Twenty Boy Summer (21 page)

thirty-two

The trip back home is like watching a highlights reel of our arrival in quick reverse. From the car, we turn to watch the fiery orange windows of the house vanish behind the palm trees until only the tip of the wooden iceberg roof remains. The road winds farther down and the house is all but erased, back to the photographs and fairy tales from which it sprang.

We don't stop on Moonlight Boulevard to say goodbye to Breeze or Sweet Caroline's or the postcard stand or the tourists in their lime green spandex, but Red slows down for Jayne to snap a picture of the sign posted on the far end of town.

You Are Leaving Zanzibar Bay

Thanks for stopping by!

Along the highway, Red pulls over at the lookout where we first saw the harbor seals on our arrival, insisting that we take another official family vacation photo for comparison's sake.

The seals are right where we left them, barking and playing on the shore.

The guardrail and the informational sign and the worn picnic table are right where they've always been.

The dolomite boulders still protect the cliff from collapsing into the sea like they've done for tens of thousands of years.

My entire life has changed in the span of three weeks, but as the seals howl against the Pacific, everything around me remains exactly the same.

"You guys okay?" Uncle Red asks us when we're buckled back into the car. "I'm surprised you're not documenting this."

"Just tired," Frankie says, ignoring the camera in her backpack. "I don't want to leave, either," Aunt Jayne says. "But I bet we'll take another trip next year."

We nod like robots and look out our separate windows from the backseat.

At the airport, we return the rental car, check in, and rush through security amid the same flux of reunions and breakups we witnessed on the way here. Same people. Same hellos and goodbyes. Same beginnings and endings. Same befores and afters.

We get to the gate with time for a Jack's Java run, but Frankie and I order separately. We don't do any mock interviews. We don't make up stories about the other waiting passengers. We drink our expensive coffee milk shakes and try to stay awake long enough to board the plane without falling down dead.

Soon we're in our seats, listening to crewmember instructions and following along with the passenger safety information card conveniently located in our seatback pockets.

Frankie lets me have the window seat again and promptly passes out against my shoulder, listening to the new HP playlist she made on her iPod after the concert. As I watch the white dots of sailboats disappear into the vast blue ocean, the Golden Gate bridge becomes a series of suspended red matchsticks, and I think about Mom and Dad, wondering whether they'll notice how much I've aged in these three short weeks. Will I look or talk or walk different? Will they
know
?

Yes, Anna was such a sweet girl, but that was before the incident. We'd rather not talk about it.

We get home after midnight East Coast time and it takes all my remaining energy to say goodbye to the Perinos, hug Mom and Dad hello, and drag myself up to my room. Save for a set of clean sheets on the bed, my room is exactly as I left it -- familiar, comfortable, and expected. I know which boards in the floor will creak under my steps. I know which drawer holds my socks. I know which monsters live in the closet and which under the bed, and when I crawl between my sheets and lay my head against my old, lumpy pillow, I pull my sheets up to my chin, close my eyes, and allow myself to think that maybe I never left this safe, boring place with its old predictable ghosts.

thirty-three

Morning comes too soon, Mom buzzing around my room to wake me out of a deep sleep so we can have breakfast together and talk about the trip. I sit up and take in the familiar walls, remembering that I'm no longer two thousand miles across the country in a beach rental house.

The clock says eleven a.m. Ten hours isn't nearly enough to repay the sleep deficit I've built up these past few weeks, but Mom is too excited about making up for lost quality time.

Downstairs, Dad's at the table with the newspaper, surrounded by covered dishes. In honor of such a triumphant return from such a wholesome family vacation in which I did not experiment with alcohol, boys, curfew breaking, or walking outside without ample applications of sunscreen, Mom prepared a breakfast fit for kings and angel daughters alike.

I pull up my usual chair, load up a plate, and tell them all about the trip. Rather, the PG version, focusing on activities coordinated by Red and Jayne and a few strategically placed mentions of Jackie and Samantha (whose parents were of course very strict). I talk about the seafood we ate and that night when the waiter dumped the pitcher of water on Frankie's sunburn. I even tell them about the sand angels we made with Aunt Jayne. I describe the ocean and the house and Moonlight Boulevard with its eclectic mix of tourists and locals, finding it extremely challenging to reminisce without mentioning Sam and the Va-Va-Vineapple smoothie I plan to recreate in the blender later.

