The Summer of Impossibilities

by Rachael Allen

  The boy at the front whoops and does a backflip off the boat into the water and then climbs back up again. Tan. Blond. So freaking cocky. I am acutely aware that I am wearing a swimsuit as opposed to something that covers more of my body.

  “Cool,” says the driver. “Well, see you around.”

  “Bye,” I say.

  Skyler says nothing.

  “Bye, Skyler,” he says.

  “Bye.” Her cheeks go a little pink.

  “Friday sounds like a good day to fall in love,” I say as we watch the boat drive away. I pick up my vocab book like nothing to see here, show’s over. And then I go for it: “And speaking of people being in love, which one of those boys on the boat are you in love with?”

  “What?”

  “The boat,” I repeat. “You wouldn’t look anywhere near it. Which means A) one of those boys hurt you, in which case I will be forced to kill him, or B) you like someone.”

  Skyler blushes to the roots of her hair.

  “So, it’s B.” I grin at her. “Is it the driver? I have a very strong feeling it might be the driver.”

  She hides her face behind her hands. “I think he might be a jerk. Or the only person who gets me. It’s a very fine line.”

  “Well, we’ll find out Friday night!” I say with a shimmy. I close my vocab book. “So. You really up for helping me clean out the loft?”

  A few minutes later, we are facing down the loft. It is . . . more cluttered than I remember. Maybe because it’s daylight. I am not fazed. I Marie Kondo’d our entire house last winter break for fun. I move like a whirlwind, pushing the larger bins to the side, sorting the entire loft into “keep” and “throw away” and “donate.” Skyler tells me what can go in which piles and gently puts items in a trash bag, almost like everything is made of glass.

  “Hey, can you pass me that bag?” I ask.

  She hands me the trash bag. “Here you go.”

  “Thanks, Sky. Do you care if I call you Sky?”

  “I love it when people call me Sky.” She grins like a Cheshire cat.

  I giggle. “Why are you making that face?”

  She leans toward me, chestnut hair sweeping forward like a curtain that will hide the secret she’s about to tell. “Well, I really like being called Sky, but, like, I don’t like to tell people. It’s just, if someone thinks to do it, it lets me know they’re special. And then they get to be in a secret club for awesome people.”

  “Um. I have always wanted to be in a secret club for awesome people.”

  HOLY CRAP, THIS IS SOME INNER-CIRCLE SHIT. FRIENDSHIP IS MAGIC.

  I try to contain my chill as I reach for one of the last few things in the back of the loft.

  “What is this? A vase?” I hold it up. It’s not a very pretty vase. It’s neon green and really long and—

  “I’ll take that,” says Skyler. She trashes it fast.

  I throw away a few pool noodles that are on their way to falling apart, and then we’re done. Well, with the sorting.

  “Do you think we should carry the bins down to the garage or what?” I ask.

  Something like fear flashes in Skyler’s eyes. “Um, let’s wait until we have more people, in case they’re heavy or something. I don’t want to drop them.”

  “Sounds like a plan. Also! Do you know what this means?”

  “What?”

  “It means we can totally start on the magic portal closet now! I’m big on saving the best for last.”

  Skyler nods seriously. “Me too.”

  We approach the tiny nook that barely qualifies as a closet. If we squeeze, we can both stand in the doorway at the same time. It really is just candles and papers and a box of ancient cigars and stuff, but I can’t shake the feeling I’m about to be sucked into another universe.

  “What should we do first?” I ask.

  “Candles?” says Skyler.

  “Candles.”

  There are still some candles from last time on the overturned crate in the middle of the loft. And I know we’re supposed to be making the loft look all fancy, but it feels wrong to move any of that stuff. We made our pact there. It’s kind of like the crate and the candle stubs and the bowl with the charred bits of paper are sacred.

  We do, however, take all of the creepy-ass candles that are left in the closet and strategically position them around the loft so they make a rough circle of tea lights, fat white candles with petrified wax drips down their sides, and even a dusty wrought-iron candelabra that looks like it’s straight out of Phantom of the Opera.

