What I Thought Was True

by Huntley Fitzpatrick

  Cass nodded, game face, neither gratified or abashed. Then he looked over at me. “Can we g-give G-Gwen the Lifeguard of the Year award, Coach? She w-was trying to save me.”

  Coach snorted. “All you two need saving from is your own foolishness. Didja even kick off your shoes, Castle?”

  I wiggled my wet toes in my hiking boots. “N-no.”

  “Glad you’re not on my team,” Coach huffed. “You gotta think on your feet.” He scanned the beach for Mrs. Santos, the school nurse, but she was bent over Hooper, face concerned.

  Coach sighed. “Always that guy,” he said. “Scat, kids. The bonfire’s not going to do it for you. Go someplace warm. And lose those sopping clothes, pronto.”

  I was someplace warm. Cass’s arm was tight around my shoulder. It was thirty degrees, tops, but I felt hot.

  “Can you drive me home?” he asked. “I came here with Pieretti and I think he’s w-wasted.” In addition to the chattering teeth, his voice sounded slurry.

  “Well, that was a given,” I said. “Can’t you be the designated driver? Or, oh, were you drinking too?”

  “N-no. My lips are j-just numb. B-but frostbite may be setting in.” He held one whitish blue hand outside the blanket, flexing it gently, wincing. “I can’t feel my fingers. Doesn’t seem safe to wait. Jimbo’s car’s got a stick shift. Hang on.”

  He disentangled himself from the quilt, and my arms, and walked slowly up the beach toward the bonfire. Vivien immediately scooted to my side.

  “What’s going on?” She gathered the quilt folds around me more securely. “What’s up with you and Sundance?”

  “Nothing. I thought he was d-drowning. He wasn’t.” I gave a short laugh. “End of story.”

  “I doubt that.” She ducked around to the other side of me as Cass returned, carrying his clothes and Converse.

  “All set,” he said. “Thorpe is d-driving Pieretti home. You can drive me—can you handle a s-stick? Pieretti can grab it when he sobers up. Then I’ll bring you home.”

  I found myself saying only, “I can drive a stick,” concentrating on pulling Mom’s parka back up. After lying on the cold beach sand, it felt like an ice pack.

  “Cool.” He put a hand on my down-covered back, steering me to Jimmy’s car up in the beach parking lot.

  It was a Kia. Why did huge Jimmy Pieretti have the smallest car in the world? I squelched my way into the driver’s seat, shivering again. I’m sure my lips matched the navy-blue vinyl seats.

  “Here.” Cass tossed the keys to me. I snagged them in midair, and he smiled at me, the sidelong curl revealing his dimples, crinkling the corners of his eyes, taking his face from perfect to real. When I turned the keys in the ignition, he snapped on the hot air, which blasted glacial currents at us.

  “It’ll heat up in a minute.”

  “That’s okay. I’m f-f-fine.”

  “Gwen, you’re a Popsicle.” He dropped his clothes in my lap. “P-put these on.”

  My face heated instantly. “I c-c-can’t do that!”

  He folded his arms. “Want me to do it f-for you?” He flexed his fingers. “As soon as the numbness and tingling go away . . . But I thought you m-might not wanna wait that long.”

  “It’s fine. I’ll just change later.” I notched up the heat a few more degrees. It seemed to get even colder.

  “C’mon. I can’t have your f-freezing to death on my conscience.” He said all this in a flat, logical tone without glancing over at me. “Just change.”

  “Here?”

  “Well, I th-thought you might like the privacy of the backseat, but whatever my fearless rescuer w-wishes.”

  “You want me to take off my clothes in the backseat?” I echoed, like an idiot.

  “C-can’t get warm if you just put the dry clothes on over wet ones,” he told me, still in that serious, scientific way. “So, yeah, d-ditch yours, put on mine. I’ll wear my parka over my suit. It’s fine. But do it fast. I’m f-freezing.” He shuddered.

  His clothes were faded jeans, a black turtleneck, thick woven gray wool socks. Sandy, but not dripping wet or icy cold. I stumbled over the stick shift and into the backseat, unzipped Mom’s parka, then halted, my eyes flicking to his in the rearview mirror. “No looking.”

  “Damn. I was hoping you’d forget about the m-mirror. No problem. I’ll just shut my eyes. I’m getting kind of warm and drowsy, anyway. Must be the hypothermia c-coming on.”

