A metal bucket rests at my dad’s feet, two beer cans floating in the water. I scoop out the three remaining ice cube fragments and stick them in my mouth, then slouch into the empty seat to face him. My older brothers take after my mom with blond hair and brown eyes, but I got my dad’s curly dark hair, blue eyes and dimples.
“How was the pool?” he asks, closing his laptop. He always closes his laptop when someone comes across him trying to write. Ever since he wrote You’re Dumb and Here’s Why, an advice book for, well, idiots, people have been clamoring for a follow up he’s never been able to complete. Not that it matters. That thing’s been printed in nineteen languages in sixty-seven countries and had six print runs. It’s still prominently displayed in the local bookstore and my dad always makes sure they have signed copies.
Getting stuck in a rut is kind of my dad’s thing. He always talked about seeing the world, but everyone knows he got my mom pregnant—four times—married her, and stayed in Avilla. He’s a good guy, but you can tell this isn’t the life he wanted, even though he puts on a good show.
“Busy,” I say around the ice. “Hot.”
“How’s Andrea?” He always calls her by her full name, pronounced An-dray-ah, which we always teased her about, like she’d chosen a fancy name for herself.
“Fine.”
“You talk to her?”
My parents don’t know what happened between me and Andi that summer, just that she didn’t come out to say goodbye the day I left. It was a huge, heartbreaking red flag and the ultimate slap in the face. “She couldn’t resist the lure of chili fries.”
“Well, who could?”
I finish the ice and wipe sweat from my temple. “Is mom inside?”
“Yep,” he answers, re-opening the laptop.
I kick off my shoes and enter, sighing in the blissfully air conditioned cool. “Mom?”
“Kitchen,” she calls.
I find her at the counter, staring at a package of head-on shrimp like it’s an alien corpse. She dresses up every day, no matter the occasion. Today it’s a green sundress, her blond hair in a French twist. I was born eight years after my next oldest brother, so when my mom wanted someone to help with things around the house, they ran off and I got the job. I complained bitterly about learning how to cook, clean, and help my mom apply her makeup, but those skills have come in handy. Well, some of them. “I asked your father to get shrimp,” she says, nibbling on a manicured fingernail. “This is what he came home with.”
“That’s shrimp.”
“It’s eight little monsters.”
“Let me see the recipe.”
She slides over a page she printed off the internet and I skim through quickly. It’s grilled shrimp with a side salad.
“Now the salad I can do...” she says, trailing off as she eyeballs the shrimp. “But these things have heads. And eyes. And feet. And...is that hair?”
I nudge her aside. “Why don’t I take care of the shrimp while you handle the salad?”
I’m reaching for a dishtowel when my phone beeps in my pocket, signaling a new text. I pull it out and swipe the screen, grimacing at a picture of a hand with a nail sticking out of the palm. Another message comes, this one with words. Helping hand, it reads, accompanied by a poop emoticon. It’s from Crosbie, my best friend.
I smirk and type back. Is this an illusion?
Crosbie’s really into magic and I’m trying to be more supportive, like he’s been for me. I call what happened last fall an “incident,” but the truth is, I had gonnorhea. It was the most terrifying and mortifying diagnosis of my life. There was a literal sex list of women I had to go through to find the infected partner, and Crosbie was there to help the whole time. A prescription and a healthy mourning period cleared up the symptoms, but the effects have been long-lasting. I came up with a cover story and took a bit of a time-out to clear my head, figuring I’d go back to my partying ways when I felt better, but something shifted. I tried to hook up, tried to enjoy it, but I didn’t. I’ve been faking it ever since.
“Kell?” My mom’s voice breaks up the pity party.
“Sorry. Were you saying something?”
“Just asking if you were going to clean the shrimp or fondle them a bit more?”
I look down to see that I’m weirdly stroking a shrimp. “Ah...I’ll clean them.”
“If you don’t mind. And also, that one’s yours. Set it aside.”
