“Depends on what you think is okay. I’m on crutches.”
“How bad is it?”
“Well, they think it’s my medial collateral ligament, my MCL,” he told me, as if that meant something to me other than that I should have paid better attention to anatomy in my biology class. “I have to go see an orthopedist tomorrow to find out what grade it is—that’s like a measurement of how screwed I am,” he explained.
“What’s the worst-case scenario?” I asked, although from the sound of Luke’s voice, I had a feeling I already knew the answer.
“A grade three means up to eight weeks off my knee and a brace.”
“But what about lacrosse camp?”
“Forget camp, Emily. I might not be able to play this season if it doesn’t heal. What if I need surgery?” Luke’s voice was strained, and I could tell he was getting upset.
“I’m really sorry,” I told him, because I was, and because I wasn’t sure what else to say. It was obvious any attempt to try and downplay his injury wouldn’t help, not unless I suddenly obtained a medical degree.
“Do you know what that would mean?” he asked.
That you’ll be around all summer, I thought, and then immediately hated myself. I suddenly envisioned a special place in hell for girlfriends who hear about a potentially lacrosse career–ending injury and the first thing they think is at least you won’t be going to camp in New Hampshire.
“I’m sure you won’t need surgery.” I tried to sound convincing, but it’s not like my assurance held much credibility.
“Emily, I might not be able to play, don’t you get it? This is a big deal.”
“I get it, of course I do, Luke. But think positive!” I added, and instantly realized I sounded like a bumper sticker. “Before you start thinking the worst, wait until you hear what the doctor has to say.”
Luke’s silence meant my pep talk wasn’t helping. “Is there anything I can do?” I asked, wishing there was some way I could make him feel even a little hopeful.
“No, there’s nothing anyone can do. I just have to stay off my knee and see what the doctor says.”
“So what happens next?”
“I can barely get around, so I guess I’m here for a while,” Luke told me, and then added, “Camp is out of the picture, and you’re heading to the Cape anyway. Melanie, my mom’s friend, invited me to stay here and hang out until they go back to New York in August. She said I could keep Sam and Charlie company. Charlie’s not real psyched about being on the island all summer.”
“Charlie?”
“He’s going into his senior year. We’ve known each other since the day he was born, my mom always likes to remind us.”
I started to get excited, and then pinched my hand hard to remind myself that this wasn’t a good thing for Luke. Even if it was starting to feel like a good thing for us. “So you’re going to be on the Vineyard the entire summer? Josie’s house in Falmouth is right across the water, so we’ll only be a ferry ride away.”
“I know. That’s a bonus.” He attempted to sound happy, but it wasn’t working. I tried to not take his lack of enthusiasm personally, because I’d never heard Luke sound so down before. Given the crazy circumstances of our relationship, I’d seen a whole range of reactions from Luke, but this one was new for me.
“Look, you’ve been running and training, right? You’ve never hurt your knee before, so it had to be healthy to start with. And even if you can’t work at the camp, you have almost two months before pre-season conditioning starts A lot can happen in two months.”
“I know, you’re probably right.” Luke paused, and I heard a rustling sound that made me think he was moving the phone from one ear to the other. “These crutches aren’t exactly conducive to ferry travel, though. Which is why Melanie told me to invite you to come here. When can you get a ferry over?”
I wasn’t even unpacked from my three-week romp across the United States. I hadn’t slept in my own bed in what felt like ages. I’d eaten every meal in a restaurant for more than twenty days, and all I wanted to eat was a homemade peanut butter and jelly sandwich from my own kitchen.
“Really? You’re inviting me to come see you?”
“Well, it’s actually me, my mom, Melanie, Charlie, and Sam, but yeah. That’s exactly what I’m doing. So, can you come?”
In a few days, I was leaving for Josie’s house, and I had to imagine my parents wouldn’t be too thrilled to hear I was taking off for Martha’s Vineyard, especially since my mom just spent the past three weeks telling me how much she was going to miss me when I left for school in August.
