by E. Lockhart
But Gat didn’t answer. He was looking at me.
His nose was dramatic, his mouth sweet. Skin deep brown, hair black and waving. Body wired with energy. Gat seemed spring-loaded. Like he was searching for something. He was contemplation and enthusiasm. Ambition and strong coffee. I could have looked at him forever.
Our eyes locked.
I turned and ran away.
Gat followed. I could hear his feet behind me on the wooden walkways that cross the island.
I kept running. He kept following.
Johnny chased Gat. And Mirren chased Johnny.
The adults remained talking on the dock, circling politely around Ed, cooing over baby Will. The littles did whatever littles do.
We four stopped running at the tiny beach down by Cuddledown House. It’s a small stretch of sand with high rocks on either side. No one used it much, back then. The big beach had softer sand and less seaweed.
Mirren took off her shoes and the rest of us followed. We tossed stones into the water. We just existed.
I wrote our names in the sand.
Cadence, Mirren, Johnny, and Gat.
Gat, Johnny, Mirren, and Cadence.
That was the beginning of us.
—
JOHNNY BEGGED TO have Gat stay longer.
He got what he wanted.
The next year he begged to have him come for the entire summer.
Gat came.
Johnny was the first grandson. My grandparents almost never said no to Johnny.
5
SUMMER FOURTEEN, GAT and I took out the small motorboat alone. It was just after breakfast. Bess made Mirren play tennis with the twins and Taft. Johnny had started running that year and was doing loops around the perimeter path. Gat found me in the Clairmont kitchen and asked, did I want to take the boat out?
“Not really.” I wanted to go back to bed with a book.
“Please?” Gat almost never said please.
“Take it out yourself.”
“I can’t borrow it,” he said. “I don’t feel right.”
“Of course you can borrow it.”
“Not without one of you.”
He was being ridiculous. “Where do you want to go?” I asked.
“I just want to get off-island. Sometimes I can’t stand it here.”
I couldn’t imagine, then, what it was he couldn’t stand, but I said all right. We motored out to sea in wind jackets and bathing suits. After a bit, Gat cut the engine. We sat eating pistachios and breathing salt air. The sunlight shone on the water.
“Let’s go in,” I said.
Gat jumped and I followed, but the water was so much colder than off the beach, it snatched our breath. The sun went behind a cloud. We laughed panicky laughs and shouted that it was the stupidest idea to get in the water. What had we been thinking? There were sharks off the coast, everybody knew that.
Don’t talk about sharks, God! We scrambled and pushed each other, struggling to be the first one up the ladder at the back of the boat.
After a minute, Gat leaned back and let me go first. “Not because you’re a girl but because I’m a good person,” he told me.
“Thanks.” I stuck out my tongue.
“But when a shark bites my legs off, promise to write a speech about how awesome I was.”
“Done,” I said. “Gatwick Matthew Patil made a delicious meal.”
It seemed hysterically funny to be so cold. We didn’t have towels. We huddled together under a fleece blanket we found under the seats, our bare shoulders touching each other. Cold feet, on top of one another.
“This is only so we don’t get hypothermia,” said Gat. “Don’t think I find you pretty or anything.”
“I know you don’t.”
“You’re hogging the blanket.”
“Sorry.”
A pause.
Gat said, “I do find you pretty, Cady. I didn’t mean that the way it came out. In fact, when did you get so pretty? It’s distracting.”
“I look the same as always.”
“You changed over the school year. It’s putting me off my game.”
“You have a game?”
He nodded solemnly.
“That is the dumbest thing I ever heard. What is your game?”
“Nothing penetrates my armor. Hadn’t you noticed?”
That made me laugh. “No.”
“Damn. I thought it was working.”
We changed the subject. Talked about bringing the littles to Edgartown to see a movie in the afternoon, about sharks and whether they really ate people, about Plants Versus Zombies.
Then we drove back to the island.
Not long after that, Gat started lending me his books and finding me at the tiny beach in the early evenings. He’d search me out when I was lying on the Windemere lawn with the goldens.
We started walking together on the path that circles the island, Gat in front and me behind. We’d talk about books or invent imaginary worlds. Sometimes we’d end up walking several times around the edge before we got hungry or bored.
Beach roses lined the path, deep pink. Their smell was faint and sweet.
One day I looked at Gat, lying in the Clairmont hammock with a book, and he seemed, well, like he was mine. Like he was my particular person.
I got in the hammock next to him, silently. I took the pen out of his hand—he always read with a pen—and wrote Gat on the back of his left, and Cadence on the back of his right.
He took the pen from me. Wrote Gat on the back of my left, and Cadence on the back of my right.
I am not talking about fate. I don’t believe in destiny or soul mates or the supernatural. I just mean we understood each other. All the way.
But we were only fourteen. I had never kissed a boy, though I would kiss a few the next school year, and somehow we didn’t label it love.
6
SUMMER FIFTEEN I arrived a week later than the others. Dad had left us, and Mummy and I had all that shopping to do, consulting the decorator and everything.
