The Goodbye Summer

by Sarah Van Name

  “You took the SAT in seventh grade?” I say, momentarily distracted.

  “Yeah, it was this practice thing they offered at my school; it didn’t mean anything. Anyway,” she says, sighing a little. “I went back through, and I erased almost all my wrong answers and put in the right ones, and when my parents asked, I lied about it. I told them I got a really good score. So I could stay in the green zone and keep hanging out with you and everyone like I have all summer.”

  She takes a deep breath and releases it. I wait for the rest of the story before I realize that’s it.

  “So…you lied about an SAT practice test to your parents?”

  “Yeah,” she says. The word has an unbelievable heaviness.

  “Not the actual SAT, but just a single practice SAT?”

  “Well, yeah, of course it’s not the real one yet.”

  “And because of this, you drank too much and started sobbing over nothing.”

  “Well, I was feeling really shitty and trying to forget about it. And tonight, yeah, I drank too much, but I didn’t mean to. I was just having a good time.” Her voice is a mixture of defensive and embarrassed. “But then Matt and Serena were talking about the SAT because she’s taking it at the same time as me, and Matt was talking about how bad a score he got—almost bragging—and he said the number, and it was the score I got on Saturday. And I…” She pauses as if searching for the next phrase, and then gives up. I can feel her shrug through the mattress. “I freaked out. Because what if all my good scores are a fluke? And really after all this work, I’m gonna have an off day on the day I finally take it for real, and I’m gonna fail. And then I won’t get into any colleges, and then—”

  “Oh my God, Georgia, you have to stop,” I say. I scoot closer to her and hug her, awkwardly, one arm squished underneath me. She laughs a little. “You already have a great SAT score. Right?”

  “It’s good, not great,” she says, her voice muffled.

  “Your good is other people’s great. You’re fine on the SAT. You have to know that, rationally.” She nods with a tiny movement of her head. “And separately, you are the smartest person I know,” I tell her as I pull away. “It’s okay to lie to your parents every once in a while.”

  “Not about this,” she says.

  “Yes, about this. It’s not fair that they would keep you from your whole life because of one bad score. Just don’t consume a thousand grams of sugar and several glasses of champagne the night before your real test, and I think you’ll be fine.”

  She laughs for real. “Maybe,” she says. “Anyway. I really am sorry.”

  “It really is okay,” I say. I look at the clock. It’s late, later than when I usually go to bed. “We should get to sleep.”

  “Yeah,” she says.

  “Good night, Georgia.”

  “Good night, Caroline.”

  The room is quiet for several minutes, and I am drifting toward unconsciousness when she says, very quietly, “Hey, Caroline?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Thank you.”

  She presses the bottom of her foot against the bottom of mine. I press back, briefly, feeling the warmth of her body through this small surface, and then we both pull away and fall asleep.

  Chapter 10

  Here’s the thing about romance: sometimes, it’s inconvenient.

  “I wanna make it up to you,” Jake says to me as we sit on his porch on Tuesday. He sets his jaw in an earnest square as he looks at me. His right hand is holding mine, warm and dry, and his left shakes in a jittery rhythm, ash falling from the cigarette onto the unfinished boards below.

  “Make what up to me?” I say, because it could be anything. Our definitions of something worth making up for—well, they’re different.

  “Leaving this weekend. Going to the beach. I know you were…” He takes a long pause and a drag on the cigarette. The smoke is noxious and comforting, a soft bitterness in the air. “Lonely.”

  I stare at the kudzu through the screen window. He’s wrong. I spent the weekend surrounded by people: baking with Mom, laughing with Georgia, eating hamburgers with Dad. But he’s also right, of course. I wanted him to be there with me, under the cheap cul-de-sac fireworks. I could press on the bruise he’s beginning to feel. Or I could be sweet.

  “I missed you,” I say, trying for somewhere in the middle. “But I had a really nice weekend too. And, I mean, I get it. It’s cool to hang out with your friends.”

