“Swings!” she says, pulling me up, smiling. “Time to be happy. At least for the rest of the night, okay? You gotta give yourself that.”
“Okay,” I say. Georgia takes my hand and leads me down the path toward the swings, and her touch makes it a little easier. The sky is such a beautiful blue, fading into purple at the edges, and the crowd is joyful and the rides are loud, and all of that makes it easier too.
We spend maybe twenty minutes looking for the swings, Georgia pulling me around corners, muttering, “I thought it was this way,” and then turning to try a new direction. When we finally get there, the sun is resting low in the sky and I’m out of breath. The ride is at the end of a long side street that starts with some boring shops and games and gets even less interesting as it continues. The last few stands are shuttered.
But then there are the swings, which rise out of nowhere as we turn a corner. I didn’t know at first what Georgia was talking about when she said swings, but I recognize them now: chairs like baby playground swings sized for adults, attached via very long chains to an enormous circular brim at the top of the ride. The ride looks more like an old-school carousel than the bright neon machinery in the rest of the park—all fake gold filigree and deep red and navy blue.
It is also completely empty. Maybe the closed stores have scared away the kids, or maybe it’s just difficult to find, but the swings are dangling unused and there’s no one in line. The only person in sight is a grizzled woman who looks about three steps away from death.
“Y’all in line?” she croaks in our direction.
Georgia and I look at each other. I shrug. “Sure,” Georgia says. We step up to the platform and strap into two seats right next to each other. The woman comes by and checks that we’re safe. Then she trundles back to her post and hits a couple buttons, and the swings jolt to life.
They start slow, lifting us a few yards off the ground and spinning gently. Then they speed up and raise higher, as if the machine is standing up straight from a crouch, and we start to go faster, and we swing out wide. Suddenly we are so high up I can see everything. I can see the sunset in the west with the roller coasters silhouetted against it, the lights of the park spread out below me, and all those people, people everywhere, swarming together and breaking apart like flocks of birds. I am flying.
I don’t mean to start laughing, but I do, a huge, gasping, surprised laugh. The wind streams my hair out behind me and dries hours of accumulated sweat, cooling my skin to goose bumps. It’s so strong it forces tears out of my eyes.
I turn my head to my right, and Georgia looks the same as I feel: laughing, delighted, hair a ribbon of black against the purple air. Our eyes meet. She reaches out her hand toward mine, and I reach out mine in return, tilting my chair to reach. Even then, only the tips of our fingers connect, a featherlight electric touch, and then the forces spinning us pull us away from each other again as we arc high out into the sky.
Then, all of a sudden, there’s another jolt and the momentum slows. The pillar in the center of the ride begins to lower. It takes a minute, maybe, to get back to the ground, and when my toes touch the aluminum floor, I let out a breath.
“That was incredible,” I say to Georgia.
“Right?” she says, grinning from ear to ear. “I knew you’d love it.”
“Y’all wanna go again?” the old woman calls from her seat in the center. I glance around. There is no one else in line. The whole area is empty.
“Want to?” I ask Georgia.
“Nothing better to do,” she says.
“Yes, please,” I shout to the woman. She turns to her controls and it all begins again.
I don’t know how long we’re on the swings, how long a single ride is, or how many times we repeat. After the third time, the operator doesn’t even ask us whether we want to go again. Twice, a few kids come and join us for one ride, then leave again after it’s done. We are giddy. I lose my hair tie to the wind, and one strap of Georgia’s tank top falls down her arm, revealing a blue bra strap and pale tan lines. I feel like one of the magical creatures I used to read about in fantasy books, invincible and almighty.
The sky around us is made of brilliant colors, and for a little while, I don’t register that everything’s getting darker, just that those colors are changing. But then, we finish a ride and don’t immediately start back up again. I look around for kids waiting in line; I can’t see any. It’s only then, in looking, that I realize the sky is black. The air is dark and the lights of the ride, previously just a complement to the sunlight, are the only things illuminating us.
