Say something say something say something.
“No,” I blurted.
“No?” He raised his brows.
“I don’t want to watch another show.”
He shifted again, but this time toward me on the couch so we faced each other. “Really,” he said. “Any other suggestions, then?”
My head felt so light I thought I might pass out. My breaths came quick and shallow, and the nerves in my stomach hadn’t disappeared. All I could manage was the smallest nod.
“Like what?” He lifted a hand and toyed with a strand of my hair.
“Um.” I swallowed. Could he hear my heart? I couldn’t hear anything over the roar of blood in my ears.
He wound my hair tight around one finger, then released it, brushing the strand back in a long, lingering motion, palm sweeping against the side of my head. I shivered. His hand slid over my neck and jaw to cup the back of them. His eyes never left mine. “No suggestions?”
My heart was about to burst from my chest. My words came out as the barest whisper. “Kiss me.”
A slow, radiant smile covered his face. “Kiss what?” He brushed his lips, light as a feather, across my cheekbone. “Kiss this?”
I managed a tiny, wordless nod.
He pressed his mouth to a soft spot beneath my ear. “Kiss this?”
Heat rocked through me. I hadn’t known that spot existed. My head fell back. “Oh, god, Noah.”
I could hear the smile in his voice. “Kiss this?” He pulled the lower lobe of my ear into his mouth and I gasped, hands reaching for him as sensation washed through me. Ears. Why had no one ever told me how great ears were?
My hands found his head and I pulled him toward me, twisting so our lips finally met. My whole body seized. It was like I had both expected it and had no idea at all the kiss was coming, like I’d been preparing my whole life and was stunned senseless.
His mouth was firm and warm and I couldn’t get enough of it, I couldn’t get close enough to him. We pressed against each other, hot and insistent and together. His tongue slid into my mouth, twining around mine until I gasped. All my bones seemed to loosen, my muscles coming undone. Fire rolled over me, hot and slick and dangerous, and I would have been quivering if I hadn’t been pressed against Noah so closely.
His hand reached for my leg and pulled it over his own so I straddled him, and he let out a small groan as I settled on top. His hand clasped the back of my neck and pulled my mouth down to his for several long, burning minutes. Then he pushed me back slightly, both of us breathing hard, my hair dangling down, a curtain between us and the world. “Is this okay?”
“Yes.” I pressed a kiss to his brow, which was weird but seemed right. “Yes, it’s great.” Then realization clicked and I pulled back, bracing my hands on his shoulders. My cheeks turned bright red. “Oh! Um. I’m not going to sleep with you.”
He grinned up at me, eyes sparkling. “Okay.”
“Okay? Okay. Good. Just making sure—we’re okay.”
“This isn’t, like, an express train or anything. We can stop whenever we want.”
I couldn’t keep a grin from breaking. I already knew I liked Noah Barbanel, but I liked him even more when he was being considerate and making nerdy analogies. “I like you, Noah Barbanel,” I announced. “You’re a good person.”
“Thanks?”
“You’re welcome,” I said, and kissed him again.
Twenty-One
February 3, 1953
Remember how when I was little, I used to pace the widow’s walk? I told people I was pretending to wait for my whale captain husband to return from sea. Your mother had told me about past women of Nantucket who’d done so, and it sounded terribly romantic. I used to stand on the widow’s walk for hours. “She has such a rich imagination,” guests used to say.
I lied.
I wasn’t looking for some imaginary husband. I was looking for my parents. Even though I’d come by boat to New York, even though I knew most people arrived there, I had the idea my parents would come to Nantucket. They’d have learned, somehow, I was there. And I would see their ship sailing close, see it curving over the horizon, and it would draw closer and closer and they would be at the rail, waving.
I can’t believe I got the letter. I feel like I’ve been waiting for it a hundred years. And I know I told you it would be better to know, I know I said this state of suspense hurt too much, but now I’d give anything to go back to last week when I thought, Maybe. I’m not an idiot; I knew it was a pipe dream. I knew. But I didn’t really, did I?
1943. Gassed on arrival.
I hate this world, Ned.
I wish you were here.
I woke before Noah. We’d fallen asleep in his room, because the idea of separating from him, even to sleep, had seemed untenable. He faced me, his chest rising and falling peacefully, his lashes a sweep of black against his cheekbones. I gently dislodged his arm and slipped out of bed, padding toward the bathroom.
I’d never slept in a bed with a boy before.
Well, to be honest, I hadn’t done much sleeping. Turned out it was hard to sleep with another body right next to you. But in a good way? I kept waking up, but instead of being irritated, I glowed with happiness and snuggled up to Noah.
Noah. Noah, Noah, Noah.
After showering and pulling on a lilac sundress, I sat in the unused bedroom and called Mom to give her the rundown. “One of the records mentioned O’ma!” I told her. “She said O’ma was from a town close to hers, and she was from Hamburg, in northern Germany.”
“Really? What else did she say?”
Suspecting Mom might ask this, I’d copied down Else Friedhoff’s words, and now I read them to Mom. “I was thinking, since we’ve narrowed it down to a region, I could double-check O’ma’s parents’ names against the 1930s censuses from the area, and see if we could find them?”
