by Justina Chen
“Skype, text, IM. You name it, we’ll try it.”
I knew what he was suggesting—we buck conventional wisdom and prove the improbable: Eighteen-year-old kids can fall in love, forever love. Jackson leaned down then to kiss me, a tender pledge: I will be true.
Resisting that was impossible. I threw my arms around Jackson and pressed close, my chest against his, missing him badly. His hand cupped my neck and he kissed me, imprinting his lips on mine.
Just then my phone chimed. Without looking at the screen, I knew it was Mom, with her impeccably timed interruption at the faintest hint of arousal, no different from the night of my first date with Jackson. I knew she was going to remind me that it was time to come home, time to step back into the antiseptic life she had orchestrated for me, which meant clearing our damned home of dust balls and clearing my life of Jackson. I ignored the phone and deepened our kiss, as if I could truly lose myself. It was Jackson who stepped away, breathing hard.
“Not yet,” I moaned.
The phone chirped insistently. I sighed, irritated at my mom—even if, in some small way that I refused to inspect too carefully, I felt a tiny bit of relief at this reprieve from having the breakup talk with Jackson. Dad’s unexpected approval had thrown my decision off kilter.
Jackson raked his fingers through his hair, looking frustrated before he managed a wry grin. He was always so Zen, my Jackson. For now he pulled me close, leaned his forehead against mine, and whispered, “Thanksgiving, and you’ll be back. November isn’t that long away, Rebel.”
I nodded and leaned against him but didn’t tell him about the plane tickets Dad had offered. Jackson’s fingers combed through my hair, making my scalp tingle with pleasure. The feeling almost made me want to grow my hair out, if it meant having his fingers for a few moments longer, that gentle downward pull, that melting along my spine.
Maybe I should tell Jackson, Yes. Why not try?
The phone rang again.
“Geez! What’s her deal?” I groused, frustrated.
“Well, your mom was the one who asked me to come early so we could hang out together.”
“Why?”
“It’s a surprise….”
So we climbed back into Jackson’s car and drove home, my hand in his until he needed to shift the gear. Only then did Jackson move my hand to rest on his thigh, and squeeze me gently, as though he wanted me to feel him even as he let me go.
Chapter Three
As soon as Jackson pulled into my driveway, my two very best friends skipped down the front steps, waving at us. Six years ago, our mother-daughter book club was formed—Bookster Babes, so called because all our names were inspired by literature. Ginny for Virginia Woolf. Mine from the gothic novel Rebecca. And Shana from a torrid seventies romance novel, which the three of us surreptitiously read, graphic sex scenes and all. Now whenever Shana falls for a guy, Ginny and I tease her, “Yeah, but is he ‘Ohhhhh, Ruark!’ ”
Over the last six years, we’ve held a Bed & Bookfest celebration, always at my home on Lewis Island, always once a season, always overnight. We have never skipped a single meeting. And apparently, we weren’t going to miss this last one.
“Surprise,” Jackson said, and leaned over to kiss me a moment before my girlfriends yanked me out of his car. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“You don’t have to drive me to the airport.”
His look—Are you crazy?—melted me.
“Okay, Jackson, she’s all ours now,” announced Shana, sweeping her hair out of her eyes to mock-glower at him. He laughed, a sound that made me prematurely homesick for him. I was glad we’d have until tomorrow to say good-bye. Whether it was our final good-bye, my girlfriends wanted to know as soon as we stumbled through my treehouse door, leaving our moms in the main house until the evening book discussion.
“Hurry,” said Shana, slinging her pink sleeping bag onto the floor. “We have got to talk.”
“Not another talk,” I groaned as I wedged my sleeping bag between hers and Ginny’s. Then, following Shana’s lead, I flopped onto my stomach.
“Oh, good.” She brushed her long bangs out of her wide blue eyes to study me approvingly. “You broke it off with Jackson. What’d you say?”
