The Goodbye Summer

by Sarah Van Name

  I was pissed at first. Really pissed. But after two days of ranting about it to Georgia at work, and two correspondingly grumpy nights of cuddling with Jake on the couch, the vitriol was draining out of me. Anyway, Georgia said her parents would’ve forbidden it too.

  “Have you even asked them, though?” I said over pizza one day at lunch.

  “Not worth it,” Georgia said, shaking her head. “Dating isn’t really on the table.”

  “But you’re not dating any of those guys…”

  “Yeah, but they’re still guys. I’d be staying overnight with them. Anything could happen.” She waggled her eyebrows. “I mean, we know what Jake’s roommates look like, and that you’re dating Jake, and that I wouldn’t touch Toby with a ten-foot pool cleaner. But my parents don’t have that information.”

  “That sucks.”

  She shrugged. “It’s unsurprising, given how strict they are about everything else. And I don’t really mind. All the guys I know are boring and shitty anyway.” She nudged the pizza box toward me. “It’ll be a good Fourth of July.”

  “I guess you’re right,” I sighed. “It was a fruitless endeavor.”

  Now, Jake’s video ends abruptly as the phone swings toward him, and I catch the blurry edge of his jawline. I’m left staring at a blank screen.

  Georgia moves away and starts tugging a new set of tissue paper into a clumsy flower. Halfway through, she stops. I’m still looking at my phone, thinking about how to respond to Jake. She gently takes it from my hands and puts it on the opposite side of her.

  “I have to text him back,” I tell her, reaching for it.

  “No, you don’t,” she says, scooting it farther away. “He’ll be fine on his own. He’s with his friends, you’re with yours. You’re good.”

  “Georgia.”

  “I’m serious!” I’m surprised by the sharpness in her tone. She drops the flower. “Look,” she says, “I know you love him, and he’s a really great guy. But you’re always texting him. Literally always. Can’t you just stop and hang out for a little bit just with me? I’m not saying you have to stop all the time. Here”—she hands me my phone—“text him back if it’s important. Just…maybe put your phone away sometimes?”

  I look at my phone, look at Georgia. She’s never texting anybody when she’s with me.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. I quickly text Jake, that’s so amazing! i gotta go but i’ll talk to you later, and slide my phone across the floor. “No more texting for the rest of the night.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously.”

  “It’s only ten, that’s like…four hours if we stay up late. Are you sure you’ll survive?”

  I’m offended at first, but then I see she’s trying not to laugh. I throw a crumpled flower at her head.

  “You’re horrible,” I moan. “You’re awful. You’re the worst.”

  “You’re stuck with me.” She giggles. She puts down the flower she’s holding and reaches up to untie her hair. It shakes loose across her back, and she falls onto the piles of reject paper, black sweeping over the colors in long, thin lines. “For the night, anyway.”

  “I’ll run away to the beach,” I say.

  “No, you won’t,” she says, and she turns toward me and props her head on her arm. In this light, her dark eyes are shimmering and her skin is golden brown, round and full in her cheeks and chest and arms. I lie down and lay my arm next to hers. You can see my veins, blue and purple, through the skin.

  “Will I ever get tan?” I ask her.

  “You’ll never get skin cancer.”

  “Not good enough. I wanna tan like you do.”

  “You don’t wanna look like me. I’m fat.”

  “You’re not fat.”

  “It’s fine, I am, and I am also unspeakably beautiful,” she says, smiling. And she is.

  We watch the ceiling fan spin in lazy circles, pick up tissue paper and drop it again. With the light showing through the colors, falling on our bellies, they could be the sparks of fireworks.

  Chapter 7

  The next day, I wake up earlier than Georgia and untangle my feet from hers. Light is only barely visible outside my window. Georgia’s breathing is deep and even and soft. Her hair is spread out over my pillow, and her hands are twitching in a dream. For a minute, I try to pretend it’s Jake next to me. But his sleeping breath is loud and deep with the rumbling edge of a snore.

