The Goodbye Summer

by Sarah Van Name

  “Well, I’m glad you’re working at JAC,” I tell her quietly.

  “I am too.”

  “You know, your parents should be happy. You’re basically surrounded by academic superstars at the aquarium,” I say. “I’ve been meaning to tell you that I got early acceptance to Harvard. I’ll be leaving for the fall semester.” That makes her crack a smile.

  “Really, though,” she says, “your mom just wants you to go to college, which you are.” I fidget in my seat, but Georgia doesn’t notice. “I don’t think it matters to her so much where you end up. All she wants is to be involved and make sure it’s not, you know, some sketchy unaccredited hole in the wall. And I know it bothers you, I’m not trying to say that’s not legitimate, but my parents are so much more aggressive about it. It’s so much pressure.”

  We slow and reach the stoplight right before my neighborhood, and she looks at me.

  “They’re like that all the time,” she says.

  I put my hand on her knee lightly, her skin warm against my palm. I let it stay there while she pulls into my neighborhood, passes the dark and gated pool, and arrives in front of my house, and then I give her an awkward hug across the middle of the car. She laughs a little—my head is sort of resting on her shoulder and I can’t quite reach across—and that makes me giggle too, and soon we’re just sitting in the dark car, laughing together, me leaning against her. Then the porch light switches on, my mother’s face appearing in the window, and we break apart.

  “So my house next time, then,” I say.

  “I think so.”

  I get out of the car and pause, my hand on the door. “I’m really sorry, Georgia,” I say, and I don’t know exactly what I’m apologizing for.

  “It’s okay,” she says. “They love me. We’re a family. We’re good. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “See you tomorrow,” I say, and I close the door. As I walk up the sidewalk, my mother peering out at me from beside the door, I feel guilt and gratitude in equal measure, and I cannot bring myself to examine why.

  Chapter 5

  I talk to Jake about Georgia all the time, and vice versa. But they keep just missing each other: I’m at Jake’s on the weekends, and Georgia leaves work a little earlier when she’s not waiting to take us to my house. It is, needless to say, awkward.

  “You’ve gotta let me meet him,” Georgia says finally. “I feel like I know him already, and I’ve never even seen him in person. It’s very weird.”

  I tell her she will meet him soon, but I’m worried. They are two separate worlds. Georgia is lunchtime, and making faces at each other through the gift shop window, and Wednesday and Thursday nights with a background of my mom’s classical music. Jake is clementines and butterfly kisses and sex. And though they are the two melodies in the song of my June, they alternate; I fear they won’t fit in the same time signature.

  It’s a Monday evening, and I’m waiting for Jake to come get me, arms sore from lifting the heavy boxes of penguin notebooks we just got. It’s the most humid day of the summer so far. A storm came through this afternoon, sweeping in rough and loud, and we had to move our lunch to the miniscule staff room in the back. I watched the rain from the window there as I ate blueberries and hearts of romaine. It hit the sidewalk like it was pounding on a locked door.

  Now, I’m sitting on that sidewalk and my butt is thoroughly wet, and I’m trying to figure out whether Jake will think it’s funny or gross, when Georgia bursts out the doors, yelling, “I have had it with this fucking place. I cannot deal with it any more. I am done.”

  “What’s the deal?” I say, arching my head up to see her. She flings down her backpack and sits beside me. Her cheeks are flushed, and she’s tangling her fingers together, making her hands look like soft pretzels.

  “Just the permission forms,” she says, quieter now. “For the natural history museum trip we did last Friday. They said they didn’t have all of them, and I know for a fact I put every single one in the folder, just like I do every time we go anywhere new. I know how to do my job. Now they’re talking about getting sued, and how much trouble I could be in. But nothing’s gonna happen. It never does, because I always do what I’m supposed to. They’ll find it tomorrow, and they won’t even apologize.”

  I scoot behind her and rub her back. Her shoulder blades jut softly through the cotton. She sweeps her ponytail over her shoulder and sighs.