"It sounds beautiful, Anna," Mom says, pouring herself more coffee.

"So, anything new around here?" I ask, hoping I don't accidentally mention Sam.

"Dad has some news." Mom smiles at Dad across the table. "Remember right before you left I won the Hoover House listing -- that old mansion out on Route Five?" Dad asks. "Well, I sold it. One week flat, and we had a huge bidding war, just like I predicted."

"Dad, that's great! Congratulations."

"I'm taking us all out to celebrate tonight. The Perinos, too. Sound fun?"

I catch myself shrugging and quickly turn it into a happy nod. "Where is Frankie, anyway?" Dad asks. "It's almost noon. I'm surprised you two can stand the separation."

I take a deep breath and gulp down some orange juice.

Well, Dad, first Frankie lied to me about losing her virginity to the foreign exchange student on the soccer field, and how your first time can't be special and all
that.
Then we decided to have this twenty boy contest but we only met, like, half, and she lied again about sleeping
with one of them when really they just kind of fooled around naked and broke up. Meanwhile, when I was casting off my virginity with boy number five (or was he six?), Frankie read my journal and found out that I was in love with Matt for a million years and by the way, right after you took that picture of us with all the cake and frosting, he kissed me and started this whole long thing that we weren't allowed to tell her about. Frankie was so mad that she threw my journal into the bottom of the ocean, where it is banished for all eternity with a lovesick mermaid who cries out pieces of sea glass. Are you going to eat that bacon?

Dad prepares his toast, careful not to get crumbs in the butter, politely awaiting my response.

"I'll probably see her later," I say. "Good. We already told Red and Jayne about dinner. You know, Anna, you look different." He watches me a moment longer than usual.

"What do you mean?" I hope my voice doesn't betray any guilt about the aforementioned "incident," which will completely evade his Dad-sensors, but Mom will be all over it.

"Hmm. Tan. And relaxed."

Mom nods. "We should have sent you away a long time ago."

"Ha-
ha.
" Sometimes I think I'm an alien that accidentally fell off the mother ship, destined to wander among clueless earthling parents for all eternity.

After the breakfast play-by-play, it's time for the daunting task of unpacking three weeks' worth of dirty secrets. I mean
clothes.
Dirty clothes.

I start by dumping the entire contents of my suitcase -- including about five gallons of sand -- on my bed.

I separate out all of the nonclothes -- a random assortment of beach glass, shells, and sand dollars; the striped beach stone Frankie gave me on our first day; iPod; cell phone; postcards I never mailed; a San Francisco magnet for my locker next year; the book of ocean poems from City Lights; and the takeout menu from Smoothie Shack with Sam's e-mail address scribbled in the bottom corner.

I start a new jar for my beach glass and stick the menu in the bottom of the sock drawer where Mom won't see it. Everything else finds a place in my room as if it had been here all along -- even Sam's sweatshirt folds effortlessly into my drawer among the others like they are old friends reuniting after a long separation.

It still smells like him. I leave it near the top so I can wear it tonight after Mom and Dad are safely tucked away in their blissfully clueless bedroom.

I open my window and slide up the screen, hoping I can shake the sand out of some of my clothes without the breeze blowing it back into my face. I spot Frankie lying out in her backyard, perpetuating her gorgeous tan. She flips through an issue of
Celeb Style
and drops it on the stack in the adjacent lounge chair formerly known as mine.

The magazine causes an avalanche, sliding off the chair and into the grass, taking three or four others with it. She leans over to grab them but can't reach without getting out of her chair, opting instead to knock the rest of the pile into the grass and roll over on her side.

There is no expertly posed flat stomach, glistening parted lips, slightly bent legs, or heaving bosom.

There is no sparkling sand.

No roaring ocean.

No drooling, whistling boys.

Just Frankie and my empty lounge chair.

It hurts to watch, and I feel guilty for lingering in the shadows of my room like a stalker.

"Frank!" I yell down to her. "I'm coming over."

Frankie meets me in her kitchen, grabbing two Diet Cokes on our way upstairs.

It seems like years since I've been here, and the maroons and purples of her Moroccan room are a comfortable homecoming.

I sit on the bed, pulling my legs under me. Her video camera is connected to the computer on her desk, transferring the evidence of our Absolute Best Summer Ever to her hard drive.