  I turn away and close my eyes again. Thinking about Jake in bed next to me while Georgia is there makes my stomach hurt, and I don’t know why—though my mom did bring us a huge bowl of leftover cookie dough last night, so come to think of it, there might not be any weird emotional shit. I force myself to stop thinking and fall asleep again.

  When I open my eyes, it’s after 9:30, and Georgia is looking at herself in the full-length mirror, twisting her torso to see the back of a frilly red-and-white skirt. “Fuck it,” she mutters. She struggles out of the skirt and pulls on the same ratty cut-offs she wore yesterday. She catches my eye as she tugs up the zipper.

  “You gotta get up. Your mom’s been calling us for breakfast,” she says, pulling her hair into a ponytail. “Don’t wanna incur the wrath of Cathy.”

  I groan. “This day is going to be fucking ridiculous. I hope you’re prepared.”

  “I’m pumped,” Georgia says. “The Fourth always sucks at the nursing home. I’ve been looking forward to this for weeks.”

  I roll over toward her and shove my pillow farther under my head, propping myself up with my elbow. “You and Mom both,” I say.

  When I was little, we would make a countdown like other people keep an Advent calendar before Christmas. Starting on the last day of school, Mom would read to me from a history book about the Revolutionary War every night before bed, and we’d cross off the day together. I learned all about the Founding Fathers, and for a while she taught me about the Marvelous Mothers, but then I referenced them at school and everyone teased me because she had made them up.

  “I’m with your mom on this one,” Georgia tells me, smiling. “You can’t bring me down.”

  “It might be fine. I guess we can wait and see,” I say to Georgia as I try to muffle a yawn. “I’m glad you’re here. Last year, all my friends were out of town and my parents’ friends kept asking me how I was doing in school, and it was awful.”

  “I love that shit,” Georgia says. “I always brag a ton when it’s people I don’t think I’ll see again. I’ll say I’m taking ten AP classes this semester and I edit the school newspaper, or something like that.”

  “What?”

  She shrugs. “I lie. White lies, little things. Why not? It’s a completely meaningless interaction. And it’s not as if these are total fictions or anything. Like—I was assistant editor of the newspaper sophomore year, and I do always take a bunch of AP classes. I never make up anything really absurd. I just exaggerate to the point where it’s almost unbelievable, and then people don’t know what to do because they know it’s bullshit, but they aren’t sure how much is bullshit, and they don’t want to be the stranger calling out this teenage girl, so you can just run with it. Try it, I’m telling you.”

  I ponder it for a moment, trying to think of minor accomplishments I could exaggerate and coming up empty. It strikes me, not for the first time, how smart and driven Georgia is in comparison to me, and I shake my head. “It wouldn’t work,” I tell her. “They’ve all known me since I was a kid. Which makes it even worse. They always ask me if I’m going to sing.”

  Georgia stares at me for a moment. “What?”

  “I used to sing at the party.”

  “Wait, seriously? As…entertainment?”

  “Kind of. My mom made me sing the national anthem.”

  When I was little, I loved to sing. Everyone clapped at the performance, the last event before the end of the n
ight. I adored the attention. It got uncomfortable, though, as I got older and a cappella renditions of “The Star-Spangled Banner” weren’t so cool. The older neighbor kids smirked at me behind their parents’ backs. When I was thirteen, I had a mild cold and used it to get out of singing. Mom’s asked every year since, but she’s always accepted my excuses.

  “Huh.” Georgia ponders this, leaning over to grab a white T-shirt from her duffel bag. “Weird. Well, you’re still in chorus, right?”

  “Yeah, but I stand in the back. I’m not that great.”

  “But you’re singing tonight, right? I mean”—she looks at me dead serious—“it’s America’s birthday.”

  I bury my head under the blankets. I can hear her giggling. When I peek out, she’s sitting on the floor in her sports bra, holding her shirt in her lap and shaking with mirth. The sunshine from the window drapes over her, lighting her up, and it’s impossible not to smile at the sight of her laughing there. I give her an exaggerated sigh and throw the blankets off me.

