The Goodbye Summer

by Sarah Van Name

  It’s blurry and oversaturated and not the best angle for either of us, but we look so happy. Best friends on a summer afternoon.

  Jake and I spent that weekend together after we talked, and all Monday morning, Jake and I text about Kentucky. He sends me a picture his dad sent him, of this gorgeous field with a forest in the distance, and of the barn, which is smaller than I imagined and more of a shed, but the choice is made. In between, I think about lunch.

  Jenny won’t let me stay in the store, and I haven’t brought a lunch, having snoozed through my mom’s offer to make me a salad and failed to grab anything myself. My choices are to sit alone outside on the curb and eat nothing, texting with Jake whenever he gets a free moment, which would be okay. Or I could walk a mile to the deli down the street and pay eight dollars for a shitty sandwich, which would also be fine.

  But both choices sound exhausting. I am exhausted with exhaustion. It would be so easy to go out to the back patio and slowly eat a slice of pizza, making it last for a half hour, and lie down next to Georgia.

  Fighting with her, though, would be the most exhausting thing of all. And as she jogs through the atrium practically carrying a groggy latecomer four-year-old, she glances at me only once.

  So it’s the curb. I walk outside and sit near the slowly wilting flowers and pick apart a leaf while I wait for Jake to text me back. I am fully prepared to spend the entire lunchtime sitting there. But after about five minutes, a shadow falls over me, and I look up, squinting into the sun until the shape moves and blocks the light. It comes into focus.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” Jenny says. “You’re the biggest mope. Go eat with your friends. This is the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  “I think Georgia’s mad at me,” I say, the words sounding childish as soon as they come out. I shred the leaf between my fingernails.

  “Well, work it out. That’s what adults do. Come on, get up, go.” She nudges me with her foot, and I look at my phone. Jake still hasn’t texted me back.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I say, and she shakes her head as she reaches out a hand to help me up. I take it, and she pulls me upright, surprisingly strong.

  She watches me as I walk back into the atrium, the air conditioning hitting me like a sudden gust of wind. I glance back at her, still standing there squinting into the sun, as I walk through the door to the back hallway. The hallway seems longer than ever, silent but for the air conditioning buzz.

  When I come out, the sun is blinding, and the air smells like pizza grease and cement. Toby turns at the sound of the door and grins.

  “Hey, it’s Caroline! The triumphal return! She’s been gone for weeks!”

  “Barely a single week,” I say, breaking into a smile despite myself.

  A whoop arises from the gathered group, lounging in various states of undress on the ground. Toby gets up and claps me on the back. Matt throws a balled-up napkin at me, missing by a mile. Even Serena looks up from her book. She tilts her head down to look at me over her sunglasses, nods and smiles briefly, and returns to form. Everyone’s happy to see me.

  Except Georgia. She doesn’t even look at me. She’s hunched over the SAT book, sitting cross-legged with her hair in a messy topknot. As the others fire a loose barrage of questions at me—mostly asking where I was and suggesting that Jenny might have tied me up in her office as punishment for some imagined infraction—she continues to stare down at the book.

  She’s not really studying. When she’s focused, she scratches her pencil against the back of her neck and furrows her brow. Sometimes at the end of a really long SAT session, her neck is practically silver from pencil lead. I can’t stand it. I think about lead poisoning, even though she’s told me over and over that pencil lead isn’t the same as the dangerous stuff.

  There’s no lead on the back of her neck. She’s not even holding her pencil.

  I stand around and listen to Toby and Matt joke for a while, and eventually, their shallow river of words passes over me and Jenny and on to Melinda, the administrative assistant who we never see, except—as they tell me—she’s intensely pregnant, and they’ve started a pool to bet on when she’s gonna have her kid.

  They talk and they talk and they talk, and Georgia stares at the cement through the hundreds of thin pages. I am not sure how to approach her at first, but after a few minutes, I walk over and sit next to her. I can see her eyes barely flick toward me and return to her book. It feels like everyone should be quiet for this dramatic moment, but no one looks at us; no one cares.

