Between Us and the Moon

by Rebecca Maizel

  I reach back, Andrew’s wet hand grasps onto mine and something about a boy in just his swim trunks, clutching onto his sandy jeans makes me braver. He is here for me.

  For me.

  I point to the stairs. They creak beneath our feet. We both stop and freeze at one particularly loud crack of the stairs. We dart past Scarlett’s floor and soon we’re up on mine. I open the door for him and we scoot inside.

  His arms slide around me and I shiver, waiting for his body heat to warm me up.

  “Come on,” he whispers and pulls away. I shiver again as the air-conditioning pumps through the vents onto my skin. Andrew sits down on my bed. “Let’s get warm.”

  “Hold on,” I say and lock my door. Just in case. I can’t help it. I check to see if the Waterman Scholarship application sits faceup on the desk along with a couple of Summerhill Academy folders. They do and I relish the darkness.

  I wring my hair out, bay water sprinkles the white carpet, and Andrew lies across my bed, leaning his head on his hand. I’ve never been naked in bed with a guy before, not even Tucker.

  “I told you this a hundred times, but you’re beautiful,” he says.

  I crawl on the bed toward him and snuggle into the sheets. He stays on top of the blanket. His blue eyes are darker in the night. His shoulders and chest are broad and I want to touch him again, run my fingers over him like I did down in the bay.

  Andrew moves the sheets aside and slides his wet body on top of me instead. The pressure of his weight lifts when he holds himself up.

  “Tell me something about you,” he whispers.

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Something. Anything. I spent a day on a boat with fishermen.”

  I lift my chin and find his lips—we kiss, and it’s salty seawater. There’s a tiny ball of light in the center of my stomach and it’s radiating up to my chest, to my throat, to my mouth, and I pull away from his lips. I don’t want to be anywhere else. Ever.

  “Okay. Have you ever seen a solar eclipse?”

  Andrew shakes his head.

  “If it’s a total eclipse, the sun and moon perfectly align with the Earth. The moon’s disc makes a ring of light around the sun. It’s called ‘the diamond ring effect.’ I mean, it’s just a metaphor. You know? Because it’s not really diamonds,” I say.

  He considers me as though he’s figuring something out for the first time. “Sarah,” he whispers, pulling away from me. “Sarah, I—I love you.”

  Hope—joy—love all explode in me at once.

  “There is no concrete scientific proof that love exists,” I say.

  “Okay . . . but do you love me?” he asks slowly.

  “Yes. Of course. I love you.” As the three words slip through my lips I know I do not need to test this through empirical data. This is fact.

  He dives for me, his tongue parts my lips as we kiss deeper than we ever have before. I pull away and place my hands on his cheeks.

  He kisses me again.

  And again.

  And again.

  We talk and kiss and he teaches me about his body. I didn’t know the body could pulse like this. Contract like this. The stars he makes me see are on the back of my eyes. We don’t have sex—I’m not ready, I say. He kisses me as a response and does not pressure me. When the sky starts turning pink is when I fall asleep with my head on his stomach. He’s stroking my head, with the palm of his hand. That puts me right to sleep. And I do sleep. Sleep like I haven’t a care in the world.

  A mouth on mine. Someone’s kissing me. Hands run down my shoulders to my arm. I kiss back—oh! I draw in a heaving breath and awake. Andrew is on top of me again, his eyes are now a blue-green in the morning light.

  “I gotta go,” he says. “Busy day. It’s 5:06 and I have to be at the juvie camp at 7:30. I have to get some paperwork to BC, too.”

  He slides on his swim trunks and he is absolutely beautiful with his unkempt hair and stubble. It’s strange. I know what he is covering up with his clothes. I haven’t thought about it until now, but it’s a special knowledge. One that can only exist when two people really know one another.

  “Walk me out?” he asks.

  I wrap a robe around me and unlock the door. I make sure to block my desk with my body so he can’t see the application in the morning light. We wait in the doorway, listen for any movement in the house, and tiptoe down the stairs. He keeps a hand on my lower back the whole way.

  A door unlatches.

