by Lexa Hillyer
Wait a second.
“You found it . . . on the dock?” she asks. Tali’s face is so hot at this point, she’s sure steam must be rising from her skin. Did any of it happen? What about the part where she got him fired . . . the part where he hated her and stormed off, never wanting to see her again?
He takes her right hand and positions it palm up, then places the necklace there, folding her fingers around it. “Here,” he says, biting his lip slightly.
He starts to back up, but she grabs his arm, forcing him to stay. The feeling she had in her dream, or her past, whatever it was, when she flew off her stolen bike in a neon-green lacy thong and bra, throwing herself into the lake, comes back to her now. Wild. Free. Like nothing anyone else thinks matters—it’s just her, and the world lying before her, open to any possibility. Including this one.
“Shane,” she says, her words coming out breathy and urgent.
“Yeah?” he says, adjusting his hat with his free hand.
“I have something for you as well.”
“Oh, you don’t . . . I mean, that’s okay, I don’t need—”
“Just . . . shut up for a second, will you?” She tries to make her eyes look stern.
He puts his hands up in a sign of surrender.
Now another memory comes over her—the sensation of being thrown overboard on Casino Night, crashing backward into the freezing cold waves, thrashing alone out there in the rough, dark water, and then feeling a strong pair of arms wrap around her, pulling her to safety.
She stands on her tiptoes, places her hands on Shane’s broad shoulders, and kisses him.
She can tell he’s startled at first, but then he wraps his arms around her and kisses her back, his lips warm and urgent and strong, his chin just slightly scratchy against hers.
She pulls away for a breath.
“What was that for?” he asks, searching her eyes. He looks truly startled.
“Saving my life, remember?” she replies, unable to stop the huge dorky grin from forming across her face.
His jaw drops slightly, and he continues to look confused. “I don’t remember . . . I don’t think . . . Are you sure . . . Wait, when did I save your life?”
For a second, Tali’s disappointed. It wasn’t real. It seemed real, but it couldn’t have been—at least, not for him.
But then, she feels relieved. Because this means she can start over, from here, going forward. She can do everything differently from now on. Including this.
She smiles, feeling her face redden. “Just now,” she whispers.
He shakes his head. “You might be the most forward girl I’ve ever met.”
She laughs. “Are you okay with that?”
“Okay with it? If I’d known, I would have tried the necklace thing way sooner.” His grin takes over his whole face and all she wants to do is ask him about his four older sisters and whether he still listens to the Lost Tigers and whatever happened with his plans to transfer schools . . . but she’s got to slow down. He doesn’t know her yet.
She needs to earn his trust.
Because—even though she still can’t believe it—none of what she just experienced really happened. And yet somehow, anyway, Shane, present-day Shane, is here, in her arms, real and solid. Not the guy she thought she wanted, but so obviously the guy she needed, car-oil stains and all—whether he knows it yet or not.
And she can’t wait.
“How did you know?” he asks, looking into her eyes.
“Know . . . what?”
“That I, well, liked you. I thought I kept it pretty subtle that summer. But it was enough of a crush that I couldn’t go back the next year. I don’t know if I should even admit that. That’s why I started up at the tow company instead. It’s nowhere near as fun, but I couldn’t go back to Okahatchee and risk anyone finding out I’d had a thing for one of the campers.”
So he quit. He didn’t get fired because of her. He left for his own reasons. He left because of her, but the situation was different. And she’d had no idea. Because she’d been blind. Because in the real past, she hadn’t had a chance to open her eyes.
She’s about to tell him more—about how she’s changed—when a glass shatters on the other side of the room. A bunch of people quiet down and turn their heads, including Tali and Shane. Her heart thuds in her chest, as though the broken glass has awoken her too suddenly from a dream.
Then someone screams.
It’s Luce. “Help!” she’s screaming. “My friend is sick!”
Tali’s heart stops. Joy has dropped her water glass and collapsed to the ground. Zoe is leaning over her now, shaking her shoulders. “Joy, wake up!” she shouts, as Tali tears across the room toward her friends.
By the time she pushes through the crowd and crouches down beside Joy and Zoe, Luce and Andrew have gathered as well. It’s just like finding her in the woods, only worse somehow. She’s breathing, faintly, but she’s not waking up.
“Come on, Joy,” Luce says, urgency in her voice as she clutches Joy’s shoulders.
Ryder emerges out of the crowd, kneeling beside them, shouting for someone to call an ambulance. Then the Cruz is there, speaking in staccato into a cell phone. Mr. Wilkinson materializes, too, talking rapidly, urgently, holding on to Bernadette Cruz by the elbow, like she might fall over. It all seems to happen so fast, Tali’s not sure if she even remembers to breathe. The wailing siren echoing through the mountains. The red and blue lights flashing through the rec hall window. The crowd parting to let Joy’s parents through. Tali hasn’t seen Joy’s parents in a few years. Joan and Allen Freeman. Joan is crying. She, too, looks thinner and much older than Tali remembers, gray streaking her brown hair. Allen is talking in urgent commands to the EMTs as they lift Joy onto a stretcher. Tali catches only brief capsules of his words—missed meds, stolen car, unsupervised, nurses were supposed to . . .
