“Willa.” Lane says, her tone a warning. “Turn the boat.”
“Okay.” She doesn’t.
The motorboat growls, zigzagging recklessly, and the little sailboat glides on, unaware of impending disaster. The sea will swallow them without a care, and Willa wants to turn, so badly, but she can’t, she can’t, she can’t.
“Willa. Turn the boat.”
Lane’s tone leaves no room for disagreement, jarring Willa out of her panic. She pushes the jib, just a little, opposite the direction she wants to go, like driving a car in reverse. The motorboat zips across their path, Willa holds her breath, and then the bow turns port, away from its chaotic path.
“Okay,” Lane says, “Okay, good. That was good.” Willa can hear how shaken she is despite her reassuring words.
I did it, Willa thinks, then offers the tiller back to Lane, carefully climbs over her, and leans over the side of the boat to vomit. I really did it.
Lane takes over fully, and with the boat in her competent hands while she patiently explains everything she does, Willa begins to relax. The ocean is gently rocking waves and smooth valleys; the sky is clear blue and endless and painted with wisps of white. A flock of cormorants circles overhead looking for fish. Willa understands in a new way why so many people spend weekends and holidays out on the water, why someone like Lane would commit so much time and energy to it, why Jenn and Robin would pack up their big city lives and sink everything into a little sailing shop on a little island off the coast of North Carolina.
“If we kept going straight, right now, what’s the first land mass we’d hit?”
Lane eyes her suspiciously. “Bermuda, I guess…”
“That sounds good.” Willa watches the birds circle and dive. “Just drop me there.”
Lane doesn’t respond; the birds fly off en masse.
How difficult would it be to change her name and start a new life in Bermuda?
“I bet everyone would be more understanding than you think,” Lane says finally. “If you came clean.”
Willa’s experiences with human nature suggest otherwise. “I doubt it.”
Lane looks at her for a long, considering moment, then back toward the horizon. “I was always good at sailing, just naturally. It came easy to me.”
“Okay,” Willa says, seems like a weird time to brag, but, whatever.
“I sailed because it was easy and I was good at it and it made my parents happy.” Lane pauses and tugs at a rope. “So things I’m not already good at? I don’t even try. Dating, for example. Starting a new career. Coaching someone.”
“You were…” Willa starts, fine, dying on her lips. “I’m probably not easy to coach.”
Lane shrugs. “The point is, you’re out here doing something you aren’t good at and it’s something that scares you, even. So maybe you’re not giving yourself enough credit.”
It’s not that she’s afraid, though, of what people might think. “What if I lose everything?”
Lane’s mouth tips into a wry grin. “You’ll survive. You’re young; you’ll start over.”
As pep talks go, it’s not the most inspiring. “Right.”
“You figure out who you really are,” Lane says. “When you hit rock bottom.”
But Willa doesn’t want to hit rock bottom. She doesn’t want to lose everything and she doesn’t want to start over. She likes her life. Most of it. Usually. Or like, the parts that she’s very carefully curated and clung to with near-desperation.
“And who are you really?” Willa says.
Lane looks away, eyes scanning the ocean as if she’s searching for something in particular in the movement of the waves. “These days? No one.”
Ch. 13
Over the next few weeks Willa amasses an impressive collection of popular Instagram posts for her personal page and for Lane’s shiny new real estate page and collects several minor sailing injuries: the bruise on her hip from slipping on the deck, then a red, angry lash across her face from a loose rope whipping out of her grip, a twisted ankle after gracelessly falling onto the dock. Her hands turn raw and cracked from pulling lines; her lips are chapped from the wind. Every muscle is tender and aching from the strain she’s putting her body through. Now, whenever someone asks how her shoulder injury is holding up, the groan and wince she gives in response isn’t even fake.
