by Sarah Dessen
“This game’s done,” Blake announced, glancing at the TV. “You up for some beer pong?”
“I’m not much of a drinker,” I told him. “But I’ll cheer you on if you play.”
“Yeah?” He seemed surprised by this, even touched.
“Sure,” I said.
He smiled, then got to his feet, picking up his cup. Before moving, though, he waved a hand in front of him, signaling I should go first. That’s sweet, I thought. As was the touch of his hand, which I felt briefly on the small of my back as I started toward the kitchen. Was this what it really felt like to have a boy interested in you? Girl falling in love at the lake was my mom’s story. But maybe it could still be mine as well.
“Great minds,” Blake said, waving a hand between us. “It’s hot as balls in there.”
That wasn’t exactly how I would have put it, but he wasn’t wrong. Hannah and Rachel had returned, the beer pong game began, and I watched as Blake lost three rounds in a row. Meanwhile, a bunch of servers and waiters, off their shifts from the Club restaurant, began to show up, taking the room from crowded to outright packed. Unlike at Mimi’s, the A/C couldn’t keep up. I’d basically had to leave before I melted.
Still, I hadn’t expected Blake to follow me outside, as this was technically his party. Then again, he had downed several beers in a short period. He probably needed air even more than I did.
“Having fun?” he asked. “I mean, aside from the hot-as-balls part.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“You sure you don’t want a beer? We have plenty.”
I shook my head. “No thanks.”
“Why not?”
“I’m sorry?”
He cleared his throat. “Sorry. It’s just in college, when people are sober, there’s usually a reason. Religion. A problem. Parents super strict. Or something.”
“Nothing like that,” I said, and he nodded. I thought maybe I should explain more, tell him about my mom. But something stopped me. “Just not my thing.”
“Ah. Got it.” He snapped his fingers. “Speaking of parents, I wanted to show you something.”
“Is it your parents?” I asked in a deadpan voice. “Because if so, you might want a mint. And some coffee. And a chance to make better choices.”
“What?” he said.
Again, I thought of Roo, nodding as I discussed my humor. Clearly, Blake was not of our people. “Never mind,” I said. “Show me.”
I followed him down the sidewalk. At the end of the row, there was a laundry room, a dryer inside banging loudly, as well as a bulletin board with the clearly ignored rules of NO PARTIES and NO GUESTS. After that, the walkway ended, but Blake kept going, hanging a left into the dark behind the building. We passed a row of shrubs before coming up on a blank bit of wall, a pair of floodlights shining down it.
“I give you,” he said, “the Campus wall.”
What I was looking at was a square expanse, maybe six feet by eight feet, weather-worn and streaked with dirt. It looked in need of a power washing, not our attention. “It’s nice?” I ventured.
“Nice?” He sighed, then stepped closer, right up to it, gesturing for me to do the same. “It’s history. Look.”
I stepped up beside him. As I did, I saw what I’d thought was dirt and blotches were actually signatures, tons of them, stretching from one side to the other. KENT RAMENS KITCHEN WARRIOR! CLASS OF 1987. ELIZABETH WAS HERE ’94. ALEX AND EVIE, 7/20/2000–4EVER. It reminded me of the pictures under glass in Mimi’s office, all these memories, but in words, not images.
“When was your dad here?” Blake asked me now. “Do you know?”
I thought for a second. “The late nineties, I think.”
He bent down to study something scribbled by one of the bushes. “I’ve seen some from then here for sure. Unfortunately, they’re not in any order. You just sign where you find a spot.”
“Have you?” I asked.
“Yep. It’s up there.” I looked where he was indicating, scanning the scribbles above us to the left. Finally, I found it: BLAKE R., DOCKS Y’ALL! ’18. Colin’s signature was below.
“You do it every summer,” I said, clarifying.
“At the end of summer. The bash on the last night. It’s a ritual.”
