"The most tragic thing about California is that nothing is permanent or real here," he says. "It gets to you, you know?"

"No. I wish I could stay here forever."

"But you can't, Anna. That's the point." He lifts my chin and looks at my face. "You're like this beautiful, crazy ghost, and when I wake up, you'll be gone, and I'll wonder if any of this really happened."

"I know what you mean," I say, wishing I didn't.

Sam asks me about New York, rubbing my back lightly as I talk. I tell him about our childhood, carefully skirting the tragedy that so defines me. But all my real childhood stories -- the important ones -- reach the same inevitable end.

Before
-- together.

After
-- apart.

Before
-- happy.

After
-- sad.

Being with Sam on this trip has been like a vacation from sorrow, but now I can't talk about growing up without thinking about Matt. The effort of pushing him from my thoughts and words drains me. Finally, his memory wins out, creeping into my mind and making me go quiet against the sound of the ocean and Sam's breathing.

Right after Matt died, I was afraid to do basically everything. I couldn't even bite my nails or sniff my shirt to see if I needed deodorant without feeling like he was watching me. I willed and prayed and begged him to give me a sign that he
was
watching, that he
was
with me, so I would know.

But he never did. Time moved on. And I stopped being afraid. Until right now, vulnerable and insecure and a little bit drunk. Lying in the sand and falling in crazy love with someone I just met. Matt is watching me. Observing. Possibly judging. And the worst part of it is, I don't
want
to wake up under his landslide of sad rocks anymore. I don't want to taste the marzipan frosting and the clove cigarettes. I don't want to think about the blue glass necklace or the books he read to me on his bed or the piles of college stuff or some random boy in the grocery store wearing his donated clothes.

I don't want to be the dead boy's best-friend-turned-something-else.

Or the really supportive neighbor friend.

Or the lifelong keeper of broken-hearted secrets.

I just want to be floating, suspended here in my California time capsule with neither yesterday's dusk nor tomorrow's dawn anywhere on the horizon.

Erased.

What's your earliest memory?
I asked Matt. We were washing his car while Frankie made sandwiches in the kitchen.

Most of them are in California. The ocean. I don't really remember the first time I saw it, just how I felt.

How?

Impossibly small. Impossibly insignificant. And completely safe. Sounds crazy, right?

No.

What's yours?

I wanted to tell him it was my fifteenth birthday party two weeks earlier, because everything that came before that night was a pale moon behind the sunshine of that kiss. Instead, I told him about sitting in the garden with my dad while Matt caught caterpillars and tried to feed them oak leaves from the tree in our backyard. I must have been about three.

I wanted to make a caterpillar farm. I can't believe you remember that, Anna.
Matt smiled, rinsing the car soap from his hands.

Not as cool as seeing the ocean for the first time, but it still makes me smile.

I promise I'll take you there someday. I want to see it with you. I want to see everything with you.

Sam looks at me hard and serious, like he's trying to read my mind. I can't find the words for this conversation and even if I could, I'd probably just cry. So I do the next best thing and kiss him.

Erased.

He kisses me back, deeper and more intense, and moves on top of me, pulling off my sweatshirt, his hips pressing against mine, harder and closer than ever before. I feel things that I've never felt, in places I didn't know existed, like a hundred hungry little flowers waking up and blooming in the sun after a long, harsh winter.

Somewhere beneath my newly tanned skin I know that I should wait, that it should be special, that it should be with someone I can wake up with in the morning, tomorrow and always.

What if he thinks I'm a tourist girl looking for some romantic long-distance love affair just so she can share his gushing, beach-stained postcards with her friends?

No -- after this vacation, that's it. Sam and I will no longer exist in the context of
Sam and I.
I will lose him, just like Matt. Whether by death or the impossible distance between New York and California, soon I will wake up, and Sam will be gone.

Sam, whose sea locks fall in soft waves on my cheeks as he kisses me.

Sam, whose wild green eyes are on me like his hands, searching and finding, hot and intense.

Sam, whose skin tastes like salt and summer.

Sam, whose last name is -- a total mystery.

"Wait!" I pull away from him as he fumbles with the ties on my bikini top. "I just realized that we don't know each other's last names. Mine's Reiley." I look at him with a sense of urgency, as though this new piece of information will sway the forward momentum of this crazy night.

He laughs. "Macintosh."

"Like the apple?" I ask.

"Like the computer."

"Same thing, right?"

"Um, Anna?"

"Yeah?"

"No more talking." He smiles.

"Okay," I whisper, running my fingers along his lower lip. My mind is racing faster than my heart, but I'm not sure how to stop it. I don't want to stop it. I want to devour everything about him. I want to taste his mouth and smell his shampoo and then die with this memory, immediate and swift, before anything can take it away.

