Chapter 16
Georgia’s birthday is a Wednesday. I’m hanging out with Jake the night before when she texts me:
sooo my mom told me dinner tom is gonna be earlier than i expected
gonna miss the thing tom night
:(
“Aw, shit,” I mutter while I text her: noooo! can’t you push it back?
“What is it, babe?” Jake looks up from his laptop screen, which is filled with Kentucky rental houses. Georgia texts me back: nooo, they had a reservation at buona tavola, not like you’d even need a reservation, but then my dad’s business partner got us into this french place that’s so so great but it’s like an hour away so I’m leaving right after work.
“We were gonna do this whole birthday thing for Georgia at work tomorrow night,” I tell him while I text Toby to let him know it’s off. “Toby got his boss to let him keep the building open for an extra few hours for a team meeting. I was gonna go get streamers and cake and stuff right after work. But now I guess we’ll have to have cake during lunch, so…” I look up. “Would you mind taking me to the store?”
“You were never this excited about my birthday,” Jake says. His eyes have dropped back down to his keyboard, and I can’t tell if he’s serious or not.
“Babe, last year you and your mom were on vacation, and I had a ton of papers due, so it was kind of hard to have a party,” I say, a little cautious. He doesn’t respond, so I try to do better. “But this year we’re gonna be in Kentucky! And it’ll be so great! You have no idea the kind of stuff I’m planning for you.”
“No, you’re not. It’s whatever.”
“I am, Jake. I promise,” I say, and it’s not a complete lie. I was certainly planning to do something for his birthday. I’m thinking about it now. That has to count as a mark in the truth column.
“Seriously?” He looks up again, so hopeful and handsome, and I take a step forward and kiss him right there.
“Seriously,” I say, looking into his eyes.
He looks down again.
“It just seems like you’re doing all kinds of shit for Georgia that you would never do for me.”
“Oh my God, Jake, no,” I plead. This is not an argument I want to have right now. It’s not an argument I want to have, ever. “You are my boyfriend. You come first, you know that.”
“You’ve only known her for like two months.”
“Two and a half, and—no, I mean, listen, we’re friends, but I’m only doing this because it’s such a huge deal to her. We’re only gonna be hanging out for a couple more weeks. I don’t want to spoil it.”
“But…” He pauses while he struggles to find the words. I wait, my stomach clenched tight. “Why does it matter? If we’re leaving and you’re not gonna see her, like, ever again?”
All of a sudden, I am furious. It’s as if someone planted anger in the ground below me, and it grew up through the foundation and the carpet and my feet and into my bones. It overwhelms me. My vision narrows to a sharp point.
My thoughts are a tornado, and I can’t pluck out what has me angriest. It could be the implication that Georgia would never visit us or that I’d never come back to visit her, the idea that we wouldn’t continue to talk every day. Or maybe it’s the idea that I shouldn’t care about my life here, my whole almost-seventeen-year-long life here, just because we’re about to live somewhere else. Or it could be the simple fact of Jake’s unbelievable, unspeakable selfishness in this moment.
Then I breathe in and the fury recedes, and the tightness inside me barely even makes it into my voice when I say—like the sweet, rational girlfriend I am—“Well, you wouldn’t want to have drama with your roommates, right? Even now?”
He shrugs. “I guess not.” He closes his computer and grabs his keys. “I’m planning something for your birthday, for sure. Although given that I have to work all weekend, and it’s in the middle of the week, it’s not gonna be a blowout or anything. I figure we can do something big once we’re moved in together, and you don’t have a curfew and shit.”
“Yeah, totally, I would love that,” I say as the anger drains out of me. It leaves me feeling deflated, and the idea of a belated birthday party is no help. But he’s not wrong. My birthday is a Wednesday, and he’s picking up extra shifts to get the most out of that last paycheck before we leave. I appreciate the hard work. Plus, there’s the trip that next weekend with the counselors. I feel a flicker of resentment toward Georgia, for making me care about something as foolish as a birthday and sowing this discontent in my relationship. But I can’t really pretend that it’s her fault.