I looked back up at all those names and dates, wondering if my dad’s really was up there someplace. It was weird, picturing him at Blake’s age, maybe with my mom nearby. And now here I was, brought to this same place all these years later. It seemed crazy, and fated, hitting me all at once, so that I felt unsteady even before I turned to find Blake right there, his face close to mine.
“Hi,” he said softly. Up close the freckles weren’t so noticeable, which was weird.
“Hi,” I replied. I could see a name in my side vision—MARY!—with a heart, but only for a second, because then I was closing my eyes and he was sliding his arms around my waist and kissing me.
I’d waited so long for this moment, my first real kiss, and envisioned it in a million different ways. None of them, however, involved a wall, the thought of my mom and dad, and then, just as I’d managed to push these things away, the sudden sound of someone yelling.
“Did you hear that?” he asked, pulling back from me.
“Yeah. What was it?”
We were both quiet. His arms were still around my waist. A beat later, I heard a girl’s voice, distant but clear. “I always do what you want! The least you can do is return the favor once!”
“That sounds like Bailey,” I said softly, not sure why I was whispering.
“You want me to let you drive the boat home when you’ve been drinking,” a male voice replied.
“Goddammit, Jack. I didn’t say that!”
Blake looked at me. “Her brother,” I explained. “I should probably—”
“Yeah,” he said, stepping back to wave me past him. “Let’s go.”
Quickly, I made my way around the building and into the light of the Campus. As my feet hit the sidewalk and I passed the bulletin board, I realized how loud their voices actually were.
“I set this whole thing up,” Bailey was saying. “I told everyone you guys were going to be here, and then you finally show up and just want to take the boat—”
“Because you’re not driving it,” Jack shot back. “Look at you! You’re slurring!”
“I am not slurring!” she shouted, and she wasn’t, to my ears. “I’m pissed!”
Now, coming around the final corner to the row of units, I could see a small group—Colin, Rachel, some of the servers—gathered around my cousins, who were face-to-face. I hurried over.
“Give me the keys to the motor,” Jack said now, sticking out his hand.
“You couldn’t just hang out for an hour,” she said, and I thought of how she’d organized this from the start to bring both sides of the lake together, folding Colin in. “For me.”
He wiggled his hand at her, impatient.
“You’re an asshole,” she said.
“Whoa, whoa.” Colin stepped up beside her. “Let’s take it down a notch.”
Jack pointed at him. “You stay out of this. It’s your fault she’s drunk in the first place.”
“Me?” Colin objected. “I didn’t force anything on her.”
“She’s underage!” Jack said. “Still in high school. Did she tell you that?”
In response, Bailey surged forward, slapping both hands against his chest and pushing him backward. As he stumbled, then caught himself, I spotted Roo just behind him, watching all of this with a tense look on his face.
“Bailey,” I said to her softly.
“Just get out of here,” she told Jack, her voice cracking. “You don’t want to be here, go.”
He held out his hand again. “Give me the keys and I will.”
She shoved a hand into her pocket, pulling out a key ring and winging it at him. “Fine. Here.”
Even though she was upset, her aim was good enough that he had to shift right at the last
minute to avoid getting hit. The keys hit the ground with a clank. He bent down, snatching them up, then turned and started to walk away.
“You’ll thank me tomorrow,” he said over his shoulder. “When you realize how close you came to doing something stupid.”
“I wasn’t going to drive home!” she replied. “We both know I wouldn’t do that.”
“What we know,” he replied, “is that death is no joke. So stop fucking around.”
Furious, Bailey started to charge at him again. I looked at Colin, who was beside me, but he just stood there, so I reached to grab her, pulling her back. She was shaking, an actual heat coming off her skin as I tightened my grip around her wrists. On Jack’s other side, Roo was watching, too.
“Take a breath,” I said into her ear. “Bailey.”
After fighting me for another moment, she finally went limp. Jack was almost to the road now, his own pace brisk, but Roo remained where he’d been.
“I wasn’t going to take the boat home,” Bailey said to him, her voice tight. “Roo. I wasn’t.”