  I put my hand on her knee, and she tilts her head toward me, eyes still pointing down. Her skin is warm and soft from the sun, coated in a thin dark layer of fuzz. She doesn’t shave as much as I’d think she would for someone whose legs are bare all the time.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  I’m not sure what I’m apologizing for—keeping the secret for so long, or not coming to talk to her before, or compromising with Jake when she thought I shouldn’t. Not that I’ve told her yet.

  “I’m going to Kentucky,” I say. There’s a long pause.

  “I know,” she says. “I just…I think it’s a mistake. I’m not judging you. But I really, really don’t think you should go.”

  I take a deep breath, feeling off balance. I open my mouth to argue, but there’s no point. Instead, I say, “I know.”

  “Okay,” she says.

  “Okay.”

  We sit there like that for a long time, my hand on her leg, her chin tucked into her chest, strands of hair clinging to the sweat on her cheeks.

  “I’m really sorry, Georgia,” I say again.

  She puts her hand on top of mine and says, “Me too.”

  I don’t know what she’s sorry for either: blowing up at me at the restaurant, or not coming to talk to me before, or believing what she does about my life and my boyfriend. But I turn my hand over, and we fold our fingers together. She pushes aside her SAT book and lies down, pulling me with her, and just like that we’re back as we were in the picture: heads touching at the side, eyes closed, squinting into the sun, together.

  Chapter 14

  Plans are starting to come together. The process of deciding specifics gives a new dimension to my conversations with Jake. This week, on the nights I spend with him, we sit on the porch for hours talking details. How much money we have, how long the drive is, what kinds of jobs there are in the small town near the farm.

  Jake and his dad talk on the phone every day now, though from what he tells me, I gather the conversations are still short. He’s started calling it “our farm.”

  Despite all that, I can’t get a clear picture of what our lives will be. I can’t fit the pieces into a whole. He says his dad talks about the horses on the farm next door. I say, does our farm have horses? Jake says it might. He says his dad talks about the sunset over the fields. I ask what kind of crops there are, if it’s a functional farm or simply a big plot of land. Jake doesn’t hear me. He’s talking about the path his dad is building down to the river, how he wakes up in the morning and hacks at trees, and how he wants Jake to help.

  The mosquitoes get in through holes in the porch screen as Jake talks, and I listen. I ask questions, and he kisses me and doesn’t answer. I rub aloe on my bites. When the mosquitos come back, they get caught in the aloe and I hit them, leaving a red mark on my sticky greenish legs.

  We don’t have sex as much as usual. On Tuesday, I climb on top of him while he’s talking and straddle him in the flimsy plastic chair. Sometimes, when I can’t listen to the thirteenth recounting of a conversation with his dad, I look at his body, let my eyes linger on him for a long time, all up and down, and good God, he is so hot. The lean line of his chest down to his legs and the muscles in his calves. Looking at him makes me remember why we’re leaving.

  “I want you,” I whisper. I kiss his neck.

  He gently push
es me back, hands on my shoulders. “Baby, we have so much to go over, there’s no time. Dad says there’s a coffee shop and a hardware store hiring. I feel like I’d be a good fit at the hardware store, right? I mean, I’ve spent tons of time pushing carts around at the grocery store, it can’t be that different.” I must look disappointed, because he laughs and says, “Okay, down, girl, we’ll do it. But later, not now.”

  I dismount, my limbs awkward, while he gestures like an orchestra conductor about the pros and cons of this job versus that one. When we do have sex at ten, his roommates are home, and I can hear them laughing at some stupid action movie through the walls. My heart isn’t in it. It’s quick and hurts a little and I don’t even pretend to come.

  Driving me home, Jake turns on the radio, and it’s my favorite song. He turns it up and rubs my leg, smiles, tells me he loves me.