  We freeze. There are footsteps in the kitchen, heavy squeaky ones, and I know it’s Nancy up earlier than she probably ever has been in her life. Of course.

  I bring my finger to my lips. Andrew meets my eyes and I mouth, “My aunt.”

  My fingers linger on the banister. My other hand is firmly grasped in Andrew’s. Her footsteps squeak away down the hallway and I nod my head to the patio.

  “Let’s go,” I whisper.

  We stop on the first floor near Mom and Dad’s room. In the living room, I know there are pictures of Scarlett and me on the fireplace mantle so I need to get him onto the porch and out the door before he has time to really see them and recognize her face. I grab Andrew’s hand once we get to the living room and pull him out to the patio.

  “I’ll call you tonight,” he says. And with one more kiss, he’s down the patio steps, his feet pad on the path and after a few moments, there’s the purr of his motorboat.

  He drives a bit out from the dock. From up here in the living room, we’re high enough up that I can see the harbor. He’s out of my inlet before the sun is fully over the horizon.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  LOVE.

  Neuroscientists have scanned the human brain in an attempt to understand love and its chemical origin.

  Nothing is conclusive.

  I know I love Andrew. That is irrefutable. I don’t need to peruse pie charts to accurately deduce if I love him or not.

  A few days later, after a breakfast of waffles, I gather up all of Scarlett’s clothes from my bedroom floor. She’ll be home in two days. Forty-eight hours.

  I hug her clothes to my chest and head to the laundry room. They smell like coconut oil and suntan lotion. I pass Mom on my way. She writes in a calendar book and I hope it’s for an interview.

  I toss in the darks. I pull out the short-shorts from the party the night Curtis yanked at me and the T-shirt from the dune buggy ride. I hold up the blue sundress from the night of the comet and I’m not exactly sure I would even want to wear this anymore. The dress is the same. The fabric and the color is too. It’s not . . . it’s not . . . me. I think it’s more girly than I would like to wear. It’s more Scarlett. I want to wear clothes that are down to earth. Natural. I would never have known that before the Scarlett Experiment. Maybe Tucker was right. Maybe I had to do the Scarlett Experiment so I could change.

  The dress dangles in my hand. The cold water fills the machine and I am about to wash away the sand, the sweat, and the stardust overhead. Once I am done, I will put away all of her clothes and pretend that I never paraded around pretending to be someone I am not. One thing is for sure: I am wearing that cocktail dress Saturday night. I haven’t forgotten how I felt when I put it on or that it represents the new me.

  I also haven’t forgotten that I still need to tell Andrew.

  I drop the dress into the washer. It’s okay. Andrew loves me. Me. The girl he thinks is funny, and smart. The girl who helped him see that he does have a future of his own making.

  “Gran mixes her lights and darks too,” Mom says from the laundry room doorway. “You two are too much alike,” she says with a little shake of her head.

  Maybe Mom does see me. Just a little. Even if she can’t see who I am, Mom gets something right.

  “Smart, smart, smart. You and your Gran.” She steps away.

  Mom and Dad love me. I know this, they tell me all the time. But they don’t see me. Not really. I watch her from the laundry room doorway. She passes the maid, who is scrubbing th
e kitchen, and the cook, who is prepping for dinner.

  I want to stop Mom and tell her about Andrew. Tell her that someone loves me. Loves me for my brain, books, mathematical equations, and so much more.

  She calls to me from down the hall, “Beanie, give Dad your essay tonight so he can proof it before Scarlett comes home.”

  I grip the doorway—hard.

  “If I had to smell pee one more time, I swear,” Scarlett says when she comes out of the terminal at the Hyannis airport. I didn’t want to go, but somehow here I am. “NYC in the summer is pee and garbage.”

  She hugs Mom and when she sees me, she gives me a one-armed hug.

  “You’re tan,” she says, disguising her jealousy. She takes out her cell phone.

  “I’ve been on the beach a lot,” I say.

  I grab one of Scarlett’s suitcases from the revolving carriage and Mom takes the others. Scarlett gabs on and on about skyscrapers, elevators going up one hundred flights, Juilliard, and the smell of the dorm in summer.

