by Sarah Dessen
So, just like that, I lost the end of my summer. By that Sunday I was packed and riding three hours into the mountains with my mother, who spend the entire ride reminiscing about her own golden camp years and promising me I’d thank her when it was over. She dropped me at the registration desk, kissed me on the forehead and told me she loved me, then drove off waving into the sunset. I stood there with my duffel bag and glowered after her, surrounded by a bunch of other girls who clearly didn’t want to spend two weeks “bonding” either.
I was on what they called “scholarship” at Sisterhood Camp, which meant I had my way paid free, just like the four other girls I met whose parents just happened to be therapists. I made friends with my cabinmates, and we complained to each other, mocked all the seminar leaders, and worked on our tans, talking about boys.
But now I was leaving early, drawn home by the loss of a boy I’d hardly known. I put my stuff in the trunk of the car and climbed in beside my mother, who said hello and then not much else for the first fifteen minutes of the drive. As far as I was concerned, we’d come to a draw: I hadn’t wanted to come, and she didn’t want me to leave. We were even. But I knew my mother wouldn’t see it that way. Lately, we didn’t seem to see anything the same.
“So how was it?” she asked me once we got on the highway. She’d set the cruise control, adjusted the air-conditioning, and now seemed ready to make peace. “Or what you saw of it, that is.”
“It was okay,” I said. “The seminars were kind of boring.”
“Hmm,” she said, and I figured that I was pushing it. I knew my mother, though. She’d push back. “Well, maybe if you’d stayed the whole time you might have gotten more out of it.”
“Maybe,” I said. In the side mirror, I could see the mountains retreating behind us, bit by bit.
I knew there were a lot of things she probably wanted to say to me. Maybe she wanted to ask me why I cared about Michael Sherwood, since she’d hardly heard me mention him. Or why I’d hated the idea of camp right from the start, without even giving it a chance. Or maybe it was more, like why in just the last few months even the sight of her coming toward me was enough to get my guard up. Why we’d gone from best friends to something neither of us could rightly define. But she didn’t say anything.
“Mom?”
She turned to look at me, and I could almost hear her take a breath, readying herself for whatever I might try next. “Yes?”
“Thanks for letting me come home.”
She turned back to the road. “It’s all right, Halley,” she said to me softly as I leaned back in my seat. “It’s all right.”
My mother and I had always been close. She knew everything about me, from the boys I liked to the girls I envied; after school I always sat in the kitchen eating my snack and doing homework while I listened for her car to pull up. I always had something to tell her. After my first school dance she sat with me eating ice cream out of the carton while I detailed every single thing that had happened from first song to last. On Saturdays, when my dad pulled morning shift at the radio station, we had Girls’ Lunch Out so we could keep up with each other. She loved fancy pasta places, and I only liked fast food and pizza, so we alternated. She made me eat snails, and I watched her gulp down (enjoying it more than she ever would admit) countless Big Macs. We had one rule: we always ordered two desserts and shared. Afterwards we’d hit the mall looking for sales, competing to see who could find the best bargain. She usually won.
She wrote articles in journals and magazines about our successful relationship and how we’d weathered my first year of high school together, and spoke at schools and parents’ meetings about Staying in Touch with Your Teen. Whenever her friends came over for coffee and complained about their kids running wild or doing drugs, she’d just shake her head when they asked how she and I did so well.
“I don’t know,” she’d say. “Halley and I are just so close. We talk about everything.”
But suddenly, at the beginning of that summer, something changed. I can’t say when it started exactly. But it happened after the Grand Canyon.
Each summer, my parents and I took a vacation. It was our big splurge of the year, and we always went someplace cool like Mexico or Europe. This year, we took a cross-country road trip to California and then the Grand Canyon, stopping here and there, sucking up scenery and visiting relatives. My mother and I had a great time; my father did most of the driving, and the two of us hung out, talking and listening to the radio, sharing clothes, making up songs and jokes as state lines and landmarks passed by. My father and I forced her to eat fast food almost every day as payback for a year’s worth of arugula salad and prosciutto tortellini. We spent two weeks together, bickering sometimes but mostly just having fun, me and my parents, on the road.
