The Goodbye Summer

by Sarah Van Name

  Georgia blushes deeply and there’s a beat of silence—the clicking of plastic forks and other people’s conversations. Bill steps in to ask me if I also work at the aquarium, and we maintain comfortable small talk as we move slowly to the front of the line. I like this better than the usual bullshit, actually, talking to people who haven’t known me since I was a baby. To this couple, I am nothing but the friend of their child’s favorite person; daughter of the no-doubt helpful and enthusiastic Aerobics Cathy.

  When we reach the table, I pause for an instant, overwhelmed by the options. There is far too much food here for any group to ever finish. But Georgia nudges me forward, and I grab a little of everything.

  It’s then that Mr. Yearby strikes. He slides right in front of me, an unfortunate apparition, as I’m reaching the end of the table.

  “Caroline!” he roars, patting me heavily on the back. “Lookin’ real grown up now.”

  He winks. I wince.

  “How old are you this year? Heading off to college soon, huh?”

  “Not yet, sir.”

  “Aw, man. You’ll love college. I can tell you some stories,” he says. He folds his arms and looks at me intently. “I was in a fraternity, you know, and I’d highly recommend you join a sorority. The parties, let me tell you, they—”

  “Caroline?”

  I take a step to the side. Georgia, plate piled high with food, is standing right behind Mr. Yearby. He turns around to see her and is opening his mouth to speak, but she beats him to it.

  “We have to talk.”

  She looks serious, and for a moment I’m honestly alarmed, but then the corner of her mouth twitches and she tilts her head back toward the porch.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt,” she says, “but I really need to borrow Caroline. It’s important.”

  “Well, certainly,” Mr. Yearby bumbles. “I’ll speak with you later, Caroline.”

  “Yes, sir,” I say and slide past him to follow Georgia.

  She opens the porch door, sun striking against the glass. When she turns back, her face is delighted. “You’re welcome,” she says with a smile. I follow her outside.

  “I really should be inside, though,” I say as Georgia sits on the porch, and I take a bite of my burger.

  “Why?” Georgia rolls over on her back and dramatically throws one hand over her forehead. “I’m your guest. You need to take care of me. God forbid I get bored or upset. I just might need you to stick around.”

  I sit down cross-legged beside her and look up at my dad, who is shaking his head with a small smile. “Sorry, Dad.”

  “I’ll forgive you someday,” he says.

  Georgia makes a face. “Whatever, your mom’s too preoccupied to notice you’re not making the rounds.”

  We lie like that in the hot July sun, eating in silence to the sound of the birds and the kids down the street and the burgers on the grill. And it’s only when I roll over onto my back, belly so pleasantly full, that I remember I left my phone on my dresser. I think about going to get it. But Jake is having a good time with his friends. I’m having a good time with mine. It’s like Georgia said last night. We’re doing just fine.

  When my mother calls me in an hour later, half scolding me for hiding outside but half just happy, her curls escaping her ponytail, it isn’t even hard to fake interest. I move through it all with ease: the questions about college, Jake, the future, the aquarium job. Through the rote exclamations of how thin and grown-up I am or have become. Through even the un-asked-for suggestions about how I should be preparing for my senior year, even the veiled insult about my boyfriend’s lack of higher education. Maybe it’s the half a bottle of champagne that Georgia stole from the kitchen and split with me outside. Maybe it’s the sun. But whatever it is, I am above it all, unbothered. I float.

  The guys in the cul-de-sac down the street, home from college and restless at their parents’ houses, light fireworks as the air starts to get thick and purple. The party wanders outside to watch. Little kids squeal, and Georgia wraps her arm around my waist, and my parents are tipsy and laughing. The sky lights up, the air shrieks. But we all, including my parents, walk away fast as we hear the police a few streets over. Their sirens and the red and blue lights mimic the fireworks. In a blissful daze, I drift back home, holding Georgia’s hand.

  The cops didn’t catch Jake and his friends after they set off the fireworks last night. They ran. All down the beach, by the ocean, into the dunes.