"We can watch it later if you want," she says, nodding at the camera as she pulls a pair of boxers over her swimsuit and sits in front of the vanity. Last time I was here, I watched her get glammed up for trip planning night in front of the big mirror behind her.

I shrug. We look at each other, then away. At each other. Then away. We open our Diet Cokes and take a few sips. Neither speaks. Then both at the same time.

"Frankie, I" and "Anna, I," awkward and strained. We've never been in this place before. We don't know how to navigate.

It's her room, so I let her go first. "I'm glad you came over, Anna. I know we already talked about this some, but it still feels weird. There's more I have to say."

"Yeah, me, too."

"Okay, so..." She takes a deep breath, letting it out slowly, a faint "Matt" wafting off the end of her sigh like steam.

"I understand why he didn't want to tell me right away," she says. "He was always worrying about me -- even when we were kids. If I scraped my knee or fell off my bike, he was the first one to help me up and make sure Mom got a Band-Aid."

"I remember." I smile. "He was the quintessential big brother."

"He was. But that's just it -- he's not here to protect me anymore, Anna. And you don't have to be, either. I know I let stuff get crazy. I didn't mean to be like that -- it just kind of happened. You couldn't have changed that. I -- it was something I had to go through myself."

My throat tightens. "I felt like I let him down," I say. "All that stuff with smoking and Johan and Jake -- I didn't take care of you. I couldn't even keep that one simple promise."

"Anna, my brother
died.
There's no way you could protect me from that. It's up to me, now.
I
let him down. I let
me
down."

She reaches into her top desk drawer for the stale pack of cigarettes.

"I know I can do better," she says, crushing them in her hand and dropping them into the trash can. I haven't seen her so convinced about anything since she picked out our bikinis at Bling and invented the summer of twenty boys.

"Frankie --"

"There's more, Anna. When we first got to California," she says, "you asked me if I remembered your birthday party."

I nod, picking at a thread on her comforter. "I
did
remember. Matt was acting like such a space cadet that night after we got home -- like he was floating. I can't believe I didn't figure it out, but of all the things that he could have been thinking about, you were the last -- I mean, my mind just didn't even go there. You were like our sister."

"But I --"

"Wait -- let me get this out." She looks at me hard, her broken wing eyebrow trembling to keep the tears back. "After I brushed my teeth, I walked into his room. He was sitting on his bed, playing with that blue glass necklace he always wore, a big smile on his face. Remember the necklace?"

The necklace.
"Of course."

"I asked him what was so funny. He jumped a little, not knowing I'd been watching him smile there like a goofy little kid. He said it was nothing -- just that he had fun at the party. And I believed him, all the way up until the day I read your journal. That's when it all made sense. All the times he'd ask me about who you liked at school, or who wanted to take you to whatever dance."

She's quiet as I digest her story, putting the pieces together to form a complete whole from the missing half that's haunted me since that night -- how did he really feel about me? Was it just one stupid moment, perpetuated a little too long, only to be forgotten as quickly as it came? As soon as he went away to school?

"I was in love with him forever -- since I was, like, ten," I confess.

"Yeah," she says. "You both were in love. I know that now. We were all so close, you know? I just didn't see it coming until I read your -- I'm sorry, Anna."

I close my eyes, fighting back the image of her hand on my journal. "It's okay."

"The night we got back from the hospital," she says, "when Mom and Dad were downstairs with your parents after they took you home, I went into his room. I still don't know why -- it felt like he was calling me or something.

"Inside, everything was exactly as he'd left it that morning. His bed unmade. Dirty clothes on the floor. The frosting shirt from your cake fight weeks earlier -- just like the one you have in your closet. It was hanging inside his closet door, blue and crusty. It's probably still in there."

I smile, picturing Matt hanging his frosted shirt behind the door that night at the same time I was stuffing mine into its plastic bag in my room next door, totally freaked out about what had just happened.

"I didn't think you recognized it," I say. "That day we went through my closet before the trip. You wanted me to throw it out."

"I didn't recognize it that day. But once I saw the picture in your journal, it started to come together.

"Anyway," she continues, "that night after the accident, his room still smelled like him, you know? It was like I could lock myself in there forever and just keep breathing and telling myself that he would come back.

"I sat on the end of his bed and looked through the stuff on his nightstand. Alarm clock. Half-empty glass of water. Loose change. Some books he was in the middle of reading. And the necklace."