He moves close to kiss me again, but I push my hand against his chest. "Sam, I mean, it's
okay.
Do you have something?" I wait for the glimmer of recognition to rise on his face.

"Yeah," he says, nodding and reaching for his sweatshirt beside me. I hear the crinkling of paper as he tears open the condom.

"Are you sure?" he asks.

"Yes."

Sam kisses me hard, breathing through his nose as he unzips, unties, unbuttons, and pulls our clothes down, kissing my stomach as he goes. His mouth moves slowly back to my lips, murmuring softly as I wrap my legs around him and pull him inside.

It doesn't hurt exactly -- it's just kind of --
strange.
At first I hold my breath, my shorts and bikini bottoms clinging limply around one of my ankles like they didn't run off in time and now have to sit through the whole act without making any noise, lest they be discovered.

Sam tangles his hands up in my hair, pushing back and forth against my body like the waves in front of us. I sense his rhythm and relax as my shoulders and hips dig trenches in the sand beneath our blanket. Through the silk of his hair, I watch the low, orange moon, tasting the salt of his skin on my mouth, breathing hard, waiting for the stars to fall down around us.

But they don't fall.

They just fade, looking on in silence, lingering over the rushing waves until Sam disentangles from my body and I sit up, pulling my clothes back on.

The sparkle of the night sky pales with the receding tide, evaporating in the pink dawn along with the albatross I've at long last abandoned.

Somehow, I don't feel any different than I felt in front of the mirror back at the party. I'm not older. I'm not smarter. Nothing in the murky waters of my life has been suddenly clarified or demystified now that I'm a member of the secret club.

Sam lies with his eyes closed, arms crossed over his chest. "Stay with me, Anna Reiley," he whispers sleepily, smiling. I reach down and touch his stomach with light fingers.

"I'm just going to rinse my feet off. I'll be right back." I hook my flip-flops through one finger and walk barefoot to the edge of the water, my unbuttoned jean shorts slung loose over my bikini bottoms. Clumped with sand, the fringe clings to my thighs like wet spiderwebs.

I let the water lick my feet and wait for a sign that I'll be okay, that what I did is okay, that
everything
is okay. I look out over the licorice-soup ocean and wait.

The waves whisper against the shore as they have all night, knowing and ancient and unchanged.

The sand and the vanishing moon and the hotel beach umbrellas closed like flowers at dusk sit still, unaltered, unaffected.

The sea surges forward over my toes, only to recede, her opalescent slick on the sand evaporating instantly.
I took the magic pill, and now it's done.

I rinse my hands in the water and turn back toward Sam. It must be after five. He's sitting up now, watching me with his hazy green eyes, shivering and smiling.

"What?" I ask, digging in the sand with my toe, hiding my own smile.

"Don't move, Anna Reiley," he says. "Right now, everything is perfect."

twenty-four

We walk along the shore at dawn, arms locked, heads down, scanning the damp sand as it passes below our feet. My pockets grow heavier with each piece of sea glass I collect -- greens, blues, whites, ambers. After three weeks on the beach, I'm still amazed that pieces of things that were once whole, once part of something else, can break and fall into the ocean, traveling thousands of miles and years only to end up here, passengers in the pockets of my white sweatshirt.

The rest of the beach comes to life, preparing for the morning tourists. Hotel staff scuttle along the strip like tiny ants in khaki shorts and pastel polo shirts, cleaning, straightening, anticipating. As the umbrellas yawn and stretch and open their white-and-yellow petals against the sun, Sam smiles at me.

"You okay, Anna?" he asks.

I stick my hands in my pockets, feeling the cold, smooth glass between my fingers, remembering something I'd read in one of the trinket stores on Moonlight Boulevard with Frankie and Jayne.

"Pieces of sea glass are supposedly the tears of a lovesick mermaid," I tell Sam. "She was banished to the bottom of the ocean for all eternity by King Neptune because she fell in love with a ship's captain and saved him from a storm."

Sam nods. "Yeah, I've heard that before. There are all kinds of sayings like that around here. But sometimes you gotta just take things for what they are and appreciate them, not try to label it or explain it. Explanations take the mystery out of it, you know?"

"I guess." I crouch down to scoop up a square of turquoise glass I spot beneath my toes, and that's when I see it, dark and deep, poking out of the wet sand. "Oh my God, look!"

I stand and hold out my hand for Sam to inspect.

"Wow," he says, taking the glass and holding it up to the sun. "Red is, like, the rarest color there is. You're totally lucky you even saw it."

I take the deep red, half-dollar-sized piece from him and smile, looking out across the ocean. I told Matt in my letter before we left that I'd find a piece just for him, but now that it's actually here, sparkling in my hand, I know he'd want me to do something else with it.

