Last Year's Mistake

by Gina Ciocca

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  For my family and friends, especially Mom, Dee, Dom, and Sarah, because you believed this would happen even when I didn’t. And for Dad, the original number thirty-three.

  One

  Rhode Island

  Senior Year

  The first day of senior year, he came back. I should have known it wasn’t over. Nothing ever is.

  I smoothed my white sundress beneath me as I took my seat beside Ryan, my boyfriend of almost a year, in his Camaro. The air was tinged with last night’s September chill, a reminder that I’d soon be watching summer melt into fall for the second time as a resident of Rhode Island. Sometimes I still wondered if the whole thing was a dream.

  The Camaro’s engine idled loudly as I pulled down the visor to check my makeup. Satisfied that lip gloss and mascara hadn’t budged on the way from the house to the car, I snapped the mirror back into place.

  Then my insides went cold.

  Something was clipped to the visor that I’d never seen in this car before but would have recognized anywhere.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “This?” Ryan unclipped the half-dollar-size medal, laughing as he held it out to me. “Keep it. You need it more than I do.”

  I made no effort to take it from him. “Where did you get it?”

  The dimple in Ryan’s left cheek disappeared as his smile faltered. “I found it. What’s your deal?”

  My eyes darted from him to the medallion and back again. When I still didn’t touch it, he added, “Oh, come on, babe. It’s a Saint Christopher medal. It’s to protect you while you’re driving. Or, in your case, running squirrels off the road. Lighten up.”

  My sister and I were bumming a ride with Ryan on the first day of school because my car was in the shop—the result of an unfortunate incident involving one too many tequila shots and a squirrel. At least, that was the story I’d told him.

  I tentatively touched the medal, engraved with an image of Saint Christopher and his staff.

  Ryan thought he was teasing by giving me this, laughing it up over an inside joke. But nothing about it was funny. The car suddenly felt too warm, too small, and memories I’d locked away for more than a year poured into my head like water through a broken dam. Images of smiles and touches and kisses that weren’t his.

  I stared at the medal in my palm, running my thumb over the uneven surface. “I—I knew someone who had a medal like this.” Not like it. This one was identical to the one in that long-buried past of mine. And now I held it in my hand like sunken treasure churned up from the ocean floor. I rolled the window down a little more, wondering why air couldn’t seem to find its way to my lungs, and stared absently at the wicker rockers on our front porch before adding, “Someone I haven’t seen in a long time.”

  “I miss him.” Miranda sighed from the backseat. “He was the best.”

  I whipped around. “Be quiet. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Him?” Ryan adjusted the red Clayton High baseball cap sitting sideways over his blond curls.

  Wistfulness clouded Miranda’s blue eyes. “Our friend from back home in Connecticut. He’s—”

  “Not important.” I twisted around in my seat again. “Do you want to die on your first day of freshman year?”

  “Him who?” Ryan pressed.

  I didn’t look at him when I answered. “Not that kind of him. A friend. One I don’t speak to anymore.”

  Ryan shifted in his seat. “It’s not like it’s the same medal. Those things are mass produced. You look like you saw a ghost.”

  If only I’d known how prophetic those words would be.

  I’d tossed the medal into my purse, and had almost forgotten about it by the time Ryan and I were kissing at my locker half an hour later.

  “I swear, you two should get tracheotomies so you’ll never have to come up for air.” My best friend, Candy, ­wrinkled her nose as she slammed her locker shut.

  “Jealous, Candle Wax?” Ryan retorted. I hated when he called her that. Candy’s last name was Waxman, hence the rather dim-witted nickname.

  “In your dreams, Smurf.” Equally dim-witted: Ryan Murphy. Smurf. Ugh.

  Candy fiddled with her cell phone, simultaneously running a brush through her pin-straight dark hair. “You guys wanna grab some breakfast? I’ve been dying for one of Ruthie’s egg ’n’ cheeses all summer.”

  “ ‘Egg ’n’ cheeses’?” I laughed. “Is that even a word?”

  Candy threw her phone in her bag and tugged on my hair. “Who gives a flying fig? They’re fried, greasy goodness, and that’s all I care about.”

  Ryan snorted. “Easy, Wax. Too many of those and that bodacious booty won’t fit into your rah-rah uniform.”

  He gave mine a squeeze and I smacked his arm. Kissing and hand-holding and other tame forms of PDA were fine, but I had no interest in being groped in front of our entire high school. Nor did I appreciate him teasing Candy about her butt. As someone who’d spent the better part of puberty hiding its traitorous effects behind shapeless T-shirts, I didn’t take kindly to body comments.

  Nothing fazed Candy, though. She and Ryan sparred all the time, and as usual, Candy didn’t miss a beat. Not that I knew what she came back with, because I didn’t hear a word of it.

  I happened to glance over her shoulder at that moment, right as one of the glass double doors at the end of the hall opened. Bright sunlight shone through, and for a second I could only make out the outline of the person who stepped inside.

  But it was all I needed to see.

  My heart froze as I took in his broad shoulders, his dark hair sticking out in all directions. He was taller than I remembered, more built, the angles of his face sharper. Evidence of the time that had passed since I last saw him.