“We didn’t break it off exactly.” I hid my face on my arms so I wouldn’t see Shana and her five feet seven of long, lean disapproval. If left to her, Jackson would have been dispensed with weeks ago in a swift, clean text. Her formidable time-management skills were acquired not from juggling homework, like the rest of us, but from juggling boys. It wasn’t unheard of for her to log a six-mile run early on Saturday morning with one boy, study with another at ten, and cap the day off with a late-night movie with a third. After her record five-boy day, Shana had called me up to complain: “That was exhausting. There’s only so much flirting you can do before you realize you just can’t have another tongue in your mouth.”
“Shana! Gross!” I had protested.
But she was adamant. “It’s true.”
“Well, why not?” Shana demanded now. “It so does not make sense to stay together. You’re going to meet a ton of guys in New York. And the minute you’re gone, girls are going to pounce on him.”
“Nice, Shana. Really nice.” Ginny reached down from her perch on the window seat to squeeze my hand. Her glossy brown hair striated with light streaks fell over hazel eyes that tilted at the corners, and I could completely understand why my mom marveled over how beautiful mixed-race kids were whenever she saw Ginny.
“What? He goes to my high school, not yours. I see the way girls look at him. And she should know that they’re so going to make their move.” Shana pointed her finger at me before crawling into her sleeping bag. The pitfall of being so thin (not that I would know) is being perpetually cold. “Look, wouldn’t you rather know?”
There it was, the question Grandma Stesha had put to my mom in my hospital room when I nearly drowned, and again two years ago before she left to launch her tour of fairy sites in Scotland: “But, Betsy darling. Isn’t it better to know?”
Maybe I wanted to celebrate my inner ostrich and bury my head and forget how frightening it had been to know at seven that I might drown. Maybe I didn’t want to know what was going to happen in the future any more than my mother did when she tucked me tight in the hospital bed after my near death. As though she didn’t trust me to escape fate or tempt curse, she had ordered me, “Stop dreaming.”
And so I did.
The story Shana was spinning now of Jackson cheating on me was my nightmare. The rare times the women in my family—Grandma Stesha and her three sisters, Mom and her two—gathered, the conversations were filled with stories lamenting their shared curse: Not a single one aside from my mother had a soul mate. That was not a future I wanted to inherit.
“Do you guys ever get the feeling… that something’s not right?” I asked tentatively.
An uncomfortable frown flitted across Ginny’s face, a look she wore the rare times I broached the topic of my maternal line’s purported sixth sense. “You’re just having moving jitters,” she said, zipping her sleeping bag to her chin with one efficient tug. “That’s all.”
“You mean something not right, like, with Jackson?” Shana nodded sagely, as though I had finally seen the light. “I mean, you’re only eighteen. You’re starting college and, let’s face it, that means it’s fishing season. Besides, we’re way too young to be this serious about anyone, even during college.” She flipped onto her side, propping her chin on her hand. “It’s not like you’re going to marry him.”
That echo of Mom was eerie: You’re way too young. Irritation snaked up my skin. Why was everyone ringing my wedding bells when I hadn’t even slept with Jackson?
I asked, “Why are you so sure I should break up with him?”
“Because first,” Shana responded, now sitting up cocooned in her sleeping bag, “your mom might have gotten married because she was knocked up at twenty-four. But most people don’t. And if the
y do, they grow out of each other. And, hello, you’re going to college; Jackson’s got another year left in high school. What are you going to talk about? Prom?”
Those remarks might have stung once, except for two things: Shana was right. There were my parents, superstars in their careers. Dad, a producer at his first game company in San Francisco, and Mom, a publicist at a start-up cell phone company in Seattle. All of that derailed with the two pink lines on the pregnancy test that was me. And second, Shana had given this rant for female independence a million times.
I stage-whispered to Ginny, “Watch out. She’s about to invoke the head shave.” Together, Ginny and I intoned: “We’ll shave your head if you get married before you’re thirty-five. Go see the world.”
“Well, my parents are right. That’s what we should do. See the world before we settle down.” Shana grinned before whipping out her camera to take a candid shot of us. “But I plan to shoot the world.”