  “It’ll be okay,” I say.

  “I know. I love this place. I love it so much, but some days it just really sucks. I can’t wait for the Fourth of July break.” We sit for a moment in silence. I consider telling her that she will probably get roped into my parents’ enormous Independence Day party—which will make the long weekend anything but a break—but I don’t want to make her mood worse.

  And then I’m inspired. “Hey,” I say, “do you wanna come to Jake’s place with me tonight?”

  She twists around to look at me, and I gently push her head straight, rubbing small circles on her back with the heel of my hand.

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah, seriously. You guys have been waiting to meet each other for forever.”

  “Huh.” She winces as I make my way down her lower back. “But won’t you guys be hooking up or whatever?”

  “We don’t have to do that every time we’re together,” I answer, feeling mature. Jake and I are more than our chemistry. We’ll have to be, being together for our whole lives.

  I still haven’t told Georgia about our plans for September. But I did tell her that I’d had sex. We were lying on my bed making fun of old issues of Cosmo, and she didn’t believe me at first. Then I think she judged me a little. Then she had all these questions. What hurt, what felt weird, what felt good.

  “But have you ever…I mean, have you, like…had, with him…”

  “An orgasm?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Nah. Well—” I thought about it for a moment. There was once, almost, but… “Not really. At least I don’t think so.”

  Her eyes got big, and I felt ashamed of myself and defensive of Jake all at once. “I mean,” I said quickly, “sex is great. He’s really good at it. I just think there might be something sort of wrong with me. Or something. I’m sure I’ll figure it out.”

  “But wouldn’t you know for sure if you’ve had one? From, you know…” She tilted her head down at the article in the magazine: “31 Ways to Spice Up a Solo Date Night.”

  “I mean,” I started, and then stopped. “I do know. It’s not that I don’t know. It’s just that…it’s not always so cut-and-dried. Whether you have one or not.”

  Her cheeks flushed and she flipped to a fashion spread. “Seems pretty straightforward to me,” she said, her voice half-amused and half-annoyed. And then, normal again—“Look at this hideous fucking skirt”—and we moved on to celebrity style, a topic about which we disagree vociferously.

  We haven’t talked about sex as much since then. But now, she laughs.

  “Well, if you’re sure you won’t be overcome by your cavewoman urges, then yes, I’d love to come over,” she says. As if on cue, Jake’s pickup turns into the aquarium parking lot. I hop up and pull Georgia with me.

  “Are you sure he’ll be cool with it?” she asks. We watch him swing into the circle, and I feel vaguely uneasy. I didn’t think to ask him if Georgia could come. But I’m sure he’ll be fine. He has been wanting to meet her for a while, after all.

  “Definitely,” I say. He pulls up and puts the truck in park.

  “Hey, baby,” he smiles. “Ready to go?”

  “Yeah,” I say, “but hey, this is my friend Georgia I’ve told you about. Georgia, this is Jake.”

  He leans way over and sticks his hand out the passenger side window. Georgia shakes it firmly.

  “Nice to meet you,” she says. “Caroline’s told me so much about you.”<
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  “All bad things, I hope,” he says and grins, and my stomach turns over.

  “Hey, love, I was hoping that maybe Georgia could come over to your place with us tonight? And maybe have some dinner with us? She has her own car and everything, so…”

  “Yeah, come on over!” Jake exclaims, waving his arm abstractly toward the road. “My roommates’ll appreciate the company. We don’t get a lot of girls around the house. With the notable exception of Caroline, of course.”

  Georgia half laughs and tucks her thumbs into the straps of her backpack.

  “So…I’ll follow you there?” she says.

  “Sounds great,” Jake says cheerfully. He reaches across the car again and opens the door for me. “Caroline?”

  “I’ll see you there,” I say to Georgia. As I get in the pickup, I watch her in the rearview mirror, jogging across the parking lot. I try to tell how she’s feeling from the cadence of her run—is she nervous, excited? Does it even matter to her, meeting my boyfriend? As she opens her door, Jake leans over the divider and pulls my attention away from the mirror with a long, wet kiss. His hand roams over my thighs, searching.

