The Whole Thing Together

by Ann Brashares

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2017 by Ann Brashares

  Cover art copyright © 2017 by Gallery Stock

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  randomhouseteens.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Brashares, Ann, author.

  Title: The whole thing together / Ann Brashares.

  Description: New York : Delacorte Press, [2017]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016026996 | ISBN 978-0-385-73689-3 (hardcover : acid-free paper) | ISBN 978-0-385-90630-2 (glb : acid-free paper) | ISBN 978-0-399-55600-5 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Interpersonal relations—Fiction. | Vacation homes—Fiction. | Families—Fiction. | Domestic fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3602.R385 W48 2017 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  Ebook ISBN 9780399556005

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Thomas-Harrison Family, in Brief

  Chapter 1: The Highs and the Lows of a Relationship That Did Not Exist

  Chapter 2: A Deeply Considered Stranger

  Chapter 3: Corn and Matthew

  Chapter 4: Zero-Sum

  Chapter 5: Suggestions for Your Possible Heart

  Chapter 6: I Never Wondered.

  Chapter 7: Trouble Me.

  Chapter 8: This Is How She Appeared to Me When I Didn’t Know Who She Was.

  Chapter 9: Getting Strong by Giving Things Away

  Chapter 10: Or/And

  Chapter 11: It’s a Weird Way to Have a Family.

  Chapter 12: Boxes (and Cans)

  Chapter 13: And on to the Next Worry

  Chapter 14: Talk About Getting More Than You Came For

  Chapter 15: What It Costs

  Chapter 16: How to Play Dirty Pool

  Chapter 17: Curly Feet

  Chapter 18: The Truth and Two Lawn Mowers

  Chapter 19: Sow the Wind….

  Chapter 20: I Wasn’t Crying, but I Couldn’t Stop.

  Chapter 21: After That You Clean It Up.

  Chapter 22: “There’s Rue for You, and Here’s Some for Me….O, You Must Wear Your Rue with a Difference.”

  Chapter 23: Tender and Crouching

  Chapter 24: The Deeper Magic

  Chapter 25: Broken Open

  About the Author

  With deep appreciation and love to dear friends Nancy Easton, Bethany Millard, Janice Meyer, and Elizabeth Schwarz, who helped me through this story—and all my stories—over many miles and many seasons in Central Park.

  The smell of home for him, more than anything else, was the smell of a girl he didn’t know.

  Home wasn’t the creaking three-story brownstone on Carroll Street in Brooklyn where he lived most of the time, but this big house on a pond that let out into the ocean on the South Fork of Long Island in a town called Wainscott. He’d spent half the weeks of every summer here and half the weekends for most of every year of his life.

  Ray sat on the floor of his bedroom amid piles of books, clothes, old toys, blankets, rain gear, fishing stuff, and sports equipment, and he breathed it in, seeking her part in all of his. It was an old smell, habitual and nostalgic, associated with the happiness and freedom of summer, the outdoors coming in. It was also a new smell, recharged every other week, adding particles of new shampoo, a new dress, shiny stuff she put on her lips.

  On the achy and full feeling of it, he got up and lay on his bed, where her smell was always the strongest. It instilled old comfort, the privacy of nighttime. He always had better dreams here, almost never nightmares. In his bed in Brooklyn he had nightmares.

  He lay there in his shorts and T-shirt. He let his sandy, dirty bare feet dangle, out of deference. He used to never think about things like that.

  Sleep in this bed, though sweet, had gotten fitful in the last year or so. Sweetly fitful. Sweetly frustrating. The smell, with its new and extra notes, got to be as stimulating as it was comforting. He didn’t know exactly what those notes were, but they stirred his night thoughts in a new way.

  “How’s it going in there?”

  He sat up. His mom’s knock and entry were practically one motion.

  “You’re taking a nap already?” she asked.

  “No, I was just—”

  “Did you empty out the whole closet?”

  He glanced back at the dark, walk-in closet. “Most of it. I tried to leave Sasha’s stuff how it was. But some of it is mixed together. And some of the stuff I’m not sure of.”

  “It would be easier if there was a light in there,” his mother pointed out.

  He nodded. He probably hadn’t replaced the bulb in two years. He hadn’t cleaned the place out in a lot longer than that.

  “Can I be done now?”

  Lila gave him a look. “Seriously? You just threw everything on the floor. You have to deal with it.”

  “That’s why I went back to bed.”

  She retied the bandana around her head. Her pants were covered in old paint and clay stains. “You should see the kitchen. You’re lucky I’m not asking you to help with that.”

  He got up, not feeling lucky. “Why are we doing this again?”

  “The girls organized it.”

  “The house looks fine.”

  “The other family is doing it too, next week.”

  “We should have gotten them to go first.”

  “Just get back to work, Ray. I left trash bags and boxes in the hall. Stuff you want to save put in boxes. You can bring them out to the storage room when you’re done and stack them neatly on the shelves.”