  In the car, Scarlett finally takes a break from her stories to turn around in her seat.

  “So what did you do while I was gone?” she asks.

  “Nothing much. Tracked the Comet Jolie.” I am about to mention that I think she’d like some of the necklaces I’ve seen in town and that maybe we could go together to pick one out. Scarlett brings her hands up to her mouth like a chipmunk and sticks her teeth out.

  “Did you get your acclimation and detention?” she says in a funny, deep voice. Is that supposed to be me? She laughs at herself and spins back around.

  “Right ascension and declination,” I mutter.

  “Come on, Scarlett,” Mom says as we get back on route 6 heading toward Orleans.

  “What? Beanie is our eager beaver.”

  “That’s enough.”

  “God, Mom. We’ve only had to hear about her tracking that damn comet for a year. If I don’t ask, she’ll die. It’s her whole life.”

  I lean forward, heat rushes through my cheeks.

  “Did you gain weight?” I ask. I know it’s a nasty thing to do. I know it’s the one thing in this house we do not say.

  “No, she didn’t, Bean,” Mom says, and her eyes are daggers in the rearview.

  “No, I’m pretty sure she did,” I say.

  “You’re a bitch,” Scarlett says and twists to me. “I have a trainer at Juilliard. In fact, I weigh exactly a quarter pound less than when I left.” She spins to face forward so all I can see is her tight bun wrapped on the top of her head.

  The word “bitch” hangs in the air and I sit back in the seat. Scarlett’s never called me a bitch before. I’ve never called her fat before. She doesn’t have an eating disorder—yet, as the dance teachers say. One time Mom and Dad caught her with a bottle of diet pills and made her go to a psychiatrist.

  “You shouldn’t call your sister a bitch,” Mom says to Scarlett in a low tone once we get back to Nancy’s. “I don’t ever want to hear that from you again.”

  “Did you hear what she said to me?” Scarlett asks.

  “Well, you’re not the easiest person to talk to sometimes, dear.”

  I can’t decide if this is progress or not.

  The next morning, the morning of the party, I stand in the backyard.

  A huge tent has been put up and takes over almost all of the lawn. Though in true Nancy fashion, she’s positioned it so there is still a fantastic view of the ocean.

  The band has come with piles of tarp in case it rains. The party planner that Nancy hired screams at a higher decibel than Nancy, if that’s even possible. She is currently hollering into her cell phone while checking uniform sizes.

  Beneath the massive pavilion are piles upon piles of tarp in case the rain starts early. Glassware has been delivered too and it’s sitting there in plastic containers.

  I’m not staying to help.

  I am telling Andrew today. If he knows I am Scarlett’s sister, I can contain it before the party. He probably won’t find out my real age by nightfall. I need to go to the docks before Andrew goes out on the water.

  I walk back in the house to grab my cell but stop at the patio doorway. At the kitchen table, Mom, Scarlett, Dad, and Nancy sit together, laughing and smiling at Scarlett’s photographs from her month in New York. Some new costumes hang from the countertop, they glitter and sparkle under the track lighting. They’re a tapestry of color compared to the whiteness of everything else. Mom holds on to Scarlett’s arm.

  “Look at that! Look at that grand jeté!” she says, showing Dad a photo, and he raises his eyebrows. He isn’t distracted at all.

  I’m wearing a chocolate-colored peasant blouse I picked out on Main Street with khaki shorts, and some sandals with a blue gem on the toes. The blue is a great detail that compliments my tan.

  But they don’t notice.

  I turn right around and walk down the wooden steps of the patio and to the backyard. I keep walking, past the garage and the hidden shingle with Scarlett’s and my name scrawled in the wood. I walk down the shell drive to the street—to tell Andrew about Scarlett.

  When I get down to the docks it smells like my first date with Andrew: fried fish and seawater. I walk across the parking lot, replaying the memory of my skinny-dip in the ocean. At the docks, tourists take pictures of a couple of seals poking their little whiskered noses out of the shallow water.

  Andrew jumps down from the boat to the dock and kisses me quickly.

  “Attention whores,” Andrew says about the seals.