As soon as I got home, though, three very big things happened. First, I started my job at Milton’s. Scarlett and I had spent the end of the school year going around filling out applications, and it was the only place with enough positions to hire us both. By the time I got home from the trip, Scarlett had already been there two weeks, so she taught me the ropes. Second, she introduced me to Ginny Tabor, whom she’d met at the pool while I’d been gone. Ginny was a cheerleader with a wild streak a mile wide and a reputation among the football team for more than her cheers and famous midair splits. She lived a few miles away in the Arbors, a fancy development of Tudor houses with a country club, pool, and golf course. Ginny Tabor’s father was a dentist, and her mother weighed about eighty pounds, chain-smoked Benson and Hedges 100’s, and had skin that was as leathery as the ottoman in our living room. She threw money at Ginny and left us alone to prowl the streets of the Arbors on our way to the pool, or sneak out across the golf course at night to meet boys.
Which, in turn, led to the third big event that summer, when two weeks after coming home I broke off my dull, one-year romance with Noah Vaughn.
Noah was my first “boyfriend,” which meant we called each other on the phone and kissed sometimes. He was tall and skinny, with thick black hair and a bit of acne. His parents were best friends with mine, and we’d spent Friday night together, at our house or theirs, for most of my lifetime. He’d been all right for a start. But when I was inducted into the new crazy world of Ginny Tabor, he had to go.
He didn’t take it well. He sulked around, glowered at me, and still came over every Friday with his little sister and his parents, sitting stony-faced on the couch as I slipped out the door, yelling good-bye. I always said I was going to Scarlett’s, but instead we were usually meeting boys at the pool or hanging out with Ginny. My mother was more sad about our breakup than anyone; I think she’d half expected I’d marry him. But this was the New Me, someone I was evolving into with every hot and humid long summer day. I learned to smoke cigarettes, drank my first beer, got a deep tan, and double-pierced my ears as I began to drift, almost imperceptibly at first, from my mother.
There’s a picture on our mantel that always reminds me of what my mother and I were then. We’re at the Grand Canyon, at one of those overlook sites, with it spread out huge and gaping behind us. We have on matching T-shirts, sunglasses, and big smiles as we pose, arms around each other. We have never, in any picture before or since, looked more alike. We have the same small nose, the same stance, the same goofy smile. We look happy, standing there in the sunshine, the sky spread out blue and forever in the distance. My mother framed that picture when we got home, sticking it front and center on the mantel where you couldn’t help but see it. It was like she knew, somehow, that it would be a relic just months later, proof of another time and place neither of us could imagine had existed: my mother and I, best friends, posing at the Grand Canyon.
Scarlett was sitting on her front steps when we pulled up. It was early evening, just getting dark, and all up and down our street, lights were on in the houses, people out walking their dogs or children. Someone a few streets over was barbecuing, the smell mingling in the air with cut grass and recent rain.
I got out of the car and put my bag on the front walk, looking across the street at Scarlett’s house, the only light coming from her kitchen and spilling out into the empty carport. She lifted one hand and waved at me from the stoop.
“Mom, I’m going to Scarlett’s,” I said.
“Fine.” I still wasn’t totally forgiven for this, not yet. But it was late, she was tired, and these days, we had to pick our battles.
I knew the way across the street and up Scarlett’s walk by heart; I could have done it with every sense lost. The dip in the street halfway across, the two prickly bushes on either end of her walk that left tiny scratches on your skin when you brushed against them. It was eighteen steps from the beginning of the walk to the front stoop; we’d measured it when we were in sixth grade and obsessed with facts and details. We’d spent months calculating distances and counting steps, trying to organize the world into manageable bits and pieces.