Mom let out a startled laugh. “Not a bad idea.”
“Except I have no idea how to get a hold of censuses.”
“There must be genealogy websites which can help. How are things going with Noah?”
I glanced at the other bedroom. “Good.”
“Is he there right now?”
“Yes.”
“What did you guys do last night?”
Nothing! “We went to the Arnold Arboretum and out to dinner.” Thank god I’d called her instead of Skyping, so she couldn’t see my red face.
By the time Mom and I hung up, Noah had jumped in the shower. I googled German census records, and found more information than I’d expected, but no concise search engine—mostly places I could pay for in order to download census results from different towns. I bookmarked the pages for later.
Next, I looked up the Holtzman House, which Else Friedhoff had said she and O’ma had been placed in by the German Jewish Children’s Aid society, the principal organization for getting children over from Europe. Like the GJCA, the Holtzman House was a privately funded refugee organization. It provided temporary housing for Jewish children.
Perhaps they’d been the ones who’d informed O’ma her parents had passed away, which meant they might have more information about them—or perhaps they’d have more information about O’ma’s arrival itself, including family facts.
The Holtzman House no longer existed, but another Jewish nonprofit had inherited their records. Like many of the other organizations I’d come across, it didn’t have digitized records and suggested coming to New York to search their archives, but nothing ventured, nothing gained. I shot them an email, grateful to have actual information to impart: My grandmother, Ruth Goldman, came over on the SS Babette in 1939. She stayed at the Holtzman House for several weeks. Do you know if there’s any mention of her in your records?
Noah came out of the shower, rumpled and half-awake. He wore a towel slung low o
ver his hips. “Morning.”
“Good morning.” I felt unexpectedly shy, as though we hadn’t spent half the night with our bodies pressed against each other.
He filled a glass with water from the tap. “Were you on the phone?”
“With my mom, yeah.”
He drained half his drink, then looked at me. “You’re okay?”
“About my phone call?” I said, slightly confused.
“No, I meant—” For the first time, he fumbled. “I wanted to check about last night. Make sure we didn’t go too fast or anything.”
I couldn’t stop a smile from springing to my lips. “No. We didn’t.”
“Good.” He came over and kissed me full on the mouth, then grinned his heart-melting grin. “Because I thought it was great.”
This boy was going to kill me.
“Should we get breakfast?” he asked. “I’m starving.”
* * *
We went to a café down the road with sandwiches named after streets and schools. We ordered breakfast burritos and Noah got a coffee while I added on a cookie (to each their own). Then we took the T downtown and spent the afternoon walking around the Common and Public Garden, which (as Noah told me) was the oldest in the country. Then we took the T to the train, the train to the ferry, and the ferry all the way back to Nantucket.
Returning to the island after a night away felt odd. You weren’t supposed to return to your vacation land once it had ended, and the vibe of Boston had been far different than of Nantucket. Not to mention what had happened between Noah and me. I felt nervous as we walked down the dark, familiar streets to Mrs. Henderson’s house. Now what? Had Boston been a fairy tale, and Nantucket, however odd it sounded, our ordinary lives? In the city we’d existed in a bubble of our own making. What would happen here?
Noah walked me to my door, and we lingered on the steps. He hitched his duffel bag strap higher on his shoulder. “I’ll see you soon.”
Right. Because now we were parting. “I’ll let you know if the archive has any info.”
“Good.”
“Good.”
We stayed locked in place. Then Noah’s hand came up to cup my cheek and he lowered his lips to mine, soft and light as a whisper. The worried tension inside me unwound. “See you later, then.”
“See you.” I slipped inside, then leaned against the closed door. I grinned at the ceiling, unable to suppress the thrill of the weekend. I’d kissed Noah Barbanel! And, you know, extensively made out. I gave a hop of sheer joy.
The house was dark but moonlight streamed through it. I danced upstairs, silently entering my room where Jane already lay sleeping. I floated down atop my bed like a maple seed helicoptering down to earth, blissful and dream-filled.
I fell asleep thinking about Noah.
* * *
I woke up thinking about Noah.
Okay, wow, this could get real time-consuming real fast.
Did people usually feel so destroyed by hookups? Utterly all-consumed? Was it normal, craving another person like a drug? It couldn’t be.
Of course it could. My body chemistry had probably changed, addicting me to Noah’s hormones. The biological imperative was laughing its little brain off, encouraging me to procreate even though Earth had too many people, and it would be nice if humanity had an off switch for a while, or at least until we’d terraformed Mars.
God, I wanted him so badly.
“You’re back!” Jane bounded down the stairs and joined me at the kitchen table. “How did it go?”
“It was great. We found this one recording—”
“Tell me about Noah.” She dashed milk into a bowl of Cheerios. “You spent the night together! And don’t tell me only technically. Your texts were very coy.”
I put my spoon down, a smile worthy of the Cheshire Cat crossing my face. “Well . . .”
“Oh my god, what happened?”
Jane made all the right noises and exclamations as I told her. When I finished, she let out a whoosh of air. “Finally!”
