When I close my locker, I look down the quiet, almost-empty hallway. It’s my last time standing here as Emerson. In three months I’ll come back as a senior, and I won’t be Him. Emerson, the Golden Boy of Riverton Baseball. I’ve already noticed the change the last week, as I’ve navigated the hallways with my mangled face. I’ve had to wear my failure like a mask.
I push the doors open and walk into the courtyard where the bike racks are. My yellow Schwinn is the only one left. It’s still dusty and scratched from two years of sitting in the backyard shed since I got my permit and abandoned it. I brush off the black handlebars and give it a squeeze in my palm. It’s just you and me this summer. As I roll out onto the sidewalk I can see a few of the guys out by the double doors leading out of the gym, at the opposite end of the building. They’re looking out into the parking lot.
When Stevens’s eyes meet mine, I know they know. I hear my name in a loud shout—not angry, just loud—and steer myself in the opposite direction. They can’t fix this. And I don’t want to hear about how I’m letting the team down, or ruining senior year, or driving away scouts. I know I’m doing it. I let all those thoughts infest my brain for the last week, until it got so messed up I had to let them out. I’m used to baseball being on my brain—games, scouts, college plans, all of it. But not when I can’t have it. Not when I know it’s out of reach.
Because there’s no such thing as a legally blind pitcher. Even if it’s just one eye. I close my left eye as I pedal, and watch everything get soft and shaded like a watercolor painting. I can still see the road—the dark strip stretching out in front of me. The grass and trees are all shades of green, blended together, lights and darks, like little puddles of paint against the blue background of the sky. I close my other eye as well, just for a second, feel the breeze against my face, warm sun in my hair. My shoulders suddenly feel so much hotter.
I jerk as a rush of air goes by me. My eyes whip open as the car flies by down the country road, my tire sliding just off the shoulder into the gravel, crashing me down to the ground.
“Fuck.” I push myself up, pulling my bike with me. My forearm burns, covered in dirt and tiny pieces of gravel, the blood starting to seep out in thin lines and splotches. Fantastic. Because I didn’t look like enough of a freak show with my mutilated face. My mom’s going to lose her shit when she sees this. She’s already convinced I’m going off the rails. That I’m being hasty quitting the team. Things will get better, she says. Which is probably true, but what she doesn’t understand is that baseball isn’t going to wait for me. That the idea of a baseball flying in my direction is fucking terrifying now. That even before I took a line drive to the face, I flinched every time Zander lobbed the ball back at me in practice. I knew as soon as I left the ophthalmologist’s office a month ago that I probably shouldn’t play, but I’ve let my parents’ optimism keep pushing me forward. Until the hit. I knew that hit was the end of more than just our chance at regionals.
My phone is buzzing in my pocket and there are only three possibilities:
1. The guys, ready to trash me about baseball
2. Ellis, my cousin and best friend, making sure I survived
3. Dad, checking in about River Depot
When I finally pull up to the house and take my phone out, it turns out I was three for three.
Zander: WTF Emerson!!!
Stevens: Come on man, get your ass back here
MISSED CALL: Dad
Ellis: You alive?
Still have all your beautiful teeth?
Your face needs all the help it can get at this point.
I laugh out loud, because Ellis is obsessed with the current status of my face. A few days ago he tried to put concealer on my eye, and he’s already looked up the area’s best cosmetic surgeon, in case—his words, not mine—my face doesn’t “pull together” soon. It’s not really that bad. The swelling is gone and in another week the bruises will hopefully be gone completely. There’s a healing cut on the outside of my cheekbone, but the little white strips across it look kind of badass. Like I was in a fight or something. By the time I throw another bandage on my arm, the look will be complete.
* * *
When I pull into the driveway, Dad’s giant red truck is in front of our massive garage. Most people would just call it a pole barn, but to me it’s always been the garage. Except it’s the kind of garage where you winter fifty canoes, a hundred kayaks, and piles and piles of life jackets. Even now, with the season getting started, a third of the space is still covered in red, blue, and green boats.