Ever since her father gave Shana her first camera when she turned five, she’d vowed to make her living somehow with her photography, like her father wished he could but didn’t dare. She couldn’t understand his hesitation any more than mine to commit to the same kind of risky livelihood with treehouses. The last thing I wanted was to incite that particular monologue now, so I stayed quiet while she lowered her camera to check the photograph. If I thought she’d forgotten her train of thought, I was wrong. Shana continued without looking up from her camera, “So tell him that you want to have an open relationship. That way, if you want to date other guys, you can.”
“Other guys? I didn’t even want to date Jackson, remember?” I said, flipping over to my back to stare at the moody sky.
Ginny smirked as she stood up, hands on her hips. “Uh, yeah, because you totally obsessed about that for two weeks.” Her voice grew high as she swung her hips in time to each point: “I can’t date The Boy! The Boy’s a grade younger than me. The Boy lives an hour away. The Boy mountain bikes. Who the hell mountain bikes? I don’t.”
“I said that?”
Both of them nodded.
Shana actually threw her sleeping bag off, frustration overheating. “Come on, it’s totally crazy to orient your entire life toward a guy who might be around for another month. Two, tops. Especially when he’s come out and said that he won’t go to a college just because it’s near you. And—”
I interrupted, waving my arms at Shana. “Hello? I’m not orienting my life toward him. I’m starting college away from him. That’s the whole point. Right, Ginny?”
Ginny shifted uneasily on the window seat. “Sometimes, to tell you the truth, I just wonder what the whole point of trying is, especially when it’s hard. Look what happened to my parents….”
A year after we formed the Bookster Babes, Ginny’s father had been diagnosed with late-stage prostate cancer. “Does everyone think kids are dumb?” Ginny had asked me the morning after one of our Bed & Bookfests while we were drawing. Her paper was covered with angry girls with grim lines for mouths; mine, with a series of Gothic treehouses. “I can hear what the doctors say about Dad.”
“You should go home today. He’s going to die soon,” I had pronounced, speaking without realizing it until Ginny slashed an angry crayon line across my drawing. Even then, I barely recalled what I had intoned like an oracle, the words pouring out of me without thought.
“Take it back,” she hissed.
But it was too late.
Two days afterward, as if my prophecy had cursed her father, he was dead. Ever since, I have been afraid of uttering aloud a single feeling, the slightest inkling, in case my visions were even more potent than my grandmother believed.
Ginny broke our silence now by plunking down a plate of thick brownies she’d snuck in without us noticing. “It’s time for chocolate.”
Of the three of us, only Ginny could cook a gourmet meal, but her baking went unrivaled. Not even the best bakeries around town could touch her pastries. Still, Dad thought she was wasting her life going to the Culinary Institute of America in the Hudson Valley rather than a “real” college: “That’s called a retirement activity, not a retirement plan.” I had to agree. Baking was as practical as me building treehouses for a living or staying with my high school boyfriend.
“Can you taste the coconut and curry?” Ginny asked with an eager expression.
I nodded my head, surprised at the heat and texture on my tongue. “Yeah.”
The unexpected flavor of Ginny’s brownie filled me with tearful yearnings. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to move. I didn’t want to miss out on a single moment of life with my friends. It wasn’t only Jackson who I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want to say good-bye to my friends or my home, my sanctuary, my history. Lewis Island was everything I had ever known, the only place I’d ever lived.
The morning’s anguished cry rang clear in my head. Part of me wanted to say something to my girlfriends; part of me wanted to know what was causing that animal wail. But I swatted away the real danger of probing too deeply and focused on the bittersweet dessert instead.