  He surveyed the shelves along the bedroom wall. He and Sasha had had their unspoken agreements over the years about dividing up drawers, shelves, and closet space and their unspoken disagreements about dividing up drawers, shelves, and closet space.

  Almost all the books were hers. Her entire Harry Potter collection still stood there, along with Narnia and His Dark Materials. He’d contributed The Hobbit to her Lord of the Rings set. He’d read almost all her books except the really girly ones, sometimes at the same time as her. He got indignant when he was reading one of her books, like the last Harry Potter, and she brought it back to the city.

  He got out a recycling bag for his old comic books and his random piles of school papers. Among them he found one of her old science tests (91%) and her handwritten book report on Charlotte’s Web. You would never mistake her rounded, regular script for the mess he made with a pencil.

  The cabinet devoted to seashells, sea glass, smooth rocks, egg cases, and sharks’ teeth was joint property. He couldn’t begin to say who’d found what. They’d both been big hoarders on the beach. And all of it belonged to the sea, didn’t it? He got rid of some crumbling coral and left the rest as it was.

  He didn’t bother with the bureau—since middle school he’d let her have the whole thing except one big drawer at the bottom with old sweaters and sweatshirts they both used. He kept his small and unimpressive wardrobe on two shelves and on
e hanging bar on the left side of the big closet. The medicine cabinet was at least ninety percent filled with her stuff. Granted, he had hardly any toiletries, in large part because he used her stuff. He was happy using her shampoo, taking a part of her smell around with him. He hadn’t provided toothpaste or dental floss in years.

  There was a lot of semibroken or useless crap to get rid of. He spent some time going through the fishing gear. He had to admit it took up more than his share of the closet, but she was welcome to use it if she took good care of it. They had one boogie board between them and he still took it out sometimes.

  Did she? He didn’t know. He found himself hoping so. He always imagined she loved this place, this pond, this beach, the weird house, this old camp bed under the skylight, as much as he did.

  The surfboards they kept in the garage.

  Though they slept in the same (comforting, fitful) bed, looked out the same skylight at the same moon, they didn’t know each other. They shared three older half sisters, Emma, Quinn, and Mattie, but they weren’t related. Sasha’s father had once, long ago, been married to his mother.

  He’d seen Sasha’s face, very small, on the other side of Radio City Music Hall at their older sisters’ graduations. He never saw her closer, because their two sets of parents choreographed the seating and the after-parties so they would never have to acknowledge each other. His sisters’ birthday parties were like that too. Always separate, always two of them: the one with his family that involved homemade zucchini cake and craft-y presents around the Brooklyn kitchen table, and one with the other family that seemed to involve private rooms at trendy restaurants where a regular person couldn’t get a reservation. He’d never been to one of those, of course.

  He’d seen pictures of Sasha in the house from when she was little. He kept his eye out for new ones, but there hadn’t been any in a long time.

  He’d tried friending her on Facebook in eighth grade, and she’d declined. He’d been irritated at her for it, respected her for it, ultimately been relieved by it. He didn’t really want to see her like that—another girl clustered with bikini-clad friends flashing braces and peace signs on Paradise Island or whatever. He wanted to keep alive the idea that she was different.

  By tenth grade he’d deleted his Facebook account because he didn’t want to see anyone else like that either. The projection of fake good times grated after a while. He had a tendency to harsh judgments, and Facebook made it worse. “You’re such a curmudgeon,” Mattie had told him. Which wasn’t completely true. He used Snapchat and Rapchat as much as his friends.

  He knew Sasha went to an all-girls’ school on the Upper East Side where they wore uniforms. According to scoffing Mattie, there were a mere forty-two girls in Sasha’s junior class. He pictured Sasha in a little pleated skirt. He tried not to do that too much.

  Ray went to a public magnet school in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. There were 1,774 kids in his junior class and few pleated skirts.

  The world of New York City private schools was like a club, insular, self-congratulatory, and pretty annoying, and Ray was not part of it. His sisters were part of it because their dad was rich. It was weird being from a different economic class than your own family.

  So he didn’t know Sasha through any of the normal channels. He felt like he knew her in an older and deeper way. He’d played with her toys, read her books, slept under her blankets, loved and fought with her sisters. He almost felt like she was part of him. She was his ideal friend in many ways: always with him, never disappointing. She never offered him the opportunity to judge her on surface things.

  When he got to the pile of shoes, he began dividing, because dividing was what they did. He couldn’t remember whose old beat-up and outgrown flip-flops were whose, so he tossed most of them into a garbage bag. He hoped she wouldn’t mind. When he was in a good mood, he always gave her the benefit of the doubt. When he was in a bad mood, his opinion of her sometimes suffered. But even his most irascible moods, apt to ruin things, couldn’t ruin anything with her.