Now I just walked toward her in the half-darkness, aware only of the sound of my own footfalls and the air conditioner humming softly under the side window.
“Hey,” I said, and she scooted over to make room for me. “How’s it going?”
It seemed like the stupidest thing to ask once I’d said it, but there really weren’t any right words. I looked over at her as she sat beside me, barefoot, her hair pulled away from her face in a loose ponytail. She’d been crying.
I wasn’t used to seeing her this way. Scarlett had always been the stronger, the livelier, the braver. The girl who punched out Missy Lassiter, the meanest, most fiendish of the pink-bike girls that first summer she moved in, on a day when they surrounded us and tried to make us cry. The girl who kept a house, and her mother, up and running since she was five, now playing mother to a thirty-five-year-old child. The girl who had kept the world from swallowing me whole, or so I’d always believed.
“Scarlett?” I said, there in the dark, and as she turned to me I saw her face was streaked with tears. For a minute, I didn’t know what to do. I thought again of that picture tucked in her mirror, of her and Michael just weeks ago, the water so bright and shiny behind them. And I thought of what she had done all the millions of times I’d cried to her, collapsing at even the slightest wounding of my heart or pride.
So I reached over and pulled her to me, wrapping my arms around her, and held my best friend close, returning so many favors all at once. We sat there for a long time, Scarlett and me, with her house looming over us and mine right across the street staring back with its bright windows. It was the end of summer; it was the end of a lot of things. I sat there with her, feeling her shoulders shake under my hands. I had no idea what to do or what came next. All I knew was that she needed me and I was here. And for now, that was about the best we could do.
Chapter Two
Scarlett was a redhead, but not in an orangey, carrot-top kind of way. Her color was more auburn, deep and red mixed with browns that made her green eyes seem almost luminous. Her skin was pale, with masses of freckles for the first few years I knew her; as we grew older, they faded into a sprinkling across her nose, as if they’d been scattered there by hand. She was an inch and three-quarters shorter than me, her feet a size larger, and she had a scar on her stomach that looked like a mouth smiling from when she’d gotten her appendix out. She was beautiful in all the unconscious, accidental ways that I wasn’t, and I was jealous more than I’d ever have admitted. To me, Scarlett was foreign and exotic. But she said she would have given anything for my long hair and tan in summer, for my thick eyelashes and eyebrows. Not to mention my father, my conventional family, away from Marion with her whims and fancies. It was an even trade, our envy of each other; it made everything fair.
We always believed we lived perfectly parallel lives. We went through the same phases at the same times; we both liked gory movies and sappy stuff, and we knew every word to every song on the old musical soundtracks my parents had. Scarlett was more confident, able to make friends fast, where I was shy and quiet, hanging back from the crowd. I was forever known as “Scarlett’s friend Halley.” But I didn’t mind. Without her I knew I’d be hanging out in the bus parking lot with the nerds and Noah Vaughn. That was, I was sure, the destiny in store for me until the day Scarlett looked up from behind those white sunglasses and made a spot for me next to her for the rest of my life. And I was grateful. Because life is an ugly, awful place to not have a best friend.
When I pictured myself, it was always like just an outline in a coloring book, with the inside not yet completed. All the standard features were there. But the colors, the zigzags and plaids, the bits and pieces that made up me, Halley, weren’t yet in place. Scarlett’s vibrant reds and golds helped some, but I was still waiting.
For most of high school, we hadn’t known Michael Sherwood that well, even though we’d grown up in the same neighborhood. He’d gone away the summer after middle school to California and returned transformed: tan, taller, and suddenly gorgeous. He was immediately the boy to date.
He went out with Ginny Tabor for about fifteen minutes, then Elizabeth Gunderson, the head cheerleader, for a few months. But he never seemed to fit in with that crowd of soccer-team captains and varsity jackets. He went back to his buddies from Lakeview, like his best friend Macon Faulkner. Sometimes we’d see them walking down our street, between our two houses, in the middle of the night, smoking cigarettes and laughing. They were different, and they fascinated us.