  “Not tonight, Jake,” I whisper. “Not with Georgia around.”

  “Oh, she won’t mind,” he says, so soft and low I think I might dissolve in his voice.

  “Just one night, love. Just not tonight. No big deal.”

  “If you’re sure,” he says. He straightens up and checks the side mirror. I look in the rearview again. Georgia’s car is idling, and she’s staring absently out the window at the sparse forest across the street from the aquarium. She doesn’t look nervous or excited, just lost in herself, un-self-conscious in a moment alone. I watch her until Jake puts the truck into drive and pulls away, the view in the mirror twisting abruptly into a blur of concrete, trees, and sky.

  On the way to his house, Jake rests his hand on my knee and spends too long looking into my eyes between glances at the road. The wind brushes my hair back from my face, and the guitar on the radio twangs its way through a familiar melody.

  He asks me how my day was, and I tell him about the boxes and the storm.

  “I’m glad I’m finally meeting Georgia,” he says. “You talk about her so much, she’s gotta be pretty cool. Do you think she’d be into Craig?”

  “Maybe,” I say, thinking of Craig’s perpetually snotty nose and wrinkled polo shirts. “Probably not, though.”

  “Ah, well,” Jake sighs, “worth a try. Anyway, cool that she’s hanging out with us. What do you want to do?”

  “What we usually do, I guess.”

  “Minus sex.”

  “Minus sex, yeah.”

  “Well, what do you guys do when you hang out?”

  I think about Wednesday and Thursday evenings. The hours pass slow and fast at the same time, the way you don’t think the clouds are moving, but they’re in different shapes the next time you look up. Magazines, movies, the back porch, and our hands red with strawberry juice.

  “Anything. We can watch a movie, I guess. That’d be nice.”

  “A movie it is!” Jake declares and puts both hands on the wheel in a gesture of finality.

  “How was your day?” I ask.

  He launches into his favorite story of every day, the tale of the weirdest purchase. Today, it’s an elderly man buying apple-cinnamon cereal, pink princess cupcake holders, and rat poison. He’s speculating about what this guy might be doing. But as much as I want to, I can’t focus, because the sky is so blue, and Georgia is bobbing her head back and forth in the car behind us. I want to freeze this movement—the world so warm and everyone I love here with me, all of us in motion.

  At the house, Jake throws open the door and ushers in me and Georgia first. He gives her the tour. It’s brief: “Here’s my room, and here’s Craig’s room, and Joe’s room—I wouldn’t go in there—and here’s the bathroom—I try to keep it clean for Caroline—and here’s the kitchen, and there’s the porch, and here’s the living room. You cool with hot dogs for dinner?”

  Georgia stands between the two couches, slowly turning in a circle, looking. It’s the same way she looked around my kitchen when I took her home the first time, as if to her, every new place holds secrets worth finding out, even if it’s just a decaying little ranch house like this one. The sun drips yellow and gold through the mosquito screen on the porch. Jake turns on the radio as he pulls a pan out of their cluttered cabinets. I want to give her a different tour, show her the house as I saw it the first time Jake opened its door for me.

  It was our fourth date in as many weeks. The first date was coffee. The second was also coffee. The third was a movie.

  The fourth started with dinner at the Italian place where Craig worked and could get us a discount. It was the beginning of the summer, just after school had let out, when the heat was only starting to make itself known.

  We finished dinner early. The sun was still going down, and as he drove me to the house, we talked about the colors of the sunset, and I tried to keep my voice from wavering.

  “And this is my place,” he said casually, as he pulled into the gravel driveway and turned off the car. The house was dark, flat, and quiet, red brick and a scratched front door painted green like a Christmas tree.