Willa makes slow and unsteady progress. She’s still prone to panicking and making stupid mistakes, and Lane is still impatient and temperamental. And though their conversations remain stagnant, silence interspersed with orders mingled with occasional open honesty, Willa finds a new side to Lane. On the water she lets some of her walls down; that haughty lift of her chin lowers and the tense set of her shoulders and jaw eases. Everything Lane does on the water is confident and competent, and, as the weather warms, Willa gets to see more of the strong, athletic body Lane has cultivated through her years of full-time sailing. Lane on the water, helming a boat—confident, happy, strong—unsettles Willa in a way she tries to ignore. Every time Lane snaps at her, pulling Willa’s attention from a muscle pushed taut on Lane’s thigh or her knotted bicep, Willa is relieved, then embarrassed.
It’s annoying, Willa tells herself when her mind wanders at work or at night in bed, unable to stop thinking about something Lane said in her deep, commanding voice or the way her hair shines and billows in the breeze or the muscles in Lane’s back revealed the day she wore a tank top, and how Willa nearly capsized the boat that day.
When Willa can raise the sails and launch from a dock on her own, they switch to the marina adjacent to the store and to the boat Willa borrowed from Mr. Kelley. When she manages that without any catastrophic incidents, Lane nods and says, “Well, safe to say you won’t kill yourself immediately.” After that, Lane doesn’t call again. Willa is desperate to stop thinking about her.
* * *
The first bonfire of the year is at Hunter’s place, on the section of private beach near the condo Hunter’s parents bought for her. Willa and Bodhi don their best flip-flops and walk up to the beachfront neighborhood of shingle-sided duplexes laced with white-washed balconies and rooftop decks.
“It’s not like I expected us to be best friends,” Willa says as they follow smoke and thumping music past the grassy dunes. “But sometimes she’s nice and sometimes she’s not, and I think I just can’t figure her out. It’s driving me crazy and—”
“Hey,” Hunter says as she jogs up. She hands Bodhi a beer and walks with them to the fire, where a dozen or so people are sitting on blankets or standing around talking. “Who are you talking about?”
“This chick Wills is into,” Bodhi says, casually sipping foam from the lid of her beer can.
“What. I am not.”
“Ooh,” Hunter interjects, before Willa can craft a better rebuttal. “Who is it?” She looks around, as if it’s one of the people they hang out with.
“Some older lady,” Bodhi says. “She’s hot though.”
Willa rolls her eyes and retrieves a drink from the blue cooler parked up the beach near a wooden stairwell, since Hunter only hand-delivers drinks to Bodhi. And anyway, first of all, Lane is only fourteen years older than her, hardly some old lady. Second of all, she isn’t hot. Not regular hot. Like, annoying hot. If Willa thought about her that way, which she doesn’t. Except for her muscles, and her lips, and her long neck, and her eyes. But only, like, objectively. Third, Willa is definitely not at all obsessed with her. That’s why, when Lane comes striding purposefully down the wooden stairs as if Willa conjured her up out her own swirling, frustrated thoughts, Willa is utterly dumbfounded.
“Lane?”
Lane pauses at the bottom step, head cocked. She spots Willa, looks her up and down, and says, in a bored voice, “Ah. Of course you’re here.”
Of course she is. This is her sort-of friend’s party. “Why are you here?” Someone l
ike Lane surely isn’t here for a what they loosely call a party but is really just an excuse to get drunk and smoke weed on the beach before hooking up with the people they usually hook up with or to gossip about the people who are getting drunk, smoking weed, and hooking up with each other.
“I’m here to get the music turned down. It’s deafening.”
Willa is relieved and mortified in equal measure. “It’s not that loud,” she says, trying to head Lane off at the pass before she stomps off to lecture someone.
“It is that loud. I have to work in the morning.” She steps onto the beach and around Willa. “Some of us have jobs.”
Sometimes it feels as if they’ll never move past that day when Willa first ran into Lane, and that first social-media-obsessed, beach-bum-slacker impression Willa made on her.
“I have a job,” Willa points out, scrambling to follow. “You’ve seen me at my job.” Lane crosses her arms and takes a few more steps. “Wait. You live over here?” She been at this beach and at Hunter’s house hundreds of times. Has she seen Lane before? Willa is sure she’d remember her.
