The Goodbye Summer

by Sarah Van Name

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  Books. Change. Lives.

  Copyright © 2019 by Sarah Van Name

  Cover and internal design © 2019 by Sourcebooks

  Cover design by Brittany Vibbert/Sourcebooks

  Cover images © Yaroslav Danylchenko/Stocksy, Danylana/Getty Images

  Internal design by Danielle McNaughton/Sourcebooks

  Internal image © Yaroslav Danylchenko/Stocksy

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

  Published by Sourcebooks Fire, an imprint of Sourcebooks

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  sourcebooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Van Name, Sarah, author.

  Title: The goodbye summer / Sarah Van Name.

  Description: Naperville, Illinois : Sourcebooks Fire, [2019] | Summary: Eager for the end of summer when she and her boyfriend, Jake, plan to run away together, Caroline finds herself drawn into Georgia’s life and begins to question to whom she should say goodbye.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018043063 | (trade pbk. : alk. paper)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Dating (Social customs)--Fiction. | Friendship--Fiction. | Summer--Fiction. | Aquariums--Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.V353 Goo 2019 | DDC [Fic]--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018043063

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  June

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  July

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  August

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Winter

  Chapter 20

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  For Elyse,

  like I promised.

  June

  Chapter 1

  Here at the aquarium gift shop, we sell posters, puzzles, and stuffed animals of everything under the sea. We’ve got dolphins, sea turtles, penguins, fish, sharks, whales, whale sharks, and more!

  That’s the pitch—what the tour guides say before they lead their groups into the store. It’s technically true, although the stuffing falls out of the dolphins through their mouths, the puzzles are sometimes missing pieces, and the posters are just stock photos with the watermarks removed. We also sell seashells, though we are nowhere near the seashore. As a landlocked girl, I have never been to the ocean.

  We don’t sell the animals themselves. Some people ask.

  We also don’t have the live versions of most of these animals at the aquarium. But the gift shop is here to make people feel like they’ve visited a truly impressive place. It has glass walls and lighting that makes everyone’s skin look gold.

  I began working here yesterday, the first Monday after my junior year ended. It would’ve been nice to have a bit of a break, but I wanted to start making money, and my parents wouldn’t let me have a job while I was in school; academics, they said, were too important, though I have never been a straight-A student. They’d even told me I didn’t need to work this summer.

  “It’s fine to be at home all day, sleep in,” my dad said.

  “I can teach you how to sew,” my mom said.

  “You don’t get many chances in life to relax,” they said. Both of them had worked full-time jobs during every break from the age of sixteen, and I think they mourned the loss of their teenage summers. They must have felt they were giving me an immeasurable gift in the option of leisure, a gift they’d never had.

  But I told my parents I wanted to do something with these three months. They said it was good that I had a work ethic, but Mom looked sad.

  I got the job through Toby, Jake’s cousin, who has worked at the aquarium since he graduated high school two years ago. Jenny, the manager, chewed gum all during my interview a few weeks ago. Her office in the back of the store had a window looking out on the parking lot and a giant, faded poster of a shark on the wall. She looked young, in her twenties or thirties, but for the entire half hour of our conversation she bore an expression of ageless exhaustion.

  “…so I really think being a part of that science fair team gave me some stellar organizational skills,” I finished. She stared out the window. In the parking lot, a minivan was failing to complete a three-point turn.

  “Can you work a cash register?” she said without looking at me.

  “I can learn, definitely—”

  “Could you yell at a kid if they were trying to steal something?”

  “Um…yes.”

  “Do you have a passion for ocean life?”

  “I—”

  “Nah, I’m just messin’ with you.” She opened a desk drawer. “Toby recommended you. So you’re probably okay.”

  “Toby’s great, right?” I said. “I hear he leads great tours.”

  “He’s okay,” Jenny said. “When did you want to start?”

  It’s early afternoon my second day on the job, and there’s a burst of sound and a flood of hassled parents and children surge into the lobby, finished with their tour and heading my way. A second later, the doors from the outside open too. They admit a steady stream of kids, all chattering and holding matching plastic backpacks. Two guys wearing blue shirts herd them toward the front desk. The door falls shut behind the last child and then opens again, too quickly, as if it’s about to be yanked off its hinges.

  And that’s when I see her.

  I notice her first because she is a girl my age, and the aquarium mostly employs guys. She is wearing a Junior Aquarium Camp T-shirt that says COUNSELOR in big letters on the back. The N and the S are obscured by a wet band of dark, frizzy hair. In Junior Aquarium Camp the counselors take the kids to the pool and tell them to pretend to be fish. If they learn about a certain type of fish on Monday, they practice being like it in the pool on Tuesday. I know this because I went when I was little.

