Emily warned me ahead of time, if you call receiving a text fifteen minutes before her ferry arrived a warning. She was still coming to the Vineyard, but she wasn’t coming alone.
The whole thing was weird, especially considering that Emily had practically planned every minute we would have together while she was here. Emily not only looked up the bus schedule to Aquinnah so we could have lunch at the restaurant on the cliffs next to the lighthouse, but she calculated our trip almost down to the minute so we would arrive after the lunch crowd, with enough time to get back to Edgartown for ice cream at Mad Martha’s.
The idea of hobbling onto a bus with my crutches wasn’t exactly appealing, but there was one thing I hadn’t thought of when I’d decided to stay on the Vineyard with Charlie and Sam for the summer: it’s actually really boring. With Sam working and Charlie doing anything but working, I’d basically realized that when he was kayaking or playing tennis or biking over to a friend’s house, the only thing left to do was torture myself. This typically involved watching game videos of last season’s Tufts lacrosse team, checking out the videos being posted by the camp where I should have been coaching, and looking up gnarly images of orthopedic surgeries gone wrong. Not exactly productive activities.
Ever since Emily told me she had Wednesdays off, though, I’d been looking forward to having her here. And while, at home, I was used to the fact that being around Emily usually meant being around Josie and Lucy, too, I had no idea what the four of us would do all day. Together. On an island. Me, my girlfriend, my sort-of-ex-girlfriend, and their best friend. It sounded like a reality TV show.
And since I couldn’t exactly tell Emily that I wished she’d asked me first, I did the next best thing I could think of. I recruited Charlie for the day.
At least we didn’t have to drive all the way to Vineyard Haven to pick them up, which would have been pretty much impossible, since we couldn’t all fit in the Jeep with my leg taking up the whole back seat. Usually, Sam got first dibs on the car, since she was the one who had a paying job to get to, but Charlie convinced Melanie to let him use her SUV for the day so we could get around. I think Charlie was more excited about Emily visiting than I was, if only because he had worked his way through most of the girls on the island already, and Josie and Lucy were two new prospects.
“So Josie’s the one you went out with before Emily,” Charlie clarified as we waited for the ferry to come into Memorial Wharf, which was right downtown and just a few minutes from Charlie’s house.
“Yeah, but it’s not like I jumped from one to the other,” I told him. “There was a break in between.”
“Right, the whole party thing where Josie found you with that girl…” Charlie thought the story was infinitely amusing, and no matter how many times I told him it wasn’t that interesting, he found a way to get me to retell it all over again.
“Do we really need to rehash the details?”
“I don’t think there are many girls who would be so forgiving of you dating their best friend after that.”
“Josie and I were never that serious, and besides, like I told you, she helped get me and Emily back together.”
“You know what? After everything you’ve told me, it actually sounds like Josie is the really nice one.”
“I never said she wasn’t nice. She just isn’t for me.”
“I get it. Hey, I’m the one who told you not to blow it with Emily by doing something stupid.” Charlie shot me a knowing look, which I wanted to ignore but couldn’t. “Besides, she can sure as hell play ping pong.”
I stared down at the rubber cap on the tip of my crutch.
“You haven’t told her, right?” he asked, although it was more of a confirmation than a question.
I shook my head and pushed my crutch through the coating of sand that had blown across the parking lot, marking an X beside my foot and then scrubbing it away.
“Good. Keep it that way.” Charlie lowered his voice even though there was no one nearby to hear us. “Trust me.”
I wasn’t convinced Charlie was right, and not just because he hadn’t had a serious girlfriend in his life. But he was the closest I ever came to having a brother, and I realized that, even if he barely knew Emily, he knew how much she meant to me. Still, I couldn’t help thinking I should tell her what happened while she was on tour with her mom, even if Charlie thought that was the equivalent of asking her to kick me in the balls.
“So you’re cool if Josie and I hit it off? Or the other one?” Charlie didn’t have a type, which meant he usually cast a wide net, but since Lucy had just broken up with Owen, I was pretty sure she wouldn’t be all that excited to have Charlie all over her as soon as her feet hit dry land.
“The other one is Lucy,” I told him. “And yeah, I’m good. But don’t get your hopes up.”
“Duly noted,” Charlie assured me. “You want to wait here or walk over to the railing where they come in?”
“I think I’m going to sit down over there,” I told him, pointing my crutch at the low brick wall surrounding a life-sized sculpture of a finback whale’s smooth black tail diving into the green grass like a question mark, creating the illusion that its massive body was submerged underground. “You can meet them on the wharf if you want, though.”
“Make a good impression.” Charlie considered my suggestion. “Not a bad idea. I’ll bring them over.”
By the time I made it to the wall and sat down, the passenger ferry from Falmouth was nudging itself alongside the wharf, where Charlie was waiting to greet the girls as soon as they stepped off the boat.
I expected to see Emily at the head of the line, anxious to jump onto the wharf and find me. But Josie led the passengers off, her camera in one hand as she pointed things out to Lucy with the other—the small Chappy Ferry carrying a few cars and standing passengers across the narrow inlet to the harbor, the pristine white homes lining the edge of the water, even me.
