No One Here Is Lonely

by Sarah Everett

  “I told you I was,” I say, then give her a hug. As I lean in, I catch a whiff of something sweet in her mug. Something that is definitely not coffee. I drop my voice to a whisper. “Are you drinking? Kiely will kill you.”

  Lacey laughs. “That rhymes.” I start to wonder whether her post-performance giddiness has anything to do with endorphins.

  “I’m serious,” I say.

  “It’s fine. How will she know?”

  My face remains disapproving until Lacey says, “Oh my God. If I’d known you’d be like this, I’d have asked you to stay home.” She bumps me with her shoulder to show that she’s joking.

  I oblige her with a retaliatory bump and an unamused “Ha ha,” but her comment hurts the slightest bit anyway. Would she have preferred I stayed home while she hung out with Hail, Libby and Vance instead?

  We walk back toward her table.

  “Oh! How was your interview?” I ask, turning to look at her.

  All of a sudden, Lacey won’t meet my eye.

  “Lace?”

  “Okay, don’t freak out,” she says, ensuring that I do just that. “I missed it.”

  “You did what?” I say, voice so shrill that Vance actually pretends to jump. We’ve reached their table now, and I grab an empty chair from a neighboring table but don’t sit down.

  “You did what?” I repeat, only slightly less shrill and loud.

  “I overslept,” Lacey says sheepishly.

  I gape at her. “Today was the last day of interviews.”

  “I know,” she says, decidedly less frantic than I am.

  “Camp training starts next week.”

  “I know.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Okay. Here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to call Kim and tell her you’re really sorry but you were super sick this morning and you’ll make up the interview. Make sure you tell her how much camp means to you, how much you are looking forward to this summer and also—”

  “Eden!” Lacey interrupts. “I’ve been thinking…”

  I stare at her, waiting for her to go on.

  “I’m not sure I want to go to camp this summer.”

  I know I’m looking at her as if she’s just sprouted spare limbs, but I can’t help it.

  “We’ve been planning this for months.”

  “Yeah, I know,” she says, sounding apologetic, and I suddenly wish we were having this conversation without an audience, away from Hail and Co. “But it’s our last summer before college. I don’t want to spend it all at some camp.”

  “It’s not some camp,” I repeat, feeling blood rush to my face. I grab Lacey’s arm and pull her into a corner where only half the coffee shop can hear us instead of all of it. “It’s Camp Rowan. I mean, it’s all set up. The paperwork is filled out. We’re getting assigned cabins in a couple of days. It’s literally all ready to go.”

  “For you,” Lacey says, taking a sip from her mug. She makes a face as she swallows, doing a poor job of acting like it’s only coffee in her cup. “It’s all set up for you. And you can still go. You don’t have to not go just because of me.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yeah. Why shouldn’t you go? You’ve been super excited about it.”

  “We’ve been super excited about it,” I correct. But then I think of the number of times I reminded Lacey just to email and set up the interview, the number of times I had to remind her about the interview itself. And she’s right.

  Maybe I’ve been the only one excited about it.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you didn’t want to go?” I ask, unable to hide my dismay.

  “It’s not that I don’t want to go. It’s just…I want to do other stuff. Like, Libby’s uncle is looking for a receptionist at the country club. I’m thinking of applying.”

  “Oh,” I say.

  “Don’t be mad,” Lacey says, poking my arm.

  “I’m not,” I lie, but really I’m transported back to last night and the exhausted expression on Lacey’s face. I’m wondering how long she has been planning this. How long she’s been making plans for a summer without campfire songs and late-night adventures and years’ worth of memories.

  A summer without me.