 
The girl is shouting at the kids in front of her and shooing them toward the front desk where the other counselors wait with stickers. One child dawdles behind, and she picks him up and balances him on a wide hip. As she carries him to the desk, her eyes flick around the small atrium and toward the gift shop. They meet mine and roll upward as she smiles, like she’s saying: Can you believe this shit?

  As our eyes connect, I have a peculiar sense of déjà vu, as if I know this girl already and have seen this eye roll and this smile many times before—in front of parents, teachers, other and lesser friends. It feels like a familiar and thrilling inside joke, like we are halfway to friendship already, though we have never met.

  Then one of the guys yells, “Georgia!” and she looks away, sets down the kid, and starts passing out stickers. They walk through the door into the aquarium itself, and she is gone. I look at the lobby where she was, now empty and silent, floor littered with waxy sticker backings.

  After that, it’s a quiet day. Most days, Jenny tells me, are quiet, with occasional bursts of post- or pre-tour activity. It’s true that the aquarium gets the most traffic in the summertime, but even then, she says the gift shop doesn’t make much revenue. Last week I spent most of my time straightening displays and texting Jake, and it looks like this week will be the same.

  Jenny wanders out of her office at 5:15, fifteen minutes before I’m supposed to close up shop.

  “Might as well leave early,” she says.

  “Maybe things will pick up this week,” I say. “With the campers.”

  “Maybe.” She shrugs. “Now go ahead and start closing up. I’m supposed to supervise you for the first seven days and I’ve got shit to do.”

  I complete the closing tasks at the store under Jenny’s watchful eye with her correcting me every other minute. But in the end, there’s not that much to do. We walk outside together.

  “See you tomorrow,” I say.

  “Mm,” she responds, already halfway across the parking lot. I sit on the curb and pull out my phone. I’m alone for a couple minutes until a woman wearing a business suit comes outside, talking to someone on her phone. She glances at me and her eyes linger. Normally, Jenny told me, Junior Aquarium Camp parents pick up their kids at 5:30. Today, though, there is a special welcome-to-camp party in the activity room. This woman must need a break from all the fun.

  I feel incredibly awkward.

  With the waiting and the heat and the looks from the parents, I’m in a shitty mood when Jake’s truck pulls into the roundabout at 6:15. He would have been late even if I’d gotten out of work on time, and as it is, I’m stiff and sore from sitting on the curb so long. The sun is still high, and the air hangs around me, wet and syrupy. When I get up, lines of sweat have gathered in the crooks of my knees.

  I throw my bag behind me into the back seat and get ready to sit in annoyed silence until he apologizes, but then Jake reaches over and grabs my face with both hands and kisses me so long and sweet that I cannot be angry. He pulls away a little. We are so close that I can see only one of his eyes at a time, and I don’t know which to focus on, both dark and deep. I look back and forth and get dizzy.

  “Missed you,” he murmurs.

  “Missed you too,” I whisper back.

  When we get home, we lie on the porch of his house. We stay there, talking and laughing and occasionally making out as it grows dark. The kudzu rises like a wall down in the valley. He smokes a single cigarette, the smoke clouding the air inside the screen porch and then disappearing. Inside, his roommates are making dinner, and all I can hear are cicadas and the sound of hot dogs sizzling in the pan. The air is blue and purple. Mosquitos drift through the holes in the netting and wander lazily in the air above us. One alights beside my belly button. I slap it dead, leaving a spot of someone else’s blood on my skin.

  I’m drunk. One of Jake’s roommates recently turned twenty-one, and Jake got him to buy us a bottle of wine to kick off the summer. I look at Jake next to me and I think it’s the wine that’s making me dizzy, but I can’t be sure. He rolls on his side to face me, props his head under one arm.

  “So, I’ve been thinking,” he says, raising one eyebrow and wiping his mouth, “about the end of the summer.”

  “About leaving?” I say.

  “Yeah. I figure with your money from the aquarium and my money from the grocery store, we can probably get just about anywhere. But I think somewhere nice and cool. Northeast, maybe, or the upper Midwest. After this summer, you know you’re gonna want some snow.”

  I look out at the backyard. The air shimmers, blurry with heat.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I like being hot.”

  “You always complain about being hot.”

  “But I complain more about being cold.”

  “That’s true,” Jake says, laughing. “But, baby, you’ve never lived anywhere cold. You don’t even know what snow is like.”