  It can’t be.

  I might have said it out loud as I pulled myself from Ryan’s arms, my legs turning to mush beneath me.

  “Who is that?” Candy said, just as Ryan asked, “Are you all right?” But they sounded a million miles away.

  My pulse quickened as the person at the end of the hall took a step forward, and even as the words It can’t be repeated over and over in my head, there was no room for doubt. This morning in the car, I’d felt my past shift in its grave. Now the piece I’d wanted to bury deepest stood right there in front of me, breathing the same air.

  I took a step forward, and he stopped. He’d seen me, too.

  The beginning of a smile curved his lips. Lips I knew all too well. Lips I hated.

  But that didn’t stop me from taking another step forward. And another, until I stood right in front of him, still not convinced he wasn’t some sort of hallucination. It wasn’t until he reached out and slid hesitant arms around my rigid body that I knew he was real.

  I had no intention of hugging him back, but my body had other ideas. The second my face pressed against his shoulder, every lie I’d told myself for the past year dissolved into the scent I’d know anywhere. I closed my eyes and wound myself around him, burying my nose in his shirt. The stiffness in his embrace melted away, and he crushed me against him.

  “Hey,” he whispered against my hair. “It’s been a long time.”

  Two


  Rhode Island

  Summer before Freshman Year

  I lifted my foot to the bumper of my parents’ car and braced myself as I wrestled my suitcase out of the trunk, anxious to start my vacation. A cloudless blue sky stretched above me, and a salty breeze tempered the August heat. The perfect way to begin an end-of-summer getaway.

  Every August my family made the two-and-a-half-hour drive from our home in Norwood, Connecticut, to stay with our (loaded) uncle Tommy and aunt Tess at their summerhouse. They were right at the heart of everything that the pristine, manicured beach town had to offer: the ocean; the preserved Gilded Age mansions; and Thames Street, ­Newport’s main drag. We spent two weeks each year enjoying the fruits of my aunt and uncle’s good fortune, wishing we’d come across some of our own.

  That summer, I was fourteen, and my family was broke. My dad—Uncle Tommy’s brother—liked to refer to himself as a “starving artist.” He’d been a teacher at Norwood’s local high school until a few years earlier when he’d been unable to dodge a hailstorm of layoffs.

  Once he’d lost his job, he had this epiphany that he should pursue his long-forgotten dream of publishing a novel. Sure, he’d put in job applications when my mother reminded him that his unemployment check and her paralegal salary weren’t enough to put two girls through college, but nothing over the past three years ever seemed to pan out. Including the novel.

  So we were all ready to forget about life for a while when we pulled up to Uncle Tommy’s cabin that summer. It was nothing like a cabin, of course, but that’s what we’d always called it. Originally built in 1902, it had been a Victorian before various additions and build-outs turned it into the turreted, twenty-four-hundred-square-foot Thing with a Porch that currently stood on the property.

  Whoever owned the house before obviously hadn’t been into the whole historical preservation craze that permeated the rest of Newport. Not that I complained; everything was modern and clean, and I didn’t have to share a room with Miranda. Plus, having restored mansions and the beach practically in your backyard had the crazy effect of making everything seem right with the world.

  If only I could get the damn suitcase out of the car.

  I wasn’t sure what happened next—if the hard smack that impacted my upper arm caused me to jostle my suitcase loose, or if the case had just broken free of whatever it had been caught on and flew out of the trunk. Either way, my butt hit the ground and so did my luggage, right after it bounced off my foot.

  “Ow!” I grabbed at the stinging spot below my ankle and massaged it.

  “Are you okay?”

  I looked up with a jolt at the sound of the unfamiliar voice. It belonged to a boy about my age. He and an older man peered over the white fence that separated Uncle ­Tommy’s driveway from theirs. The boy’s thick black hair flopped over his forehead, and both his hands stretched toward me, though I didn’t know how he planned to help with a fence between us. Or while wearing a baseball glove.

  “Sorry about that,” he said.

  “Completely my fault,” the man added, waving his own gloved hand in the air. He pushed his glasses up his nose. “I missed it by a mile. Are you all right?”

  Only then did I notice “it”—the worn-looking baseball nestled in the grass a few feet from where I sat.

  “I’m fine,” I lied, not wanting to make a big deal. I let go of my foot and stood to retrieve the ball, wishing I had more hands to rub all the places that hurt.

  “Jimmy!” a voice carped through one of the open windows in the house behind the fence. “Where’s my Swiss Army knife?”

  The older man sighed and shook his head, his thin shoulders sagging. “In a box in the hall closet, Dad, exactly where I told you I put it,” he called back.

  “I can’t find it. Get in here, would you?”

  The man’s mouth twisted as he abandoned his glove and turned toward the house, stopping to give me a look of regret. “Again, my apologies.”

  I waved, unsure of what else to do, before winging the ball toward the boy. A thwack sounded as it slammed into his glove, and his eyes went round as quarters.

  “Nice arm!” He grinned, revealing a row of metal braces and drawing my attention to a small beauty mark beneath the left side of his bottom lip.

  “For a girl?”

  “For anyone.”