  BEFORE LAST YEAR, Lacey and I had spent every summer together since we were four. From ages four to eight, it was day camps and playdates, running barefoot through the sprinklers at her house or mine. From nine to fourteen, it was Camp Rowan. It was three hours northeast of Erinville, and our parents would take turns carpooling us there. On the drive over, we’d sing along to the radio and bop excitedly in our seats. Then we’d arrive at camp, where we always requested to be put in the same cabin. There were late-night campfires and groggy morning camp songs and sugary midnight snacks, contraband passed from cabinmate to cabinmate while our teenage counselor pretended not to notice. There were dual crushes, on the same boy or wildly different boys. Lacey would like the edgy camper whose hair was a color not existing in nature, the boy whose lip rings were confiscated at the start of camp and returned to him on the last day. My crushes tended to run the full spectrum of boys—class clown, jock, nerd—I had tried it all, but I was partial to nice boys who could make me laugh. Boys like Will.

  Camp Rowan was where Lacey first got her period. Where I lost my first kiss. Lost, because Malcolm Denison had a vaguely reptilian tongue that tended to retract and protrude in turns. By the end of the longest fifteen seconds of my life, I had decided I wanted a do-over on my first kiss, but when I confessed to the girls in my cabin, they insisted that it had to count. The tongue made it irreversible.

  The year we turned fifteen and got too old for camp, we spent the summer lazing about by the local pool, eyeing lifeguards but being too intimidated to talk to them. The summer after that was more of the same.

  For as long as I could remember, summer had been synonymous with scouting out adventures with Lacey.

  But last summer, the summer after junior year, was different.

  From the day after the Fourth of July to just a couple of days before school started, Lacey had been with her dad in Los Angeles. She’d gone alone, because Oliver hadn’t wanted to leave their mother after her latest bad episode.

  It had been a lonely summer. I’d spent it working at my dad’s practice, filing paperwork and answering calls, missing Lacey like a temporarily bandaged limb. I knew she was coming back, but in her absence, everything felt awkward and off balance, like I was compensating for the limb I couldn’t use.

  As strange as those two months were, things got stranger when Lacey returned.

  Right away, looking at her was like one of those spot-the-difference games, a before-and-after side-by-side.

  There was the tan, so strong that her arms and legs were dark deep into the fall. But she’d spent the summer on the beach, so that was to be expected.

  There was the purple streak. It feels too easy to single out that one element, a change in her appearance, and cast it as the defining moment, the first-ever moment in our friendship when it seemed like our paths might be diverging.

  But it was the first thing I noticed when she stepped off the Greyhound that had brought her from Beddingfield Airport. I had driven over with her mom and Oliver that evening, not caring whether they wanted it to be a family-only reunion. Or perhaps I was emboldened by the thought. If Lacey and I weren’t each other’s family, then what were we?

  She stepped off, wearing distressed denim cutoffs almost identical to the ones that I was wearing. The same sunglasses we’d picked out for her at the mall a few weeks before she left, and the black-and-white Converse we both lived in.

  Presumably, her mother and Oliver had already seen the streak when they had video-chatted earlier, because, save a tightening of the lips, Mrs. Murdoch did not react. Lacey and I had videochatted a couple of times too, but not for the last
three weeks—I hadn’t even seen pictures—so I was the only one who exclaimed.

  “Lace! Your hair! Your one beauty,” I gasped as I hugged her, paraphrasing one of our favorite Little Women movie quotes. I said it quietly enough that her mother couldn’t hear, because if I knew anything about Lacey and her mom, it was that they never really saw eye to eye.

  Lacey was stepping back in almost the same motion that she returned my embrace. “It’s on my head. You don’t have to like it,” she said with a tight smile. And then Oliver was taking her bag and her mom was giving her a stiff-backed hug and Lacey and I were sliding into the back seat of her mom’s car.

  “I was kidding,” I said, even though I shouldn’t have had to. Though I had sounded a little alarmed and maybe even judgmental, I had only said what we always did to acknowledge any physical change in each other’s lives. When, for instance, my mom had bought me a new winter jacket at the start of the year, Lacey had said, “Eden! Your coat! Your one beauty.” And when she’d changed the layout of her room just before she left for her dad’s, I’d walked in and gone, “Lacey! Your room! Your one beauty.”