  “I will never sing that awful song again,” I say.

  “I bet you were great.”

  “I was not.”

  “Girls!” my mother yells from downstairs. “Happy Fourth of July! Now get your tushes down here!”

  I look at the clock: 9:55. We’re almost late. I jump out of bed and throw on a tank top and shorts.

  “I thought you had a whole outfit planned,” Georgia says.

  “Yeah, but we have baking to do. Whatever clothes you wear now are gonna be totally messy when the party starts. You just gotta save time to change.”

  “Fuck,” Georgia mutters, throwing the pristine white T-shirt back into her bag.

  “Girls!”

  From ten to noon, we work a cupcake assembly line with factory-level precision. Mom mixes the batter; Georgia puts it into the pan, works the oven, and licks the bowl; and I make and apply the frosting. Cupcake frosting annoys my mother—the recipe takes no skill, she says, while the application is harder than it should be—and Georgia is too impatient to get it right. But I love it. My favorite part is adding the food coloring. Georgia puts the red into one bowl, and I put the blue into the other. We only add a few drops, but the color suffuses cleanly through the butter and sugar.

  From there, we sprinkle parmesan on homemade cheese crackers, gather and organize about a hundred cases of beer and soda, and cut up enough salad vegetables for an army. And then the pièce de résistance: a gargantuan vanilla sheet cake, which my mother lets no one touch until it’s out of the oven and cooled in its pan. She tells us to spread it with white frosting and gives us a large place mat of the American flag and two big bowls of blueberries and raspberries. Our instructions are to make an exact model of the stars and stripes using fruit.

  “Make sure you leave fifty obvious white spaces between the blueberries,” she says from the other end of the kitchen, where she hovers, craning her head to see our work, while pretending to clean.

  She finally releases us at 3:30, half an hour before the party starts. In the shower, I have to scrub to get the stains off my hands: blue, purple, and red from the food coloring and the berries.

  I also accidentally spend ten minutes in bed texting Jake. I’ve barely talked to him all day—my hands have been too full, literally. But he remembers how much food my mom bought for this event last year. He was working at the store that day. It was four full shopping carts, and I was embarrassed to be seen with my mom and so much junk food, frustrated to have him selling us food for a party he couldn’t attend. But he told me my blushing and my scowl only made me look cuter.

  The first ring of the doorbell makes me scramble up to find my hairdryer. I hear Mom greeting Mr. and Mrs. King at the bottom of the stairs, and I get ready in a record twelve minutes. But when I come downstairs to run the gauntlet of guests, I see Georgia through the back window. She’s leaning against the porch railing, still in her jean shorts and frosting-stained T-shirt, munching potato chips from the bag and talking to my dad.

  “Excuse me,” I whisper as I move through the kitchen, giving polite smiles in place of greetings, and open the back door. “Georgia?”

  “Yeah?” Georgia says, her mouth full of chips.

  “People are getting here. You wanna change?”

  “Balls!” she exclaims, dashing into the house and toward the stairway. She narrowly misses the Thompsons as they set down a six-pack of beer. Dad chuckles and flips a burger.

  “I like that one,” he says.

  “Me too,” I say, smiling in spite of myself.

  “You wanna help me with these burgers?”

  “I don’t know how to grill.”

  “Yeah, but you know how to not stand inside with the rest of those clowns.”

  “That’s true.” I sigh, closing the door behind me. Outside, the silence stands in stark relief to the increasing noise in the kitchen. All I can hear is the hiss of meat and the faraway yells of the kids down the street, playing in someone’s backyard.

  “Why do you and Mom still throw this party every year?”

  “Your mother likes it.”

  “Yeah, but you have to like it too. It can’t be all her.”

  “I like it all right. I like the food, and I like that the three of us spend the whole day together. But mostly, I like how happy it makes your mom. You know, I don’t go to enough of those events she throws with her volunteer group. She puts a lot of work into those things. So, I try to get excited about this party, to make up for it.”