By leaving the popular crowd, Michael Sherwood became an enigma. No one was sure where he fit in, and he was friendly with everyone, sort of the great equalizer of our high school. He was famous for his pranks on substitute teachers and was always asking to borrow a dollar in exchange for a good story; he told outlandish tales, half true at best, but they were so funny you got your dollar’s worth. The one I remember he told me had to do with psychotic Girl Scouts who were stalking him. I didn’t believe him, but I gave him two dollars and skipped lunch that day. It was worth it.
Each of us had our own story about Michael, something he’d done or said or passed down. More than anything, it was the things he didn’t do that made Michael Sherwood so intriguing; he seemed so far from the rest of us and yet implicitly he belonged to everyone.
At the end of every school year there was the annual slide show, full of candid shots that hadn’t made the yearbook. We all piled into the auditorium and watched as our classmates’ faces filled the huge screen, everyone cheering for their friends and booing people they didn’t like. There was only one picture of Michael Sherwood, but it was a good one: he was sitting on the wall by himself, wearing this black baseball hat he always wore, laughing at something out of the frame, something we couldn’t see. The grass was so green behind him, and above that a clear stretch of blue sky. When the slide came up, the entire crowd in that auditorium cheered, clapping and hooting and craning their necks to look for Michael, who was sitting up in the balcony with Macon Faulkner, looking embarrassed. But that was what he was to us, always: the one thing that we all had in common.
The funeral was the next day, Thursday. I went across the street to Scarlett’s after breakfast, in bare feet and cutoffs, carrying two black dresses I couldn’t decide between. I’d only been to one funeral before, my grandfather’s in Buffalo, and I’d been so little someone had dressed me. This was different.
“Come in,” I heard Marion call out before I even had a chance to knock at the side door. She was sitting at the kitchen table, coffee cup in front of her, flipping through Vogue.
“Hey,” I said to her as she smiled at me. “Is she awake?”
“Practically all night,” she said quietly, turning the page and taking a sip of coffee. “She was on the couch when I got up. She really needs some rest, or she’s just gonna crash.”
I had to keep from smiling. These were the same words I heard from Scarlett about Marion on a regular basis; for as long as I’d known them their roles had been reversed. When Marion had been depressed and drinking hea
vily a few years back, it was Scarlett who came knocking at our front door in her nightgown at two A.M. because she’d found Marion passed out cold halfway up the front walk, her cheek imprinted with the ripples and cracks in the concrete. My father carried Marion into the house while my mother tried her best therapy schtick on Scarlett, who said nothing and curled up in the chair beside Marion’s bed, watching over her until morning. My father called Scarlett “solemn”; my mother said she was “in denial.”
“Hey.” I looked over to see Scarlett standing in the doorway in a red shirt and cutoff long johns, her hair still mussed up from sleeping. She nodded at the dresses in my hand. “Which one you gonna wear?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
She came closer, taking them from my hands, then held each up against me, squinting. “The short one,” she said quietly, laying the other on the counter next to the fruit bowl. “The one with the scoop neck always makes you look like you’re twelve.”
I looked down at the scoop-necked dress, trying to remember where I’d worn it before. It was always Scarlett who kept track of such things: dates, memories, lessons learned. I forgot everything, barely able to keep my head from one week to the next. But Scarlett knew it all, from what she was wearing when she got her first kiss to the name of the sister of the boy I’d met at the beach the summer before; she was our oracle, our common memory.
She opened the fridge and took out the milk, then crossed the room with a box of Rice Krispies under her arm, grabbing a bowl from the open dishwasher on her way. She sat at the head of the table, with Marion to her left, and I took my seat on the right. Even in their tiny family, with me as an honorary member, there were traditions.