Up for Air

by Laurie Morrison

  He knew she liked him, so he’d been about to tell her about Caroline. To break it to her that he was taken.

  And now Annabelle was in Caroline’s seat. She’d been getting herself all worked up over every message from Connor, convincing herself that every reply was proof of his interest. She’d thought Kayla and Elisa didn’t know what they were talking about. She’d thought Ruby was her biggest competition. She never in a million years would have believed that there could be someone else completely.

  “I like your shirt,” Caroline said. “It’s adorable.”

  Adorable. Like a puppy or a baby or a personalized purple towel.

  A few hours before, Annabelle had admired the way the thin striped fabric clung to her chest and waist. But now she saw: It didn’t matter that the shirt showed off her new curves. She only looked like she was trying too hard—playing dress-up in her mom’s clothes.

  “I—I’d better go,” Annabelle stammered. “I was just coming for a little walk while I was waiting for my ride.”

  “Have a good night,” Connor said.

  As if that was possible now. And as soon as she got up, he reached for the beer can Caroline held out to him and swallowed down a gulp.

  On her way back to the dunes, Annabelle had to pass a cluster of girls. Ruby. Genevieve. A couple of other summer girls she didn’t know.

  Annabelle wished Mia were there. The old Mia, who would link arms with her and pull her into that cluster where she could just be one girl in a group. No more obvious than anyone else.

  “Hey, Annabelle,” Ruby called.

  Her voice was kind. Like maybe she’d been upset to see that Connor had a girlfriend, too, so she knew how Annabelle felt? Or maybe she’d known better, but she felt sorry for poor innocent, little-girl Annabelle?

  Either way, that kindness pulled tears into the corners of Annabelle’s eyes.

  “I’ll see you later,” she said, rushing away from Ruby and the other girls, toward the beach exit.

  When she looked back one last time, Caroline was back in her seat in the sand, and her head rested on Connor’s shoulder.

  No swimming, no Mia, no Jeremy, and now no Connor. And Annabelle was as clueless with boys as she was with everything else. She couldn’t read a guy like Connor any better than she could read her history textbook.

  Chapter 26

  When Annabelle finally made it home, she heard Mom and Mitch out on the deck, laughing.

  “And then the oysters started to come out completely frozen—hard as rocks—when the whole reason they wanted the wedding at the Charthouse was the promise of fresh fish!” Mom was saying.

  “What did you do?” Mitch asked. “Told the servers to take those oysters right back to the kitchen and top off everybody’s wineglasses to keep them happy while they waited for food. Then I told the grooms that serving a light fish course after the entrées was more cosmopolitan, and I told the kitchen they had thirty minutes to figure out how to thaw the oysters or else I’d tell every couple I meet with that their fish isn’t so fresh after all. I made sure those oysters came off the bill, too.”

  Mitch chuckled. “You’re a genius.”

  Mom the genius and Mitch the strategizer, problem-solving their way to success.

  Mom had been successful way before they moved to Gray Island and she started her event-planning business—she’d gotten lots of promotions at her old PR firm. One time, at a party for Mom’s old job, Annabelle had overheard a man with a bushy mustache saying that if Mom hadn’t gone part-time for a while when Annabelle was really little, she’d be running the whole department.

  And Mitch had been profiled in a magazine piece about Gray Island “movers and shakers” last year—there was a whole article with pictures and everything about how he’d left his New York City finance job and built up his financial planning office here because he saw a need on the island and had the guts to take a chance.

  “Belle?” Mom called, and Annabelle slid open the screen door to join them on the deck.

  They were sitting at the table, with Mom’s feet on Mitch’s lap and a glass of wine in front of each of them.

  “How’d you get home?” Mitch asked. “I would have come to get you.”

  “Got a ride,” Annabelle mumbled. She didn’t add that the ride came from the bus driver, or that she’d had to wait twenty-five minutes for the bus and trek home from the closest stop, almost a mile away.