  “Clearly, we should put this right in front of the little window,” says Skyler.

  “Obviously. How else are we supposed to summon the spirits?”

  I go downstairs and grab some pink tea plates to put under the candles that don’t have a holder (because only you can prevent lake house fires). Skyler is still rooting around in the closet. I find her turning the yellowed pages of an old book.

  “Whatcha got there?”

  “Journal entries?” She turns another page and then sneezes from the ensuing dust cloud.

  “Anything good?”

  “‘Nick and I had sex for the first time last night. It was on the back deck of his house because his parents were out of town, and I don’t know what to do because I couldn’t stop thinking about someone else,’” Skyler reads aloud.

  “Yeah, we’re definitely saving that.” I stack the other notebooks and papers and stuff and set them beside the crate like they’re our holy books. Skyler adds Nick and his back-porch lovemaking to the top.

  I take a look around.

  “What do you think? I don’t know about you, but my joy is seriously effing sparked right now.”

  “I think,” says Skyler, “it’s missing something.”

  She ducks back into the closet and grabs the rules for the Southern Belle Drinking Club. She tapes them to the wall inside the loft. I want to hug her so badly right now. I really do.

  “It’s perfect,” I say. And then a realization slips like a slug down into my stomach. “Do you think we can really get the other girls to come back up here, and, like, do this thing?”

  Skyler touches my shoulder. “I think being friends with my sister just takes time,” she says. “You have to earn it.”

  Amelia Grace

  I feel like I’m in one of those horror movies where the girls try to have a séance in their attic and accidentally bring a serial killer back from the dead. Or like I’m at an evening church service. One of those.

  The loft is decked out with candles of every shape and size, wax melting slowly onto candelabras and pretty pink plates. The wooden crate is still there. And the bowl. But now the list has been tacked to the wall, and there are two stacks of old papers and books, and there’s this feeling, like the kind you get when someone is standing behind you, just about to touch you.

  “Whoa,” I say.

  Ellie grins. “Thank you.”

  “Y’all did a really great job up here.”

  Skyler looks pleased, and Ellie waves one hand like, Of course, it was nothing, being a super-secret séance interior designer is one of my many hobbies. I notice something unexpected in her hand.

  “I thought we weren’t smoking cigars.” It comes out more judgmental than I mean it to.

  “Oh.” She looks at the cigar like she forgot it was there, and her eyes light up. “We’re not. I just thought it would be fun to gesture wildly with it.” She assumes the posture of a CEO. “What’s the progress on those pacts? Darling, you absolutely must try this wine!” She punctuates each sentence with a sweep of her arm that would make Holly Golightly jealous. Then she giggles. “It’s everything I could have hoped for. Hey, have you seen Scarlett? We told her to be here at ten.”

  “I know she’s around here somewhere.” I check my phone. 9:59. We play a hand of poker while we wait for Scarlett.

  She finally arrives at 10:14.

  “Hi!” says Ellie, waving her cigar like she totally wasn’t freaking ou
t about whether or not Scarlett was coming.

  “Hi,” says Scarlett. “What’s the secret thing you need my help with?”

  She glances from Ellie to Skyler, waiting, but Ellie just grins.

  “In due time,” she says. “First, I officially call this meeting of the Southern Belle Drinking Club to order.”

  She bangs her cigar against the wooden crate like a gavel. It breaks in half. “Oops. Oh, well. Any new business?”

  We stare at her. And each other.

  “Umm . . .” I begin.

  “OMG, this totally makes me feel like Kristy from the Baby-sitters Club,” Ellie says. “Maybe I should get a visor!”

  Scarlett side-eyes her.

  “What? Did you want to be Kristy? I’m really more of a Stacey/Jessi hybrid, so I don’t mind.”

  “Oh! I call Dawn!” says Skyler.

  Scarlett’s side-eye changes direction, which is really a pretty impressive feat of extraocular muscles. “You are Mary Anne,” she tells her sister.

  “I don’t even like cats! Or Logan!”

  “Mary. Anne.”

  “Forty percent Mary Anne, sixty percent Dawn!” Skyler jockeys.