  It was our thing. One of many.

  “I know,” she said, smiling more sincerely at me, but then she turned and faced the window, barely answering her mom’s and brother’s questions about LA and the plane and bus rides.

  She was insufferable for the entire next week, even after school started. So much so that I let Mom drag me to Sam’s skating lessons because Lacey never wanted to hang out, or if she did, she spent the entire time sulking or complaining about her mother. I mean, I got it. My mother is Maura Paulsen, PhD. She owns a company called Happy and You Own It. But there is only so much shit talking a person can take. And I especially felt guilty because I loved Lacey’s mom; Mrs. Murdoch and I had always gotten along.

  Exactly a week after the Saturday she got home, Lace’s bad mood from hell ended. When she showed up at my house, the streak in her hair less vibrant than when I’d first seen it, she hugged my mom and then me, apologizing for PMSing, and I accepted her apology.

  We sat in my room, going through the increasingly unsatisfactory collection of movies I had on my computer, and then she started to tell me why she’d been so angry.

  “She lied to me,” Lacey said, legs outstretched and back resting on the door of my room as a precaution in case my younger sister tried to come in. Sam, as a rule, exhibited no interest whatsoever in my life unless Lacey was around, and then she tagged along nonstop, trying to listen in on our conversations. For what purpose, God alone knew.

  “When I was gone, we had this long, like, heart-to-heart phone call in July and Mom was all I’ll talk to your dad and she promised to at least think about letting me stay. Come to find out, she was never going to. The whole—”

  “Wait,” I said, stopping her. “Stay where?”

  Lacey looked at me as if I was stupid, or like I hadn’t been listening to anything she’d said. “In Los Angeles. My dad’s there. Plus, LA is way better for my career. How do you do music in a shit hole like Erinville?” She kept talking, unable to feel that the air in the room had shifted, that I was gaping at her and that all I could think was what.

  I interrupted her again, this time truly not having been listening. “But…”

  She stared at me, waited for me to go on.

  What about senior year? And prom and driving aimlessly around Erinville, wasting gas and time and energy, because we have enough of all of them?

  “What about Oliver?” I asked.

  It was a good enough question. The twins had been inseparable when they were little. Round-faced, long-limbed kids who did everything together. According to their mom, they had cried together and yo-yoed laughter back at each other from across rooms as infants. When we’d met as four-year-olds, they’d taken me in together, almost a collective decision between them. The first time they were ever really separated was in first grade, when Miss McGurdle had called their parents in to say she was worried about their—Lacey’s—emotional health. Lacey followed her brother everywhere, and the sooner they learned to differentiate themselves—the sooner they found separate identities—the better. Oliver was moved from our classroom to 1B across the hall, which, from what I can remember, was actual hell at the time—if hell is your best friend’s high-pitched shrieking for hours and hours, days on end. Finally, though, Lace settled down, and it turned out Miss McGurdle had been right. LaceyandOliver and OliverandLacey and OliverandLace and LaceandOliver became two separate people. Their parents requested every year from then on that they be put in different classes, and when they could choose for themselves, they still preferred being in separate classes.

  Still, up until, like, age ten, they continued to be The Twins at home. Their parents divorced when they were nine, and their dad moved to Los Angeles to pursue a new career as a production assistant. Apparently there was a second when their parents considered Parent Trapping the twins (their mom taking one and their dad the other), but no one could imagine tearing them apart.

  Now there was no real danger in doing that anymore—they were so different from each other.

  But Lacey paused a moment to think about my question before shrugging.

  “I guess he’ll visit,” she said. “Though he and Dad aren’t getting along. And then there’s Christmas. No way she won’t make me come and spend Christmas with her.” Lacey wrinkled her nose as if the mere mention of her mother filled her with distaste. “Whatever. That’s clearly not happening now. Might as well get used to being back here.”