  “Sucks you’re so young,” he says, rubbing my hand with his thumb as if consoling me for a great failure. “Coulda come with us otherwise.”

  “Yeah. I’ll get older, though.”

  “For sure. So, you know how I normally have the early shift on Saturday morning?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Right, well, Brittany needed to go to a birthday party or something on Monday, and I traded shifts with her, so I have off this Saturday. And I was thinking, maybe I can spend the whole day with you. Morning to night. We can ask your parents to extend your curfew an hour? Half an hour?”

  I’m stumped. Jake rarely trades shifts—he likes routine—so I never expect him to tell me his schedule has changed. And in an unfortunate coincidence, Naima has to go out of town for yet another weekend, and Jenny asked me a couple weeks ago if I could cover her.

  I said yes. I didn’t feel like I could say no, having left her in the lurch on the Fourth, and I figured it’s a little extra money—a fair amount of extra money, actually, since I’ll be working overtime. But it also means that I need to be there for a full work day, from nine to six. Not a lot of time with Jake.

  I tell him this as gently as possible. I’m already annoyed, and I can’t tell whether I’m mad at him for trying to make up for something I just want to forget, or whether I’m experiencing a renewed hatred toward the generally incompetent administration of the aquarium. I pluck the cigarette from his fingers and bring it to my lips when I finish relaying the news. It tastes rancid. I love secondhand smoke, hate smoking.

  “Huh,” he says. I hand the cigarette back to him. He takes a smooth drag, exhales, the smoke clouding the air in front of us before it settles into the wood and my hair and the cotton of my dress. “Well, I guess that means I’ll be getting pretty familiar with the gift shop.”

  “What do you mean?” I look at him, startled. He twists his torso in the chair to turn toward me and grinds out the cigarette.

  “It can be take-your-boyfriend-to-work day. I’ll just come and hang out. It’ll be cool.”

  “I don’t think that’s allowed, though,” I say.

  “Who’s gonna stop me?” He’s right—if Jenny were there, she would cast him out of the store with a single look, but Wendell, Jenny’s boss, will only stop by a couple times to make sure the place hasn’t descended into chaos. And he probably won’t even notice Jake is there.

  “You’re gonna be so bored, though.”

  “Naw, it’ll be great. I’ll squeeze your ass behind the counter. And I’ll go on one of Toby’s tours. Hey, maybe he’ll let me lead a tour, that’d be cool. I don’t know shit about marine life.”

  “Neither does he.”

  “Yeah, I know, that’s why he gives such great tours.”

  “He doesn’t always work on Saturdays. They bring in more…real adults on the weekends.” Weekends are busier, I’m told, than weekdays. It’s also harder to get away with bullshit on the tours, according to Toby. Jenny used to work the weekend shift in the summer, and she says you get the parents who work twelve-hour days during the week and don’t know how to interact with their kids without structure.

  Jake’s phone buzzes, and he glances down. “Toby’s working. I asked him earlier—he just texted me. We can have lunch together. It’ll be cool.”

  “Well, okay, sure. That’ll be good.”

  “How good?” Jake says, tilting his head t
oward mine.

  “Amazing.” Our foreheads meet, and the warmth of his skin comforts me. It tamps down an unease in my stomach, pushes it to the back of my spine, where it rests, an ache. As if I’ve run too many miles with bad form. Then Jake smooths his hands over my thighs and in between them, and the ache disappears completely.

  That’s how I find myself leaning against the back counter at 9:40 a.m. on a Saturday morning, Jake beside me on a stool he dragged in from Jenny’s office. Toby half paces, half dances around the aisles, spilling tiny drops of coffee from his Get wet! At the Bonneville Aquarium thermos onto the fake-marble tile. He pokes the belly of a stuffed manatee, upright on the top of the pile. The manatee teeters and falls onto its side. Toby twirls away.