* * *
On Thursday night I’m in my bedroom watching a baseball game when Andi’s light comes on. It’s just after nine o’clock and my team, the Giants, trail by seven in the bottom of the sixth. I mute the TV, order myself to count to fifty so it doesn’t look like I’ve been waiting for her, then lean out the window. Approximately three feet separate each of the houses on our street, a fact that was equal parts awful and delightful growing up.
“Andi,” I whisper, like we’re still twelve and in danger of getting grounded for talking instead of sleeping.
Her curtains are drawn but I see a hazy shadow approach and a second later Andi appears, still wearing the dark pants and button-up shirt from her restaurant job. “Hey,” she says, unbuttoning the shirt to reveal a plain white tank top underneath. The shirt falls to the floor and she reaches up to pluck bobby pins from her hair, now secured in a neat knot at the nape of her neck. It reminds me of school picture days when her mom would make her promise to stay tidy until after the photo was taken, then she could dishevel herself all she wanted.
“The Giants are losing,” I say, knowing it’ll make her happy.
“The Giants suck,” she informs me.
Andi is a hardcore Oakland A’s fan, and the last thing we did together before she stopped speaking to me was go to a game in San Francisco, Giants versus Athletics. We got a ride with a friend’s older sister and the three of us had an awesome time. At least, I thought we did. The Giants won, 4-2, but though we’d spent the ride over exchanging furtive longing glances in the side mirror, on the trip home, Andi sat stone-faced in the backseat and didn’t say a word. I didn’t know it at the time, but it would be two years before she spoke to me again and I would never have the balls to ask why, preferring to run off to Burnham than deal with my issues here.
Her hair spills around her shoulders, briefly short-circuiting my brain and making me forget my genius retort of “No, you suck.”
“Don’t go to sleep yet,” I say when she yawns.
She wipes her eyes. “Why not? I’m tired.”
“Because I’m leaving tomorrow. Let’s hang out for a bit. Let’s go to Grim.”
Her dark brows raise. “Grim Mountain?”
“Yeah. Come on. I’ll drive.”
“Is there a beverage involved?”
“If that’s what it takes.”
Three minutes later I’m sitting in the front seat of my car, watching Andi emerge from her house. She traded her black pants for faded jeans with a tear in the knee, but kept the tank top, her silhouette tall and lanky in the porch light.
I lean over to open the door and she drops into the passenger seat, her feet bumping the six-pack of coolers I’d stolen from the fridge and stashed in the footwell. “What’s this?” she asks, reaching down in the dark and squinting at the bottle she retrieves.
“Your bribe.” Though Andi joined us in our teenage drinking endeavors, she never had the dedication required to develop a taste or tolerance for beer, wine or hard liquor.
“Pineapple Passion Twist,” she reads. “Nice choice.”
“Guaranteed to induce vomiting.”
At this hour, the streets of Avilla are dark and quiet. Warm desert air wafts through the open windows as I steer us toward Grim, a large mesa at the very outskirts of town. Its steep sides make it popular with climbers, and as kids we used to hike to the top and throw pebbles over the edges, earning points for each direct hit.
We don’t say much on the short drive over, nor on the forty-minute hike to the top. The incline is sharp and no amount
of exercise can prevent the intense burn in my thighs. We use lights from our phones to guide the way and for a long time the only sound is the clink of the bottles in their cardboard carrying case, the grit of our shoes on the rocky terrain, and raspy breathing.
“Wow,” Andi says, when we reach the top. She paces away, hands on her hips, the moonlight glinting off her hair. “I haven’t done that in a while.”
“It’s steeper than I remembered.” I pluck my sweaty T-shirt away from my chest and grab one of the cooler bottles, twisting off the cap. “Want a drink?”
“Yeah.”
I pass her the cooler and take one for myself, setting the rest on the ground and sitting beside them. The rock is still warm from the day’s sun, but a faint breeze cools the damp sweat at my nape. I take a big gulp of Pineapple Passion Twist and grimace. “Ick.”