“Okay,” he said quietly.
She exhaled a half sob, half breath, running her hands through her hair. I’d been so caught up on what was happening I hadn’t noticed everyone else had gone back into Blake and Colin’s place, leaving the three of us alone. I watched as Bailey saw this as well, processing what it may or may not have meant, before she spoke again.
“I’m leaving. Come on, Saylor.”
I looked back at the guys’ apartment, where the door was half-open, voices and music drifting out from inside. It seemed rude to just take off, especially since I’d been lip-locked with one of the hosts only moments earlier. And didn’t she want to say goodbye to Colin?
Apparently, the answer was no. She was already halfway to the road.
I looked at Roo again. “What just happened?”
He was watching Bailey crossing the grass. Jack was long gone. “Depends on who you ask, I guess.”
“I’m asking you,” I said.
Now, he did meet my eyes. “She wanted him to stay. He wanted to go. And drinking and boats don’t mix.”
The accident. I blinked, it only just then hitting me that we were talking about his dad, and that night all those years ago, when my mom was with him.
I squinted through the dark, to the road. Bailey was about a block down now. “I should go, I guess.” I kicked off Trinity’s shoes, picking them up in one hand, then started across the grass.
“Hey,” Roo called out. I turned. “See you later?”
I told myself it was just what they said here. And yet. “Yeah,” I said. “See you.”
I had to jog to catch up with Bailey, leaving me breathless. Finally I reached her, the lights of Campus dimmer now behind us. “Hey,” I said. “You okay?”
“No,” she replied, still walking. “Yes. Maybe. I don’t know.”
We walked in silence for a bit, passing the back of the Tides—PRIVATE! GUESTS ONLY! said several signs—as well as the boardwalk, which was pretty much deserted. It was clear that North Lake and Lake North had many differences, but neither was a late-night town.
“I wasn’t going to take the boat home, just so you know,” she said suddenly as a gated neighborhood called Bellewether came up on our left.
I didn’t say anything.
“Seriously! I wasn’t.” She tucked a piece of hair behind her ear. “I figured Roo would bring them over, Jack would take our boat back, and we’d catch a ride with someone. It would have worked out fine if he’d just not been such a jerk. But lately he’s always a jerk because my dad is putting all this pressure on him about taking over the Station.”
A car was coming toward us now, moving slowly, headlights bright in my eyes. I started to move out of the road, but then it turned, leaving just us and the dark again.
“I’ll be honest,” I said. “I don’t really understand what happened back there.”
She sighed, shoving her hands in her pockets. “Jack’s the oldest of all of us. He knows that what he does, everyone else will do. He’s hung out with Rachel and Hannah before on our side. If he’d come over here in good faith, it would have been just like any other night. Only the setting is different.”
“But he didn’t do that,” I said, clarifying.
“Of course not. He had a chip on his shoulder, the way he always does about guys from the yacht club, and everyone from Lake North, for that matter.”
“And it probably doesn’t help if they’re into his little sister,” I added.
She glanced at me. “That’s irrelevant. He’d rather I date a certified douchebag from our side than a saint from over here.”
“Is there really a verification process for that?”
She rolled her eyes. “Ha, ha.”
I smiled. “So maybe he’s biased. But it seems like what you were actually about to come to blows about was the whole drinking-on-the-boat thing.”
“Because he knows that subject negates anything else!” she replied, loudly enough so I stopped walking for a second, startled. “Sorry. It’s just we’ve heard about that accident our whole lives. It’s the cautionary tale of all cautionary tales and had nothing to do with all this. And the fact that he brought it up in front of Roo just makes me look more like a jerk, because . . .”
She trailed off, her flip-flops slapping hard against the pavement as we passed a third gated neighborhood in a row, by my count, on this tiny deserted road. What were they keeping out? Civilization?
“Because it was his dad,” I finished.
“Which, again,” she shot back, “had nothing to do with Jack sabotaging my night and this thing I had going with Colin!”