  “Here’s the thing about the end of the first season,” Jake says to Toby, spreading his hands in front of him as if presenting a dissertation. “Greyson is just starting to really get interesting. Like, the evil chick redeems herself at the very end by not betraying his secret, and he could rescue her, but he doesn’t. They build him up as this great guy, and then it turns out he has a dark side. And then for the network to end it like that? It’s ridiculous.”

  “I firmly believe we haven’t seen the last of Hilda,” Toby says, doing a lazy moonwalk down the paper goods aisle. “Because he didn’t rescue her, definitely, but he also didn’t kill her. He left her on the outer planets.”

  “The show got canceled, dude.”

  “I don’t think it’s actually over. I think the network is only saying they cancelled it so people get more hyped up when they bring it back.”

  “I dunno, man, I really think Universe Leap is done. For good.”

  “I will not believe it. I need to know what happened with Hilda. Honestly, the only two things I’m looking forward to in life are the Great Adventures trip this summer and Universe Leap coming back.”

  “It’s not gonna come back, dude. And when are you going to Great Adventures?”

  “Therein lies the genius of Universe Leap,” I say. I’ve only been half listening to the conversation. “It leaves us with profound uncertainty.”

  “Nope,” Jake shouts, pointing an accusatory finger at me. “No making fun. You haven’t even seen it yet. You refuse to watch it.”

  “I don’t refuse. I just haven’t gotten around to it yet,” I protest. Because it sounds incredibly fucking stupid, I do not say. I tried telling Jake this once, and he wouldn’t talk to me for ten minutes. But come on, a show about a space cowboy, his best friend (a space vampire), and his ex-lover (Hilda, provenance unclear) sounds so aggressively silly that I can’t bring myself to watch even a single episode. I’ve spent money to take Jake to movies so he wouldn’t make me watch Universe Leap. He has the entire series—that is, the entire first and only season—on DVD. It is the only set of DVDs he owns.

  “I’m gonna get you one of these days,” Jake says. “Maybe tomorrow. Maybe after dinner tomorrow, we will watch the first episode.”

  Toby sips his coffee as he inspects a bright green manatee notebook. “You should try it, Caroline. It’s great.”

  “Sure,” I chirp, the required minimum of enthusiasm. I’m already trying to figure out what else we could do tomorrow to avoid sitting through an hour of angsty space vampires and exposition.

  Toby stands up. “See,” he begins, “what you have to understand about Universe Leap is—shitbuckets,” and he grabs his travel mug from where it was balanced precariously on a stack of puffer fish picture books. “Duty calls.”

  For the last twenty-five minutes, ever since the first tour of the morning started, a small and excitable crowd has been gathering in the atrium. Saturday morning people seem to be generally happier than weekday visitors. The kids are chasing each other in massive circles while the parents stand in a smaller cluster holding their coffee and making aimless family small talk: school, camp, the price of new clothes. The children orbit the adults like comets, tiny and blazing. Sometimes one of them gets pulled in by the gravity of a parent and clings to a mother’s bare calf, a father’s khaki trouser leg.

  Toby slurps down the last of his coffee and sets the empty cup on the ground beside the poster display. “I’ll be back around lunchtime,” he says over his shoulder to me and Jake. Then he strides out into the atrium, hands on his hips, huge grin on his face. The parents turn toward him and instinctively smile themselves. They know he’s a guy they can trust to entertain and educate their kids. After all, he hasn’t begun the tour yet.

  He starts his spiel, which echoes, muted, through the glass walls. I’ve heard it so many times I know the cadence of it, the moments where there’ll be laughs, the smiling, barely audible response of the shyest kid in the group, whom Toby will specifically pick out to compliment.

  “So, what do you actually do here?” Jake says, turning to me. “All you’ve done is stand here and draw for like an hour.” I look down. Without realizing it, I’ve scribbled doodles all over the pad of aquarium stationery I keep next to the register in case someone calls. Tight black stars, spiraling tornados, little circles combining into clumps like bubbles coming up from deep water.