Fear swirls through Tali’s chest, spiraling up to her head, making her dizzy. “What are you talking about?” she hears herself say, though it sounds like the voice of a little girl. “What’s wrong with her? What’s wrong with Joy?” Now her voice is getting more high-pitched. Hysterical. “What’s happening to her?”
As the words spill out, she feels herself spinning closer and closer to the dark center of the whirlpool, the answer to the mystery she could sense was there all along, staring at her like a black pupil. The secret. The truth.
Joan is squatting down to their level, one hand on Tali’s shoulder and one on Luce’s. Zoe is curled up with her arms around her knees. “Joy didn’t tell you?” Joan asks Luce, then looks to Zoe, then Tali. “Oh, honey . . . girls . . .” Joan shakes her head, tears still trickling down her face. She wipes them with the back of her hand.
“What is it, Mrs. Freeman?” Luce asks, her voice shaking.
And then in a hoarse voice, Zoe says, “You have to let us know. Whatever it is.”
Joan just shakes her head again, unable to speak. Allen steps in next to her, helping her to stand. “Joy is very sick,” he tells them. His voice, by contrast, is steady and even, filling Tali with sudden rage. “She’s been fighting it for the last couple of years, but she’s . . . she’s no longer winning the fight. She wanted to come so badly tonight. I think she wanted to see you all. She missed you so much.”
And then Tali is stumbling through the rec hall doors after them. Mr. Wilkinson is there, holding the girls back, as Joy’s parents are getting into their car, slamming the doors with finality, following behind the ambulance as it wails away into the night, and Tali is somehow inside the ambulance and not, standing there on the lawn unable to feel her own hands or her feet, simply watching, helpless, as the ambulance lights flicker behind the trees, before the vehicles turn a bend and are gone.
26
There are certain moments in life that no SAT word can describe. There’s no thesaurus in any la
nguage that can find the right adjective for how Luce feels as she walks into her house late that night, closely followed by Andrew, her mom, and her twin brothers. Her mom heads inside first, to tuck in the younger kids. Luce sees her father’s car in the driveway and, for a second, wishes he was working late tonight, like he does so often. There’s a lot she doesn’t understand about her parents’ marriage, or her perfectly organized and polished family, she realizes.
Then again, there’s a lot she didn’t know about Joy, either—like the horrible secret she kept from all of them for the past two years. Even as it sickens Luce to think about it, it makes a disturbing kind of sense. The way she vanished so abruptly, refusing to talk or let them visit. The heaviness Luce felt in the air earlier that night, when they first arrived back at camp and saw Joy, so thin and so frail, leaning against the wall, waiting for them. The gravel in her voice when she told them she’d come to say good-bye.
Good-bye to all of it, she’d said.
“Are you okay?” Andrew asks, putting an arm around Luce.
She shakes her head. Of course she isn’t okay. Upstairs, her room will be sitting there just like she left it, filled with boxes packed to the brim with stuff she’s supposed to bring to Prince-ton. But this terrifies her. How can she move forward, knowing what she knows now?
“Do you mind if I talk to my mom alone for a minute?” she asks.
“Of course not,” he replies, taking a seat at the kitchen island.
“I’ll be right back,” she says, heading up the stairs to the study, where her mom has plopped down her bag.
Luce enters the room and quietly closes the door behind them. “I need to talk to you,” she says.
Her mom looks up, pushing some of her curly dark hair back from her face and retucking it into her bun. She looks tired and overheated, but pretty—her features delicate and refined. “Sweetie, you must be in so much shock,” she says, sinking into her leather chair, then bending down to rifle through a drawer.
For a minute, Luce isn’t sure whether she’s referring to what happened with Joy, or what happened in the past, with Mr. Wilkinson. It occurs to her that while she’s been carrying around the burden of this knowledge, her mom probably has no idea that she knows.
It became clear to Luce as soon as they returned to the present that her trip back in time must have been imagined—an extended, if incredibly vivid, hallucination. There was simply no other way to explain it logically, and she knew from the moment she spoke to Andrew that he hadn’t experienced it, hadn’t remembered anything of their game of Strip Twenty Questions or their rooftop picnic or their attempts to ensnare her mother.
Which made her wonder—did her mom’s affair really happen? If it did, was it simply that Luce hadn’t noticed the first time around? Did her weird flashback somehow reveal an unconscious suspicion?
She needs answers. That much is clear.
“I am,” she says now. “I am in shock. But I need to know something from you. Did you ever—”
Before she can finish her question, she hears a sniffle. It takes her so much by surprise that she can’t complete her sentence. Her mother looks up and wipes her eyes.
Her mom.
Bernadette Cruz.
The woman who says crying is a waste of time, who says achievers don’t have regrets.
Luce is frozen. “Mom?”
Her mother shakes her head. “Can you get your father, please?” Another tear slides down her face.