  It feels like a fist stretched out, offering a gift as a surprise, but inside the hand there’s nothing. Or less than nothing. Something worthless, like a slip of paper from a fortune cookie.

  Everything is becoming more real. Jake knows how many days are left now; he texts it to me every morning with a smile and a heart. When I said yes, it made something shift inside him, and so it shifted inside us.

  It’s more than us who are different. Georgia knows too, and though I was worried about telling her, it turns out to be an immeasurable relief. She comes over to my house on Wednesday, like usual. Except unlike usual, I just talk. I don’t think she says six words from when she picks me up at the aquarium until dinner. I talk and talk and talk, first out on the porch and then inside when it gets too hot, checking over my shoulder every few minutes in case Mom got home from her tennis date too early.

  I thought I told her everything before, but there is so much still to tell. Months and months of planning and conversations, and all the times I wouldn’t go to the movies with her unless my parents would give me ten dollars for a ticket. The reason I don’t like the SAT books, and why I haven’t talked about college at the dinner table.

  We sit on my bed as the sun melts into the horizon. She hugs her legs while I tell her about all the places I wanted to go and why. She takes the postcards as I hand them to her and inspects them closely, then pins them back on the board. By the end, she has organized them into a neat grid. Pictures of my family and my old friends from school and Georgia are on the right and left, postcards from other places and pictures of Jake are at the top and bottom. In the middle, there’s a hole.

  “What goes there?” I ask, even though I know the answer.

  “Kentucky,” she says. She looks down at her feet. “If you’re still sure.”

  Mom calls us down to dinner.

  Meat loaf, broccoli, pasta. Mom beat her tennis partner so bad that the woman wanted to play another couple matches to make it best of five, then best of seven, which is why dinner is late. Dad has a new coworker who keeps messing up his code. From Georgia, we hear about the latest installment of the ongoing saga of her young admirer. Today, he gave her a cookie from his lunch. My parents love these stories. I manage a weak contribution about a ten-year-old girl who, after almost an hour of browsing, chose the most terrifying thing in the store—the stuffed octopus.

  Then my mom, slyly, in between bites of broccoli says, “You know, we’re almost at September, and all the books say that’s when you should really start your college applications.”

  I roll my eyes, but my stomach drops.

  “Just one Common App essay, Caroline,” Mom pleads. I shrug and shove more food into my mouth. She sighs and turns. “Georgia? Are you sure you can’t convince her?”

  Georgia looks at me a beat too long, and for a moment I’m terrified that I have underestimated her anger, that she’s not over it or sorry at all, and that I’m screwed.

  She combs her fingers through her hair and says, “Sorry, Ms. Weaver. Not gonna happen.”

  Mom sighs and regroups. “Well, Georgia, honey, have you narrowed it down any further?”

  Georgia nods. “I’m thinking I don’t really need to apply to all the Ivies, so if I limit those to only four or five, I’m down to like sixteen total. Obviously there’s Stanford too, and I’ve been having trouble choosing my safeties, but I think…”

  Mom props her head in her hand, distracted, bringing a forkful of pasta slowly to her mouth. Dad pats me on the shoulder in an awkward attempt to comfort me, I suppose, for not having made up my mind about this, apparently the most important decision of my life. And it is comforting, but not for the reasons he thinks.

  Georgia sits there, talking, feeding my mom all the beautifully laid-out future plans she wants. I am lucky she’s not a vengeful girl, because God, she really could have fucked me over.

  The next day at work, I use Jenny’s computer and the twitchy office printer to print out one of the photos of Kentucky that Jake sent me. It’s the prettiest one, featuring the fields with the sun starting to set behind the trees in the distance. It’s hard to visualize where the house and the barn are. The one picture of the barn is from far away, and it looks less than idyllic.