  “That shirt’s so cute on you,” Mom said. “I’m glad you had a night with friends, honey. Did you have fun with the girls?”

  She sounded so hopeful. So eager to know that Annabelle wasn’t a complete disaster—that at least she could handle making some nice friends and spending a pleasant evening with them.

  “Sit down and join us,” Mitch offered.

  But Annabelle’s clothes smelled like the bonfire, and anyway, Mom and Mitch were so happy there, just the two of them.

  On the floor of the deck, those newer planks of wood were still the littlest bit lighter and smoother than the old ones. When they’d set up the deck furniture in the spring, she’d caught Mom sighing over them.

  Mom leaned forward, squinting to see Annabelle better. “Are you okay? Did something happen?”

  “My hand’s just bothering me. I’m gonna go ice it before bed.”

  She went up to her room even though it was barely nine and checked her phone as a reflex, as if there might be a message from Connor. And then a giant wave of humiliation threatened to drag her under and spin her dizzy as she looked at the blank display.

  Connor had never been interested in her. He flirted with everybody, like Elisa and Kayla had said. He’d probably only kept their text conversations going because he was bored.

  Annabelle didn’t have any new text messages—no surprise there. But she did have new messages in her email. She tapped on her inbox and then gasped.

  She’d given him her email address in her letter, and he’d written.

  Her dad had written her back.

  Her letter had made his day, that’s what the email said. He said he was thrilled to hear from her. He said they could email back and forth to get to know each other again, if that’s what she was comfortable with. He’d wait until she was ready to talk on the phone, and he wouldn’t push for a visit yet. But whenever she was ready, she was welcome.

  He didn’t say a whole lot about himself—only that he was working at a coffee shop for now, right down the street from his apartment. “Nothing too fancy,” he wrote. “But I get to come up with new menu items. I added that grilled cheese you used to love, with goat cheese and strawberries.”

  She remembered that sandwich, with little green basil leaves peeking out. “Grown-up grilled cheese,” Dad had called it. She’d felt so sophisticated when she ate it.

  It was true that his new job didn’t sound as impressive as Mitch’s or Mom’s. But it sounded a lot better than what he used to do, trying to sell real estate when nobody seemed to be buying houses. Or at least, no one seemed to be buying houses from him.

  Then he asked question after question. About which events she was swimming and who her friends were and what the best part was about summer in Gray Island. Ten questions in a row—like there were so many things he wanted to know—and not a single one about how she was doing in school.

  She started to write back immediately, but it would take a long time to reply to all those questions in just the right way. She stopped partway through, leaving the rest to come back to later.

  It was the first time she could ever remember leaving questions until the next day because she was looking forward to finishing them and didn’t want to rush, not because she got too discouraged and had no idea what to say.

  Chapter 27

  That night, as Annabelle lay there in bed picturing Caroline snuggled up next to Connor, she almost convinced herself she could leave Gray Island and go live with her dad.

  The shame she felt over Connor—it was big. Really, really big. But it probably wa
sn’t anywhere near as big as the shame Dad had felt that day when her old coach had sent him home from swim practice. If her shame was as long as the marsh that stretched along the bottom part of the island, his was probably ocean-sized.

  He was proof that people messed up sometimes and could bounce back and be okay. That not everybody did the right thing all the time. Maybe he would understand her in a way Mom and Mitch didn’t.

  But then the next morning, Mitch knocked on her door. “Waffles or pancakes?” he asked, as if that were even a question. And she couldn’t imagine not living with him, even though things had been weird.

  Waffles were still her favorite, just like they had been the day she and Mitch had first met and he’d made her a whipped cream smiley face. As the first batch filled the kitchen with their sweet, warm smell, she breathed it in and tried to calm down.

  Maybe last night hadn’t been quite as humiliating as she’d thought. Maybe Ruby and Genevieve and those other girls didn’t actually realize what had happened with her and Connor. And maybe Connor didn’t actually realize she liked him. Maybe he’d been about to tell her something else. About swim team or something.