My car is sitting in the unopened bay at the far end of the garage, and even though I can’t see it, I can sense it like a cosmic pull. I can almost feel the worn leather interior, like a phantom limb.
“Aiden.” My name rings across the yard as I dump my bike in the grass.
“Hey.” I make my way toward the porch where my dad is coming down the steps in his unofficial summer uniform—khaki shorts, Birkenstocks, and a Riverton t-shirt. My dad owns every t-shirt River Depot sells. This one says SALT-FREE SUMMER FUN with an outline of Lake Michigan, and RIVERTON across the bottom. It’s so weird to live in a place where people buy everything from shot glasses to kid’s slingshots with the town’s name slapped on it. It’s not like we’re New York or Chicago or Paris. I doubt some dude overseas visits the Eiffel Tower and then thinks, “Now all that remains is to see Riverton, Michigan, and I can die happy.” It’s a nice enough place though, if you like the water, which my family does. We’ve spent most of our summer free time outside for as long as I can remember. Canoeing and kayaking; hiking in the dunes along Lake Michigan.
“Help me load up?” Dad nods toward the garage. “It’s good practice for you.”
“Sure.” I toss my backpack onto the porch and make my way to the garage. Dad looks at my wrist, then holds it up in his hand. “What’s this?”
“Bike ride home.” I lightly brush at the dirt still stuck to my arm. “Wiped out.” The blood is starting to dry and it’s going to hurt like a bitch when I finally get a chance to wash it off.
“You’re killing me with this stuff.” Dad laughs softly, but I can tell he’s irritated. “Throw your mom a bone and try to be more careful, okay? I’m tired of hearing about how you’re mangling the body she spent nine long months growing.”
“Limb by limb,” I mutter, and Dad laughs. I look down at my arm, barely bleeding at all but clearly not looking great. Life has been more dangerous lately. “Sorry.”
Dad grabs one end of a canoe and I grab the other. “How’d it go?” he says, as we make our way to his truck. “Martinez give you crap?”
I hoist my end of the metal boat up onto the rack that sits atop the bed of my dad’s truck. “It was fine.” I don’t know what else to say. This isn’t the kind of talk we usually have about baseball. Dream colleges and major league pipe dreams is our usual thing. Stuff that’s less depressing.
He nods but doesn’t say anything else about it. We load five more canoes onto the rack, and then start shoving oars in the empty cavity of the truck bed. Dad climbs into the driver’s seat and hangs his elbow out the open window. “You sure you’re up for this?”
I know what Dad means—you’re sure you want to work at River Depot? Sure that after all these years avoiding it with baseball camps and pitching clinics and extra workouts, I’m not going to let him down this summer? I won’t be in charge—I don’t know enough now to do anything other than grunt work. Ellis starts training me this weekend, getting me up to speed on all the things I didn’t learn the last four years, while he was working there without me.
I’m excited to work with my best friend. Excited I’ll mostly be helping tourists who don’t know me, and not locals who will ask questions. A three-month break from teammates, classmates, and coaches sounds like a best-case scenario. This summer I need to figure out who I am without baseball, and I don’t need to be reminded of who I was with it.
OLIVIA
“I c
ould stay here.” I turn my eyes from the ceiling and look into Zander’s blue eyes. It’s the first day of summer break, and I’m lying on his bed in a post-lunch food coma.
“In my room? You’re not supposed to be up here to begin with.”
I think of what Aunt Sarah would say, and snort a little. Even when we were in middle school and just friends, I always had strict instructions not to be in Zander’s room. I’m not sure what the goal was, because Aunt Sarah is far from conservative and I wasn’t even thinking about sex back then—I certainly wasn’t about to do it with his parents down the hallway. Maybe it just made her feel more like a mother figure? I had just moved in with her full-time, and she was still getting used to the whole pseudo-parent thing. Sometimes I think she still is.
“Your parents don’t care,” I say.
