“Asher’s a little seasick. Could I get a can of ginger ale?”
“Oh no, poor girl,” Elisa says. She opens a cooler and digs around inside before tossing me a green can. “Here you go. I hope she feels better.”
I thank her and turn to leave, but Tarek catches me, hurrying over to where I’m standing in the doorway. “Quinn, wait a sec.” Now his brows are drawn together in concern. He plants a hand on the wall next to me, leans down so that only I can hear him. “Are you okay? You seem a little…” He trails off, as though he doesn’t know me well enough to understand what mood this is.
The truth is, he doesn’t.
“I’m fine. I have to get this to my sister.” I tighten my hand around the cool aluminum and make my way back to Asher.
She lifts the can to me in cheers before taking a sip. We watch the couple and the photographer, my mom supervising while my dad helps the DJ with the sound system.
“They look so happy,” Asher says. “I love second marriages. Well, I don’t love whatever bad shit led to the end of the first marriage, if that was the case, but couples like this, they always seem the happiest to me. They tend to know exactly what they want, and they just seem so sure of everything.”
For a moment I want to confide in her about Tarek, get some of that sisterly wisdom, but I’m not sure I can put it into words for myself. Somehow I doubt she’s had enough of this particular experience to counsel me through it.
Even if she had, we’ve seen so little of each other lately. I’d have too much to fill her in on.
“Hi, um—you’re with the wedding planners, right?” a redheaded guy in a tux is asking me. He’s the bride’s son, about my age, his face full of freckles. “We have a slight problem with the cake.” He runs a sheepish hand along the back of his neck. “Apparently there was an issue with one of the fridges, the main issue being that it wasn’t working, and the cake is kind of…”
“Melting,” fills in the girl next to him, laying a hand on his shoulder. She’s in a lilac dress with a sweetheart neckline. “One whole side of it is melting.”
“We can fix this,” I assure them. Or at least, Tarek can. Another reason to go talk to my new best friend.
I lead them back into the kitchen, where Tarek is finishing off another tray of appetizers. We open up the fridge, and there’s the saddest cake I’ve ever seen. It’s falling into itself on one side, the chocolate pooling in the plastic beneath it. The leaning tower of pastry.
Tarek examines it, and the two guests lean forward, waiting for his verdict.
“Chocolate and heat do not get along,” he says. “I can fix it, but it’s not going to look the same as the cake they thought they were getting. I think the best thing we can do is scrape off the frosting that’s left, take the layers apart, and try to re-form them before re-frosting it. Quinn, your mom has bamboo skewers in her emergency kit, right?”
I nod and slip out to grab some. When I return, he gives me this big smile.
“Thanks, friend,” he says, and it’s the heartiest thank-you I’ve heard in a long time, like I’ve saved him from toppling overboard instead of handing him a few sticks of bamboo. The word “friend” might as well be Edith’s claws on a chalkboard. This isn’t the Tarek I talked to at two in the morning, his hair rumpled, his voice soft like a secret.
This is a performance, and I’m not sure if he’s doing it for his benefit or for mine.
When it becomes clear that this is going to take a while, I turn to the couple. “I’m Quinn, by the way,” I say. “And this is Tarek.”
“Rowan,” says the girl, and the guy whose mother just got married introduces himself as Neil. I’m not sure how long he and Rowan have been together, but they can’t seem to stop touching each other. Even now, she has a pinkie tucked into his pants pocket.
“Are you guys in college?” I ask.
“Just finished freshman year,” Neil says. “We’re home for the summer.”
“Ah, so there is life after high school.”
“Barely,” Rowan says, and Neil gives her a playful nudge. In her heels, she’s taller than he is. “It’s very grim.”
“The wedding was beautiful.” I think back to what Asher said. “I haven’t seen a couple that happy in a while.”
Neil and Rowan exchange a look. “It took a lot to get here,” he says, and I get the sense there’s a deeper story there, one that isn’t the kind you tell during a first conversation with someone.