Johnny and Mirren met us at the dock, pink in the cheeks and full of summer plans. They were staging a family tennis tournament and had bookmarked ice cream recipes. We would go sailing, build bonfires.
The littles swarmed and yelled like always. The aunts smiled chilly smiles. After the bustle of arrival, everyone went to Clairmont for cocktail hour.
I went to Red Gate, looking for Gat. Red Gate is a much smaller house than Clairmont, but it still has four bedrooms up top. It’s where Johnny, Gat, and Will lived with Aunt Carrie—plus Ed, when he was there, which wasn’t often.
I walked to the kitchen door and looked through the screen. Gat didn’t see me at first. He was standing at the counter wearing a worn gray T-shirt and jeans. His shoulders were broader than I remembered.
He untied a dried flower from where it hung upside down on a ribbon in the window over the sink. The flower was a beach rose, pink and loosely constructed, the kind that grows along the Beechwood perimeter.
Gat, my Gat. He had picked me a rose from our favorite walking place. He had hung it to dry and waited for me to arrive on the island so he could give it to me.
I had kissed an unimportant boy or three by now.
I had lost my dad.
I had come here to this island from a house of tears and falsehood
and I saw Gat,
and I saw that rose in his hand,
and in that one moment, with the sunlight from the window shining in on him,
the apples on the kitchen counter,
the smell of wood and ocean in the air,
I did call it love.
It was love, and it hit me so hard I leaned against the screen door that still stood between us, just to stay vertical. I wanted to touch him like he was a bunny, a kitten, something so special and soft your fingertips can’t leave it alone. The universe was good because he was in it. I loved the hole in his jeans and the dirt on his bare feet and the scab on his elbow and the scar t
hat laced through one eyebrow. Gat, my Gat.
As I stood there, staring, he put the rose in an envelope. He searched for a pen, banging drawers open and shut, found one in his own pocket, and wrote.
I didn’t realize he was writing an address until he pulled a roll of stamps from a kitchen drawer.
Gat stamped the envelope. Wrote a return address.
It wasn’t for me.
I left the Red Gate door before he saw me and ran down to the perimeter. I watched the darkening sky, alone.
I tore all the roses off a single sad bush and threw them, one after the other, into the angry sea.
7
JOHNNY TOLD ME about the New York girlfriend that evening. Her name was Raquel. Johnny had even met her. He lives in New York, like Gat does, but downtown with Carrie and Ed, while Gat lives uptown with his mom. Johnny said Raquel was a modern dancer and wore black clothes.
Mirren’s brother, Taft, told me Raquel had sent Gat a package of homemade brownies. Liberty and Bonnie told me Gat had pictures of her on his phone.
Gat didn’t mention her at all, but he had trouble meeting my eyes.
That first night, I cried and bit my fingers and drank wine I snuck from the Clairmont pantry. I spun violently into the sky, raging and banging stars from their moorings, swirling and vomiting.
I hit my fist into the wall of the shower. I washed off the shame and anger in cold, cold water. Then I shivered in my bed like the abandoned dog that I was, my skin shaking over my bones.
The next morning, and every day thereafter, I acted normal. I tilted my square chin high.
We sailed and made bonfires. I won the tennis tournament.
We made vats of ice cream and lay in the sun.
One night, the four of us ate a picnic down on the tiny beach. Steamed clams, potatoes, and sweet corn. The staff made it. I didn’t know their names.
Johnny and Mirren carried the food down in metal roasting pans. We ate around the flames of our bonfire, dripping butter onto the sand. Then Gat made triple-decker s’mores for all of us. I looked at his hands in the firelight, sliding marshmallows onto a long stick. Where once he’d had our names written, now he had taken to writing the titles of books he wanted to read.
That night, on the left: Being and. On the right: Nothingness.
I had writing on my hands, too. A quotation I liked. On the left: Live in. On the right: today.
“Want to know what I’m thinking about?” Gat asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“No,” said Johnny.
“I’m wondering how we can say your granddad owns this island. Not legally but actually.”
“Please don’t get started on the evils of the Pilgrims,” moaned Johnny.
“No. I’m asking, how can we say land belongs to anyone?” Gat waved at the sand, the ocean, the sky.
Mirren shrugged. “People buy and sell land all the time.”
“Can’t we talk about sex or murder?” asked Johnny.
Gat ignored him. “Maybe land shouldn’t belong to people at all. Or maybe there should be limits on what they can own.” He leaned forward. “When I went to India this winter, on that volunteer trip, we were building toilets. Building them because people there, in this one village, didn’t have them.”
“We all know you went to India,” said Johnny. “You told us like forty-seven times.”
Here is something I love about Gat: he is so enthusiastic, so relentlessly interested in the world, that he has trouble imagining the possibility that other people will be bored by what he’s saying. Even when they tell him outright. But also, he doesn’t like to let us off easy. He wants to make us think—even when we don’t feel like thinking.
He poked a stick into the embers. “I’m saying we should talk about it. Not everyone has private islands. Some people work on them. Some work in factories. Some don’t have work. Some don’t have food.”
“Stop talking, now,” said Mirren.
“Stop talking, forever,” said Johnny.