  Her old water shoes. His. When they were young their feet were approximately the same size and they could share stuff like that, and sometimes they did. But she often wore a special orthopedic shoe, which he wasn’t supposed to touch, and that had given him an unexpectedly tender feeling toward her. Something about the way they stood, season after season, a little extra puffy and ready in the closet, you could picture exactly her stance when she wore them. In the last few years his feet had taken off in size, and hers, from what he could tell, had stayed pretty small.

  Her sneakers, his.

  Dividing was what they all did. As set down by their parents, they divided the house, divided the year, divided the holidays, divided the food, divided the paper products, divided the costs equally—well, supposedly equally. There was contention among the parents in nearly all the divisions: housework, lawn mowing, pool maintenance. In the case of his sisters, they got divided too.

  His own parents seemed to enjoy a peaceful marriage, but it was the old dead marriage and bitter divorce between his mother, Lila, and Sasha’s father, the semi-mythic Robert Thomas, that shaped their lives. Besides their three daughters, this beach house was the one thing neither Lila nor Robert would give up and couldn’t divide.

  It was an uneasy truce, laced with the old poison. During the school year, changeover was Sunday at midnight, so the house had five empty weekdays to reset itself, to forget one family and remember the other. But in the summer, the house was in constant use. Changeover time moved to noon on Sunday, setting up that one witchy hour when the lives of two families bumped up against each other and strained the suppleness of the old house.

  In summer there was the danger, the thrill, of seeing the other family, maybe catching a glimpse of their car on the way out. Every other Sunday, Ray imagined the house held on to their faint smells in the kitchen, wavelets in the swimming pool, maybe a little warmth in the bed. It was the ironclad rule in the summer that they never left the beach house later than quarter past eleven on Sunday morning, never arrived at it before quarter to one. They never risked a true encounter with the other family. And despite Ray’s unspoken wish, they never had one. They maintained a half-life among half a family in half a house for half the year. If you put both sides together, it would kind of make a whole. But you never put both sides together.

  In the closet was one row of distinctly girl shoes—flat sandals with straps, newer pairs with heels. No puffy orthopedic ones anymore. He wondered a little at those grown-up shoes, fleetingly sought to picture the now older girl who wore them, but didn’t try for long, and didn’t touch them. Because of the fitful bed problem, he’d become wary of letting his roommate become literal.

  Brooklyn was his house, wholly, and his room there belonged to him alone, and yet he never felt as whole there.

  He carried the first two boxes through the sliding-glass doors of the kitchen onto the flagstone path, through the fence that bordered the pool, and to the pool house. The front room, facing the pool, had regular pool-related stuff—a refrigerator, shelves, and hooks for cushions and towels—but the bigger, windowless room behind it was for the kind of storage you didn’t visit too often.

  He felt for the light. He hadn’t been back here in a long time. It smelled of mold and mess.

  He was struck right off by the old dusty crib. It had been his and also hers. He saw the plastic sheet that still covered the baby mattress to protect it from vomit. His vomit, to be precise.

  What a history they had together, not together. Two babies who slept there, turned into people inside those bars. They used it equally but never at the same time.

  Stashed under the crib were old toys. Why did they even have these anymore?

  As he looked closer, he was glad they did. There was a wide plastic box full of Legos. One particularly rainy summer and fall they built a city, not together exactly, but sequentially, each adding to it week by week. He made the airport, she made the zoo. It had two amuse
ment parks, four playgrounds, and a library, but no school, as he recalled, and not even any stores. They were naturally harmonious as urban planners. And circumstances forbade his being imperious or bossy to her. He had no choice but to be patient, to let her take her full turn. He remembered the excitement of arriving at the house and tearing upstairs each week to see what she had added.

  He loved that city. He ranted and raved when a cleaning service hired by the other family dismantled it just before Thanksgiving that year. Would she remember their city now?

  There were balls, and light sabers with long-dead batteries. Another box contained the plastic animals they had jointly collected and shared over years’ worth of birthdays and Christmases. There were the dusty stuffed animals she had loved gently and he had used for projectiles. There was the Barbie airplane he had publicly scorned but secretly played with a little during the long July they both had chicken pox.

  He touched his fingers to the crib rail before he left.

  One time when he was around nine or ten he stole one of the blankets from their bed and brought it to his regular bed in Brooklyn, hoping it would work its charm and ward off bad dreams there, too. But eventually her smell wore off and it just got to be another thing that smelled like him.

  —

  “My God, Quinn, I didn’t see you. You’re like a house fairy.”

  Quinn laughed from where she perched on her mother’s bureau.

  “How long have you been sitting there?”

  “A few minutes. I watched you empty your sock drawer.”

  Lila cocked an eyebrow at her.

  “And then put everything back.”

  “So you have been there a while.”

  Her mother wasn’t very good at getting rid of things, Quinn observed. She wasn’t a hoarder, but one thing suddenly represented everything and she got overwhelmed and closed the drawer.