Josie was pointing at me.
I stood up, but Josie started waving for me to move aside and held up her camera, as if I should have known it wasn’t me she was interested in, it was the photo op behind me—which was a good thing.
It wasn’t that Josie scared me, at least not in the same way as a two-hundred-pound defenseman attacking me at full sprint did. It was just that I still didn’t know exactly how to act around her—whether she was really okay with me now that Emily and I were back together, or if it was just a matter of time before she decided she’d made a mistake when she arranged for me and Emily to meet and work things out. No matter what happened, she was still Emily’s best friend, and that meant I couldn’t piss her off without serious fallout.
I caught so much shit from my friends for even agreeing to meet Josie when she texted me about Emily right after the time capsule assembly. After all, she’d been the one to fish the guide out of the trash and give it me. “I think you should see this,” Josie had told me before handing over a notebook with Emily’s familiar bubbly handwriting across the front. At first, I’d thought she was giving me notes for a class, but then I saw my name, thumbed through the pages, and realized I was reading words and details from my conversations with Emily. And then there were the tips. Emily had reduced our relationship to a neatly numbered list of dos and don’ts, cataloging our progress with the detached, objective observations of a scientist recording the results of an experiment. I didn’t even know what I was reading. It made no sense. The person dissecting every word I spoke, every move I made, sounded nothing like the Emily I’d spent weeks getting to know. It even occurred to me that Josie could’ve made it all up, that she was still angry at me. But that would’ve been a lot of trouble to go to just to get back at me, and there was no mistaking that every page was written in the careful penmanship of a girl who grew up writing thank-you letters after every holiday.
Every midfielder on the lacrosse team told me how brilliant it was to turn the tables on Emily and show everyone what she was really like. Our goalie was con
vinced that moving away had caused Emily to have some sort of mental break, like one of those girls you see on a true crime show, who seem totally normal on the outside, until they snap and you realize what you thought was a sweet smile was hiding the psycho with a knife behind her back. All my friends on the team—even the guys on the bench, sophomores and freshmen who didn’t know Emily before she moved away—had an opinion of her now, and it could be summed up in two words: stay away.
What she did to you. That’s how they referred to it. Why would you want to talk to her after what she did to you? How could you even consider giving her a second chance after what she did to you? You must really hate her after what she did to you.
When Josie had first texted and asked to meet me to talk about what happened, I didn’t even reply. I ignored her and barely resisted the urge to tell her to fuck off. But she was unrelenting—a quality that had contributed to our own breakup, but that finally wore me down when it came to Emily. I agreed to meet after school, if only to have her stop blowing up my phone. We met and I listened, barely. I’d had no intention of doing anything Josie asked, least of all forgiving Emily. I hardly even looked at Josie when she told me why they hatched their plan, and how Emily had thrown the notebook in the garbage can before the assembly because she’d decided she couldn’t go through with placing it in the time capsule. Fine. Whatever. So Emily had finally grown a conscience at the last minute; that didn’t absolve her of the lies she’d told me for three months.
When Josie finished pleading Emily’s case, I asked if she was done and she nodded.
I’d started to walk away, leaving Josie in the parking lot with her excuses and explanations that didn’t make a bit of difference to me.
“So it doesn’t matter? Nothing I said changed your mind?” Josie had asked.
I’d kept my back to her and continued walking.
“You know, she didn’t have to tell us how she felt about you. She could’ve just said she lost the notebook or dropped it in the toilet or whatever, but she didn’t.” Josie wasn’t letting up. “She didn’t want to go through with it anymore. She was done pretending you didn’t matter, even if it meant losing her best friends.”
I didn’t turn around, and Josie gave up trying to stop me. Even though I didn’t have practice that day, I went to the field and tried not to think about what Josie had said, but no matter how many plays I ran or drills I practiced, I couldn’t get one thing out of my head. Not the excuses or attempts to defend Emily, but how Emily didn’t want to pretend anymore. I was pissed, that was real. I was also confused and about a million other things I didn’t understand. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t also pretending. Because I was pretending that I’d stopped caring about Emily.
Everyone assumed we were over, which is what happens when your breakup plays out in a gym filled with every student, teacher, and administrator in the school watching as you call out your girlfriend for being a liar. No one expected me to do anything other than treat Emily how she’d treated me, only they didn’t know what wasn’t on the pages of the notebook, and I did. Emily may have been pretending to be my girlfriend, but I knew she wasn’t faking how she felt. And neither was I.
Then, out of the blue, Josie texted me two words: Friendly’s now.
And I went. Even though Owen told me I was crazy and grabbed the car keys from my hand so I couldn’t drive.
It would have been easier to hate Emily than try to understand how she could do that to me. I didn’t hate her, though. I hated what she did, but I couldn’t believe that it had all been an act. There was no way she was that good of an actress. And our last day together, when she came over to my house… afterwards, I’d accused her of sleeping with me as some sort of final act she needed to complete before finishing The Book of Luke. I didn’t want it to be true. I wanted to believe it meant more to her than a concluding paragraph in her notebook before writing The End.