  “Oh,” I said, because it felt selfish to say she should stay here with me, if she missed her dad that much. Plus, she was right: she couldn’t leave now. School had started. She couldn’t move in the middle of the school year—in the middle of senior year, at that. The relief covered up any sense of guilt I felt at being glad her mother hadn’t let her stay in Los Angeles.

  Secretly, I also wondered how Lacey could be so selfish. It had been only a few months since her mom’s last really bad spell, one of those stretches of weeks when Mrs. Murdoch didn’t get out of bed. Would Lace really leave Oliver to take care of her on his own? As distant as I sometimes felt from my mom, I would never just abandon her. Sure, Oliver and Lacey would soon have to leave for college, but Lacey leaving before she absolutely had to—leaving to be with her dad, no less—would devastate Mrs. Murdoch.

  A braver person would have called Lacey on this, but I didn’t.

  The conversation moved on to other things, and from then on, Lacey really did seem to have made her peace with being back.

  So much so that when I got a text from Oliver a couple of days later, I was actually surprised.

  Hey, Eden. Does Lace seem weird to you lately?

  I hesitated as I thought about it. She’d explained her moodiness. She was sad at leaving her dad, which wasn’t weird at all. It felt disloyal to tell her brother what she’d told me in confidence, especially since it involved the fact that she’d been ready to leave him and their mom and move to the other side of the country. We never talked about Lacey behind her back. For the past few years, we hadn’t talked very much at all.

  No, I wrote back. Why?

  Oliver’s response only said, Thanks. Thought you would know best.

  He never asked me in person and I never brought it up either.

  After that, the school year continued as normal, except that there was suddenly Hail and Libby and Vance. There were parties, and bottles of vodka hidden in the back of Lacey’s closet or in the trunk of her car.

  When I objected, Lacey would laugh and say, “There she is. There’s Old Edith,” poking me in the cheek with her index finger. Sometimes I stood my ground, accepting the nickname (which was only clever, by the way, because it started with the same two letters as Eden). Other times I gave in, and we’d sit in her room drinking and binge-watching bad TV whi
le her mother was at work. Going to parties was a bigger ask. Sure, Will would be there, and occasionally they could be tolerable, but most of the time they were just so damn exhausting. And disappointing. Maybe that was the worst part—that I had this idea of what I wanted them to be. I wanted them to be fun, to make me forget myself, to make me feel brave and seen and like I belonged among all these people I’d grown up with—but reality was always so much worse.

  The only times I ever truly felt brave or like I belonged were with Lacey.

  So mostly I opted out of parties. Because we were us, though, I didn’t mind Lacey going to them alone or even with her new friends. I knew that somehow, in the end, she’d always come back to me, just like she had when she’d gone to LA. It may not have been her choice to come back that time, but we always found our way back to each other.

  It was just the way we were.

  GOING TO CAMP Rowan alone is not an option.

  It defeats the entire purpose, which was to have an awesome throwback summer with my best friend, our one last hurrah before we head off to State in the fall. Not to drive three hours by myself and have to look after a gaggle of preteens alone, to not know anyone at the camp.

  When I get home from Kiely’s, I email Kim, tell her something has come up and apologize profusely that I won’t be able to make it this summer.

  On Monday morning, two days later, I find myself trudging to work with my dad for the second summer in a row. I make photocopies, I leave voice mails to remind people about appointments, I make coffee and answer the phone.

  The week—the first of the summer before college—flies by, repetitive and quiet. It feels like a letdown after all those months of looking forward to going back to Camp Rowan.

  I keep wondering at what point Lacey changed her mind about going.

  I tell her as much on Friday, when we’re sitting on her roof late at night, watching the stars twinkle in the sky like we’ve done countless times through the years.

  Lacey digs a spoon into a jar of Nutella, and sighs appreciatively when it enters her mouth. She’ll eat Nutella with anything.