Tarek deconstructs and reconstructs the cake, stealing some berries from the hors d’oeuvres and adding them to the top. By the time it’s finished, I’m not sure I’d have ever known its sordid past.
“Voilà,” he says. “Franken-cake.”
“Thank you so much,” Neil says. “Truly. I know there’s no such thing as perfect, but I really wanted this to be as close to it as possible for my mom.”
That emotion tugs at the place in my heart I thought had hardened to weddings. We’ve dealt with so many nightmare families; it’s refreshing to see the earnestness with which he speaks about his mom.
Rowan brushes her long bangs out of the way and leans closer to inspect it. “You know, I think this looks better.”
Tarek blushes a little at that, but I refuse to let myself think it’s cute. I can’t let those feelings get in the way of whatever we restarted last week. Even if I’m no longer sure how to be friends with Tarek or what that’s supposed to look like when he seems to be injected with the same kind of pep I thought my parents had trademarked.
More than ever, I’m worried we’re resurrecting a friendship that was never as grand as I made it out to be.
* * *
The sun goes down, and outside, the temperature drops. Slightly.
The bride and groom don’t seem to notice the cake isn’t precisely the one they ordered, and now that the dancing’s begun, my only job is to supervise. Wait and see if anyone needs anything.
For a couple of songs, I watch Rowan and Neil. Sometimes they dance wild, and sometimes they dance close, his hand fitting into the hollow of her lower back, her head on his shoulder. Then he dances with a smaller red-haired girl who must be his sister, which is adorable. His mom, Joelle, and her new husband, Christopher, won’t stop grinning at each other. It took a lot to get here, Neil had said. I’m glad they made it.
Tarek is standing across from me near another open window. Any other time, I’d go talk to him, make up a game, ask for extra food. But tonight… I’m not sure what to say. That might make me a bad friend, but he’s just going to have to deal with it until I figure things out.
“Hey.” I turn to see Rowan next to me. “Stating the obvious, I know, but wow is it boiling in here.”
“I was actually just thinking about getting some fresh air.”
“I might join you,” she says, and together we head to the upper deck, where one person is playing a game on their phone and another couple is gazing out at the water. The breeze is not insignificant, but after emerging from the lower-deck sweatbox, I welcome it.
The sky is dotted with stars, and Rowan tilts her head upward, exhales a dreamy sigh. “Romantic,” she says, more to herself than to me.
“Is it?” I ask, and it’s not meant to sound as combative as it does. Shit—I’m not her friend, even if it felt that way for a moment down there during the great cake rescue. I’m supposed to be a professional. “I mean, sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. It’s a wedding! Joelle is your…?”
“Boyfriend’s mom,” Rowan says, filling in what I already suspected. “We’ve been together for a little over a year now.”
“You guys are really cute.” Even I can admit there’s something sweet about the way they interact.
“Thank you,” she says. “We started dating right after high school, and then we were going to different colleges. I was worried about doing long-distance, but we made it work. We’d see each other on weekends when we could, talk almost every night on the phone. And then there was the, um, creative t
exting.” She blushes a little at that, which convinces me even more that she’s someone I could be friends with.
“What’s your major?”
“English. Creative writing, actually.”
“Did you always know you wanted to do that?”
“Sort of. I had to allow myself to want it, despite the judgment I knew I was going to get from other people. You’re starting college in September?” When I nod, she asks, “Any idea what you’re going to study, or are you completely sick of that question?”
I almost laugh. I haven’t been asked that question in a long time. I glance around, make sure no one up here can overhear us. “I can tell you what my parents want me to study.”
“I get the impression that’s different from what you want.”
“If only I knew what that was.”
“This seems like the time for me to give you some sage advice”—Rowan leans against the railing, shivering as the wind lifts the hem of her dress—“that I feel entirely ill-equipped to give. Follow your heart? Shoot for the moon? Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans? I don’t know if I have anything that wasn’t used on a motivational poster from the nineties.”
“Honestly?” I tell her. “It’s just good to tell someone.”