  I tried to move quickly. My drenched hoodie made a wet slapping sound as I yanked it over my head and onto the backseat. My fingers were too stiff to undo the clasp of my bra, so I just left it on. Though I’d forbidden Cass to do so, I couldn’t avoid a glance in the rearview mirror. Fantastic. My hair stood out in icy-dark Medusa curls, my nose was red, and my lips, yes, blue with cold. I’d never looked more bedraggled in my life. I shoved myself into Cass’s clothes and stumbled back over the seat.

  Cass did indeed have his eyes closed; his head slanted back against the headrest, his black parka bundled around him. There was a silver strip of duct tape on the shoulder, starkly bright against the black. He looked pale. Had he really gone to sleep? Into a hypothermic coma? I bent over to take a closer look.

  He opened his eyes, smiling. I caught my breath. He moved in infinitesimally closer, dark lashes fluttering closed, just as Coach rapped hard on the window.

  “C’mon, you two clowns. Get a move on. This isn’t a drive-in movie.”

  We were silent after that as I pulled out of the parking lot, through town, following Cass’s mumbled directions. He reached out, flexing his fingers, then drumming them against the dashboard.

  I tried to drive resolutely but couldn’t resist a few stolen glances.

  Always when he was doing the exact same thing.

  It was strange. Like a dance. One I’d never done.

  “First left up here,” he said. I turned onto one of those quiet, tree-lined streets with wide, paved sidewalks and generously spaced houses with their rolling lawns. So different from the scrubby twisted pine bushes, crushed clamshell driveways, and shoulder-to-shoulder ranch homes of my side of Seashell. “You turn down this road.” He indicated a right onto a drive with a sign that said “Shore Road.”

  I couldn’t help but gasp when I saw the house. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen . . . Modern, but somehow old-fashioned, built along the long strong lines of a sailing ship, a schooner, a clipper ship—something majestic poised to conquer the sea. One whole side of the house was bowed out with a narrow rail around the second story, high and proud, jutting like the prow of a boat.

  “Wow.”

  Cass tilted his head at me. “My uncle designed it. That’s what my parents were building—that summer.”

  “It’s amazing. This was where you went? When you left us?” Then I winced because . . . because the Somerses were on the island for one season. It’s not like they abandoned us. Me. But Cass didn’t blink.

  “Yeah. My brothers still rag on me because I mostly got to grow up here and they were already off to college. Down there”—he pointed down the low hill, grass turning to sea grass, tumbling softly down to the ocean—“there’s a good stretch of beach. Just ours. It’s beautiful. I’d like to show it to you. But not now. We’d both freeze.”

  A mansion. No one could call this anything but that. Not a house. An estate. It reminded me a bit of Mark Twain’s house, where we went on a school field trip once. But that was built to look like a riverboat, and this could only be a sailboat. The yard had all these big trees, a wrought-iron bench under a willow, a fountain even. It looked like something from Perfect Life magazine.

  A mansion and a private beach.

  I did not belong here.

  “I’m glad you didn’t drown,” I said, at the exact moment he said, “Thanks for wading in after me.”

  “It was nothing,” I added, just as he said, “Gwen—”

  We both stopped. His eyes were the darkest, purest blue. The ocean in winter.

  “Look .
. . My parents are going away tomorrow for a week. I thought I’d live the high school cliché and have a party. Will you come?” He’d somehow moved closer again, smelling like the best of the coast: salt water, fresh air.

  I leaned toward him without meaning to, without a clear thought in my head, and he bent forward and kissed me. It was such a good, sweet kiss—a simple press of the lips at first until I opened, wanting more, and he was ready. No jamming tongues or bumping teeth. Just one smooth delicious glide and then a rhythm that made my insides jangle and had me tilting against him, gasping for breath, then diving back for more. We kissed for a long time—a long, long time—and he let that be it, only brushing his hands into my hair and gently grazing my neck with his thumbs.

  “Will you come?” he repeated.

  I looked back at his house, that huge house. I’d never heard of Cass having a party. Who would be there? Spence Channing. The people Cass hung out with at school. Jimmy Pieretti, Trevor Sharpe, Thorpe Minot. The Hill guys—the boys who lived on Hayden Hill, the richest part of Stony Bay. No one I knew well. A . . . a party.

  And Cass.

  I swallowed. “What time?”