  “It snows almost every winter!”

  “Once. Maybe twice. And that’s not real snow.”

  “Well, you don’t know what real snow is like then either.”

  “I do not,” he says. “Listen, though. I honestly think you would hate it if we went somewhere hot. I think you’re already sick of it, and you don’t know it yet. But we can go visit Florida if you want. On vacation. One of those beach resorts.” He reaches out for me, and I scoot closer to him, his strong arm wrapping around my waist. “We’ve got no limits, Care-bear. No limits in the world.”

  I tip my head back to kiss him and imagine us alone in Arizona, Texas, Vermont. He is right. No limits in the world for us.

  We lie like that, looking at each other, until finally his eyes droop and his breathing changes. I study him in sleep. His skin is even and brown from his forehead down his chest, shimmering with sweat and grease, his breath calm. I wish again for September, when we’ll be able to fall asleep and wake up together, beholden to no one. If I didn’t have to go home in two hours, I would curl my body around his and stay like that, entangled until the morning.

  His roommates turn on the porch light and moths swarm toward it like they finally have a destination. Jake opens his eyes slowly and turns to me. I drape my arm across his chest and settle my head on his shoulder. He sighs.

  “This is the life,” he says.

  He unravels the skin of a clementine with his thumb and presses a piece between my lips. It bursts upon my teeth. Juice runs down my chin.

  At 10:45, I pick up my bag from the kitchen counter, slip on my flip-flops, and change from my sundress back into the sweaty aquarium uniform: khaki shorts and the polo with the dolphin on the pocket. My parents don’t know I keep a set of clothes at Jake’s. I guess if they saw me, they might think I brought the dress to work today, but I don’t want to worry that they’ll worry.

  Jake turns the radio to the country station as he drives the dimly lit five miles to my house. First his neighborhood, with its small, tired houses, then mine, green grasses and red doors, stopping before we get to the bigger, nicer houses. The long way home. Thirteen minutes from his door to mine.

  To my parents’ door, I mean. I’m trying to think of it as my parents’ house. I think that might make leaving easier.

  He’s quiet. He’s not usually quiet when he drives me back.

  “Are you okay?” I venture.

  He doesn’t answer. The passing streetlamps create a shifting palette of orange and black on his skin, light and shadow. The song on the radio fades away and is replaced by a commercial for a mattress store.

  Out of nowhere, a thought pops into my head: Where will we sleep when we move? A hotel? A house? An apartment? I guess we can sleep in the back of the truck for a while. The more I think about it, the better it sounds. Especially if we’re in the southwest, where it’s warm and dry and it never rains. They don’t have mosquitos there, do they? Only snakes and scorpions, and thos
e stay on the ground. We could sleep under the stars, out by the side of some long, slim desert road.

  These thoughts have been coming more and more recently—the flecks of logistics that orbit our love like asteroids.

  “I’m fine,” he says. He breathes out a long sigh. “But it sucks. Having to take you to your parents’ every night. It’s shitty they won’t let us stay together.”

  He’s right.

  “I’m sorry I’m so young,” I say. I feel helpless in the face of this immutable, inescapable fault—the fact of my age and all the many burdens it implies.

  “Can’t you ask them if you can stay over?”

  “They would say no.”

  “But you can’t know that, if you won’t ask them.”

  “I don’t want to ask them. They like having me at home. Besides…”

  “Besides what?” he says, and he turns off the radio and it’s silent.

  “Well, September,” I say. “We’re leaving. I won’t live there anymore. So, you know, they like having me at home, and they don’t know we’re leaving soon, so I should…I don’t know, I should sleep at home, just until we leave.”

  He sighs again and rubs the back of his hand across the stubble on his chin.

  “I guess,” he says.

  I think about earlier this evening, splayed out together on the floor, his skin so warm and soft. The vulnerability of his heartbeat in my ear. Only a few more months of leaving him at night, and then we’ll wake up together every day for the rest of our lives.

  He walks me to my door and we stand there hugging. 10:59. I can hear the credits of a TV show in the living room and the sound of running water, my mom washing dishes. Jake pulls back and kisses me gently.

  “I love you, Caroline.”

  “I love you too,” I say.

  “September,” he says.

  “September.”

  I walk inside and close the door behind me, feeling warm from his body and cold from the blast of air conditioning. Mom turns around and smiles as I walk into the kitchen.

  “Caroline! How was your day?” she says, drying a soup pot in her hands. She smiles really big and I register, briefly, the lines around her eyes and the step she takes forward to greet me.