  I had never dated a guy with his own place before. I’d never even dated a guy with a car. The only real boyfriend I’d ever had, a guy named Ethan I’d gone out with for a few months freshman year, always got nervous at the beginning and end of our dates; his mom would drive us to the movie theater, and his hands would shake when he was buying the tickets. But there was nothing shaky about Jake. His chest was wide and his wrists were strong, and in his car, outside his house, he was looking at me with something in his eyes I’d never seen before.

  He leaned over and kissed me until I had to break away to breathe. It wasn’t my first kiss, or even my first kiss with him, but it was the first one in my life that felt serious—not like Ethan’s slimy tongue and tentative touches, but something confident and commanding and new. His hands roamed over my torso, tracing the underwire of my bra and wrapping around my back, drifting down my spine.

  “Wanna go inside?” he said softly. I did.

  Jake had just moved in, so there were a few boxes still scattered around the doorway. But otherwise, it was almost the same then as it is now. The kitchen was big and mostly clean, the living room carpet a rusty orange stretching from couch to sagging couch. Through the door to the back porch I could see the last rays of the sun stretching over the tops of the trees. Jake waited for me to put down my purse and poured me a cup of water from the pitcher in the refrigerator. It struck me as so genteel—the car and the house, the furniture and the dishes on which he had made and eaten meals for one, the water pitcher, all these trappings of adulthood.

  But I didn’t drink the whole glass, because almost as soon as I had taken a sip, Jake was kissing me again and pushing me down the hall. I walked backward until my back bumped into a wall, and then he turned my body to move me into a dimly lit room, and as I fell on his bed, he pulled away from me. I thought I had done something wrong until I saw he was lighting a candle, and then, so fast, he was back with me again.

  That first night I mostly saw his bedroom from my back, his tiny television and bookshelves filled with shoeboxes filled with who knows what, skewed horizontal from the bed. The movie posters on his walls and ceiling flickered with the light, coming in and out of focus. They were a patchwork quilt of stories I didn’t know, familiar faces and peeling corners.

  We didn’t have sex that night. He didn’t even take my top off. We just made out for a long time, his hands slinking beneath my shirt, and when I saw the clock tick to 10:45, I said we had to go. As he was driving me home, I asked him if he would show me all those movies. He’s tried, but we usually only watch them halfway through before we start hooking up.

 
So, I guess I don’t want to show Georgia the place as I first saw it, not exactly. But I wish I could tell her, easily, how good I feel when I walk in the door. How perfect this place is.

  And right now, she is unreadable. I start to worry she isn’t impressed. I see, as I come to stand beside her, the flickering bulb above the stove, the dust bunnies under the easy chair, the stains and scratches on the table. It’s not a flawless place. It’s nothing like what she’s used to, the impeccable arches and sparkling floors of her home. But it’s a house, and it’s his—well, as long as he and Craig and Joe pay rent—and that independence is precious.

  “Pretty great, right?” I say, and I kick myself inwardly for the defensive edge in my voice.

  But I guess she doesn’t hear it, because she turns and smiles real wide, and she says, “Yeah, this is incredible.” She sounds sincere. And that’s good enough for me.

  “Y’all can sit down,” Jake says, so I flop onto the couch, pulling Georgia with me. The material sinks in underneath us, and I slide toward her, the two of us squished together in the middle. You need at least three people to balance this thing out.

  Georgia wraps her arm around my shoulders and calls out, “So, what kind of hot dogs are you making?”

  “Oh, the usual. Ketchup, mustard, slaw. Nothin’ but the best for my girl. Well, girls, tonight.”

  “Georgia’s not your girl, she’s mine!” I cry out in mock offense. Georgia lolls her head dramatically.

  “It’s true,” she says. “We’re meant for each other.”

  “Well, Georgia, you can have her during work hours, but she’s mine at night,” Jake says. “And personally, I like Caroline a lot better at night.”

  I can feel myself blushing. Georgia gives me a look that says: What am I supposed to do with that? So I just say, “I’m fun all the time,” and Jake says, “Yes you are, baby,” and we turn on the TV. There’s a shitty action movie from a few years ago just starting, and even though Jake has seen it three times already, he insists it’s a good choice.