  “Well, I answer the phones, if people call to ask when we’re open or whatever,” I say. “And obviously I sell stuff to people when they come in.”

  “Are these people gonna come in?” Jake tilts his head to the group of families spilling from the double doors, who are blinking and squinting against the light—the last tour leaving so Toby’s group can enter. I see the first telltale sign: a boy jumping up and down impatiently, gesturing toward the gift shop with the wild motions of someone who hasn’t yet figured out what movements go with what words.

  “Yeah, probably,” I say.

  “You don’t sound that excited,” Jake teases me.

  “It’s not that exciting,” I reply.

  But the truth is, I do like it when big groups come in. People aren’t friendly, but they’re usually not too rude either. Every time I sell something, it feels like an important accomplishment. I don’t get paid on commission or anything—I would make about ten dollars a week—but any act, however small, seems important. Someone comes to me with a request, and I fulfill it. I press some buttons and an item leaves the store. Concrete actions, concrete responses. Simple.

  And indeed, this whole group is strolling slowly toward the store, one mom pointing at the display of tote bags I set up earlier this morning. Jake asks me if I need him to do anything. “Just chill,” I say, and he leans back on the stool and pulls up a game on his phone.

  After an hour and a half and three more tour groups, Jake is fidgeting like a child. I don’t blame him.

  One Saturday last semester, I hung out near the register at his job for half a shift. At first, it was interesting to see him work. He interacts with customers differently than he does with me. More formal, obviously, and more detached. I love the way his expressions jump from place to place when we’re together, how he goes from surprised to excited to thoughtful in fractions of a second. At work, he was just cool. Slow, tired, too adult.

  After a while, though, there was nothing more to see. I went to the coffee shop and watched TV on my phone on their WiFi until his shift was over. I spent four hours curled up ordering Frappuccinos until my teeth rattled with the buzz. When he snuggled me later in his bed, my eyes still felt like they were going to jump out of my head.

  I wonder if he’s seeing me as I saw him. But I don’t think I’m that boring. I enjoy talking to people; it feels purposeful. Granted, my job has way more breaks than his does. Grocery stores in the suburbs—you never get a second off.

  When Toby comes out with his most recent tour group, shaking hands with the dads and discreetly receiving phone numbers from the single moms, Jake hops up. “I’m gonna go on the next tour,” he says. “It starts soon, right?”

  “Yeah, like five minutes.”

  “Great,” he
says. “I’ll see you at lunch?”

  “Sounds good,” I say, and he thrusts his phone back in his pocket and lopes out into the lobby. Adjusting his pants next to the gathering group of families, he looks very out of place. But then a little boy points at his untied shoe, and as he squats down to talk to the kid, he looks right at home. He’ll be a really good dad someday. I look down at my belly. A few months ago, the idea of having a baby with him made me feel warm and excited. Now I feel vaguely ill, and I cannot place exactly why.

  The sick sensation lingers through lunch, which is sandwiches, Jake’s choice. Without the JAC counselors, the concrete slab behind the building feels big and empty, even though there are normally only six or seven people out there.

  I feel ill through the rest of work too. Through a customer grumbling loudly when I come back two minutes late according to the sign on the front door. Through Jake jiggling his legs while I sell stuffed animals and puzzles. Through Toby ducking into the store between shifts to tell us about the kid who got overexcited and kept slamming himself into the glass to try to “let the fishes loose.”

  It’s still there when I get Georgia’s midafternoon text showing me her mom posing with a Bev‘n’Brush creation in progress: a cactus in a desert scene, the spines as thick and long as toothbrushes. Georgia’s mom’s mouth is open in faux surprise at the quality of the painting, her hands gesturing to the canvas like a game show hostess. What a fuckin goof, Georgia’s text says, and that makes me smile, at least.

  The feeling stays all the way through the end of work, when the clock finally hits 5:30 p.m., and I ring up a pad of sticky notes for a middle-aged couple, the last customers of the day. Jake jumps up as soon as the couple exits the atrium.