  Maybe it wasn’t quite as obvious as she’d feared, how badly she fit here. Only Mom noticed the barely different wood beams on the deck. Maybe only Annabelle knew what a mess she’d made of everything.

  When Mitch dropped her off for her first physical therapy session the next morning, things felt almost normal between them.

  “Do good work in there, kiddo. That’s one important arm you have,” he said, and then he blew her a kiss and drove off to his office, a few blocks off the main street.

  The physical therapist’s office was next to Beach Buzz Coffee. After her session, she was supposed to hang out at Beach Buzz until it was time for tutoring, and she was really, really hoping Elisa wasn’t working this morning. Not after the other night.

  Mitch had let her off right in front of the little market on the corner, where Mrs. Green sometimes sent her and Jeremy to get a lemon or an onion or something else she needed for dinner. Annabelle felt a pang of sadness as she thought of Jeremy, off in Boston and still mad at her. She wished she could send him a talking-animal video and make everything between them okay.

  Could she, maybe? Jeremy wasn’t usually the kind of person to stay mad. He wasn’t like Mia, who could—

  Mia.

  There she was, halfway down the block, between Annabelle and the physical therapist’s office. She was holding some kind of iced drink from Beach Buzz and walking with two other girls. One was tiny, with bright blond hair that had pale purple streaks in the front. Reagan. So she had come to visit, like Mia had wanted. And the other was tall, dark-haired Genevieve, from the bonfire.

  “Oh, look who it is!” Reagan said. “Hey, Annabelle! Genevieve was just telling us she saw you Saturday night.”

  Reagan said it like it was some big happy coincidence. One of her loud, look-at-me laughs bubbled up behind her loud, look-at-me voice.

  Genevieve messed with the straw in her drink. She glanced down at the sidewalk, then up at the sky, then across the street at the preppy store where summer people shopped: everywhere except at Annabelle.

  So Genevieve knew, then. She and Ruby and all of those other girls knew that Annabelle had practically thrown herself at Connor when Connor had been there with his girlfriend! And now she felt guilty because she’d told gossipy Reagan, who thought the whole thing was funny.

  And even worse, she’d told Mia.

  “So Connor has a girlfriend, huh?” Mia said. “That must have been rough to find out.”

  Her voice wasn’t all-out gleeful like Reagan’s, but it wasn’t sympathetic, either. It was sort of . . . satisfied. Like Annabelle had gotten what she deserved. Before, Annabelle had thought there was nothing worse than when Mia got all “poor Annabelle” pitying, but this right now was worse.

  Mia was glad that Connor had a girlfriend.

  She was glad that Annabelle wouldn’t ever catch up in the ongoing competition their friendship had become. This was how terrible things had gotten between them: Something bad had happened to Annabelle, and Mia wasn’t even sorry.

  And now she and Reagan and Genevieve would go on with their fun summer day as soon as they said goodbye to Annabelle. Every once in a while, Mia might say something about how ridiculous Annabelle had been to think she had a shot with Connor. Or how happy she was that she’d made friends who weren’t so clueless. But otherwise, they’d do whatever they’d planned—go to the beach, maybe, and the Creamery. Or to play mini golf, except making up silly rules would probably be way too immature for the new Mia, so they’d play the normal way and take selfies at every hole to post on social media so everyone would know how much fun they were having.

  But Annabelle couldn’t have a normal day. Not when everyone knew she’d thought Connor liked her but he didn’t. Not when everyone would pity her even more than they did at school when a teacher made her answer a question in front of the whole class and she got it wrong, again.

  She needed to get away from Mia.

  She needed to get away from the feeling that she was doing every single thing wrong and everybody knew it.

  But how could she get away from that feeling when she couldn’t get away from herself?

  “I—I have to go,” she said, bolting down the sidewalk, right past the physical therapist’s office where she was supposed to go inside.

