“Clara,” she said. “I like you so much it makes my stomach hurt. I’ve liked you for so long, but I didn’t know what to do about it, which is a first for me, because I’ve known how to handle a crush since, like, middle school. The only reason I didn’t kiss you is because I was scared of screwing things up. I wasn’t sure you would want to kiss me back.”
Clara’s face went a deep shade of crimson. “You liked me for so long?”
“Yes.” Rae gripped the sculpture and focused on the branches above, on their slender green leaves and blooming roses. “Ever since last summer, when we’d hang out all the time. I hated waking up in the morning and knowing we had to go different places. I hated thinking about what would happen when Aubrey and Jonah and Gabe came back and I didn’t have you to myself anymore.”
Clara’s knee rested against Rae’s. “That summer was the first time I was one-hundred-percent certain I liked girls. It made me wonder about all the girls I could have been kissing.”
“All the girls?” Rae asked. She wanted to sound confident, but she knew she didn’t. She could feel herself unraveling.
“No,” Clara said softly. “Not all.”
Her pinkie finger moved to the fabric of Rae’s dress. Rae noticed the dark plum nail polish she’d applied that morning on the train from Vienna. She heard Clara’s breath, quiet and persistent beneath the sounds of the garden and the city and the night. They leaned into each other, their lips only inches apart. Clara touched Rae’s face, and Rae touched Clara’s—and they tumbled right off the sculpture, landing in a heap.
Clara burst out laughing. “That was totally your fault!”
“Was not!” Rae brushed dirt from her arms. But those had definitely not been her best moves.
“It really was,” Clara said. And then they were finally kissing again, dizzying and fast. Rae’s hands touched Clara’s neck, arms, waist. Clara pulled Rae to her, their bodies lining up, eyelashes brushing each other’s cheeks. They stopped for a moment, hearts pounding, to catch their breath.
Grass was tangled in Clara’s red hair, and the evening light blushed deep behind her. She rested her hand against Rae’s cheek before kissing her again. And Rae didn’t care if this was against the rules or if they were about to get yelled at or even kicked out of the park.
Because at that moment, no one else was there. The garden had grown out to cover the world, and they were alone.
23
Aubrey
Sunday, July 10
FLORENCE to ROME
It was early morning, and Aubrey and Gabe were on their way to Rome.
They were only going for the day, so they’d caught a train that left just before seven AM. It rattled quietly through patchwork fields and villages, its windows shimmering with condensation. Aubrey had brought a Virginia Woolf book with her from one of her course’s summer reading lists, but the words kept rolling past her eyes, moving as quickly as the scenery outside. So she watched that instead: the orange and red farmhouses, the peaceful clouds, the hills that crested and dipped along the skyline.
Gabe sat beside her, sharing her armrest and tapping his foot as he listened to music. Out of the corner of her eye, Aubrey saw a glimpse of his EVIL DEAD T-shirt and his mouth moving silently to a song she couldn’t hear.
She thought back to yesterday, to the two of them wandering through Florence for hours. Not talking about Rae or Jonah or even college anymore. Just throwing themselves into the list of churches and museums Aubrey had wanted to see, staying out past midnight, until they were so tired Aubrey’s mind finally went silent and dreamy. She’d woken up at five this morning to meet him again, but she’d done her best to make sure Clara and Rae didn’t wake up with her. She hadn’t wanted to ask if they felt like coming, too.
Gabe pushed back his headphones. “Did you bring any music?”
She shook her head. “I forgot.”
He twisted one half of the headphones so she could cup it against her ear and turned up the volume. He was listening to Phoenix, a band he used to play for her freshman year when they spent all that time together painting sets. At the sound of the heavy plunking piano and drums, Aubrey could remember exactly how she’d felt on those early-fall afternoons. Hours of painting gray buildings and a steely sky, making mistakes and not even caring, because she wasn’t an artist and had never wanted to be. She remembered how the music had made the afternoons seem too short, like they were songs themselves, each one ending before she wished it would.