“How about Friday?” I suggested. “My mom is taking me to Josie’s first thing, and I can drop my stuff at the house and head over to see you.”
“You can’t come any sooner?” Luke lowered his voice. “I’ve missed you.”
I laid my head back against my pillow and closed my eyes, letting his words wash over me. I’d missed him so much. I missed the way he absentmindedly tapped his fingers on my leg when we watched TV together, as if he was playing keys on a piano. I missed the way he slid his big toe from his right foot into the space between the big toe and second toe on his other foot, hooking them together until I pointed it out, and he’d laugh about how stupid it was and how he didn’t even know why he did it. Mostly I just missed being with him because, even though I’d never admit it to Lucy or Josie, after everything we’d been through, Luke had become my best friend.
“I can’t. I just got back. We’re doing the whole family dinner, group love thing tonight. I have to stick around for a few days. Besides, I have a lot of packing to do for the Cape, and I’ll have to drop my stuff off there before I head over to see you.”
“Okay.” Luke sighed, but I wasn’t sure if he was resigning himself to the fact that he’d have to wait a few more days to see me, or if the pain in his knee was getting worse. “Charlie and Sam are waiting for me to head into town, which takes twice as long now that I’m hobbling on crutches. I’ll call you later and we can figure it out.”
“I can’t wait to see you, you know.” I pictured Luke spending his summer on crutches while he waited to find out if his dream of playing college lacrosse slipped away. “And Luke? I’m sorry about your knee. Really, I am. I hope it all ends up okay.”
“I know you do. That’s why I love you.”
“It is?”
“Yeah. Well, that and the fact that you’re willing to take a ferry to see a guy with a bum leg and insanely sweaty armpits from hopping around on crutches all day.”
My mom was wrong. The best reward for giving up three weeks of my summer to go on her publicity tour wasn’t frequent flier miles. It was the chance to spend the summer with Lucy, Josie, and Luke.
“Are you kidding me,” I told Luke. “I wouldn’t miss your sweaty armpits for the world.”
Long-Distance Relationship Tip #10
Gift a personal object for the other person to hold on to,
like a keychain, a ring, or some favorite music.
And no, GPS trackers don’t count.
After five days at home without my best friends or boyfriend, I couldn’t wait to get in the car and go. I’d made my mom promise we’d be out the door by eight thirty. It was a Friday morning, and the last thing I wanted to do was hit traffic heading over the bridge to Cape Cod.
“Make sure you’re always on time for work,” my mom reminded me for what felt like the tenth time. “You don’t want Mr. Holden to think you’re taking advantage of the situation.”
“I will,” I agreed, even though I knew there was no chance Mr. Holden would let any of us take advantage of the situation. Our contract may not have been legally enforceable, but Mr. Holden was completely serious when he laid out the rules for our jobs. He’d been willing to let us only work the night shifts because we’d pointed out that it was the busiest time of day, and he needed at least three trusted employees manning the Shack. We also mentioned that parents were more likely to take their k
ids out for ice cream at night, and they were better tippers than the kids who rode their bikes there during the day (we’d all promised our parents we’d save half of everything we made). We didn’t mention that we wanted to sleep late and spend our days at the beach. I don’t think Mr. Holden would have found that rationale nearly as convincing.
“And don’t forget to send Mrs. Preston’s friend a thank-you note after you leave the Vineyard,” my mom added. “I put a hostess gift in your bag, along with your stationary.”
The stationary had been one of my graduation gifts. In my mother’s world, the only thing worse than not sending a thank-you letter was not having monogrammed stationary upon which to declare your appreciation.