  So I print the one of the fields, and I cut it out with a sticky pair of scissors in the cramped administrative office. Melinda looks at me with vague suspicion as she trundles in to get a box of highlighters. I feel somehow guilty, as if she knows what I’m planning and could tell someone. Like she can see into the picture to discover where it came from. She leaves, though, and I glue the printed paper onto an index card and go back out to lunch.

  That night, sitting in my room with Georgia while she watches TV on my laptop, I pin the picture in the middle of the corkboard, right in the space Georgia left for it yesterday. I look down, but she’s absorbed in her show.

  “How does it look?” I ask her, kneeling on the bed and craning my neck back to see her reaction.

  She looks up, but doesn’t answer immediately. Her face moves in small, incomprehensible ways. “Why didn’t you put up the one of the barn?” she asks after several long moments.

  “It wasn’t as nice a picture, I guess.”

  “I thought it was nice.”

  I sigh and look at the picture in the middle. On the printer paper, its pale matte surface looks dull next to the glossy landscapes of the postcards and prints all around it. I wish I’d gone to the drugstore to print it, like I did the others, but I wanted to get it up there as fast as possible. “The barn just looked so small. And…falling apart.”

  She gives me a look, and I moan and fall into my pillow. “Jake says he’s gonna fix it up,” I say into the stuffing. “The sunset was prettier. That’s all.”

  I feel Georgia flop onto the bed with me and nestle into my side. I turn my head to the wall, away from her.

  “Listen,” she says, “I won’t mention it again if you don’t want me to. I promise I’ll never say anything about it ever again, seriously. And I know my personal…” She pauses. “…ideas about this whole situation probably make me prejudiced. But it’s not about what I think. You don’t seem happy. You don’t seem like you actually want to go.”

  “I really do want to go,” I say. “I’m really excited about it.” But even I can hear I’m not convincing. It sounds hollow and sickly and thin. All the emotion behind those words is somewhere else, outside in the night, belonging to some other girl.

  Georgia doesn’t say anything. The weight of her in the bed is a comfort and a pressure, both.

  I roll over to face her. My face is so close to hers that I can only focus on one part of it at a time: Right eye. Left eye. Nose. Lips. Like a modernist painting, I try to look at her fully and I get cross-eyed. And like when my history teacher called on me to ask me the meaning of the painting, I don’t know what to say.

  “I’ll stop talking about it,” she whispers. Her breath blows warm across my chin.

  “It’s complicated,” I say. Again, God, the words feel weak comin
g out, not nearly enough to cover everything I want to say. “I have to go. I promised.”

  “People break promises,” she says. So quiet, so warm.

  “Not this one,” I say, and because I cannot stand to hear what she might say in return, I turn away again. The bottom row of pictures line up with my eyes. Texas. Massachusetts. California. Orange desert, red brick, blue ocean. The colors blur together in a messy watercolor. I don’t want to cry right now.

  Georgia wraps her arm around my waist and snuggles into me. Her bare prickly legs tuck into mine, and the curves and lines of her body follow the curves and lines of my body, and even though she is at least three inches shorter than me, she feels protective—almost as protective as Jake does. Unlike Jake, though, she doesn’t grab at my boobs or nudge a hard-on into my ass or whisper into my ear, all things that are nice sometimes, but that he does all the time when we’re in this position.

  She just lies there and holds me, and she doesn’t say anything. I focus on breathing in and out. When my breath gets even and my eyes dry up, still she stays and still she says nothing.

  I’m waiting for her to respond, because I know how she feels. A part of me wants her to say again that I can break this promise, I can break any promise, I don’t have to go, but she is good enough to stay quiet.

  She stays quiet long enough that I think I fall asleep, and when my mother cracks open the door and says, “Georgia, it’s ten, time to go,” she turns off the lights when she gets up. I think I remember reaching for her after she’s gone, trying to find her and finding only her body’s imprint in the mattress, making a noise halfway between a whine and a cry. But I don’t know for sure. I was long unconscious by then.