“Is this okay?” Gabe asked. “I figured you still liked them.”
Aubrey swept her thumb over the pages of her book and said, “This song is one of my favorites.”
He eased back in his seat and pressed a button on his phone. The song began to play again.
“This doesn’t feel right.” Gabe stood on the train station platform, hands lifted and palms tipped up. “Is this temperature even natural?”
“I think my face is on fire.” Aubrey’s sunglasses turned the searing morning light to amber. The heat crawled into her pores, making her wish she’d brought a compact mirror with her. There was no way she didn’t look sweaty and puffy right now.
They headed out of the station into a tangle of glinting streets full of tour groups and cars spewing exhaust. People fanned themselves with maps, and vendors stood by open coolers, selling tiny plastic bottles of water for five euros apiece. As they waded away from the station, Aubrey’s vision went foggy. She couldn’t keep track of all the street signs.
“Are you sure this is the right direction?” she asked Gabe.
They’d planned on seeing the Trevi Fountain first, which, according to Google Maps, was a twenty-minute walk from the station.
“I think so,” he said.
“You think so?” A group of people wearing matching COLE FAMILY REUNION! T-shirts took over the sidewalk, separating them. Aubrey tried to shout over their heads, “You mean you don’t know for sure?” Dark clouds rolled across the sky, blocking the sun. Aubrey was fiddling with her phone, pulling up a map, when a woman wearing bright-green sneakers knocked into her shoulder. Aubrey’s phone clattered to the sidewalk, and she lunged for it at the exact moment a tall guy wearing expensive sunglasses did. Her knees skidded on the pavement, but her hand touched it first. “Don’t even think about it,” she snapped. “This is mine.”
The guy raised an eyebrow but didn’t argue with her. He strolled away, while Aubrey scrambled to her feet, rushing back over to Gabe. “Did you see that?” she asked.
“See what?”
“That guy!” She pointed behind her as they both kept walking. “He tried to steal my phone. I dropped it, and he totally went to grab it.”
“Are you sure? Maybe he was just trying to be chivalrous.”
“Are you kidding me? Rome is a big tourist city, and big tourist cities are full of pickpockets. Besides, even if he was trying to be chivalrous, I don’t need some guy picking my phone up for me. My weak girl arms can handle it, thanks.”
Gabe looked amused. “If he’d taken your phone, we could have chased him down together. And I know a lot of Italian swear words.”
“How chivalrous of you.”
He obviously thought she was overreacting. He was treating her the way her friends always did—like she was Aubrey, the girl who panicked. The girl who saw a potential catastrophe in everything. She wished things could feel as simple and effortless as they’d felt yesterday.
They were at a red light, waiting to cross the street. Motorbikes gunned their engines. People crowded around them, smelling of sunscreen and sweat, carrying shopping bags with flashy designer logos. Maybe Aubrey shouldn’t have come here. Maybe being with Gabe like this—in a new city where no one even knew they were—was a huge mistake.
What if something happened to them? What if they did lose their phones? Or their train tickets or their money? What if they couldn’t get back to Florence and no one knew where to look for them?
“Aubrey?” Gabe sounded concerned
. “You don’t look great. Are you still thinking about your phone?”
“No,” she said. “Let’s just keep going, okay?”
But that was definitely the wrong thing to do. She shouldn’t be running around Rome with her ex-boyfriend’s best friend. She shouldn’t be having fun and acting spontaneous while Jonah was out there somewhere, probably still hopping trains, probably angry and alone.
Go back to the station, she thought. Tell Gabe you need to turn around and get the next train out of here.
The sky cracked with thunder. A girl to the side of Aubrey squealed and covered her head with her hands. Rain from a heavy summer storm began to pelt down on the cars. Lightning flashed in the gloomy sky.