“Yes.” Lane’s chin lifts higher. “Though I’m typically sleeping at this hour like most sane people.”
Willa ignores the slight. “Well, these parties happen like all the time. Honestly, they’re pretty chill.” After hesitating for a moment, knowing that she won’t, Willa adds, “Why don’t you hang out for a little?”
Lane gives a sharp laugh. “Yeah, right—”
“Wills, how long does it take to get a damn beer.” Bodhi stumbles up though the sand. She lost her shirt sometime in the last few minutes, and is dressed in only shorts and a bikini top even though it’s chilly still, particularly near the water. She throws her arms around Willa and kisses her cheek with a loud mwah! Tipsy Party Bodhi is extremely affectionate. She seems to realize that Lane is standing there but doesn’t seem to notice her crossed arms and tensely set shoulders. “Oh, dude, hey! We were just talking about you. Crazy.”
In the dark, Lane’s face is inscrutable. “Were you?” she says, in an equally unreadable tone. Bodhi, for whatever reason, probably her cavalier attitude toward clothing and working and relationships and… everything, seems to make Lane uncomfortable. She stopped getting out of the car when picking Willa up for sailing lessons.
“Just sailing stuff. In general, you know.” Willa can feel the confused look Bodhi gives her. “Anyway, Bo can you turn the music down? Lane has to work in the morning.”
Bodhi raises her beer bottle in salute and trots off to find the source of the music. Willa turns to apologize for the interruption when the bonfire flares with the sudden burst and crackle of a new log thrown on the flames, and Lane’s face is illuminated in the orange glow. She watches Lane watch Bodhi, who is laughing and saying something with one arm stretched up and behind her head, and Willa realizes that uncomfortable isn’t quite what Lane is feeling for Bodhi after all. The fire down the beach pops and flares, and irrational, surprising jealousy burns in Willa’s chest. Why Bodhi, she thinks as Lane walks away, though she knows the answer. Why does Bodhi coast by, handed everything, wanted by everyone, while Willa has to fight and fumble and fail, over and over. Why doesn’t Lane like her? Why doesn’t Lane look at her like that? Because Lane is into Bodhi, and Willa wants it to be her.
Oh, crap, she is into Lane.
Ch. 14
“What? Do I look weird or something?”
It’s the third time Bodhi has caught her staring this afternoon. If only, Willa thinks. “No, sorry. I’m just distracted today.” Willa straightens a display of sunscreen and tries to stop her mind from slipping to thoughts of Lane—and Lane and Bodhi—again.
“I bet you’re itching to get back out on the water,” Robin says, peering over the top of her glasses and tapping her inventory sheet. “In fact, maybe you should take some time off, Willa.”
“Oh, yes.” Jenn comes behind Willa at the register and squeezes her shoulders affectionately. “You should be training as much as possible! We want you to win this thing, for all of us!” Jenn shoos Willa away from the register and tells her to take all the time she needs, as Bodhi mutters, “Jeez, no pressure, Ma.”
But it’s not as if Willa doesn’t already know she’s carrying the weight of an island’s worth of expectations. Thanks to Lane’s sailing lessons, she isn’t totally hopeless but she has yet to venture out on her own and hasn’t managed a successful supervised run where she handles everything herself.
As she has several times since her last lesson with Lane, Willa slinks off to the marina and sits in her borrowed boat, still anchored to the dock. Mr. Kelley, busy as always running the marina by himself, leaves her to it, never watching her or commenting on the fact that she’s very unlikely to win a boat race while anchored to the dock. She curls up on the bow with her legs tucked against her chest and her arms wrapped around her knees. It’s warm during the daylight hours now. It has been for a while. The race is imminent, and Willa’s doom is impending.