“I guess.” Zander doesn’t sound convinced. He sounds indifferent. He’s been weird the last week, ever since I told him I was potentially moving. Weird, because he’s taken a temporary hiatus from ranting about his baseball woes, and is now talking about almost nothing. Potentially, because I still have no intention of actually leaving. Aunt Sarah seems to be open to options, so now I just need some options.
It’s true about his parents though. They really don’t care. As far as they’re concerned, my joining the family someday is just a technicality. They’ve introduced me as their “other daughter” for as long as I can remember; since I was the sometimes-neighbor girl at Oma’s house down the street. Then in ninth grade, when Zander had his first serious girlfriend, I didn’t come around as much. It was hard, seeing them together. Even harder getting the side-eye from Ellie Henderson. It won’t last, his dad said to me with a wink, when I found myself early to his house one night and Ellie and I crossed paths. She glared at me from across the kitchen as I sat at the island with a glass I’d gotten myself from the cabinet. I wanted to cry then, thinking about how I wasn’t The One. But six months later Ellie was gone. And his mom said, “It’s always been you” when we told them we were officially together.
“Are you listening to me?” I flick his hand with mine. “I’m serious. Maybe I could stay in Becca’s room.”
“She’s coming home for the summer. She’ll need her old room.”
He’s right, of course. “But she’s getting married at the end of the summer. And she’ll be moved into their new place before that … so maybe I could stay here.” I look around his room, at the posters and trophies and dents in the wall I know by heart. “You’ll be gone most of the summer, anyway. I could stay in your room while you’re gone, and then move into Becca’s before school starts.”
I’m proud of myself for thinking on my feet. Though I wonder how the Belles—or Aunt Sarah—would feel about me being in the house alone for so long.
“I’ll be gone all summer,” he corrects me.
No one knows better than me how long my boyfriend deserts me each summer, when he pilgrimages to his family’s lake house five hours north. Leaving one beach town for another—ridiculous. For ten weeks every summer I’m at the bottom of the state, and Zander is at the top. And for one glorious week in the middle, I get to stay at the lake house with him—with all of them. The Belles. Becca lying out on the float until she’s an unnatural shade of red, Zander’s mom, Trudy, making elaborate meals every night, and her husband Dean manning the grill.
The lake cabin is just the right mix of new and old and the lake is always rippling gently with the light shimmering across it like tinsel on a Christmas tree. I’m always there during the Fourth of July, when the little town puts up flags and buntings. Like a freaking Norman Rockwell painting. Just thinking about the lake house makes me giddy with anticipation. Zander and I used to share a room with twin bunk beds when we were up there, but when I had gone from best friend to girlfriend that summer after freshman year I was promoted to the spare bed in Becca’s room for the week.
“I’m staying the whole summer this year.” Zander shakes his head, and his blond hair falls across his forehead.
“Since when?”
He doesn’t say anything right away, just stares up at the ceiling. When I push myself up and sit on the edge of the bed, he closes his eyes. “Does this have to be a thing?”
“That I’m possibly leaving, and you’re not going to see me all summer?”
He shakes his head. “If you’re leaving, what’s the point of the summer?” he mumbles.
Ouch. It had never crossed my mind that my moving would mean that Zander and I were over.
“So you don’t want to waste your summer with me if I’m going to be moving … but you also don’t want me to move in, which would keep me here? That sounds like us breaking up either way.”
Zander doesn’t say anything, and I can feel the tears pricking at my eyes. I don’t say anything, because talking about feelings is hard. It was hard when I was in therapy, talking about my lousy mother, and it never got any easier when I had to start talking to Zander.
“Maybe we should, Liv. I mean—” His voice is soft but rough, and the words stick into my ribs like they were wrapped around the blade of a knife.
“Fine.” I don’t know what else to say when it’s clear he’s over this. That he’s fine with leaving me for the summer, and for forever.