Chapter Four
Being the first girl in four generations of Muir men had its perks. Those lumberjacks who felled the ancient Northwest forests became Seattle’s first real estate developers. They spawned an industry. They spawned a fortune. They spawned boys. So when Dad’s father died fifteen years ago, he bequeathed the Lewis Island property into my parents’ care under the condition that I inherit it on the day of my marriage. My dad told me later that my grandfather had his heart set on seeing me—his sole granddaughter—wed in this cottage, the one he had built as a weekend love nest for himself and my grandmother. Not a single person in the Muir family contested my inheritance or our move here immediately after my grandfather died.
The next morning when I awoke a few minutes before six, for one lazy second I considered rolling over, burrowing into my sleeping bag. But I wanted to say good-bye to my home in private. So I crept around my friends, grabbed my denim jacket off the door hook, and slid into my sneakers on the welcome mat outside.
As I set off for the beach, I cast a backward glance at my treehouse and swallowed hard. As frivolous as treehouses were, I loved this treasure box, barely visible in the forest unless you knew where to look. There was something whimsical and secretive about small spaces, however impractical they were. And this treehouse was my heart realized into four walls: snug, safe, and hidden.
Back when I was ten, my parents sold the very last of Mom’s stock options from her job at Synergy to remodel the cottage. The architectural drawings enthralled me—long scrolls of paper detailing the front and back elevations of the house. Our architect, Peter Nakamura, wore a never-changing uniform of formfitting black T-shirt and relaxed black jeans. His one accessory, the black Moleskine notebook he always carried. One morning after meeting with my parents, he had strolled to the coffee table where I was sketching my own architectural drawing of a treehouse. No sweet Snow White cottage, mine was a modern shack whose inspiration came from the eco-friendly houses in the book Peter had just published.
Peter folded his long body next to me on the floor and studied my drawings. “What do you like about this?”
“It’s outside and magical.”
My answer must have satisfied Peter, because he spoke to me like I was a colleague, his callused finger tracing the roofline. “You know, if we changed the pitch of the roof, we could put in a bigger picture window so you’d really feel like you’re outside.” A few days later, Peter gave me my own Moleskine notebook and a paper scroll: my treehouse rendered as real architectural plans.
Drops of morning dew dampened my sneakers as I followed the grassy path toward the healing garden that Mom had been testing to surprise Ginny’s dad for his convalescence, but never had the chance to plant in his yard. The closer I got to the beach, the more I could breathe. Weird, I know, since I’d almost drowned and swimming made me nervous.
At five foot one and typically dress
ed in jewel-toned polo shirts, Mom was a human hummingbird, flitting among her beloved plants and her myriad projects. So I was astonished to spot her lounging on the rickety, weather-faded bench facing the Puget Sound, a mug of tea in her hand, her knees tucked up under her chin.
“I’m going to miss this place,” Mom said softly without looking up, almost as if she had been expecting me.
“Then why are you moving? I don’t get it,” I said, as annoyance swept away the calming effect of the water along with my intention to thank her for inviting the Bookster Babes over last night.
Only then did Mom wrench around toward me to respond hotly, “Because, Reb, family is made up of all the hundreds of daily moments. Not the big ta-da family trips to Italy. It’s this.” She gestured between us before widening her arms to encompass the beach, the property, my treehouse. “That’s why we’re moving, okay? Not just to be with you, but to be with your father. To support him.”
Fine. I was going to leave her to her grouching, but instead I shot back, “Then how about you all move, and I stay here and go to UW?”
Mom guessed the role Jackson played in derailing me from wanting to attend one of the best undergraduate architectural programs in the country. She shook her head with so much vehemence that her naturally curly brown hair, flat-ironed into submission, whipped like a moon-shaped mezzaluna knife around her shoulders. “First of all,” she lectured me yet again, “this is the time in your life to be totally selfish and focus on yourself. You’ve got this amazing opportunity where you get to invent yourself. And second, I didn’t raise you to be that kind of girl who’d give up your dream to stay with a boy you just met.”
Even though I’d never admit it to Mom, I hated the image of being That Kind of Girl, too, who would shunt aside her goals and shutter her ambitions for a guy. But I had to admit: The temptation shimmered enticingly. Columbia was an inconvenient eternity away from Jackson.