When she was a kid, Willa told her classmates that her dad was in the military, a high-ranking officer in a highly top-secret mission. “We never know where he is,” Willa would say. “Sometimes we don’t hear from him for months.” And those things were true, though not because he was serving the country. She wonders now, watching the sun-drenched water lap up the sides of her boat, if she’d just been honest in the first place, about everything, how much that would have changed things. She’s had to keep up the ruses for years, remembering the lies she’d told and keeping her fake stories straight. Her senior year of high school she told people her parents had split, recently, and that’s why her mom was remarrying and her dad wouldn’t be at graduation. She’s tired. She doesn’t want to lie to the people who care about her. She wishes she was a different person. If she’d just been honest from the start, that it was just her and her mom and it always had been, it could have been over and done with, and she could have just been herself all along. And maybe someone could like her, the real her.
But it’s too late for that.
Willa takes a photo, tilting the camera and leaning close so the ocean stretches out, infinite and incomprehensible. She puts a dark filter over it and captions, “What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep without dreams.”
Lane and Bodhi make sense. They have a lot in common, and Bodhi is laid back where Lane is high-strung, and they’d probably bring out the best in each other. The wind stirs Willa’s hair; the boat sways from side to side. Bodhi is her best friend, more her sister than the little girl her mom had with a man Willa barely knows. She can be jealous of everything Bodhi has, and is, while still wanting the best for her. Willa stares at the blue sky, more endless even than the sea, and allows herself to feel small and insignificant and sad for a moment, before climbing out of the boat and getting on with it.
The same exuberant receptionist greets Willa at the real estate office, but this time Lane is there and calls her in right away.
“I just saw your Instagram post. Have you been going out and practicing a lot? How’s it going?” Lane is so uncharacteristically excited that Willa very nearly lies and tells her that it’s been going great and she’s been out all the time.
“It’s not.”
Lane’s face falls, then pulls into its more usual tight lines. “Why not?”
“Well,” Willa sits in a soft, armless chair. “If I drown, no one will be there to pull me out.”
“You’re aren’t going to drown,” Lane says, and Willa hopes it’s the beginning of a very encouraging pep talk. “That’s what a life jacket is for.”
Willa frowns and looks down at her lap. There is no life jacket buoyant enough to save her now. She’s always been honest with Lane, the most herself anyone has seen, and Lane doesn’t like her. That’s proof enough for Willa that she has to carry on with the competition no matter how afraid o
r unprepared she is. “Wait, you follow my Instagram?”
“Yeah, you agreed to promote me remember?” Lane says before Willa can get her hopes up that it means something.
“Right.”
“I got some new clients from that, by the way. Haven’t sold anything. But still.”
Lane has saved her ass twice now, literally and figuratively, and despite her gruff demeanor has been for there for Willa and helped her despite very little personal gain. She owes Lane this, more than promo for a job Lane doesn’t even seem to like. More than that, though, she likes Lane and wants her to be happy, even if that comes at the cost of Willa’s happiness. She can give her this.
Willa sighs and says what she came there to say. “Well, I wanted to thank you for your help and take you out and buy you a drink.”
Lane leans away. “Oh, I don’t think— That— That’s not necessary.” Her cheeks darken.
It’s exactly what Willa thought she would say. “It’s nothing big. Just some of us stopping by The Oyster Bar tonight around eight, and if you wanted to come by for a bit…” Lane starts to shake her head again. “Bodhi will be there,” Willa adds. Her insides twist, and jealousy thrums against her chest like a heartbeat, but still she smiles. “Come on, just one drink. Please?”
Lane pretends that all of this is of no interest to her; she shuffles through some papers on her desk, reads over one with her mouth set firm. But Willa can see the deep pink on her cheeks and the way her eyes dart around, landing on nothing.
“Um. Well that’s—” Lane scowls, seemingly to get ahold of herself. “I’ll see if I have a few minutes to drop by.”
Her plan is to convince Bodhi to go out for drinks, hang out until Lane arrives, and then make some excuse to leave early. With her extra time off, Willa goes home to crawl into bed with her laptop and whatever junk food they have at the cottage, binge watch terrible reality TV shows full of terrible people, and drown in self-pity. Her phone rings before she even makes it inside. It’s her grandparents— which one she never knows, as they only have a landline. Willa answers while unlocking the door, juggling her keys and phone and skateboard.
Tack & Jibe Page 6