The light turned green, and everyone scattered. Gabe and Aubrey gripped hands and took off across the road. They ran in the direction Gabe had been leading them, toward the Trevi Fountain, where carved stone gods seemed to emerge from the billowing mist. Water cascaded down their sides and drummed against the fountain’s surface, while Aubrey and Gabe stood in front of it, holding hands.
“Wow,” Aubrey breathed, rain trailing down her forehead and getting caught in her eyelashes.
“Yeah.” Gabe squeezed her hand. “Next stop?”
They took off again, running through the storm that covered the city like a glistening, metallic sheet. It veiled small alleys and churches and made the back of Gabe’s shirt grow darker and darker. Tucked into one of those alleys, Aubrey spotted a glowing OPEN sign hanging in the window of a storefront.
She tugged him inside.
The door closed; the sounds of Rome disappeared.
Gabe shoved his wet hair aside and scanned the aisles of a record store. “This wasn’t exactly on the itinerary,” he said.
“Screw the itinerary,” Aubrey said.
The walls of the store were painted a pale, buttery yellow and decorated with framed album covers. There were no other customers, but a girl sat behind the counter, wearing a lacy vintage dress and flipping through a magazine. There was a record player next to her, and now that the storm was muted, Aubrey could hear Otis Redding crackling through a set of speakers.
“Should we look around?” Gabe asked.
Aubrey realized they were still holding hands. All the remaining warmth in her body flooded to her fingertips. She stepped away from him, felt their palms break apart. “Yeah. We should see what they have.”
Her shoes squelched as they went to stand on opposite sides of the same aisle and began hunting through the records. Images flickered past Aubrey’s eyes: big hair and neon logos and black-and-white photographs.
“What are you in the mood for?” Gabe asked. “Country? Heavy metal? Techno?”
“All of the above.” Aubrey stopped flipping for a moment. “Actually, let’s go for something really cheesy. What about that song everyone cried over at prom?”
“The Ellie Goulding one?” Gabe said. “I don’t think people were actually crying over the song. It probably had more to do with the fact that they were wasted.”
“Cynic.”
“You’re telling me you don’t think they were wasted?”
“No, they absolutely were. But that’s not the only reason to cry at prom. It’s an emotional time.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” he said, “but I don’t remember you crying. Or getting wasted.”
Aubrey ran her fingers over the plastic-wrapped edge of a record. It was bizarre, thinking about prom. It had only been a couple months ago, but it could have easily been years. Jonah had been Aubrey’s date, Gabe had gone with this cute junior girl from his chemistry class, and Clara had brought—and then ditched—a boy she was semi-friends with. Rae had worn a tuxedo and said her date was the patriarchy, but she’d killed him, so now she had no date. And then, a couple of hours later, she’d made out with Emily St. James.
Aubrey remembered taking pictures with everyone before the dance, riding the tube all dressed up, and falling asleep on a pile of sleeping bags in Jonah’s living room late at night, her hair still stiff with hair spray.
“I wasn’t sad then,” she said. “We were still doing the musical. We still had the whole summer and all of this to look forward to. We hadn’t even graduated yet.” She tapped an alphabetical marker between albums. “Plus, prom is pretty ridiculous, right? It’s just a bunch of teenagers getting drunk and crying to Ellie Goulding.”
Gabe cracked up. Wind pressed at the edges of the door frame, the storm groaning outside. “Okay.” He lifted another album, this one with a picture of Bob Dylan in profile, a hat pulled over his eyes, his scarf curling to one side. Aubrey had seen it in Gabe’s house before. “You know how certain songs can make you think of one place or moment or something?” he asked. “I don’t remember much about living in Madrid, but whenever I hear “One More Cup of Coffee,” I start thinking about all this random stuff from back then.”
“Like what?”
“Like—lying on the floor while my parents made dinner. And looking up at this peach wallpaper we had in the kitchen. My sister would usually be in the corner practicing cartwheels, and everything smelled like chlorine, because my dad liked to listen to this album in the summer, and that’s when we’d go to the pool all the time.”