“That was the last one,” says the old woman, coming over and fumbling with our belts to unbuckle us.
“Wait, why?” says Georgia.
“Park closes at ten. Rides stop at nine. That’s the deal.” She walks away.
“Well, whatever. Caroline, you ready?” She looks at me.
I’m still sitting in my seat. My whole body feels like it’s vibrating. My hands are shaky. My skin is cold but my blood is warm, and my heart is beating too fast.
“Caroline?”
I took physics last year. I wasn’t very good at it, for the most part—as soon as the teacher started using variables and writing equations, I got lost. But I did understand some of the theories. I learned that when you stop something that has been going very fast, the momentum doesn’t just disappear. It has to go somewhere. And if the thing that stops it is immovable, the force has to reverberate back onto the thing that was stopped. If you run straight into a wall, you fall backward, but it’s not really you falling. It’s your own strength and speed coming back to push you in the opposite direction.
I get up from my chair, slowly, wobbling on my feet. I nearly fall, reach out for Georgia to catch myself. She grabs hold of my shoulder and turns me toward her.
“Caroline, are you okay?”
There, under the black sky and the golden lights, I let my forehead tip forward onto hers. I close my eyes. I wait for the words to rise in my throat.
“Don’t go,” she murmurs. “Please.”
Her hand stretched out to pull me up. The sole of her foot pressed against mine in the dark of early morning. Sun-warmed cement and the scent of chlorine; the fireworks like a hailstorm of light above us. Her smiles across the aquarium’s atrium, my parents’ dinner table, the books she’s always studying. The two of us laughing in her car, our hands trailing out the window as if through water. All those endless perfect moments in the sun.
“I’m staying,” I whisper to her.
Those two words have been living inside me for so long that I feel naked without them. I kept them hidden deeply so I could not bring them out into the light where they might hurt me. I thought they would put an end to everything I wanted, everything I had planned for.
But I haven’t wanted to leave for a long time now. Maybe I never did.
Now, as I slide my head onto Georgia’s shoulder and feel her arms wrap around me, holding me tight, I am not afraid. In this moment, the world black and bright around us, I feel like I never stopped flying.
Winter
Chapter 20
I shiver as I walk from my car to the aquarium entrance. In the dim January light, the building looks more squat and gray than ever. The golden glow of the gift shop, which I never noticed from the outside when I worked there, is the only color around. Walking inside, the heat hits me so fast I start sweating under my coat. This place was never good at temperature control.
It’s been a few weeks since I was last here. After a two-week stretch in October in which we didn’t see each other due to schoolwork and family stuff, Georgia became concerned that we’d stop being friends. So we made a pact to meet here on the second Saturday of every month. It turned out to not be necessary. We talk every day. And we see each other a lot, just like I knew we would—sometimes hanging out with Serena and Matt, and every o
nce in a while with Toby, but mostly just the two of us together.
Still, though, I’m glad this is the place she wanted to go, rather than Buona Tavola or my parents’ house. I always come early and say hi to Jenny if she’s around, chat with Toby a little, walk through the aquarium. Today, the woman at the front desk tells me the next tour will be starting in twenty minutes, but I know the schedule.
“I’m just gonna wander, if that’s okay,” I say.
She nods. She’s used to this.
I walk through the rooms with the fish, past the two lonely turtles and the empty tank they’ve been cleaning for months. In the jellyfish room, I sit, lean my head against the wall, and wait for Georgia.
I have come here a lot since Jake and I broke up. More than the once a month Georgia required. Some weeks so often that Jenny asked if I was hoping for my old job back, which I wasn’t. It’s only a half-mile walk from a bus stop on the route home from school. Sometimes I visit Jenny, bring her a smoothie and talk about school and the store, or just sit and watch TV in her office. When it was still warm, I’d do my homework on the back patio sometimes, the silence strange in comparison to our summer lunches. Now, I just come to this room, to be alone in the wide chill blue.