  I find my phone halfway through the night and text Jake between talking with Georgia. He’s happy-drunk too, Craig’s friends having bought them two cases of beer. He tells me they played music on the beach and put up some cheap tiki torches from Walmart and people just flocked to them—that now it’s this huge party, strangers dancing and laughing and drinking. Half of me doesn’t believe him and half of me is jealous, praying he didn’t kiss anyone.

  But

  i love you

  i love you

  i love you

  he texts me, over and over, and I know he wouldn’t touch another girl. His love burns into my eyes with the brightness of the phone until he says, i’m passing out, babe, i love you, and I have outlasted him in wakefulness.

  Georgia and I lie next to each other in my bedroom, staring at the ceiling and talking. We stop mid-sentence every time we see the flash of fireworks outside my window. I feel myself coming down from being drunk. My whole body is tired, and a headache is blooming like a flower across my forehead and down into my face and neck. We make shadow puppets on my wall: bunnies, dogs, wolves chasing each other across pictures of younger me.

  “Have a good Fourth?” she says to me finally, turning toward me at 4:00 a.m.

  “The best,” I say, turning to her, and we sleep like that, facing each other, two halves of the same crooked heart.

  Chapter 8

  With my mom’s patriotic obsession, the Fourth of July has always felt like the turning point of the summer. It’s only a third of the way through, really, but it seems like half—we build up, we come down. Now, I’m falling toward September.

  And it’s not just me. The whole sound and mood of the house changes. Every year on the last day of school, as soon as I arrive home, Mom’s conversation turns to the Fourth. July fifth, she starts in on school supplies, new clothes, classes. And now, college.

  She’s only bugged me a little so far this summer, and I was foolish enough to think that was as bad as it was going to get. Not so. After brunch at noon, Georgia goes home—yawning and carrying a platter of leftover cupcakes—to finish sleeping off her hangover in her own bed. As I push my plate away, Mom slaps down the big book of higher education: a seven-hundred-page tome describing the pros and cons of the top five hundred colleges in North America. I know the look of it well. Georgia often borrows our copy and flips through it as we lie outside on the porch. Its pages are filled with her notes.

  “Mom,” I protest.

  “Nope,” she says, whisking away my plate. “You’ve put this off far too long already. The college counselor at school sent us a mailing that said top candidates should have started looking last fall.”

  “I’m not a top candidate, Mom, what does that even mean—and wait, was that the envelope addressed to me the other day? You told me it was a PTA thing!”

  “Well, you didn’t care about it,” she says. “And you are a top candidate. A few Bs here and there won’t ruin you. You’ve been on the dean’s list three times, and you’re an excellent choir singer. I just wish…”

  “Mom.”

  “Just spend half an hour, sweetie. Half an hour. Until”—she checks the clock—“12:40. Okay? Half an hour of looking at colleges, and after, maybe you can tell me if there are any you want to apply to.”

  I take the book outside and sweat over the pages. I text Jake, my mom’s making me look at this stupid college book and it
sucks, but he’s not awake yet. Probably hungover. It occurs to me that I, too, am hungover. My stomach is twisting itself in circles and last night’s headache is now pulsing in my left temple. I go back inside and return to the kitchen table, facing away from the window. The heat of the sun feels good on my back, but outside, the crisp white pages of the book were too bright.

  It’s in alphabetical order. It has dollar signs for cost and stars for quality. On the inside of the cover my mom has scribbled her own notes:

  $ limit = $$

  Star limit = ∞

  Georgia’s notes, scattered throughout the pages next to my mom’s, are more interesting. They’re on what seems like every other page, everything from doodles to whole contemplative paragraphs.

  Swimming + warm! But how much party school = too much?, she wrote on the page for a university in Florida next to a childlike drawing of the sun. On a page about a small liberal arts school in the Midwest, she simply said: Never. A university in New York City yielded a wide ring of question marks around the entire perimeter of the page; our local state school, only an hour away from the aquarium, got a huge frowny face. Underneath Georgia’s pencil, I find evidence of Mom: a hopeful highlight of the location and cost markers, close and cheap.