What I didn’t know, though, was if the pain she’d inflicted was a bruise that would fade with time, or a permanent scar I couldn’t ignore. Maybe that’s why I’d finally let my friends get to me; why, with Emily across the country with her mom, I’d decided to shut everyone up for good by proving what I could do to her.
Josie pointed her camera lens at the whale tail sculpture to my right and got all serious, like she does when she’s in photographer mode.
That’s when I saw Emily step out from behind Josie, and she saw me.
Emily’s pace picked up and she practically speed walked over, her hands swinging by her sides, just short of running.
“We made it!” Emily announced, throwing her arms out like exclamation marks.
“You sure did.” I laughed and nodded toward Charlie, who was having an animated conversation with Lucy over by the car, his hands grazing her shoulders and arms as he emphasized every other word by touching her bare skin. “I don’t know who’s happier, me or him.”
“I sure hope it’s you.” Emily stepped closer and sat down on the brick wall next to me. “Otherwise I spent six hours of my pay on a round trip ferry ride for nothing.”
“Not nothing,” I assured her, laying my hand on her knee, which was damp and splotchy with sunburn. I bent my head down and rested her pink nose against mine. “You need sunblock.”
“Hey, stay there.” Josie held her camera up, squinting the eye that wasn’t pressed against the viewfinder. She waved her hand frantically, directing me and Emily to sit closer together.
“Is this what it’s been like all summer?” I asked Emily, pulling her against my side as Josie turned the camera in different angles, rotating it to the right and then the left, as if that made a difference in what she was seeing.
“Lucy says she mostly shoots at the beach—shells, waves, seagulls, that sort of thing,” Emily told me, although she seemed almost perplexed by Josie’s chosen subject matter. “She’s suddenly embraced the ocean and everything in it.”
“She does know this whale isn’t real, right?”
Emily looked over her shoulder at the tail and then whipped around to face me. “What?” Her mouth fell open, as if I’d just told her there’s no such thing as Santa Claus. “It’s not?”
For one click of Josie’s camera, I thought Emily was serious. Then she broke out into a grin that lit up her entire face like the sun shimmering on the surface of the harbor, and we collapsed against each other, our laughter tumbling between us as Emily’s hair blew in the breeze and obscured our faces.
“I was worried for a minute. I thought you were serious.”
“I may not be a marine biologist, but I think I can tell a live mammal from a sculpture—especially when it’s diving into a patch of grass behind a white picket fence.”
“Hey!” Charlie yelled across the wharf parking lot, trying to get our attentions. “Lucy wants to head to the beach.”
Josie suddenly found something more interesting than the man-made whale tail. “Me too!” she chimed in.
“What about you?” I asked Emily.
“Can you really go?” She touched the crutch being held up by the brick wall. “There’s no way you can get around on sand, can you?”
“I haven’t tried yet,” I admitted. “But I can if you want.”
“Let me go talk to them.” Emily jumped up and headed toward Josie, grabbing her hand and leading her over to Lucy and Charlie.
Honestly, I was hoping Emily didn’t decide we should go, but it wasn’t just because there was no way in hell I could use my crutches on South Beach. Sam was working today, and, even though Emily hadn’t brought her up since the last visit, I knew the best thing to do was to keep them apart. If not to avoid another run-in between them, then at least to keep today from going off the rails.
Emily came running back to me, her face flushed, which made her eyes seem even greener in contrast. “Okay!” she started, all breathy and excited, although I wasn’t quite sure why. “Here’s the deal. They’re going to go to the beach for a little bit and meet us back home.
Are you okay with that? Charlie said they could drop us off at the house on their way, but I thought it would be fun if we hung around here in town, and you could show me around.”
“And you’re okay not going with them?”
“It was my idea, actually, but I made you—or your knee—the bad guy here,” she confided, like she’d pulled off the greatest coup ever. “If you tell them, though, I’ll deny it.”
“So this giddy Emily I’m seeing here is actually brilliantly sly Emily, who managed to get us alone for at least the next couple of hours with her friends being none the wiser?”
“One and the same,” she declared.
Man, I loved this girl.
• • •
“It looks like you’re an old pro on those things.” Emily was surprised by my ability to keep up as we walked along the uneven brick sidewalks leading back to Melanie’s house. “Way better than the last time I saw you.”
I’d taken Emily around downtown Edgartown—slowly, but thankfully the town is basically four streets, so Emily still got to see all the shops where I’d spent the last few weeks. She’d kept saying how adorable it was, how sweet all the small shops were with their flower baskets and windows dressed in bright greens and pinks. But when she’d commented about how quiet it was just one street over from the main street, I knew what she was really saying: boring.
In true Emily style, though, she didn’t want to focus on the negative, and by the time we reached Melanie’s house, she’d almost convinced me that quiet was the greatest thing in the world.
“I’m glad we did that,” she told me as we walked through the side yard on our way to the boathouse. “Now I can picture you here and imagine what you’re doing without me.”
“Well, tomorrow you can picture me at physical therapy,” I said.
The Next Chapter of Luke Page 16