  Scarlett lets out a long-suffering sigh. “I mean, I guess.”

  Skyler seems mortally offended. “You know what? You’re Mallory.”

  “I am NOT Mallory,” says Scarlett, just as Ellie says, “Ohmygosh, it’s perfect! You have the red hair and everything.”

  “Nobody in their right mind would want to be Mallory. She’s a horse freak and a whiner and the biggest mystery of the series is how she ever got mono.” Scarlett smooths her hair. “I’m obviously more of a Claudia.”

  I check my phone to see if I’ve heard back from Pastor Chris yet. Nothing. I was really hoping to be able to report something tonight.

  “Ames?” says Scarlett.

  “Sorry, what? Do we still need a Dawn? I can be Dawn.”

  “Ohmygosh.” Skyler puts her hands on her hips.

  I hold up my hands in surrender. “Or Kristy. She’s good too. I always thought it was pretty cool how she started that little kid softball team.”

  I remember reading those books in fourth grade. Then everybody graduated to Harry Potter, and our preacher said Harry Potter was sinful because it was teaching kids witchcraft, and lots of the parents at church wouldn’t let their kids read it anymore. Mom was different. She said she had to read the entire series herself before she decided. And she did, all 4,224 pages. She said she thought it was a spectacular exercise for the imagination and that I could keep the books. I thought it was really cool that she read them when almost none of the other parents did. And I’ll never forget what she said: “Amelia Grace, it’s always important to look at things for yourself and make up your own mind. Even the Bible. Even if the preacher’s telling you something about it. A lot of people will tell you a lot of different things. That’s why it’s so important to read the Bible on your own, for yourself, every day, and to decide what you think about what you’ve read.”

  That was the year I read the Bible from cover to cover. A lot of people haven’t done that, even the ones who go to church all the time and sew Bible verses onto pillows. It’s hard to believe the woman who said those things is the same woman who’s having so much trouble seeing me now. But maybe it’s also why I should give her another chance?

  “Ames.” Scarlett nudges me again.

  “Huh?”

  “How’s it going with the youth minister stuff?” asks Skyler. “You reminded me when you said, ‘little kid softball team.’”

  “Oh. That.” I get the impression she’s already asked at least once. “I emailed the youth pastor at my church . . .”

  “That’s awesome!” says Ellie.

  “Well, I haven’t heard anything back yet.”

  “That’s okay. It’s huge that you reached out!” Her smile is big and genuine. It makes me feel like I really have accomplished something.

  “Definitely,” says Skyler. “I’m still working up the courage to talk to my mom. I guess that’s my update.”

  “Thanks. Actually, I think that’s my next thing too. Talking to my mom about stuff.”

  “I’ll go next!” says Ellie. “I’ve finally decided what my thing for the summer is going to be. This summer. I will. Be more authentic on social media.”

  Scarlett’s eyebrows hover somewhere near the ceiling.

  “Well, I guess it actually sounds pretty basic when you say it like that.”

  “Hey, knowing is half the battle,” says Scarlett. “You change the world with your no-makeup selfies.”

  Ellie looks flustered. “No, what I mean is, I just feel so much pressure to be perfect all the time, and present this image, and it’s not even the real me. So I wanted to talk about stuff like how I’m Muslim and how I love the fitness community but only when it’s focused on being your best you. I used to be addicted to looking at all this super-unhealthy body-shaming stuff. And, like, I want to talk about how my perfectionism is so intense, it borders on anxiety at times.”

  “That’s actually really cool,” Scarlett says quietly.

  Ellie blushes. “Thank you.”

  Scarlett suddenly looks like she’s swallowed a firework. “I guess that leaves me then.” She gulps, actually gulps, the way cartoon characters do.

  We’re so very quiet. More than quiet. There’s an absence of the normal everyday movements that people make. It tells me the other girls are as frozen as I am.

  “I want”—Scarlett looks like she’d rather do anything than tell us—“to have a healthy, grown-up relationship with my boyfriend and not let my past hold me back. So, yeah. I’m totally weak and stupid or whatever.”