  When I come across an Ivy, things get really exciting. There are so many words on those pages that I can barely keep track. Clearly, this book isn’t the only place Georgia has looked for information. SO BEAUTIFUL, she’s written at the top of the Princeton page, with but NJ sucks tucked down at the bottom. Mom’s #1 for me arcs over Harvard in a graceful rainbow. On Brown, she’s circled “independent class structure” and scrawled Yankee hippies beside it. It’s unclear whether this is good or bad.

  There are notes on every section. “Living:” She prefers dorms for underclassmen with off-campus housing for juniors and seniors. “Sports:” She doesn’t give a fuck about which league the college is in, but she makes positive notes next to strong intramural programs, especially swimming. “Academics:” She only takes the school seriously if it’s strenuous. Notes about her parents dominate in those sections.

  “Culture” is the least consistent. I know Georgia drinks, but I’ve never thought of her as a party girl. I can’t picture her wasted off cheap beer in somebody’s basement. And yet whenever the big book notes a school’s opposition to drinking or its lack of a vibrant campus social scene, she makes an X or a frowny face of disapproval. Meh, urgh, and no all adorn the page of a Christian women’s college in Nevada.

  I spend my mom’s required half hour reading Georgia’s comments and ignoring any substantive information about the colleges themselves. But against my will, I do manage to internalize the basic categories of their comments—the jargon of choice around universities. There is incessant talk of class size and professor-to-student ratio, unique majors and research opportunities, Greek life and housing. The same words appear on every page. As if they’re trying to express limitless possibility, but with an intensely limited vocabulary.

  From Georgia’s comments, I can tell she’s into it. She gets it. She sees the differences between the endless options; for her, the choice is so multifaceted it’s nearly impossible. But to me, they all look the same. The choice isn’t between one place or another. It’s whether to enter that world at all.

  Mom finds me staring absently at the book, open to a page about a small university in Oregon. Cousins in Portland, Georgia’s scribbled down the side in purple pen. Do I like them? Can’t remember. I am tracing the curves of her handwriting with my pencil, my mind on Jake and what opting out of college might mean. But Mom sees me looking, I guess, and so she comes over and places her hand on my back.

  “West Coast colleges!” she exclaims. I look up to see her smiling. Then she bites her lip. “That’s awfully far away. And without in-state tuition…but if it’s what you want—”

  “No, Mom, I wasn’t really…” I close the book. “That was just where I stopped. No particular interest.”

  “Oh.” She touches my hair lightly, tucking a strand behind my ear. She used to do that when I was a kid. In the summers, I’d sit in this chair reading, because the sunlight came through the window and warmed just this spot. She’d marvel at how hot my hair had gotten. Back then, it was so blond it was nearly translucent, and the light would filter through it like it was nothing.

  “So, anything good in there? See any places you like?”

  I look up at her again. She is so expectant, so excited for me. I don’t want to make her unhappy. I almost wish I was as interested as Georgia about this stuff, though I know I never will be.

  But her eyebrows are raised and her smile is big, and I can’t bear to disappoint her. “Lots,” I say. “Lots of good stuff.”

  She grins even wider and awkwardly hugs me from behind.

  “I’m so glad,” she says. “Do you want to keep it in your room?”

  “Let’s just put it back on the bookshelf. I’ll look again tomorrow. If that’s okay?”

  “Of course,” she says. She slides it between 300 30-Minute Recipes and Living Health on the kitchen shelf. She moves over to the sink and starts on the pile of platters and serving utensils from yesterday. “Got any plans today?”

  I don’t. I haven’t had time by myself in a while. Weeks, actually. I’m always with Georgia or Jake; now, she’s napping, and he’s not responding to my texts.

  “I guess not,” I tell her. She turns and brightens.

  “How about a family day? It’s Saturday! It’ll be just like old times. I think we all had lunch already, but we could start with froyo.”