We watch the water in silence for a while, and it is good, I realize. I haven’t felt anywhere near this peaceful in a while, and it reminds me of how I felt at Maxine’s shop earlier this week. There, I made a decision. I told her what I wanted, even when it scared me.
With a jolt, I realize that’s what I have to do with Tarek: tell him I want a real and honest friendship. That I need to understand why we’re still so far away from it.
Even if the tiniest part of me wouldn’t be opposed to doing deeply unfriendly things to his mouth.
A figure approaches from the staircase, the moonlight catching his red hair. “Cold?” Neil asks Rowan, and she scrunches her face at him. He laughs and passes her his jacket. “Brought it up for you.” He tucks it over her shoulders, then uses the lapels to draw her close for a kiss.
Maybe it is romantic up here, the sea and the stars and the soft rocking of the boat below.
“I’ll leave you two,” I say, stepping back. “Have a great rest of your night. I really am happy for your mom.” And I mean it.
13
I descend back into sweaty boat hell, weaving around wedding guests, heading for Tarek on wobbly legs.
“Can I talk to you?” I ask. “Somewhere private?”
A furrow of his brow, like this doesn’t compute with his new idea of our friendship. “Sure. Everything okay?”
“Yeah, I just—yeah.” I take a moment to collect myself as he leads me downstairs, into what turns out to be a laundry room. The noise from above-deck is mostly muffled in here, and though it’s tiny, I guess it’ll have to do.
“You’re kind of freaking me out,” he says, leaning back against a washing machine. “You know you can talk to me, right? I want to be a good friend to you, and—”
“This,” I interrupt. “This is what I’m talking about. This insistence that we’re suddenly such good friends.”
“But…” And here he looks genuinely confused. “Sorry, I don’t understand. I thought we were friends again.”
“We were. We are.” I wonder how many times we can utter the word “friend” before it ceases to have meaning. “But you don’t need to constantly remind me of that. Calling me ‘friend,’ ‘pal,’ all this enthusiasm… It isn’t you.”
Unless it’s his way of keeping me firmly in friend territory to stave off any latent feelings I might have for him. To remind me that’s what I am.
“Maybe college changed me.” Now he’s talking to the floor as the boat sways us back and forth. If I look anywhere near as grotesque as I feel, with my clothes sticking to me in all kinds of uncomfortable places, I don’t blame him.
I shove a strand of hair out of my face, though all I want to do is hide behind it. “That email I sent you. That thing we’re not talking about, or the thing we’re talking about without actually talking about it. I put it all out there. And I don’t just do that. Like… ever. And maybe we’ll have this great, fun summer together as friends and then you’ll go to California again at the end of it, and we won’t talk for another year.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“You don’t know what it was like, being ignored like that for a whole year. I know what I said about that boat gesture, about your relationships, wasn’t my finest hour. But was it so awful that you didn’t want to be friends with me anymore? Because we could have talked about it. All you had to do was tell me. Whatever it was that happened last year, it hurt me, too. I felt terrible for months.” I try to meet his eyes, willing him to look at me. “But I also don’t want to push you if this isn’t something you’re comfortable talking about.”
Finally, he faces me. It’s unfair that the heat has turned me into a sweat-monster and made him somehow look… better? What the hell. The darkest tendrils of hair closest to his head are damp, and his tie is loose, wrinkled, like it’s had a rough night too. What’s changed the most, though, is his expression. The cut of his jaw is sharper, his brows twin thick slashes.
“And yet here you are, pushing me.” This annoyance is the most real he’s been all day.
“Because I don’t know what else to do!” I say, his annoyance rubbing off on me. “Being friends again, sure, it’s awesome in theory. But I don’t know how to be friends with someone who’s still holding so much back. Which makes me wonder if we were ever that close to begin with.”
“Did it ever occur to you,” he says, “that maybe the reason I’m holding back isn’t about you at all? That it’s not about the fight or that boat gesture? Which I didn’t even fully go through with after you left, by the way. You were right. It was pretty fucking ridiculous.”