  My first thought: I hate that she feels that way. For both the right and wrong reasons. My second: I hope he deserves her.

  “No, hey, you’re not,” says Ellie.

  Scarlett looks even more uncomfortable.

  “Yeah, a healthy relationship is a totally normal thing to want,” I say. Unless the person you want to be in a healthy relationship with is already in a relationship with someone else.

  “You know what?” Skyler starts digging through the papers and books piled by the table/crate/altar of sisterhood. “I think we found something that could totally help. It’s a journal. I think it’s from one of the original Southern Belle Drinking Club girls and, hang on a sec, here it is.”

  She runs her finger down the page. And then she reads.

  Nick and I had sex for the first time last night. It was on the back deck of his house because his parents were out of town, and I don’t know what to do because I couldn’t stop thinking about someone else. It doesn’t make any sense. Nick and I are supposed to get married and have kids and stuff. We’ve even talked about it. Which I guess is weird because we’re only nineteen, but sometimes you just know. At least, I thought I knew. And now there’s this other guy, and he’s not like anything I ever planned. How do you know? Really know? It’s like there’s this whole alternate future unspooling in front of me, but I don’t know if I’m supposed to reach for it or run.

  “Wow,” says Scarlett. She’s eyeing the book, but her fingers are clenched tight into fists on top of her legs.

  “Here.” Skyler hands her the journal, and Scarlett’s entire body lets out a sigh of relief.

  I stare at the journal in her lap, and I get this prickly feeling on the back of my neck. “Wait. You don’t think this was our moms, do you? Like, the club and the journal.”

  Ellie flinches beside me.

  Scarlett snorts. “Nah. The notebook paper would have, like, biodegraded by now.”

  Sky nods. “Plus, our mom never dated anyone named Nick. Did either of your moms?”

  Ellie and I shake our heads.

  “We have a lot of repeat renters in the summer, long-term ones too. It’s probably from one of them,” says Scarlett.

  “Yeah, sounds like that’s definitely what happened. I think we can adjourn now,” says El
lie.

  We blow out the candles, leaving wisps of smoke rising to the ceiling like wishes.

  Scarlett

  I throw my arms around Reese’s neck. “You came!”

  He grins. “Of course I did. I can’t go a whole summer without seeing you.”

  “It’s only been a couple weeks.”

  He pulls me closer so his hips are against mine. “It felt like a lot longer,” he whispers in my ear.

  “I know. I’ve been kind of lonely without you.”

  “Aw. Well, it’s a good thing I’m here to rescue you.” He kisses me on my forehead and then my mouth. “Hey, remember how you used to eat lunch in the bathroom?”

  I purse my lips. “I don’t think that’s particularly funny.”

  “And then I asked you to Winter Formal, and suddenly everybody started treating you different?”

  He twirls me around on the porch, laughing when we almost fall over. Then his face grows serious. He strokes his fingers down my scars. “And you haven’t given yourself one of these since you met me.”

  “Yeah. I guess not.” I feel weirdly defensive right now. I try to shake it off. “Hey, c’mon, I want you to meet everybody.”

  I grab him by the hand and pull him inside.

  “This is Reese!” I tell Aunt Val and Aunt Neely and Amelia Grace as we pass through the kitchen.

  “This is Reese!” I tell everyone on the back porch, even though Mama and Skyler already know him.

  Reese says hello and shakes hands with everyone, and he’s perfect and charming and Southern. He’s so good at talking to people, so easy in a way I’ll never be. I’m really very lucky to have a guy like him.

  “We were just about to eat lunch,” I tell him. “But I thought it would be fun if you and I took a picnic basket and rowed out to the little island.”

  “Yeah, that sounds perfect,” he says, grinning.

  “Awesome!” I say, which is uncharacteristic of me, both the awesome part and the talking with exclamation points in my voice part.

  I go change into my bathing suit and pull on an off-the-shoulder shirt and a pair of shorts. Short-shorts. The kind I really only wear over a bathing suit. I grab the picnic basket I made from the counter.