  I groan. Through the window, I can see the Yearbys have arrived. Every single time I see them, Mrs. Yearby corners me to tell me about an article she read involving turtles. Turtles were my favorite animal when I was a kid, but I’ve moved on. And Mr. Yearby always says how much I’ve grown, but these past few years he’s started adding a wink, and it makes me feel gross.

  “Caroline?”

  “It’s the Yearbys.”

  “Ah. Yes. They’re not my favorite either.”

  “I think we should cancel it next year.”

  “The whole thing?”

  “The whole thing.”

  My dad flips a burger. “You know, here’s the other thing. There’s value in having a community around you. A community of friends. That’s especially important for your mother and me because we don’t have very much family.”

  “We have Uncle Frank. And Aunt Nancy.”

  “But they’re not within easy traveling distance, you know that. And besides…” My dad makes a face and lowers his voice. “They’re not that great, right?”

  I can’t help laughing. Frank and Nancy, my mom’s only brother and his wife, are devout members of their country club, and their kids are brats.

  “And with my parents and your mom’s parents both gone,” my dad continues, “it can be easy to just hole up as our own little family and never see anyone else.”

  I cross my arms. “I guess,” I say.

  “All I’m saying is, if it weren’t for your mother, I would be the world’s worst hermit.” Dad looks up at me with a grin. “At least with these parties, I’m reminded that we have a good community, even if we don’t see some of them very often.”

  “But at Fourth of July, you always just find your friends from grad school and drink with them the whole time.”

  “Well, true. But I don’t see them very often, so I think that’s fine. As for the Yearby clan and their ilk,” he says, “they help me remember why I like you two so much.”

  I lean against the porch railing. Sometimes my dad sneaks in his advice like this—slowly, veiled in camaraderie. It’s different from my mom’s ready-to-go aphorisms, her let’s-sit-and-talk lectures. It’s harder to ignore.

  Inside, Georgia has come downstairs wearing a white dress. I recognize it from the bottom drawer of my dresser. My aunt bought it for me last year, several sizes to
o big, and I was too pissed off to tell her to take it back. It hung on me like a white sack. But Georgia fills it out just right; she looks beautiful. She’s talking to a couple I only vaguely recognize, beaming and gesturing with one hand while she dips a tortilla chip in guacamole with the other.

  “You gonna go in there and be nice?” Dad says without turning his head.

  “I guess,” I say.

  “Well, help me load up some of these burgers, and you can take in the first plate. You’ll be greeted as a heroine.”

  Mom opens the screen door for me as I walk in, back-first, tray of burgers heavy in my arms. They go in the middle of the table on a cake stand she modified and strengthened for this very purpose.

  “Folks, time to eat!” she yells, and the chattering chaos of friends and neighbors begins to collect itself into a line. I walk quickly to Georgia, who is still talking to the couple I don’t know.

  “Caroline!” she exclaims as I come up, cutting herself off mid-sentence. “Do y’all know Caroline?” she asks the couple.

  “I don’t believe we’ve met,” the woman says, sticking out her hand. “Tasha Nolan. You’re Cathy’s daughter?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I say, shaking her hand. “Caroline.”

  “Bill,” says the man, who also shakes my hand.

  “Cathy and I are in the same aerobics class at the gym,” Tasha explains with a smile, “and she was kind enough to invite us today.”

  “And then we get here,” Bill picks up, “and find that somehow Georgia is part of the crowd as well! Small world!”

  “Tasha and Bill have a kid in JAC,” Georgia says. “Gretchen’s great. She never causes any trouble, even when all the other kids are being loud and disruptive.” I search my mind to attach a face to Gretchen, but all the kids are the same to me—an anonymous stream of giggling, three-foot-tall babies with colorful swimsuits and curious smiles.

  “Well,” Tasha beams, “Gretchen just loves you. She says you’re her favorite of all the counselors. At home, it’s ‘Miss Georgia’ this and ‘Miss Georgia’ that all evening.”