  She kept on going past Beach Buzz, and when she peeked in, she saw Elisa at the counter. Did Elisa already know what had happened, too? How Annabelle had lied and ditched her and Kayla for the party, where Connor had only proven them right?

  At the next corner, a taxi pulled up to the curb and a family of summer people tumbled out.

  Annabelle had her wallet in her bag with $60 from Mom to pay Janine, plus $10 from Mitch to get a snack after physical therapy and $14 left over from the last time she babysat the Bennett girls. Eighty-four dollars had to be plenty.

  “Taxi!” she called. “Wait, please!”

  She couldn’t believe the cabdriver actually stopped.

  She slid into the back seat of the cab, and the driver said, “Where to, miss?”

  He probably figured she was a summer person. Only summer people took taxis. She wished she were a summer person. Or anybody other than herself.

  “Miss?” the driver said, turning his head around. “Where are you heading?”

  He was wearing a Red Sox cap, and she decided to take that as a sign.

  She couldn’t escape herself, but she could escape this tiny island where she couldn’t even walk down one block on Main Street without running into people she didn’t want to see. At least for the day, anyway, and that was something.

  “The ferry, please,” she said.

  And off they went, bumping over cobblestones as the cab headed down the hill toward the harbor.

  Chapter 28

  The first time Annabelle had taken the ferry back to the mainland, she, Mom, and Mitch had gone straight up to the open-air top deck. There, they’d watched the island get smaller and smaller until it disappeared, and then they’d looked out at the steel-blue open ocean as the ferry glided along.

  These days, whether she was with Mom and Mitch or Mia’s family, they usually found an open table on the enclosed second deck, since the view was nothing new. But today she followed the summer people to the top, where the salty wind whipped the front pieces of her hair loose from her ponytail and made the corners of her eyes water.

  When the ferry looped out from the harbor toward the open ocean, a mom led her two sunburned kids up to the railing.

  “Look straight at the lighthouse and make a wish to come back next summer!” she told them.

  Annabelle knew about the Bruck Point Lighthouse wish tradition. People used to throw pennies into the water for good luck, to make sure they’d return. Over the years, the penny part had stopped because it wasn’t good for the fish or seagulls, but people had kept
up the wishing.

  Annabelle looked out at the open ocean instead of back at the black-and-white lighthouse. Whitecaps crashed against the sides of the ferry, but it slid along, too big to be shaken by even the biggest waves. Ahead of her, Cape Cod was there in the distance, past the edge of what she could see. That’s where she’d get the bus that would take her to Boston.

  For today, it was better to focus her eyes forward, even without a point to wish on, than to look back toward home.

  The round-trip bus fare from the ferry terminal into Boston was $36 because she was too old for the child rate she and Mia had gotten last summer. She’d already spent $4 on the cab and $40 on her round-trip ferry ticket, and she needed $2.20 for a student CharlieCard to take two trips on the T.

  That meant she’d have only $1.80 of her $84 left over.

  She sucked it up and handed over the money. It was okay, she told herself. All she really needed to spend money on was transportation. Dad worked at a coffee shop, after all. He’d give her food when she got there. One of his special strawberry grilled cheese sandwiches.

  She checked the time on her phone as she sat down to wait for the bus. Ten minutes until her tutoring session with Janine.

  Janine was going to text Mom when she didn’t show up, and then Mom would call Annabelle right away. She was lucky the physical therapist hadn’t called Mitch already—or that Mitch was busy and hadn’t taken the call.

  She used her phone to look up how to take the T to the address on Dad’s envelope. He’d said the coffee shop was down the street from where he lived, and she figured that’s where he’d be. She wrote the directions on the back of her ferry ticket and then sent a quick text to both Mom and Mitch.

  I’m going to Boston for the day. I’m sorry. I’m fine and will see you tonight. Love you.

  She thought about adding, Please don’t worry, but she knew that was pointless. So she just turned off her phone so she wouldn’t have to read their frantic messages and they couldn’t track where she was and show up at Dad’s coffee shop to drag her home.