  When I was little, family day was every Saturday. It entailed lunch, generally at a chain restaurant in a nearby strip mall, followed by frozen yogurt at Frozen Palace, an ancient yogurt emporium that my mom discovered when she was pregnant with me. We traditionally followed this with a board game, some alone time for a few hours, and then takeout dinner and a rented movie.

  They were great when I was nine, but I’ve grown out of them. A few years ago, I started going to the mall with friends on Saturdays, spending the whole day nibbling at a shared soft pretzel and trying on things we didn’t have the money to buy. Then when Jake and I got together, he would take me out on Saturdays for day-long dates, to the park or the pool and then, eventually, just to his house. And the thrill of being out without my parents, independent, made it easy to phase myself out of family day.

  But now I am facing a day of sitting alone with the college book, Jake busy, and Georgia asleep. And maybe it’s the hangover and maybe it’s the way Mom bit her lip when she saw me looking at a college thousands of miles away, but I just feel tired, and a day of my parents treating me like a kid sounds pretty nice.

  “Froyo would be good,” I say.

  “Really?” Mom raises her eyebrows as if she can scarcely believe it.

  “It’s not a big deal,” I say. I can hear the defensiveness in my voice, and I hate it, but I can’t help it. It pisses me off when my parents act as if I’ve abandoned them. I still come home to them every night, after all.

  I won’t forever, though, I think to myself, and then push the thought out of my head with superhuman force.

  “Well, we haven’t had time with just the three of us in quite a while, and I think it’ll be great,” she says, missing my bitterness completely. “Tom,” she yells around the corner, “we’re having a family day!”

  “Oh, wonderful,” he says from the living room. “Will we be having second lunch?”

  “Starting with froyo,” Mom yells back.

  He ambles into the kitchen, book tucked under his arm, and smiles mildly. “This will be nice,” he says. “Haven’t had a family day in a while.”

  It’s true. Our last family day was the day I met Jake, over a year ago. It was spring near the end of school, after I had already started spending Saturdays with my friends. But on this particula
r Saturday, Chandler was visiting her grandparents, and Erin was busy on a science project, and Lauren was babysitting. So, I was with my family.

  We got pizza and strawberry froyo, and then we had to stop at the grocery store to pick up supplies for a fruit salad my mom was making for dessert that night. My parents dropped me off in front with a twenty-dollar bill because the parking lot was too crowded. Big sale at the department store in the same strip mall, I think, but whatever it was, it was a blessing. I picked up strawberries, blueberries, and a pineapple and went to the quick check-out aisle, which was empty.

  I saw him from the back at first. He was texting, and he didn’t notice me when I walked up with the fruit. I grabbed a tin of mints from the stand next to the conveyor belt, shaking them loudly to get his attention, and he turned toward me, ducking his head. When he saw me, he smiled. It was an utterly disarming move, and I smiled back without even realizing it.

  Then he looked at me—skimmed my body all the way down to my toes and back up to the top of my head—and I didn’t know what to do with my hands.

  No one had ever looked at me like that: completely. Mom and Dad could sometimes look into me, like they knew what I was feeling and thinking. Ethan, my one ex-boyfriend, had looked at my boobs with that kind of intensity, but only my boobs. And boys at school mostly didn’t look at me at all.

  This was different. It was deep and long and intimate and sexual all at once. It made me feel like the most beautiful woman who had ever lived. Helen of Troy in Ten Items or Less.

  Then it ended. He dropped his eyes to the fruit, scanned it with big, sturdy hands, and put it in a bag. He looked up at me, expectant.

  I thought, for a second, he was waiting for me to talk, to continue the conversation he’d started with that look. Then he nodded toward the screen and said, “Ten dollars even,” and I realized he was just waiting for me to pay. I felt my face getting hot as I handed over the cash. He gave me my receipt, and I was stepping away when he said, “Wait.”

  “Yeah?” I said, timid. A line of shoppers was growing at the end of the aisle. An old woman nudged her cart forward an inch.