“And listen,” he says. We walk outside, and he opens the car door for me. “We’re obviously gonna be with Dad for a while, but it looks like there are a lot of great rental options around there. I guess there aren’t a lot of apartment complexes, but there are definitely some cool houses. So maybe next year, we can celebrate your birthday in a house of our own.”
“I thought we were moving on after a few months.”
“Well, sure, that’s definitely still a possibility, but I just figure, if we settle in and really like it there, why not move into our own place in the same area?”
He smiles, so delighted, and leans over to kiss me. As his lips touch mine, I fight an instinct to pull away, try to convince myself to be happy. A house of our own—how great would that be? But next year seems forever away.
It’s golden hour, and the sun blinds me as he drives. I close my eyes while he talks. His voice takes on the same lulling tones I used to hear when I would listen to him and his roommates playing video games, talking about their armor and their strategy and their victories. I used to fall asleep to it. Now I can’t fall asleep because all of it involves me. I have to help make the decisions, or at least pretend to, so he doesn’t feel alone.
“So, what kinda cake are you getting?” he says as we walk into the grocery store, finally talking about something other than house rentals and farming duties. “I liked that cake you made that one time last winter. That was so good. You should do that again.”
“I don’t have time,” I say as I inspect the various brightly colored options in the case. Behind the counter, a girl roughly my age texts and glances up at me every once in a while. “Besides, that was from a mix. Georgia doesn’t like box cakes. She likes ice-cream cakes and really nice chocolate cakes.”
“Well, shit,” Jake says. He picks up, inspects, and eats a sample of luncheon meat. “I thought you were a really good baker.”
I choose a quadruple-chocolate cake swathed in frosting an inch thick. It’s not as nice as she would like, but it’s probably the best I can get without driving half an hour to the organic grocery store one town over, where I couldn’t afford to shop anyway.
The girl doesn’t talk to me while she gets it out of the case. Jake wanders off and comes back with six cheese cubes and a free cookie, limit one per child of any age. I decline his offer to share the cheese. He does carry the cake on the way out to the car, which is nice.
The cake goes in the fridge when we get home. It’s almost nine, the sun settled low on the horizon, a thin orange line against the black and blue. Jake wanders down the hall to the bathroom without turning on the light; the whole house is thick with shadow.
“Where are your roommates?” I call down.
“No idea,” he yells back, his voice muffled by the bathroom door. “Hold on a sec.” I hold on. “Oh, they texted me, they’re at a movie.”
The toilet flushes and the door opens. He walks toward me with a mischievous grin.
“Means we’ve got the house to ourselves.”
“In a few weeks, we’ll always have the house to ourselves,” I reply, trying to smile even though the words make me feel like I’m on unsteady ground.
“Well, the barn.”
“Right.”
“And then the house once we
find a place.”
“Right, no, yeah.”
He walks toward me until he’s so close I have to back up into the cabinets. He puts his hands on either side of me, presses into me at the hips. He kisses my neck. He’s hard, but all I can think about is the fact that the toilet flushed right before the door opened. He didn’t wash his hands. One of those hands pulls at the left strap of my tank top, and I turn away. Inch away, because I’m pinned against the sink.
“Babe, not now,” I whisper.
“Why not?” He switches to the other side, and I let him pull the strap down my arm, let him lift my arm up and drop it again, strapless. I feel like a doll, hinged at the joints.
“I don’t feel like it.”
“I bet I can make you feel like it.” He returns to the left strap and gently tugs it down. His fingers glide over me in familiar patterns. Their familiarity does not make them welcome. Instead, they are a song I’ve played too many times, a song I loved so much I set it as my wake-up alarm, and now I hate every chord in the chorus.
“Babe, no.”
“Mm-hmm.”