  I laughed and walked toward him. “I’m Kelsey.”

  “David.”

  I threw a glance at the house behind him. “Do you live there?”

  “That’s my grandfather’s house.” He grumbled when he said it and looked at the ground, like it embarrassed him.

  “Really?” I pointed at the house behind me. “This is my uncle’s house. We’re here at the end of every August. I don’t think I’ve seen you before.”

  “We usually come at the beginning of the month. My dad helps pay Grandpa’s bills and stuff.” Under his breath, he mumbled something that sounded like, Makes sure he hasn’t killed himself yet. David cast a tense look over his shoulder at the house. “He’s needed some, uh, extra help lately, so we’ve been coming more frequently. And if you’ve been here every summer, I should probably apologize on his behalf.”

  So he knew.

  A nervous laugh bubbled up in my throat. “He doesn’t bother anyone.”

  David smiled. “I see niceness runs in your family. Your uncle is the only one who never calls the police.”

  “My uncle’s also not here most of the year.”

  But I’d heard stories from when he was. Jay, David’s grandfather, had a bit of a drinking problem, one that had gotten worse as time passed. In earlier years his behavior had been more or less harmless; Aunt Tess told us he’d passed out with the TV blaring a couple of times, or failed to hear an alarm clock that could wake the dead—for over an hour. Most recently, though, my uncle had found him out cold on his back porch, wearing boxers and a parka. In the middle of an eighty-degree day in August.

  “David! I see you’ve met my niece.”

  I turned at the sound of Uncle Tommy’s voice. He stood at the door, smiling beneath his strawberry-blond beard.

  David raised his gloved hand. “Hey, Mr. Crawford. I sort of knocked her over with a baseball. Sorry.”

  Uncle Tommy waved off the apology as he trotted toward us. “Don’t worry about it. Girls always get flustered around good-looking guys like us.”

  I blew an indignant pfff through my lips and shook my head.

  “Besides, David’s no fool,” Uncle Tommy teased as he righted my suitcase and pulled out the handle. “He probably spotted you a mile away and made a beeline.” He winked before adding, “That’s why you’re gonna go back inside and keep your raging teenage hormones away from my beautiful niece. This young lady is spoken for.”

  I wanted to die on the spot. My parents must’ve told him about Eric, my friend who’d recently ambush-kissed me in front of the entire cafeteria. My best friend, Maddie, made the mistake of mentioning it in front of Miranda and the news had reached my mother in a nanosecond. Maybe I should’ve told them that I found out later he’d done it on a dare. I’d hardly call that “spoken for.”

  I rolled my eyes and gave David an apologetic shake of my head.

  “All right, I’ll catch you guys later. Let me know if you need me to work on your yard this weekend, Mr. Crawford.”

  “You got it, David. I know where to find you.”

  David gave me a hesitant wave. “Nice meeting you, Kelsey.” And thanks to Uncle Tommy, I couldn’t help but notice he was pretty cute. Minus the braces and shaggy hair, of course.

  I waved back. “See you later.”

  Turned out later came sooner than I expected. When we returned from Thames Street that night, stuffed full of fish-and-chips and all things delicious, I spotted David’s hunched form on the back porch of his grandfather’s house. The voices of two
shouting males rang from inside and met my ears the moment I stepped out of the car.

  “Maybe I should go over and see if everything’s all right,” Uncle Tommy said. Before he finished his sentence, Miranda ran over to the fence, grabbed the peaks at the top, and strained on her tiptoes to see over them.

  “Hey,” she crowed, “there’s someone sitting out there!”

  “Shh! Let go before you knock it over!” I pulled her hand from the fence and held it at my side, the same way Mom used to whenever Miranda tried sneaking candy onto the conveyor at the grocery store. Seeing David had looked up, I waved at him. “Hey. Um, is everything all right?”

  “Yeah.” He tried to smile, but only half his mouth cooperated. His hands were jammed in his pockets, and the porch swing creaked back and forth under the weight of his slouched body. “I’m waiting for it to quiet down in there. Sorry.”

  Miranda hopped on the balls of her feet, trying to get a better look at him. “Come over and play video games with us! We’re having a tournament! You can be on my team, because my mom stinks.”

  Collective laughter rang through the darkness. Leave it to my sister to make clueless cute.

  “Sounds good.” David stood up, leaving the wicker swing swaying behind him. “Let me, uh, leave them a note.” He grimaced in the direction of the upper floor, where the shouting raged on.

  “If you’d grown up and gotten your act together years ago, you and Mom never would have divorced!”

  “Still high and mighty, even with the ink wet on your own divorce papers! I don’t need you and your kid telling me how to run my life!”

  I shuddered and gave Miranda a gentle push in the direction of Uncle Tommy’s house. “Go inside and help Aunt Tess set up. I’ll wait for him.” Even with her bubble of obliviousness protecting her, I didn’t want her hearing something she shouldn’t.

  David reemerged from the house a moment later, jogging up our driveway with his hands bunched into the pockets of his jeans.

  “Sorry about that,” he said, nodding toward the other house. “He’s never been this bad before. It’s . . .” He shook his head and frowned. “Out of control.”