Luce is so frightened by the sight of it, all she can do is obey, the demands of her planned confrontation instantly forgotten. She hurries to her parents’ bedroom, where her father is stepping into his slippers, his straight dark hair matted funnily over his balding head. He’s got on his striped pajamas. “Luce?” he says, scratching his head at her sleepily. “How was reunion night?”
She practically chokes. He doesn’t know about any of it. But she’s in too much shock to say so. She simply shakes her head. “Mom, um, needs you. In the study” is all she can say. Her mind’s a blank.
He looks at her like she’s grown a third ear but trudges into the hallway and over to the study, Luce following a few feet behind him.
She peers around the bend of the doorway after he enters the room, and she hears him saying, “What is this?” His voice drops an octave to a tone she’s rarely heard from him before, except when he’s taking care of Amelia. Then her father wraps her mother in his arms. He turns back to face Luce. “Luce, honey. Can you close the door, please?”
And so she does.
She stumbles back down the stairs in a haze.
“Let’s get some air,” she says to Andrew, who is typing into his phone on the counter in the kitchen. She leads the way through the house to the sliding door facing the backyard. As she slides it open, the automatic porch light illuminates the remains of the picnic Luce set up earlier, rose petals still strewn across the iron garden bench and stone patio floor, wilting slightly. It would be funny if it weren’t so awful—her aborted plan to lose her virginity to Andrew seems so stupid now. Just another attempt to control her life, to control the future. On some level, she knows she wanted to sleep with Andrew so he wouldn’t break up with her. How pathetic it sounds to her now.
Besides, the problem was never that he might leave her. He loves her. He always has.
They sit down on the bench and he moves to put his arm around her again. After a moment of hesitation, she leans into him, unable to shake the image of her mother leaning into her father. Her mother crying.
“It’s going to be okay, whatever happens,” he says, sounding, for a brief moment, almost like Joy.
“Will it?” She stares up at him. This boy who is so loyal, so good. The perfect boyfriend. What does Luce do with perfect now, though, when everything else around her has fallen apart?
“What can I do?” he asks her. “What do you need?”
She shakes her head, trying to find the right vocabulary. “I just need . . .” She thinks of Tali’s strength, of Zoe’s independence, of Joy’s quiet depth. How when she’s with her friends, she feels somehow bigger than when she’s alone, more powerful.
She looks out at the dark yard beyond their pool of light, the trees thick and looming, and beyond them, a seemingly endless smattering of stars blinking down on half the world at once. “Space,” she says now, realizing it. “I need space.” The confession burns her throat like a vodka shot. “Maybe forever. I’m not sure.” She’s never had to say anything this hard before. She feels destructive. Out of control. Like she is sinking in quicksand and she wants to grab on to him, but would only bring him down with her.
Andrew puts his arm down and looks at her, stricken for a second. His face twitches, and she prays that he won’t cry. She’s seen him cry only twice: once when his grandfather died last November, and once when he broke his leg skiing and had to miss out on varsity soccer. It kills her to be the one hurting him now.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers. She wants to take it back, but she can’t.
He clears his throat. “No, I . . . I get it,” he says finally.
Now it’s her turn to stare. “You do?”
“We’re both going to different colleges. We have our whole lives ahead of us. And . . . it’s like Mr. Wilkinson said. You can’t plan for everything.”
“You remember that?” she asks, stunned, like she has just stumbled upon a trick question on a pop quiz, and the more she studies it, the further she drifts from the right answer, deeper into confusion.
“Yeah, he used to say that all the time. Like when the sailing team lost because of some sort of westerly wind.” Andrew gives her a small, sad smile. “You know I remember it all, babe,” he replies.
The familiar saying hovers in the air between them—ironically confirming both that the past never changed, and that Andrew hasn’t either. It’s just a statement, a final admis
sion of how much he loves her, how much real history they’ve shared. And the words cut some invisible tether inside her, loosen the rope holding her above the quicksand. Gravity pulls her under. The emotion rattles her small frame, a tide coming through, a wave she has been holding back for so long she forgot it was even there. Now it rises to submerge her, sobs choking through her.
She doesn’t know the last time she cried. Luciana Cruz isn’t a crier; she’s a fixer. She holds it together for everyone. But here she is, crying for the first time since she was a little kid, since before she was the one who had to make sure her siblings did their homework after school. Since before she had to make sure that at least 76 percent of her Brewster classmates passed the SATs with Ivy-level scores, before being captain, or leader, or valedictorian kept her up and sleepless, before she was the one who had to make sure that Amelia took the right pills each morning, that the driveway lights were on for Dad at night, and her mom’s Tupperware-sealed meals were each properly labeled in the fridge for tomorrow.
She cries for her parents, who never had the perfect happy marriage she believed they did, and more, she cries for the whole idea of perfection, which feels like a giant red balloon that has finally popped, or slipped from her grasp and fled into the sky. She cries for Andrew, who is sitting beside her so stoic and solid and, she knows, so totally heartbroken. Curling into her body, she cries for herself, and how much she’ll miss him.
She even cries for her former self, the girl who struggled so hard to fit into a mold, that she became just that: a mold, like the kind they once used to make clay sculptures at camp. Just the shape of a girl. An idea of a girl. A shell.