Jake kisses my collarbone, lifting up my arm to kiss the skin all the way down, and I do not respond. He stops at my elbow and meets my eyes. In the dark kitchen, the light is blurry and thin, and it is hard for me to see him. I focus on the whites of his eyes, not the dark pupils, not my own reflection in those wide black circles.
“Do you really want to stop?”
There’s still lust in his voice, but it’s softened by boyish fear. I look into his eyes and I love him, and I am so sad. I don’t want to deal with his insecurity right now. I don’t want him to have to feel that complicated emotion, and I don’t want to feel it radiating out from him, and I don’t want the hassle of his jaw set and silent on the way home.
So, I take his arm in mine, and I kiss my way up the strong thin muscles starting at the wrist, making my way to his shoulders where I nudge at the fabric of his T-shirt with my nose, and he peels it off.
“I don’t want you to stop,” I say into his mouth before I kiss him. The words feel like lifting something heavy. A strain in my back.
“Thank God,” he whispers, and he picks me up in his arms and lays me down on the couch, strips off my shirt, pulls off my shorts, kisses me all over, everywhere, and the kisses feel like rain falling on me when I’m already cold. I make the sounds that I usually make and it’s okay.
He takes so long, though. Maybe it’s because he’s stressed about the house or because I resisted at first, but he doesn’t stop for minutes and minutes. My throat starts to get hoarse. It starts to hurt a little and then a little more.
“Uh, Jake?” I say.
“Yeah,” he groans. “God, baby, you feel so great.”
“You feel amazing too,” I say, giving up.
I lie there on the couch for a while as he keeps going and going and going, and I’m so tired. It doesn’t hurt bad enough for me to make him stop, but it hurts. I want it to be over. Finally, he picks up the pace and his breath quickens. As he comes, he kisses me, and no part of me wants to kiss him, so much so that when his lips touch mine, I actually cry out a little, the sound coming out of me without my consent.
But he thinks that means I’ve come too, so he doesn’t say anything. He just laughs in pleasure and relief as he slumps, spent, a heavy weight on top of me.
Chapter 17
Georgia likes the cake the next day at lunch. She shrieks with glee when Toby carries it out from its hiding place in the shared refrigerator. We couldn’t find any forks, so we eat it with our fingers. Someone brings chips and cheese dip from a Mexican place, and that’s our meal. Grease and frosting are everywhere.
It’s been a shitty morning. When I came in, ten minutes late, I hurt between my thighs and felt vaguely dizzy. My legs were wobbly and tired, as if I’d been doing squats. Jenny took one look at me when she left her office the first time, rolled her eyes, and tossed me an Advil. “Girl, you gotta get your shit together, seriously,” she said. “You’re young, you can be happy. It’s allowed.”
“Okay, Jenny, sounds good,” I said, and she shook her head and left to go to the bathroom. The Advil helped. She gave me another when I asked. I drank a ton of water and rallied to serve a ridiculous barrage of kids—another camp, visiting the aquarium for a field trip—and since then, it’s been okay.
Georgia is happy, at least. We all sing over the cake to her, and she doesn’t even do the thing people do where they pretend to be ashamed and say no, stop, don’t sing. She giggles in delight and throws out her arms to take it all in. To my surprise, a lot of people have little gifts for her, some of which I sold to them over the past few weeks: a turtle plush, a cheap necklace with a porpoise on it, a chocolate bar.
I have a gift for her, of course, but it’s not here. I got her a blue flowered bathrobe, supersoft on the inside. She always borrows my bathrobe when she’s at my house and talks about how great it is, and it’s not even that nice. It’s a few years old and it’s been through the wash too many times. This one is softer. My mom and I went to the mall after dinner a few days ago, and she helped me pick it out, though I bought it with my own money—some of those precious savings for Kentucky.