Andi laughs as she takes a seat on the other side of the coolers. “Delicious.”
I glance at her. She’s studying the label on the cooler in the light from her phone. “Interesting reading?”
Her mouth quirks. “It’s Avilla. Everything’s interesting.”
“How was work?”
“Fine. How was your last day back?”
“Boring. As always.”
“You must be excited to leave.”
I open my mouth to say what I’m supposed to say. I’m excited. I’m thrilled. I can’t wait. And that’s true. Well, approximately half-true. I’m looking forward to seeing my friends. I like the campus. I like the atmosphere. But I’ve somehow managed to build a reputation for myself I’m not sure I can keep up anymore.
“What’s wrong?” she asks, watching me as she drinks.
“I had gonnorhea,” I blurt out.
Her eyebrows shoot up her forehead, from surprise at the admission or just the abruptness of it, and she chokes on her drink and coughs into the crook of her arm. Immediately my skin starts to prickle with shame and embarrassment, neither of which make any sense, since the diagnosis was from last October, it’s totally cleared up, and I had to tell quite a lot of people about it in my search for the infected partner. It’s just...it’s Andi.
“Er...” she says eventually, wiping a tear from the corner of her eye. “Okay?”
“I mean, I’m fine now,” I say hastily. “It was last fall and everything’s fine.”
She’s frowning. “Then... Good?”
“But you know how I wanted to go to college and really, like, live life?”
“Yeah.”
“Like, you helped me prepare for that?” Talking about our past sex life feels like inching my toes over the edge of the mountain.
Still, all she says is, “I remember.”
“Well, I...lived life, if you know what I mean.”
“This bottle knows what you mean,” she says, gesturing with her cooler. “Are you randomly announcing that you had sex with other girls while you were at school? I figured as much. It’s kind of weird to tell me about it.”
“You had sex with that khaki guy,” I hear myself say, immediately wishing I could take back the words. Obviously Andi can have sex with whomever she wants, though I’d rather not be able to picture it.
She doesn’t acknowledge the comment. “Kellan,” she says, draining her cooler like she needs the fortification. “What the hell is going on?”
I drink the rest of mine and wince. “I don’t know,” I mutter, running a hand over my face, my palm damp with condensation from the bottle. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”
“Me either.”
“I just... When I went to Burnham, I wanted everything to change. My whole life. I wanted it to be better.” I pretend not to notice the way she flinches, lumped in with part of the not-better pre-package.
“Uh-huh.”
“And my first year was fucking awesome. Like, amazing.”
“Okay...”
“And then last year, I wanted it to be exactly like the first year, but that diagnosis came and it was like someone slammed on the brakes.”
Burnham has a very storied and distasteful tradition of keeping track of its athletes’ sex histories on the bathroom wall in the Student Union building. If you’re popular enough for your sex life to be of interest to strangers, you’re probably on the wall. And I’m on the wall. In fact, for a time, I was very proud to be on it. Until I had to use that lengthy list to figure out who it was I’d contracted a disease from, and all of a sudden I wasn’t quite so proud.
I mutter something about this to Andi, who scratches her head in confusion. “So by the time you found the person you realized you’d given it to someone else?”
“What? No. No one else had it, just this one girl.”
“And then she...died?”
“What? No!”
“Then I don’t see the problem, Kellan. I mean, I’m sure it was embarrassing and uncomfortable, and obviously I’ll judge you for life, but it sounds like you made a few phone calls and did the responsible thing.”
And that’s when it dawns on me. Everyone at Burnham knows the list had sixty-three names on it. Sixty-three girls I’d hooked up with in a very short time span. Some of which I remembered, many of which I did not.
“What?” she presses, peering at me.
“It wasn’t just a few,” I mumble.
She takes another drink and holds it out for me to snap off the cap. She’s always had to use a bottle opener, even for the twist-offs. “This is starting to feel like the most drawn-out confession in the world. How many were there, then? You obviously want to confess. Eight? Nine?” She pulls a face. “Double digits?” Her jaw drops comically. “Triple?”