“I will,” I assured her, the Bourne Bridge coming into view ahead of us. The canal under the bridge was the official dividing line separating the Cape from the rest of Massachusetts, and even though we’d taken family vacations in various Cape towns over the years, a mix of nervousness and excitement started to swell inside me. Sure, I was less than thirty minutes from seeing Josie and Lucy, but I was also about to spend the summer living in a strange room, in a house I’d never seen, in a town I didn’t know, working at a job I’d never done. It wasn’t as simple as merely transplanting my life into a new place with my best friends. If you didn’t count Lucy and Josie, everything else would be new to me. And I was already something of an outsider, arriving weeks after Lucy and Josie had settled in. It felt like I would be trying to learn the steps of a new dance when everyone else had been practicing for weeks.
I knew from the pictures and texts they’d been sending me that Lucy and Josie had a ton of stories to share. When they’d first arrived at Josie’s house, I’d received photos of a bedroom with three twin beds covered in matching comforters and pillows, the last one with the caption: yours. The pictures kept coming—different rooms of the house, the pool, a hammock that I assumed was strung between two trees in the Holdens’ yard, a path of windswept seagrass leading to a stretch of sandy beach. Then there were the videos that followed Josie and Lucy around the Scoop Shack as they showed me each of the flavors in the ice cream case, demonstrated how to use the milkshake machine, and where the extra napkins were kept. Because I was basically starting my job at the Shack on the busiest weekend of the year, they thought it would be helpful if I had some idea what I was getting myself into before I arrived, even if I was sure dipping a soft serve cone into chocolate sprinkles without having the entire tower of ice cream fall off was more difficult than they made it appear.
After the first week, though, the pictures and texts were less about the finer tips of working at an ice cream stand and more about the other people working there, and all the new names and faces were actually more difficult to keep track of than the skills I’d need at the Shack. At first, it was fun to see my summer unfold. It was infinitely more amusing to watch Josie whisper about the guy carrying the garbage out to the dumpster as she panned her phone’s camera on his ass than it was to listen to my mom explain to yet another journalist why using all caps in a text is the equivalent of shouting in someone’s ear and should only be used in the case of an emergency—and if it truly is an emergency, then you should be dialing 911, not texting. But toward the end of the tour, there were fewer and fewer texts and photos from Lucy and Josie. I’d convinced myself that the novelty of being on the Cape had worn off and the realities of working at the Shack weren’t as exciting as those first days. I tried not to dwell on the other possibility—that they were having so much fun they forgot to share it with me.
“There it is,” my mom said, pointing to the low green bushes spelling out Cape Cod on the bank of the rotary that connected the bridge to the rest of the Cape.
In twenty minutes, we’d be at Josie’s house, and then I’d be on the ferry on my way to see Luke.
As the car’s navigation system directed us through downtown Falmouth, and we wound our way toward the Holdens’ house, I could barely keep still. My mom gently placed her hand on my knee in a not-so-subtle hint to stop bouncing it up and down and annoying her.
“Sorry,” I apologized, and she laughed.
“Just don’t get out until I stop the car, okay?”
“I won’t,” I promised, but it was all I could do to keep from unbuckling my seat belt and preparing to bolt the second the car pulled into the Holdens’ driveway. Suddenly, three weeks without Josie and Lucy felt like months.
The voice on the GPS informed us that we’d reached our destination, and my mom pulled into a driveway lined with crushed shells that popped and crackled as the car slowly made its way toward the house. But even though the navigation screen declared we should stop driving, I wasn’t convinced we were in the right place. The house was nothing like I expected, because what I expected was something huge and new and befitting a tech mogul. What I discovered when we reached the front door was a traditional Cape Cod beach house with sun-faded gray cedar shingles and cornflower blue hydrangea bushes lining the front walkway. It was a decent size, but nothing like the place the Holdens called home in Branford. The house wasn’t even directly on the beach, which is what I expected from the photos I’d seen. Sure, the beach was across the street, but it wasn’t the same as walking out of your house and digging your toes into the sand.
My mom pulled the car around the circular drive and stopped when we reached the path leading to the front door. “This is really lovely.”
She was right, it was, but for some reason, I felt like my vision of the rest of the summer had already shifted, as if I’d set myself up for one thing and was realizing that I didn’t really know what I was getting into at all.