Jake didn’t take it well when I told him I wasn’t going to Kentucky. He yelled and threw his suitcase across the room. He said he didn’t understand why I had changed my mind so suddenly. He said no when I asked him to stay. He called me names I hope he regrets.
But the worst part was when he fell back onto the bed and started crying. I had never seen him cry before, and it broke me down. I started crying too, both of us sitting there sobbing. He kept asking me why, and I couldn’t answer. The fact is, there were hundreds of answers, spread throughout the summer—things he had said and done that I was only just starting to see for the hurt they’d caused, like bruises rising on my skin. But I couldn’t articulate any of them. The best I could do, finally, was to say, “It just doesn’t feel right.” Even to me, it was a truth that sounded weak.
I crawled up into bed with him and held him close, told him I loved him. Then I got up and left, thankful I’d had the foresight to borrow my dad’s car instead of asking Jake to come pick me up. I drove a mile away before I stopped and pulled over and cried for what seemed like forever, until I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see.
It was over by noon on Sunday. I spent the rest of the day in bed. When Mom came to check on me, I said, “I broke up with Jake.”
“Oh, baby,” she said, but I shrugged her away when she tried to rub my back. She sat back and hesitated before saying, “Did anything happen? In particular, I mean?”
I almost told her everything. The whole story, from April onward. But then I imagined her reaction, and the horrifying truth of what I had almost done came crashing down with renewed force. I thought about her and Dad walking into my bedroom and finding a note, Dad picking up the phone, Mom shaking. I thought about being with Jake and two unfamiliar adults in the middle of nowhere. How I would have wanted to talk to my mother. I sat up and hugged her fiercely.
“I’m sorry,” I sobbed.
She stroked my hair and said, “Sweet pea, you have nothing to be sorry for.”
I did, of course. But as I played out the first few days of that alternate future in my mind, I couldn’t bear to tell her. I was too ashamed. Instead, I let her hold me and murmur comforting words, and I promised myself I would tell her later—when I was older. When I could explain myself. Because I could not explain myself to anyone right now.
Georgia texted me too, several times, asking first, did you do it??, and then, are you ok?, and then, I’m really, really sorry, Caroline. She offered to come over. Only when she texted me, okay I’m getting in my car, I’ll be there in ten, did I respond, no no, it’s okay, I’m fine, I just want some time alone.
Finally, as the sky was getting dark, Mom knocked on my door with a plate of food.
“I know you don’t want to, sweetie,” she said gently, “but we probably ought to get you ready for school tomorrow.”
I rolled over, nauseated.
“Senior year! It’s pretty exciting.”
When I didn’t respond, she continued. “I bought you some new notebooks and binders, but we can go to the store after school tomorrow if you need more. Now, what were you thinking for an outfit? Let’s get more light in here so we can see properly. Goodness, it’s getting dark earlier and earlier these days.”
She went over to the closet and pulled out the blue dress she and Dad got me for my birthday, and I realized I never got to show it to Jake. It was the dress I was going to wear the next day, for our long, long drive. “How about this?” she asked. I shook my head. A wave of cold shivered through my body, followed by overwhelming heat, as if I had a fever. “You’re right, probably too nice for the first day.” She put it back in the closet. “Maybe separates. What do you think?”
I didn’t answer.
“Caroline,” she said, putting one hand on her hip. “Work with me here.”
I pulled the covers up to my chin, and my eye caught on a white T-shirt with the aquarium logo, crumpled on the floor. They made promotional shirts to sell in the gift shop, except the printing company got the words wrong, so they say Get wet! At the Boneville Aquarium. We were allowed to take the reject shirts for free. We made “Boneville” jokes for weeks.
“That one,” I croaked, pointing. Mom picked it up and wrinkled her nose.
“Really? This one?”
I nodded.
“Well, okay, Caroline, it’s up to you.”