“Of course that occurred to me.” There’s not nearly enough space in here. I’m suffocating. “I assume it’s not about me, or you would’ve had the decency to send me a text longer than four fucking words all year. And—I didn’t realize you hadn’t gone through with it. I couldn’t tell, since you and Elisa are still… close.”
“Elisa?” He sounds perplexed. “Elisa Dawson? What does Elisa have to do with any of this?”
“A not-insignificant amount!” I force myself to take a few too-shallow breaths. “I see you laughing with her and the other waiters, or her telling you that your cake is like—like an orgasm, and I’m just—” I break off, regretting my word choice, even though I was only borrowing hers. “I’m just wondering who the real Tarek actually is, because I sure as hell don’t think I’m seeing it.”
“Are you jealous?” He takes a step closer, curiosity quirking his mouth. Still upset, but now there’s amusement mixed in.
I can’t decide how I feel about it. I press my feet firmly into the floor, wishing it didn’t feel as rocky down here. “No,” I say in a small, unconvincing voice. A lift of his eyebrows confirms he knows I’m bluffing. “Fine. Maybe I am a little jealous. I’m jealous because you and I used to have that. And now what we have—it’s weird, Tarek, and I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.”
At that his eyes turn to steel. He lets out a half laugh, like he knows this isn’t funny, but he’s so frustrated that he doesn’t know what else to do. “You want to know why I didn’t answer your email, Quinn? It’s not because of the fight, or the email. It’s because I nearly flunked out of school.”
“You… what?”
“I wanted to write you back. I was going to. I swear. But I knew it wasn’t the kind of thing I could dash off in a few minutes. I—I wanted to take my time with it.” He exhales deeply, as though letting go of the anger, and what’s underneath is a vulnerability I’ve never seen from him. His shoulders droop as he shrinks back against a washing machine. “But the time… It kept slipping away from me. I would get so tired, and then I’d wake up and all I’d want to do was go back t
o sleep. I slept through a couple of classes, and I thought, ‘It’s okay, I’m adjusting.’ Then I slept through a couple more—a full week. And there were all these events for freshmen, and I couldn’t bring myself to go out to any of them.”
Tarek alone in his dorm room is nothing like how I imagined him spending this past year. It’s staggering, how wrong I was.
“Sometimes, going downstairs to the dorm cafeteria felt impossible,” he says. “Even getting up to take a shower—the idea of leaving my bed, forcing myself down the hallway… It was overwhelming. I—” He swallows hard, like maybe he’s regretting telling me all of this. “I’ve had this kind of thing happen before. But I was usually so busy, and my parents would be there to keep me on track, keep me working, that I was always able to snap out of it. But this time I couldn’t snap out of it. The reading kept piling up. I kept missing classes. I’d avoid calls from my parents, and the couple times I did pick up, I’d lie to them, tell them everything was going great. I didn’t even go back for Thanksgiving, told them I had to work on a big project. My roommate finally asked me if I’d gone to see a campus counselor. Said they’d helped him out with some of his own mental health stuff.”
He scrapes a hand across his stubbled jaw, and now I am picturing a different kind of stubble that grows in after days spent in bed. I’m relieved he keeps talking—both relieved and heart-achy—because I still have no idea what to say.
“It took failing two midterms—one because I didn’t go and the other because of course I hadn’t studied—to get me to make that trek across campus to see a counselor. When I got there, they gave me this questionnaire… this depression questionnaire. And at first I thought it was almost comical, because what do I have to be depressed about? My parents are great, and I’m healthy, except for all the times I couldn’t get out of bed, but I was certain there wasn’t anything physically wrong with me. And I was in college, where I was supposed to be having the time of my life. But I remember filling it out and thinking I had just about every symptom on the list, and having a name for it… It felt like finding something I hadn’t known was missing. Clinical depression. That’s what it was.” He twists his mouth to one side, a sort of half frown. “Well—what it is. Since it doesn’t just go away.”
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