  “Shameless,” I reply. Just tell him. It’ll be easy. You can stall on the MIT thing for just a bit longer.

  Sweat beads on the top of his lip and he takes off a baseball hat covering his matted down hair. He wipes his forehead.

  “We’re taking off in a few minutes,” he says. On cue, there are a couple high-pitched beeps, the motors go, and engine smoke billows from the back of the boat. “Just going in the local harbor. With the tropical storm we have to reinforce some lobster traps.”

  Across the docks, the seals have ducked back under the water. I hope they swim out into the harbor where it’s safe.

  “About tonight,” I say. “The party at my aunt’s house . . .”

  “Oh, yeah, I have to go to that girl’s party tonight too. You just reminded me. I lost the invitation in Curtis’s Jeep, like, a month ago.”

  “Yes, about that. My sister—”

  “Andrew!” one of the guys calls from the boat and raises his hands in the air. “Come on!”

  The boat pulls forward and a couple of the guys throw the line from the dock and jump aboard.

  He kisses me quickly on the cheek. “The lobsters are calling. I’ll come by your house after this other thing. Ten thirty? I’ll sneak you out if I have to.”

  I want to tell him so badly it makes my throat ache.

  “Ten thirty,” I whisper.

  He jumps from the dock to the boat, just making it within seconds.

  “Good-bye!” Andrew calls out dramatically. He hangs off the boat like a guy in a Broadway musical. A chorus of male voices mock Andrew.

  “Good-bye, fair lady! Good-bye, Maiden Sarah! I shall see you when I return to port,” some of the fishermen screech. A couple others hold their hands over their hearts. Six or seven guys, all in fishing gear, call my name and for the moment, I’m the princess of the docks. The princess who did not tell him what she needed to, the girl who has a mouthful of truth that she couldn’t say.

  TWENTY-NINE

  FOR THE REST OF THE AFTERNOON, I WALKED throughout town practicing all the ways I was going to tell Andrew about Scarlett. None of them sounded right.

  Already a couple varieties of catering trucks and the usual smattering of BMWs and Mercedes make a small line in front of Nancy’s house. As I walk up the steps of Seaside Stomachache, I recount my plan. First, I am changing into the black dress.

  Second, I will get Andrew cornered and tell him about Scarlett. The party should be too busy
for him to find out my age. I can keep him distracted from that conversation. Yeah, that sounds perfect. An hour should be enough to make Nancy happy and—

  “Bean!” Mom says when I walk in the door. “Oh good. You’re here.” I’m amazed she noticed I was gone, but this isn’t a typical day for Mom. “We need to take pictures in ten minutes.”

  It smells like garlic and cooking spices.

  In Mom’s hand is the cupcake dress.

  Nancy steps up behind her. “I cannot believe how late you are.” Nancy wears a white dress that resembles a huge marshmallow.

  Mom shoves the cupcake dress in my hands and the tulle scratches at my arms.

  “Go up and get ready!” Nancy says and waddles away into the kitchen.

  Waiters dressed in white button-down shirts and black pants shine the silver in the kitchen.

  Mom puts a pair of gold studs in her ears.

  “Your sister is getting dressed now; check on her, will you?”

  I nod and look at the time. Six o’clock. The party is due to start in thirty minutes.

  I climb the rest of the stairs to my room. I don’t want to check on my sister. She can take care of herself.

  I lay the dress down on my bed—thar she blows. The tiered pink dress with enough tulle and padding to protect me in a motorcycle accident. I lift it from the hanger and stop at the full-length mirror behind my door. I let flashes of last night ooze through my mind. Our bodies under the warm sheets. Andrew touches me until I am writhing on the bed. Tugging and touching and placing my mouth all over him until I have to get a towel from the bathroom.

  Now here I stand in front of the mirror in a strapless bra and panties.

  This body. This girl. I am not who I was when I got here at the beginning of the summer. I am the girl yelling to the sky on the back of a dune buggy. The girl accepted by a group for the first time. I am the girl who wants to try the world outside of the biology lab. I still want to be in that bio lab, of course. I just want more. I want both.