A part of me is sad that Georgia hasn’t asked if I’m okay today. But I guess that means I’ve been hiding it pretty well. As I should—it’s her birthday, and the better part of me knows this day should be about her. And besides, what would I say if she did ask? Had some bad sex, I feel shitty today? I wish I could have gotten you a nicer cake? My problems always sound stupid when I imagine saying them out loud.
Even though I’m preoccupied, the hour passes more quickly than any hour has passed for the last few weeks. I give Georgia a tight hug before we all go back inside. She lifts me off the ground and twirls me around, and I laugh in surprise and delight. The last time someone did that, it was my dad and I was twelve and had just placed third in the spelling bee.
“I have your present at home. I promise it’s good,” I say when she pulls back. Her messenger bag is full of other people’s gifts, and I feel a need to justify my friendship to her.
“I believe it,” she says with a wide smile. She leans in and smooches me on the cheek, a big wet kiss, and then opens the door to the air conditioning and the dim fluorescent lights. We start to go inside.
“Wait, wait,” I say. Georgia holds the door for me. Toby is still gathering up the trash. “Do you have any more of those chips?”
“Yeah, tons,” he says, holding up two greasy paper bags.
“I’m gonna give ’em to Jenny,” I say. He hands them over to me.
“Y’all getting to be friends, then?” he teases.
“Maybe,” I say. Georgia whines that her arm is getting tired, and I relieve her. Back in the gift shop, I toss Jenny the chips without saying anything. She doesn’t acknowledge me beyond catching them, but I hear crunching before she starts her show, and a sort of satisfied yawn.
I spend the evening with my parents, since Georgia is at her family birthday dinner and Jake is working a later shift. Mom had a big fight with Vivian about catering companies for their next volunteer event, and they almost never fight. Dad dealt with a difficult client, and since he usually doesn’t deal with clients at all, he seemed pretty depressed when he got home.
So, we eat dinner at Buona Tavola—my recommendation—and go see a movie together. It’s one of those animated kids’ movies, the kind I used to go see with them as a child, except it’s been getting really good reviews and all the commercials say, “kids and parents will love this film” so whatever, we go. Mom gets sour gummy worms and we share.
Nestled between them in the movie theater, I feel like a baby. It’s exactly the type of feeling I’ve been resisting all summer, and longer. For as long as I can remember. I want to be independent. I will be independent. But right now, watching a 3-D giraffe l
eap from a burning building into a hot air balloon, it feels good to be a kid again.
I start crying near the end when it looks like the giraffe might float up into the sky and be lost forever. It’s the place in the movie where you’re supposed to cry, but I cry a lot, tears streaming silently from my eyes. I lean into Dad’s shoulder and watch the end of the movie through the blur. He doesn’t say anything. Just puts his arm around me. We sit like that through the credits, and when my eyes are dry and the lights come on, we leave and go home together.
Chapter 18
If I were Georgia, I would say that my birthday passes without incident. But since I’m not Georgia, and I’m used to minimal festivities, this year is the biggest birthday celebration I’ve ever experienced—and we haven’t even gone to Great Adventures yet.
Jake takes me to a fancy steakhouse the night before, this meal being his gift to me as we save money for September. We share a piece of strawberry cheesecake and barely even talk about Kentucky. I tell him I want to stay in this moment; he abides by that wish. We talk about our days, and my parents, and work, and the funny things we’ve seen on TV lately.
The day of, Georgia and the others at work surprise me at lunch with an enormous fruit tart and a bunch of baguettes and cheddar from the organic grocery store. “Because we figured you’re always complaining about the grease, so we might as well get you some cheese and bread that pretends to be healthy,” Georgia says with a pronounced eye roll as she hugs me. At the end of lunch, after everyone else has gone inside, she gives me a small box containing a pair of blue glass earrings that look like the ocean. I put them on immediately.
That night, my parents and I go out to dinner too—so many different kinds of celebratory food—and the waiter brings me tiramisu with a candle in it, and my parents sing happy birthday. They don’t ask about college.
The Goodbye Summer Page 21