  He reached into the pocket of his parka and pulled out a blue Sharpie. Uncapping it with his teeth, he took my hand, his thumb dancing lightly over the inside of my wrist. He turned my palm closer. “How far, again, is it from your house to your dad’s restaurant?”

  “Three miles,” I said faintly, feeling all the hairs on my arm stand on end.

  He made an x on the base of my wrist, traced up to the line of my index finger, made another x, and then slid his hand down my palm, making three x’s below my thumb. “An approximation,” he said. Then wrote “Gwen’s” by the first x, “Castle’s” by the next. And “Shore Road” by the three x’s. Then “Eight o’clock Saturday ni—”

  “Ha!” my cousin laughs. He grabs my wrist and pulls me under, before hauling me above the water again.

  I splutter and wipe my hair out of my face. “Nic! What the hell!”

  “Thought I might find you here. What are you doing, crazy? You were headed straight for Seal Rock. Head-first.”

  I have inadvertently gulped in a mouthful of brackish water and am coughing. “I—”

  He thumps me hard on the back, dislodging another series of coughs. I dive back under, come up, flicking back my hair, then notice that he’s freckled with large spatters of white paint. Jackson Pollack Nic.

  “What?” he asks as I frown at him.

  I twitch my finger from his bespattered face to his speckled shoulders. He looks down. “Oh. Yeah. We were doing old man Gillespie’s garage ceiling. Then I went to check out the island job. Didn’t have time to clean up.” He scrubs his hand through his mop of sandy hair, much of which is also coated with paint. “Maybe I should have?” he offers. “Is this not a professional look for a job interview?”

  I’m treading water, trying not to let myself be dragged away by the rushing creek current.

  “How’d that go?”

  “Aw . . . you know.” Nic cups his hands in the water, splashes it on his face, slapping his cheeks. “It was what’s-his-face, the island president. In his shorts with the blue embroidered whales and his effing pink shirt. He acted like it was all competitive. But I know from Aunt Luce that no one wants that painting and repair job. Too much aggravation. Almost as bad as yard boy. We’ve got it in the bag. Hoop’s pissed.”

  “You’ve got a steady job all summer and Hooper’s mad?”

  Nic dunks under, bobs up. “He doesn’t want to work for ‘those summer snobs.’ Painting, we could’ve headed around the state, maybe camped out on Block Island or something, whatever—gotten the hell off island, for Chrissake. Hoop’ll come around, though. Anything’s better than working for Uncle Mike.”

  Yeah. These past few years Nic has done anything and everything to avoid working for Dad. Or, lately, even having dinner with him.

  My cousin whacks me on the shoulder and starts doing a fast crawl to the rocky shore. I used to be able to beat Nic every time, but since swim team, and especially since he’s been training for the academy, no contest. He’s nearly drip-dried; shaking the last drops off his shaggy hair, by the time I clamber up next to him and throw myself down in the sand. He tosses himself down next to me.

  We lie there for a while, squinting at the evening sun filtering through the trees, saying nothing. Finally he stands up, reaches out a white-splotched hand to pull me to my feet. He glances around the shore.

  I know what he’s searching for. A skipping stone for Vivie. I study the sand for a thin, flat rock, but Nic’s eyes are better trained, longer attuned. He finds one—“Here’s a keeper”—slips it into the pocket of his soggy shorts, jerks his head toward the sandy roadside. “Hoop let me take the truck home. Party on the beach tonight. We’re going to start this summer off with a bang.”

  Great, both Cass and a party on the first real day of summer. Talk about Kryptonite.

  Chapter Seven

  After we stop at the bridge for my clothes, we head down High Road and pass the Field House, where the mowers are stored—and where the yard boy’s summer apartment is, right over the garage. But for sure Cass wouldn’t be staying there—he’d be going home to that sailing ship of a house. Just in case, I scrunch lower in my seat, the peeling vinyl scraping my thighs.

  Nic shoots me a look, but says nothing. I sink farther down, yawning for extra authenticity. Soon I’ll be skulking around my own island in a wig and a trench coat.

  “So the bonfire’s on Sandy Claw tonight,” Nic says. “Bo Sanders. Manny and Pam and a few more. Hoop wants to hit it, but he doesn’t wanna drive home, so Viv’s picking us up.”

  “You can drop me off at the house.”