“We have a warped view of humanity on Beechwood,” Gat said. “I don’t think you see that.”
“Shut up,” I said. “I’ll give you more chocolate if you shut up.”
And Gat did shut up, but his face contorted. He stood abruptly, picked up a rock from the sand, and threw it with all his force. He pulled off his sweatshirt and kicked off his shoes. Then he walked into the sea in his jeans.
Angry.
I watched the muscles of his shoulders in the moonlight, the spray kicking up as he splashed in. He dove and I thought: If I don’t follow him now, that girl Raquel’s got him. If I don’t follow him now, he’ll go away. From the Liars, from the island, from our family, from me.
I threw off my sweater and followed Gat into the sea in my dress. I crashed into the water, swimming out to where he lay on his back. His wet hair was slicked off his face, showing the thin scar through one eyebrow.
I reached for his arm. “Gat.”
He startled. Stood in the waist-high sea.
“Sorry,” I whispered.
“I don’t tell you to shut up, Cady,” he said. “I don’t ever say that to you.”
“I know.”
He was silent.
“Please don’t shut up,” I said.
I felt his eyes go over my body in my wet dress. “I talk too much,” he said. “I politicize everything.”
“I like it when you talk,” I said, because it was true. When I stopped to listen, I did like it.
“It’s that everything makes me…” He paused. “Things are messed up in the world, that’s all.”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe I should”—Gat took my hands, turned them over to look at the words written on the backs—“I should live for today and not be agitating all the time.”
My hand was in his wet hand.
I shivered. His arms were bare and wet. We used to hold hands all the time, but he hadn’t touched me all summer.
“It’s good that you look at the world the way you do,” I told him.
Gat let go of me and leaned back into the water. “Johnny wants me to shut up. I’m boring you and Mirren.”
I looked at his profile. He wasn’t just Gat. He was contemplation and enthusiasm. Ambition and strong coffee. All that was there, in the lids of his brown eyes, his smooth skin, his lower lip pushed out. There was coiled energy inside.
“I’ll tell you a secret,” I whispered.
“What?”
I reached out and touched his arm again. He didn’t pull away. “When we say Shut up, Gat, that isn’t what we mean at all.”
“No?”
“What we mean is, we love you. You remind us that we’re selfish bastards. You’re not one of us, that way.”
He dropped his eyes. Smiled. “Is that what you mean, Cady?”
“Yes,” I told him. I let my fingers trail down his floating, outstretched arm.
“I can’t believe you are in that water!” Johnny was standing ankle-deep in the ocean, his jeans rolled up. “It’s the Arctic. My toes are freezing off.”
“It’s nice once you get in,” Gat called back.
“Seriously?”
“Don’t be weak!” yelled Gat. “Be manly and get in the stupid water.”
Johnny laughed and charged in. Mirren followed.
And it was—exquisite.
The night looming above us. The hum of the ocean. The bark of gulls.
8
THAT NIGHT I had trouble sleeping.
After midnight, he called my name.
I looked out my window. Gat was lying on his back on the wooden walkway that leads to Windemere. The golden retrievers were lying near him, all five: Bosh, Grendel, Poppy, Prince Philip, and Fatima. Their tails thumped gently.
The moonlight made them all look blue.
“Come down,” he called.
I did.
Mummy’s light was out. The rest of the island was dark. We were alone, except for all the dogs.
“Scoot,” I told him. The walkway wasn’t wide. When I lay down next to him, our arms touched, mine bare and his in an olive-green hunting jacket.
We looked at the sky. So many stars, it seemed like a celebration, a grand, illicit party the galaxy was holding after the humans had been put to bed.
I was glad Gat didn’t try to sound knowledgeable about constellations or say stupid stuff about wishing on stars. But I didn’t know what to make of his silence, either.
“Can I hold your hand?” he asked.
I put mine in his.
“The universe is seeming really huge right now,” he told me. “I need something to hold on to.”
“I’m here.”
His thumb rubbed the center of my palm. All my nerves concentrated there, alive to every movement of his skin on mine. “I am not sure I’m a good person,” he said after a while.
“I’m not sure I am, either,” I said. “I’m winging it.”
“Yeah.” Gat was silent for a moment. “Do you believe in God?”
“Halfway.” I tried to think about it seriously. I knew Gat wouldn’t settle for a flippant answer. “When things are bad, I’ll pray or imagine someone watching over me, listening. Like the first few days after my dad left, I thought about God. For protection. But the rest of the time, I’m trudging along in my everyday life. It’s not even slightly spiritual.”
“I don’t believe anymore,” Gat said. “That trip to India, the poverty. No God I can imagine would let that happen. Then I came home and started noticing it on the streets of New York. People sick and starving in one of the richest nations in the world. I just—I can’t think that anyone’s watching over those people. Which means no one is watching over me, either.”
“That doesn’t make you a bad person.”
“My mother believes. She was raised Buddhist but goes to Methodist church now. She’s not very happy with me.” Gat hardly ever talked about his mother.
“You can’t believe just because she tells you to,” I said.
“No. The question is: how to be a good person if I don’t believe anymore.”