Zander rolls off his back and sits on the edge of his bed, his back to me. I’ve spent so much time in his room, I almost forget it isn’t mine. That I’m the one who has to retreat from this match. “I still want to be friends…”
“Unbelievable.” I push myself up from the bed and don’t glance back as I make my way out the door. Of course Zander would think he could have it both ways. I was the friend, and then finally when it was convenient I was the girlfriend, and now the tides have turned again.
The hallway that runs along the upstairs balcony feels endless as I pass the doors to his parents’ room and his sister’s. I can’t believe I was thinking about moving in here while he was ready to dump me. He’s just done? It doesn’t make any sense, and the irrationality of it all gives me a certain sense of calm. Tomorrow he’ll text. I’ll wake up to “Love you”—Zander’s version of an I’m sorry—and all will be right. Because serious relationships don’t end like this. They don’t end without tears or yelling. Over the years my mother’s boyfriends just left. One day they were there and the next they were gone. Zander isn’t some guy I met at the grocery store and brought home on a whim. Why did he have to kiss me?
I had almost gotten used to him and Horrible Ellie Henderson, to the idea that we’d never get together. I had a crush on Joey Hammond that spring. He had just started texting me, and showing up at the ice cream shop after my shifts. But then Zander broke up with Ellie, and we sat on his bed, and he kissed me. He changed everything. Now I wish he had just left me in my little bubble, loving him in secret. We wouldn’t have anything to lose. But no, he just had to go and kiss me.
As I make my way through the kitchen I give Trudy a quick smile. She’s leaning her hip against the counter, hunched over a notepad as she scratches at it with a pen. Her hair is long and blond and everything about her is soft-looking. Not like my mother, who is all sharp angles, straight lines, and cropped dark hair. Trudy has always felt like what I thought a mother should be. Not just soft, but warm. I want to stop, to tell her what a jerk her son is, but it’s embarrassing to admit how dysfunctional we can be. Plus it isn’t fair to her. Or to me. Because she’d march me right back up there and somehow fix this. I’m not sure if I’m ready for it to be fixed.
I want the text.
I want to ignore it for a few hours, to make him wait and wonder. I want to be on the other end for once. I never realized how much I needed it until this moment. I’m out the door before Trudy can even say a word. And as I walk out of Zander’s house, along the brick walkway and down the driveway, where the family’s speedboat sits, waiting to be hauled five hours north, I realize that my problems have only multiplied since I arrived. I still don’t have anywhere to live next year.<
br />
This isn’t how I imagined summer starting.
Chapter
Three
OLIVIA
All I can think about is how Zander has ruined everything. How it might never be what it was, the two of us lying on his living room floor, sorting through our history homework while his mom hovered around us with bowls of popcorn (and then chips, and then pretzels). Eventually I’d stay for dinner, because Aunt Sarah works late, and Trudy thinks I’ll starve, because I’m basically a bottomless pit. The Belles were my family, my safe place, the universe’s reward for all the crap. And Zander ruined it.
“I hate boys.” The cupcake wrapper crinkles as I peel it back, letting my fingers sink into the softness. I think about the sappy text message I almost sent to Zander this morning, the one still sitting on my phone about how I wished he had never kissed me two years ago. Don’t do it, Liv. It felt good to write it, even if I’m not going to send it.
“I don’t,” Emma says, her mouth full of chocolate. There’s a smudge of pink frosting at the corner of her lips. The ridiculous uniform for her new job at The Cherry Pit is laid across my bed waiting for her shift to start in an hour. Emma and I are on the floor, sitting cross-legged and face-to-face, while I eat my feelings. Yesterday was the crying—today, I’m just mad.
“Fine, I hate Zander, not the whole gender.”
“No you don’t.”
I glance at my phone, lying on the gray carpet next to me. Forty-eight hours, and still nothing. “I seriously do.” I unlock my phone, checking to make sure I didn’t miss anything.
“You wanna eff up his house?”
“Em,” I scold. Because she’s right, I’m not quite ready to give up yet.
“No, come on.” Emma springs into a stand. “Let’s torch it!”
When Summer Ends Page 3