School was almost as bad as I’d expected, except it turns out my old friends didn’t hate me. When I told them I broke up with Jake, they didn’t crow in delight. Chandler gave me a hug, and Erin spent the whole lunch hour asking questions.
All the attention felt awkward, and I tried to deflect questions back to them. Erin told us about her friends at camp, and I could sense the wistfulness in her voice when she talked about their late nights around a fire. Chandler had met a guy in Rhode Island, where she went to stay with her mom every summer, but he’d ended things when she left. Both of them seemed kinder than they used to, and I wondered whether they had grown up or I had been wrong.
I texted Georgia a lot. The first day, she woke me up before my alarm with a text that read: I KNOW YOU’RE NOT EXCITED ABOUT SENIOR YEAR BUT IT SEEMS LIKE YOU DON’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT JAKE SO WOOOO SENIOR YEAR WHAT IS YOUR CLASS SCHEDULE. We texted at lunch and after school and made plans to get dinner at Buona Tavola on Friday. That first night, while I was doing my homework, she texted me twelve hearts in a row, and when I asked, what was that for?, she said, I’m just really, really glad you’re still here and I hope you are too. Looking down at my math worksheets, I hesitated for a moment and then typed back, I am.
I tried texting and calling Jake on Tuesday to see if he had made it, to no response. I tried the next day too, and the next, and the next, and then a few weeks later, and then again a week after that. He never responded, not even once, and he blocked me on all his social media accounts.
I gave up on talking to him. Instead, I talked about him. All through the fall, my and Georgia’s conversations kept coming back around to Jake. Unlike in the summer, though, we mostly talked about his flaws.
It wasn’t intentional at first. I didn’t bear him any ill will. But Georgia did. One day in mid-September, we were at my house, and I was taking down everything on my bulletin board, placing each item carefully in a shoebox to make room for a new set of pictures. More than half of the photos were of me and Jake. Most of the rest were pictures of the places I’d hoped to go with him.
“I’m glad you’re taking these down,” Georgia said as she highlighted something in her history book. “He was never good enough for you.”
“Well…” I started, and Georgia cut me off with a look.
�
��Just look at what was up on this board,” she said. “You had all these dreams. Of all these amazing places you wanted to be. And he used your dreams to get to his dad. He is…” She paused to choose her words. “Unbelievably selfish.”
I opened my mouth to protest, then closed it again. She was right. And I didn’t have to defend him anymore.
It kept coming up. One weekend, Georgia and I were eating pizza with Serena and Matt, and I mentioned something I had done with Jake earlier in the summer.
“Oh my God,” Serena said, “he was the worst.”
“What did he do to you?” I asked, a little alarmed.
“Nothing to me,” Serena said, “but that one time we hung out at bowling, he was so obnoxious. And didn’t he make you invite him to the Great Adventures trip?” She shook her head.
“That fuckin’ sucked,” Matt added. “That trip was for us.”
“It just seemed like he was never okay with you having your own friends,” Serena said.
“The lady is correct,” Georgia said definitively.
“Y’all are being a little harsh,” I said. They dropped it, but I knew they weren’t wrong. I just wished I had known it earlier.
After these conversations, I always found myself wanting to talk to him. Sometimes I wanted to yell at him, or ask him questions, or make him explain himself; sometimes, I just wanted to know how he was doing. If he was happier without me.
Finally, at Georgia’s urging, I went to visit Toby at the aquarium and asked him if he’d heard anything. He seemed uncomfortable. “Jake said he didn’t want to talk to you, and I don’t know if I’m supposed to tell you what’s going on with him, or what.” Eventually, though, he showed me the picture: Jake and his dad, broad smiles across both their faces, standing in a field and half-silhouetted by the setting sun. I felt all the residual doubts of the last few months well up inside me and fall away, a structure finally crumbling. “Thanks,” I told Toby and left.
The Goodbye Summer Page 24