I raise it above my head and throw it as hard and as far as I can into the sea.

Let someone else have a lucky day, Anna.

Sam laughs. "Hey, crazy, what'd you do
that
for? You'll probably never see something like that again in your entire life."

"Right. But I
did
see it. And now someone else can, too."

"I don't get it."

I shrug and smile. "Explanations take the mystery out of things, right?"

"Um, right." Sam laughs and wraps me up in a warm hug.

We walk the rest of the way to Eddie's house with our arms around each other, a happy exhaustion threatening to overtake us. My skin has goose bumps from the morning chill, but I'm warm and buoyant on the inside, giddy from lack of sleep, the way I feel next to Sam, and the red sea glass -- sign from the universe or not.

As we approach the house, a shock of shimmering auburn hair shines from the stairs leading up to the backyard. When I see the light blue camisole, I know.

"It's Frankie. She must have waited up for me or something. I wonder where Jake is?"

"He has an early class -- he probably had to leave. Speaking of which, I have to be at work in three hours myself. I'm on a double tonight."

"You can barely stand up!" I shove him lightly, knocking him off balance to prove my point.

"Nah. I just need like an hour's sleep, then I'll have some coffee. I'll be fine."

"Okay." I wave to Frankie. She's sitting on the stairs watching us, waiting for me to pay attention to her.

"Will we see you guys later?" Sam asks.

"Maybe we'll come for smoothies. Otherwise, definitely tonight." He smiles and hugs me close, kissing me on the lips and forehead before jogging down the beach, and I catch myself smiling.

Just that I could possibly.

Love him.

Forever.

Judging by the state of pollution at the bottom of the stairs, the party migrated from the backyard to the beach after we left. I pick my way through a debris field of bottles and paper plates to reach Frankie. Her head rests against her hand on the railing and she looks like she got about as much sleep as I did.

"Hey," I say, waiting for her to notice something different about me. "What are you --"

"You."
She doesn't move when she speaks, and there is nothing warm or happy in her tone. "You need to stay
far
away from me."

"Frankie, what are you talking about?" I try to remember anything I might have done or said last night to upset her, but nothing comes. She was fine when I left with Sam. And getting me to ditch the A.A. was her mission, anyway. "What's going on with you?"

She stands to face me. Her expression, like her voice, is empty and flat. Black, dried mascara streaks the skin below her eyes. Immediately, my heart seizes.

"Frankie, what happened? Is it Jake? Did something happen with him? Did he hurt you?"

She stares hard, unblinking, her breathing even and calm. Her eyes are beyond angry. Beyond hurt. Beyond caring.

I've only seen her like this one other time -- in the hospital lobby when the doctor came out with the chaplain to tell us they couldn't save Matt. Jayne just fainted, and Red, holding a plastic bag full of Matt's things, screamed, "No! No! No!" over and over. Frankie just stared at her parents, the same ghostly face, no sound, tears spilling out over her cheeks.

"Frankie, talk to me. Did something happen at the party? What's going on? Should we call someone?" My voice is shaky, moving fast. If I touch her, she could shatter. I wish Sam was still here. "
Please
talk to me."

I take a chance and put my hand on her shoulder, triggering an invisible switch. She flinches, coming back into her body from wherever she was visiting. Her eyes go wild, raging. Her face turns red and her shoulders shake violently, barely containing the fight in her.

"Talk to you?
Talk
to you?" she asks. "Okay, I'll talk to you, Anna Reiley. So, where
were
you last night?" Her voice is high and forced, mocking.

"Frankie, I was with Sam at the Vista. I told you that before I left. Remember?"

"With him? As in,
with
him, with him?"

I'm suddenly embarrassed and ashamed. I did not expect my best friend to react like this when I told her about last night. "I was trying to tell you --"

"Oh,
please.
Save it. You weren't gonna tell me
shit.
"

"Frankie, you know I wouldn't keep something like this from you."

"Is that so," she says, rather than asks. "Just like you told me about
this
?" She reaches back to the steps behind her and pulls something up to my face, her hand white-knuckled and shaking. When I see the purple rectangle, it takes a minute for me to realize what it is, to put the pieces together. It's like when Aunt Jayne rearranged Frankie's room last time. All her stuff was still there, but it wasn't where it was supposed to be. We kept waking up and forgetting where we were.

The image of Frankie's tan fingers wrapped around my journal is something out of a science fiction movie. Those are her real fingers. That is my real journal. But the juxtaposition of two formerly unconnected objects doesn't belong in this dimension.