“What do I do now, though?”
“You could text him.”
Right. I could. I did, theoretically, have command over my phone and the English language. Except. What did you text someone after you hooked up? Why wasn’t this covered in school? Why did we learn pre-calc and bio, and yet I didn’t know how to respond to a human who’d stuck his tongue in my mouth? How the hell did we manage to propagate the species? I scooped up my last three Cheerios. “No. Definitely not.”
Jane smirked. “The bravest girl in Nantucket.”
I made a face.
For the rest of the day, I was a nervous wreck. At work, Maggie paused in the middle of a conversation and asked if I was all right. I pulled myself together for the rest of my shift, but honestly, I wasn’t sure.
Most of the time in the books I read, hooking up served as the culmination of the romance, and after, everyone was happy. Or, perhaps, the couple made out because they were in a fake relationship or a marriage of convenience (I read a lot of historical romances) or because of a fit of angry passion, and were in situations where they kept running into each other.
But what if you hooked up and weren’t in a relationship or forced to keep interacting? What if you just made out once, and were really into someone, but had no guarantees? How did you figure out how to communicate afterward?
I’d resolved to text him when my phone finally buzzed in my pocket. I froze in the middle of shelving a book. I couldn’t bring myself to pull out my phone: At the moment, I existed in the Schrödinger’s cat–land of text messages. The moment I looked at my phone, I’d either be deliriously happy or wildly upset.
I waited as long as I could, like a child holding her breath underwater, until the uncertainty became worse than potential disappointment. Then I whipped up my cell.
Mom:
did you know teens spend an avg of 17 HOURS A DAY LOOKING AT SCREENS
WHAT R U LOOKING AT
GO PLAY OUTSIDE
Mom. Disappointment poured through me in a gale, followed by a wry laugh.
Me:
I’m literally spending 6 hours today looking at books, not screens
Also I bet you read this in an article ON A SCREEN
My phone buzzed again. I glanced down and let out an audible eek, throwing my gaze away from the screen, panic and hope now battling for supremacy. Breath coming fast, I forced my eyes back down.
Noah:
What are you up to tomorrow?
Oh my god. Noah. A text. Why had he rendered me verbally incompetent? Would I ever recover? Was this my life now?
How did I answer?
Oh. By answering the question, yes, good, quite.
Me:
Jane and I were planning to go to a party at Kaitlyn Phan’s house. You?
I watched intently as the three dots danced on my screen, willing them to resolve into words, desperate as a seer trying to interpret signals before a mercurial king.
Noah:
Same
What kind of response was same?
Meet you there?
Meet you there was not the same as Let’s go together, as Be my girlfriend, let’s go steady, wear my letterman jacket (why did all my examples of dating and romance come from 1950s musicals?). But it did imply we’d see each other. Tomorrow.
And for now, that would be enough.
Twenty-Two
Kaitlyn Phan’s house stood on the brink of a cliff. (Maybe if you have a lot of houses you don’t mind if one falls into the sea?) Jane had sworn it would be okay if we showed up, even though neither of us knew Kaitlyn—apparently she threw amazing theme parties, and as long as you tangentially knew her crowd, you could get in. We arrived at 10:15, trailing glitter and nerves. We’d followed YouTube makeup tutori
als with the precision of neurosurgeons, applying dramatic eyeshadow with white liquid liner on top, contouring with teal and pink, and painting our lips blue. We pulled fishnet stockings across our cheeks and temples, pressing cream eye shadow through them to create scales, and carefully applied sequins to our skin.
For costumes, we’d scrounged up metallic scaled leggings and crop tops from friends; Maggie had lent me a pink-and-green-and-blue wig she usually wore for Pride, and Jane twined green strips of fabric through her hair like seaweed.
“I feel like I’m in a teen movie,” I told Jane as we walked up the path. Thumping music radiated out from the house, while lights flashed through high-up windows. Luckily, there were no neighbors within earshot to complain. “No one has parties like this at home.”
I wished, suddenly and strongly, we’d arrived with Noah, so we’d feel like we belonged. He’d offered to swing by our place, but I’d told him not to bother—it would have been out of his way, and I’d had no intention of showing up at Golden Doors dressed like a mermaid.
Obviously, a stupid mistake on my part.
We opened Kaitlyn’s front door and stopped short. A curtain of flowers and seashells hung from the ceiling. Jane and I glanced at each other, then pushed through, into the foyer. Teal and aqua lights undulated throughout the two-story entrance, giving it an underwater effect. People were dressed like pirates and mermaids and sharks. Girls wore flowers crowns and boys wore spikey chokers I recognized from looking up the Blue Lagoon movie. In the middle of the space, where one might expect a table with flowers, or a tree at Christmas, stood a giant ship.
“Oh my god.” I had to yell slightly to be heard. “This is crazy.”
“I’ve never seen anything so extra,” Jane said. We approached the ship, tilting our heads to consider it, an island of bemused silence in the midst of chaotic noise. Tiny sailor figurines were falling to their deaths. “I’m in love.”
The Summer of Lost Letters Page 25