I crack a smile. “No, not triple, you idiot.”
She smiles back and something inside me eases. Something that was about to do something stupid and tell Andi something she didn’t need to know. Something that would only hurt her, hurt me, hurt us. It’s been two years since we last talked like this, two years of pretending I didn’t care that she hadn’t even watched out the window when I loaded up my car, waved goodbye to my parents and neighbors, but not her. Not the one person I needed to see.
That stupid number means nothing but could change everything.
“I don’t want anything to change,” I hear myself say. Something shifts in her expression, something I can’t quite interpret. “I mean,” I add quickly, “at school.”
“Of course.”
I clear my throat, take another cooler, and clink our bottles together. “To everything staying the same,” I toast.
For a long moment Andi stares at the mouths of the bottles where they touch. She rolls her bottom lip between her teeth and something low inside of me tightens in a way it hasn’t done in far too long.
I will it away. I’m leaving tomorrow, and I just said I don’t want anything to change. I can’t start lusting after Andi again. Besides, I’m ninety-nine percent sure she’d reject me if I asked her to “practice” one last time, anyway, though my dick is suddenly keen on the idea of me trying.
“To staying the same,” Andi echoes, turning to look at me, her skin pale in the moonlight, eyes dark and unreadable.
We drink in silence, watching the sky continue to fill with stars, the town lights winking out until only a few remain. When the coolers are gone and there’s no reason left to linger, we hike back down the mountain on slightly unsteady legs and drive home. I park in front of my parents’ house and we get out, lingering at the bottom of the driveway. The breeze has picked up slightly and tiny strands of blond hair float around Andi’s head like a haphazard halo.
“I’ll probably be at work when you wake up,” she says. “I have an early start.”
“Oh. Okay.”
She shifts her weight from foot to foot, tugging absently at the hem of her top. Stiffly, she reaches out to hug me, her body slim and warm against mine, the contact all too brief. Our moms made us hug one summer when we got in a fight and ended up stabbing each other with sticks. This hug feels much like that one
, only without the chaperones. She steps back and clears her throat. “Well, I didn’t say goodbye last time, so...goodbye this time, I guess.”
For two years I’ve felt a strange sadness about that missed goodbye, the way you feel when something you’ve envisioned doesn’t play out quite the way you imagined. But now I know the only thing I missed was this odd tightness in my throat and an embarrassing heat in my chest. I want to know why she didn’t say goodbye last time, what I did wrong at that baseball game, what changed. Why I went to school with a half-broken heart and a very strong determination to mend it with booze and parties and sixty-three faceless names. But I don’t ask. I don’t want to ruin whatever strange peace we’ve achieved. I want to remember her face exactly as it is now, tense and a little stoic, the girl who refused to shed a tear when I poked her finger with a steak knife as part of a blood oath a million years ago. The one who rubbed her bloody fingertip against mine and vowed “Friends forever, until one of us dies” behind the shed in the backyard.
I force myself to smile, like everything is great. Like this is closure, for both of us, a much-needed sense of something I never had a name for. Even now, as I say the words I never got to say two years ago, I realize I really don’t want to, even if I have no choice. “Goodbye, Andi.”
chapter two
The first time I drove over the border into Oregon I rolled down the windows and shouted, “I’m here, bitches!” This time when I cross the state line I just nod at the sign, solemn but dignified, like a grown up. Kellan 2.0.
The resolution of things with Andi has left me feeling a weird combination of lighter and heavier, and I don’t know what to make of it. I thought I’d be relieved to close the door on that chapter of my life, but I still feel like knocking, just to see if I’ll get an answer.
My phone beeps with another progress report from Crosbie. He and Nora returned to Burnham yesterday and Crosbie moved into McKinley residence on campus. After two years partying it up in a frat house, he says he’s never felt so old and wise. Already he’s provided a listening ear to nine teary freshmen and retrieved a lost and naked badminton player from the dining hall.
Undeclared (Burnham College #2) Page 2