"Are you serious?" I ask. "I always thought it was lost in the hospital or in the crash."

"No, he must have forgotten to put it on that morning. And the night of the accident, something told me to take it, so I did. I closed it up in my fist and cried myself to sleep in his bed. The next morning, I woke up in my own bed with the necklace wrapped around my hand. I couldn't even remember why I took it, or how I got from his room to mine.

"A few days later, Mom was wandering around the house in a trance, mumbling about the blue necklace -- she wanted them to put it on him. I didn't tell her I had it. I hid it in the pocket of an old coat where I knew she wouldn't look, even on a decorating rampage. The same thing that told me to take it, told me to keep it secret. I felt terrible that Mom thought it was lost, but I knew there was some reason I wasn't supposed to bury it with my brother. I just didn't know why -- until now."

"What do you mean?" I ask, still shocked that she'd had the necklace all this time; that all along, she knew so much about the secret.

She sets down her soda and pulls something from the desk drawer where she used to keep the cigarettes.

"I mean, it's
yours,
Anna. It's always been yours." She presses her fingers to my palm.

My eyes move slowly from her face to the flat, cool object in my hand. There it is, small and unassuming, two leather cords holding a triangle of blue glass. History plays itself through my head like a movie -- the cake, the kitchen sink, the necklace, the kiss, the text messages, the back of the house, the second kiss, the next and the next and the next, the stars, the books, the hall closet, the ice cream, the car, the hospital. My cheeks burn. I wait for the sadness to drown me, the tears to start.

I wait.

I wait.

I wait.

But... nothing.

I'm --
okay.
I think about Matt and the blue triangle always on his collarbone and feel a tightness in my chest, but no tears. No crushing sense of loss. No landslide of sad rocks.

I'm okay.

I close my hand around the necklace and feel an overwhelming surge of -- calm, I guess. And love. And forgiveness. And closure. A beginning, an ending, and a new beginning.

"Thank you," I whisper, stretching to put my arms around her for a long overdue hug.

"So I guess we didn't get to twenty, huh?" Frankie smiles, wiping her eyes.

"Not exactly, no."

"Oh, well. You get at least five extra points for Sam."

Sam.
The sound of his name reminds me of the smell of his skin, and the hair on my neck stands up.

"You do realize I'm going to need all the details of this little rendezvous, right?" Frankie asks.

"Francesca, I'm shocked!"

"Oh, come on. You knew I'd make you spill everything eventually!"

"No -- I'm shocked that you used a word like 'rendezvous' correctly! And you even pronounced --"

"And
you're
trying to change the subject." She laughs, erasing a leftover tear with her fingertip. It's different this time -- her laugh. Sad and a little bit serious, but raw and hopeful and honest, too. As the red glass of her bracelet sparkles against her tan skin, I finally understand it. There was never an old Frankie or a new Frankie. Everything that ever happened is just part of who she is; of who I am; of the best friendship that I've always loved.

I press the blue glass triangle to my lips and smile for Matt, my best-friend-that's-a-boy, my last goodbye to the brokenhearted promise I carried like my journal for so long. Somewhere below the black frothy ocean, a banished mermaid reads my letters and weeps endlessly for a love she'll never know -- not for a single moment.

Before the trip, Frankie and I set out to have the Absolute Best Summer Ever, the summer of twenty boys. We'll never agree on the final count -- whether the boys from Caroline's should be included in the tally, whether the milk-shake man was too old to be considered a "boy," whether her tattooed rock star interlude was anything other than a rebound. But in the end, there were only two boys who really mattered.

Matt and Sam.

When I close my eyes, I see Sam lying next to me on the blanket that first night we watched the stars -- the night he made me look at everything in a different way; the breeze on my skin and the music and the ocean at night. But I also see Matt; his marzipan frosting kiss. All the books he read to me. His postcard fairy tales of California, finally coming to life in Zanzibar Bay.

When I kissed Sam, I was so scared of erasing Matt. But now I know that I could never erase him. He'll always be part of me -- just in a different way. Like Sam, making smoothies on the beach two thousand miles away. Like Frankie, my voodoo magic butterfly finding her way back home in the dark. Like the stars, fading with the halo of the vanishing moon. Like the ocean, falling and whispering against the shore. Nothing ever really goes away -- it just changes into something else. Something beautiful.