Aubrey pulled at a strand of her wet, wavy hair. “You should write that down. So you won’t forget it.”
Their hands were still poised above the records, but neither of them was looking down anymore.
“Now tell me one of yours,” he said.
“One of my what?”
“One of those songs. The kind that makes you think of stuff you didn’t even know you remembered.”
“Okay, I guess I have a couple. Give me a minute.” She riffled through her memories. Of the Beatles songs her parents would play on road trips to Maine, of the Lady Gaga ones she would belt out with her friends in Connecticut. “There are tons,” she said.
“Name a few.”
She scanned the records in front of her. “Well, P. J. Harvey reminds me of your house. And Phoenix totally brings me back to freshman year. And—Tegan and Sara and Sleater-Kinney always make me think of Rae.” Mentioning Rae should have upset her, but it didn’t. She felt like she was piecing something together, something important. “They’re like time capsules, aren’t they? You could put them all in a row and listen to them one after the other. And if you did it with your eyes closed, maybe it would feel like being home again.”
The music scratched and skipped, and the girl closed her magazine and stood up to change the record. There was a beat of static, and then something new began to play—a woman’s voice, low and full of yearning, accompanied by a twangy acoustic guitar. Aubrey tried to make out a few of the lines. She wanted to remember it later.
Quietly—so quietly, Aubrey almost didn’t hear him over the music—Gabe said, “I didn’t mean it.”
Aubrey blinked at him. “Mean what?”
He flicked the same album back and forth. “All that stuff I said in Prague. How I made it sound like I regretted kissing you. Because, Bryce, the thing is, I really don’t.”
The bell above the front door jingled. A man shook out an umbrella and stamped out his shoes before walking to the world-music section. Through the open door, Aubrey could see rain popping and sparking on the sidewalk. When it closed again, the music sounded so much louder. She could hear the lyrics now—they were about sitting at a kitchen table with someone, drinking coffee, and talking about their day. How easy it was to be with that one person.
Aubrey looked up at a rusted air-conditioning vent. Gabe was waiting for her to respond. But whatever was happening between them—if something was happening at all—she needed time to figure it out. She needed time for things to feel like they did in the song. Simple. Easy.
He moved down a few steps and she followed, leaning forward. Drops of water fell from her hair and hit the cellophane on a record. “Later,” she said. “I want to talk about this, but—not yet. Not right now. Later.”
Understanding washed over his features. His voice was a murmur, as soft as the rain sounded from here. “Okay,” he said. “Later.”
The song warbled, stopped, and changed. Their eyes locked, and then dropped back to the records.
24
Rae
Sunday, July 10
FLORENCE
Clara took a step back and crossed her arms, hugging her sketchbook.
“What do you think of this one?” she asked Rae.
“I think it’s one of the most famous paintings in the world,” Rae said.
“Psh. Everything here is famous. What do you really think of it? And you’re about to be an art major, so you have to say something smart. Say it with a British accent!”
“Hard pass. I suck at a British accent.”
They were spending the morning in the Uffizi Gallery, walking down its long marble corridors and staring at paintings of myths and angels and lots of naked bodies. Right now, they were looking at a Botticelli. The Birth of Venus. A goddess stood on a shell floating on the ocean, her long red hair wrapped around her and roses drifting down. The painting was massive; it was vivid, bright, and blue.
“I think,” Rae said, “it’s beautiful.”
But she kept glancing to the side instead, taking in Clara’s furrowed brow and the small red buttons on the waist of her skirt. She watched the goose bumps form on Clara’s arms in the air-conditioned chill and the way she scuffed her shoes on the glossy floor. Because Clara wasn’t a fantasy. Or some perfect painted image. She was real, and that was even better. She was the girl who’d kissed Rae in a rose garden above the city and a few other places since. She was the girl standing with Rae now, turning every image on the wall flat and gray.
Clara leaned in. “What do you think Gabe and Aubrey are doing later?”
The Summer of Us Page 16