I expected the sound of the car’s tires crunching along the shell driveway to send Lucy and Josie bounding out the front door to greet me, but as my mom killed the engine, the only noise I could hear was the distant crashing of waves. It was barely past ten o’clock and Lucy and Josie had probably been out late with their summer friends, but still.
“Let’s go say hi!” My mom grabbed the smaller of my bags from the backseat and left me to empty the trunk as she headed up the walkway and waited for me to join her.
She had barely tapped the brass pineapple-shaped door knocker when the front door flew open. This was more like it. I closed my eyes and braced myself for the onslaught of hugs and high-pitched shrieks I expected after not seeing my best friends in weeks. What I got was a polite hug and a deep baritone voice.
“Emily! You made it!” Mr. Holden was holding a mug of coffee in one hand and an iPad in the other. “Come on in!”
Mrs. Holden appeared from around the corner, carrying two more steaming mugs toward us. “Patty, come have some coffee with us.” She kissed my mom on the cheek, handed her one of the mugs, and then turned to me. “Emily, the girls are still sleeping. They didn’t get home until… well, I was asleep, so I imagine it was pretty late. Go on up, you’re all sharing the first room on the right.”
My mom handed me my second bag and followed the Holdens down a hallway that I assumed led to the kitchen.
There was no exuberant greeting, nobody running up to tell me how much they missed me.
It was the opposite of the reaction I’d received when I moved back to Branford and saw Lucy and Josie in the hallway of Heywood Academy for the first time in almost three years. They’d screamed my name, wrapped their arms around me, and assailed me with questions to bridge the gap between the girl they’d been best friends with freshman year and the person returning as a mid-year senior. I’d instantly noticed the differences in my two best friends, the little things that didn’t make them who they were, but nevertheless changed who they seemed to be—the new highlights in Josie’s hair, or Lucy’s once haggardly bitten fingernails that were polished and shaped into perfect half-moons. It was as if in my absence they’d become more complete, like a painting that appears finished until additional details and brushstrokes are layered on top, and you realize that what you’d seen at first was nothing more than a ro
ugh sketch.
This time, I’d only been away for three weeks, hardly long enough to make a difference. But as I walked up the stairs to find what would be my bedroom for the rest of the summer, I felt it again, that twisting in my stomach, the uncertainty of what—or who—I’d find when I opened the door.
What I found were three twin beds in a darkened room, the brilliant yellow morning light filtering in around the drawn curtains. A sliver of sunbeam landed across the two beds against the far wall, where Josie and Lucy were passed out under matching seafoam green comforters. The rumpled starfish pattern suggested where I could find their heads.
My bed was opposite theirs, and perfectly made up with a single matching throw pillow. Neither of the bodies in the beds moved. I set my bags down on the hardwood floor more loudly than I had to, and hoped they’d hear me.
The body in the bed nearest the door stirred, exposing a bare foot as the comforter slipped off the side of the mattress.
“What time is it?” Josie’s hoarse morning voice asked, right before she poked her head out from under the comforter.
“Almost ten thirty. You guys don’t have to get up,” I offered, hoping they would. “Your mom said you got home late.”
“Anyone who thinks working at an ice cream stand on Cape Cod in the summer is easy has never done it.” Lucy’s head appeared from under her pillow. “It’s nonstop. I swear, if I have to listen to one more kid debate chocolate versus rainbow sprinkles while a line of seventeen people stand there waiting for the verdict, I will poke my eyes out with a waffle cone.”
“It’s only been four weeks,” I said, laughing. “It can’t be that bad.”
“Bad?” Josie chimed in, perking up a little. “We’re working for the ice cream Nazi. I swear, my dad must have harbored a serious grudge against some ice cream worker from his youth, because he acts like we’re curing cancer, not serving dessert.”
I sat down on my bed, kicked off my flip-flops, and tucked my legs under me. “You guys aren’t making it sound that great.”
The Next Chapter of Luke Page 6