"That's my -- my --" I can't speak. My knees go wobbly. That old hot, prickly feeling runs up my back and neck. The sound of the waves on the shore is amplified. I can feel the blood running from my heart through my veins and back again. I am hyperaware. Slow motion. Guilty and mad.

I lunge at her, reaching for the journal, but she's quick on her feet, backing away toward the water.

"Here's a good one," she reads from a random entry. "'Dear Matt, There is so much I want to say to you. Every day something happens at school that I want to come home and tell you about, but I can't.' Or how about this one. 'Dear Matt, Sometimes I wonder if it's ever going to stop hurting.' "

Frankie's flipping through the pages, shouting my fears and dreams and memories across the vast ocean, releasing them from their flat paper prisons and breaking me into little bits.

"Frankie, please stop!" It's barely a whisper.

'Dear Matt, Your sister is out of control. I wish you were here -- I don't know how to help her. Last night she went out with this guy from school to the soccer field and...' "

"Stop it!" I try to shout, but it still comes out as a whisper. "You think you know everything?" she yells. "For your information, I didn't even sleep with Johan! We got all the way out there, and he didn't even want to be with me!"

"What?"

"It didn't happen! I didn't sleep with him! And while we're on the subject of truth, I didn't sleep with Jake, either. Happy now? You wanna put that in your little book report?"

I can't believe what I'm hearing. I open my mouth to say something cold and angry, but no sound comes out. All I can do is claw at the air for my journal, my written thoughts like the lost children of my soul.

Frankie takes another step back, still thumbing through pages.

" 'Dear Matt, We finally made it to California, and it's just like you told me. I feel you here with us -- I think Frankie does, too.' How
dare
you write about me in here! How dare you write to my brother! You think just because you fooled around a few times he cared about you? You think he wouldn't have ditched you the second he found some new girl at Cornell? Get
over
yourself!"

Tears are hot on my cheeks. My throat has closed up. My heart is broken, and I am utterly paralyzed.

Frankie yanks on the cover and tries to tear it from its metal spirals, succeeding only partially. The cover flops sideways in the breeze like a broken wing, revealing the picture I've looked at every night since he died.
Matt's arm around my shoulders, bits of cake and colored chips and grass clinging to our clothes and hair, everything warm and pink in the glow of the setting sun, the whole summer stretched out before us.

After he died, I spent hours staring at that picture, replaying the party in my mind, willing the two-dimensional images to come back to life, to bring us back there. We could tell Frankie right away. We could be together. We could skip Custard's and go straight to the hospital and tell them to fix Matt before anything bad ever happened.

I clear my throat and find my voice again, stronger this time. "Give it back, Frankie. You had no right to read it, and you have no right to rip it apart. Give it to me."

She looks at me with crazed, lost eyes. "No, I don't think so." I'm desperate. "Frankie,
please
give it back to me. Please. I'm sorry I didn't tell you, but it's all I have left of --"

"Anna, he was
my
brother.
Mine.
You have no right to have
anything
left of him!" As the declaration leaves her mouth, she turns her back to me and runs to the shoreline, arching her arm behind her, the rarest-red mermaid tear sparkling in her bracelet like the stone I gave back to the ocean only heartbeats ago.

"Frankie,
don't
!" I run toward her, but my legs feel weighted, like I'm stuck in a horrible nightmare. I catch her and snag the bottom of her camisole, knocking her down to the sand.

But the journal is no longer attached to her fingers.

It's sailing through the air overhead, landing flat on the water with an uninspiring
plop.

It floats for a moment, lolling back and forth in the current, giving me one last chance to retrieve it. I scramble to my feet and run into the water after it, pulling through the tide with heavy arms and heavy legs, willing myself to swim and stretch and reach it.

"Anna! Leave it! Let it go!" Frankie shouts from the shore, up to her knees in water.

I keep swimming toward it, but the current is too strong, pulling on my legs and arms and burning my lungs until I can no longer keep my head above it without fighting. As I kick and yank myself back toward shallower water, the tide moves the journal completely out of reach, encircling it, giving me one last look at the warped pages before it pulls them down to the depths of the ocean.

My heart pounds in a thousand shattered-glass pieces, each beating separately, painfully.

I've lost him all over again.

When I get out of the water, I sit down hard on the shore, put my head in my hands, and weep until I don't have any bones. I don't care what Frankie thinks. I don't care if the party guests or the hotel staff see me out here. I don't even care if Sam comes back and finds me here, eyes puffy and nose running and heart broken.

My best friend is crumpled in the sand next to me like a wet paper doll.

My virginity is gone.

The ocean has swallowed up my journal.

And it takes all the strength I have left not to dive back in and follow it down, down, deep to the bottom of the sea, lost for all eternity like the broken, banished mermaid.