“I know,” I said carefully, holding up a hand. “I’m new here, remember? I’m just trying to catch up.”
She ducked her head down, not saying anything for a minute. Up ahead, the road was widening as we approached an intersection, a single red blinking light above it.
“Your mom never talked about it?” she asked me finally.
“The accident?” She nodded. “No. She told a lot of stories, but not that one.”
“Whereas my mom,” Bailey said, “couldn’t forget. Everything was a reminder. The summer starting, their group hanging out together, even the lake itself. It was like a ghost, haunting her.”
“What happened?”
We were almost to the light now. Just beyond it, there was a sign: NORTH LAKE 3 MILES. An arrow pointed the way.
“You really want to hear it?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
We passed under the light. Blink. Blink. Blink.
“All right,” she said. “So it happened in July.”
Nine
July 9, 2000, was my mom’s twenty-first birthday. She’d been with Dad for a year by then, dating long-distance during the school months. By Christmas, they’d be engaged, and she’d be pregnant with me.
But in June, as summer began, she didn’t know any of this. She was just missing her boyfriend, and more nervous than she wanted to admit about starting a new life almost two hours west. She dealt with it the way she did most things, back then. She tried to forget.
Most lake kids liked to party—in that small of a town, there weren’t a lot of entertainment options—but even with this as the norm, my mom had always stood out. Whatever she liked to do, she did to excess. What she was best known for, though, was her disappearing act.
The gist was this: they’d all be out on the water at night, having a few beers at the raft, when someone would notice she was gone. The first time, of course, panic ensued, especially when despite zigzagging the water and yelling, she couldn’t be found. Until Celeste, near hysteria, got back to the shore to call 911 and found my mom sitting there wrapped in a towel, sucking on a cold Pop Soda. She’d swum all the way back, in darkness, then sat and watched as they searched for her.
My dad hated the disappearing act. One time she did it while they were sailing with his friends on the Lake North si
de, and he was so angry he broke up with her as a result. It took a full week of profuse apologizing before she finally convinced him to change his mind.
Her birthday that year fell on a Sunday, but my mom planned to celebrate all weekend, starting with when my dad arrived on Friday from Lakeview, where he’d been taking summer classes for dental school. She’d been so looking forward to his visit, literally crossing the days off the calendar she kept on her bedroom wall. That morning, though, he called: the mandatory study group for one of his classes could only meet that weekend. He wasn’t coming.
My mom, hurt and furious, screamed at him over the phone before slamming every door on her way out of the house to her car. The next time anyone saw her was the following afternoon, when she came home hungover, slept until noon the next day, then started up again to celebrate her first legal birthday in earnest.
Her party was being held at Celeste and Silas’s new place. By then they’d been married two years and had Jack, who was just starting to walk. The house was small, but homey, and they’d planned a cookout and game night. There were stations for cornhole, pin the tail on the donkey, Texas Hold’em, and others. Celeste wanted everything to be perfect.
My mom arrived at the party with Chris Price and an open beer in her hand, then proceeded to down some shots of tequila in quick succession. As her sister began to explain the protocol of game night, my mom heckled her. When she crumpled up her hand-printed scorecard and chucked it at her, Celeste threw her out.
Chris and Silas tried to negotiate a peace, but Calvander girls, stubborn as a rule, were not budging. So Celeste locked herself in her room, crying, while Waverly and Chris Price left together to go to Splinkey’s, the only bar in town. They drank a pitcher of beer and played darts, cutting up, until the guy serving them told them to go home. Instead, they went to the lake.
At twenty-two, Chris was a year older than Waverly, and had a kid on the way with his on-and-off girlfriend, Stephanie. At that moment, they were split, having broken up after fighting about money, impending parenthood, and his own partying. Like Waverly, Chris was known for his love of a good time as well as a sense of humor that bordered on the annoying. Celeste said there were lots of reasons he and my mom were best friends, but a big one was that sometimes, no one else could stand to be around them.