  “No way, cuz. You’re coming. The recluse bit is getting old. You know you love these things.”

  And I do. I mean, I always have. Just . . .

  “You’re coming,” Nic repeats firmly.

  “Yes, sir, Master Chief Petty Officer, sir.” I salute him.

  “You mean Admiral, Ensign,” he corrects, elbowing me in the side. “Show some respect for the uniform I don’t have yet.”

  I laugh at him.

  No one can say Nic is unambitious. Since career night freshman year, he’s had One Big Dream. The Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut. He’s got pictures of it—their sailing team, their wrestling team, on the wall of the bedroom he shares with Grandpa Ben and Emory, the Coast Guard motto—WHO LIVES HERE REVERES HONOR, HONORS DUTY—scrawled over his bed in black Sharpie, he does the workout religiously, obsesses about his grade point average . . . basically a 180 from the laid-back Nic of old, the guy who could never find his homework binder and was always looking up with a startled “Huh?” when called on in class. It’s the same raw focus he’s had with Vivien since childhood. One can only hope that that discipline someday extends to picking up and washing his own clothes.

  “Seriously, Gwen. If I have to drag you. I can bench nearly my body weight now.” He cracks his knuckles at me threateningly, then shoots me his sidelong, cocky grin.

  I elbow him back. “For real? Does Coach know? How long till you can bench him?”

  “Only a matter of time,” Nic says smugly.

  I burst out laughing. Coach is huge. “You really need to work on your inferiority complex, Nico.”

  “Just calling it like it is, cuz.” Nic’s smile broadens. It’s quiet for a second. Then his face sobers. “I want that captain spot so bad I can taste it. It’s gotta go to me, Gwen.”

  “Instead of Cass or Spence, who always get what they want?” A note Nic hits a lot. He was by far the star swimmer before they transferred in last September.

  Nic shrugs.

  I bump his shoulder with my own. “You leave them both behind every time, Admiral.”

  We ditch Hoop’s truck in his pine-needle-covered driveway and reach our house on foot just as Vivien pulls up in her mom’s Toyota Corolla. She beeps at us, waving
Nic over. He leans through the window, kisses her nose, then her lips, hands slipping down to gather her closer. I look away, squeeze the dampness out of the fraying hem of my shorts.

  Viv. The first serious Nic Cruz Goal I can remember.

  We were eleven and twelve. I decoded the scribbly cursive in his I WILL notebook, this goal journal he kept hidden under his mattress—not a safe spot when your cousin is hunting for Playboys, wanting to bribe the hell out of you. But the I WILL journal proved even more useful than porn, most times.

  Kiss Vivien.

  I figured Hoop had dared him. Despite the wedding ceremony when we were five, I didn’t think of them as a couple. It was thethreeofus. But there it was, spelled out in red pen right in the middle of his other goals: Be next Michael Phelps. Own Porsche. Climb Everest. Find out about Roswell. Make a million dollars. Buy Beineke house for Aunt Luce. Kiss Vivien.

  For some reason, that one I didn’t tease him about.

  Then a few months later the three of us were sitting on the pier at Abenaki, enjoying the post–Labor Day emptiness of the beach. Nic reached into his pockets, pulled out a bunch of flat rocks.

  “Pick me a winner,” he’d said to Vivie. She’d cocked her head at him, a little crinkle between her eyebrows, then made a big show of finding the perfect skipper, handing it to him with a flourish.

  “One kiss,” he’d said softly, “for every skip.”

  The stone skated over the water five times, and my cousin claimed his reward from my best friend while I sat there still and silent as the pile of rocks, thinking, I guess Hoop didn’t dare him.

  “Gwen’s trying to bag out on us, Vee.” Nic’s voice breaks into my thoughts.

  Vivie shakes her head firmly. “Miss the first bonfire of the season?” she calls through the open window. “Not an option!” She reaches over, holds up a supermarket bag, shakes it at me. “I got the gear for s’mores!”

  Nic has already climbed into the front passenger seat. He ducks forward, flipping it so I can climb in the back. “C’mon, cuz.”

  I sigh and tell them to hold up while I change my soggy clothes. When I get inside, Mom’s got the phone to her ear, frowning. She holds a finger to her lips, jerking her head at the couch. Grandpa’s fast asleep, head tipped back, mouth open. Emory is curled like a cashew nut, his head in his lap, snoring softly.