by Trish Doller
I make the introductions, then head to the bar and order a pitcher of beer. While the bartender is pouring, I look back at the table, where Lacey curls herself around Moss’s bicep and a nervous-looking Kevlar is talking to Amber. Crazy.
Harper joins me.
“So, are we in a parallel universe?” I ask. “Because I have no idea who that guy is.”
“He is pretty drunk,” Harper says. She glances down at the floor, then up at me. That shy thing gets me every single time, even when Paige did it and I knew it wasn’t real. But Harper… it’s not a calculated maneuver to get me hot. It’s authentic. And still incredibly effective. “Do you, um, want to go for a walk?” she asks.
This could be an invitation to go for a walk or it could be for something more. Either way, I’m in. Even if it means walking to Bonita Springs and back. “Sure.”
“We’ll be back in a while,” I say as Harper puts the pitcher on the table. I reach into the pocket of my jeans and pull out a three-strip of condoms. “Be safe. Have fun. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
Kevlar looks up at me with a shitty grin. “So that means your mom’s a go?”
I smack the back of his head, then thread my fingers through Harper’s. “We’re outta here.”
We cross Estero and cut down one of the beach access lanes, where we leave our flip-flops behind. The sand is cool and damp between my toes as we walk toward the fishing pier and beach shops.
“So what’s up with the pocketful of condoms?” she asks. “Did you think you were going to need that many tonight?”
“I bought them for Kevlar. Just in case.”
Harper slants a skeptical look my way. “Really?”
“I guarantee the one he carries around in his wallet expired a long time ago,” I say. “So I picked some up at the beer store this afternoon because I knew he wouldn’t think of it until it was too late.”
“That was kind of… nice.”
I laugh. “Yeah, well, I’m kind of a nice guy.”
“Did you keep any for yourself?”
“Nope,” I say. “Should I have?”
She shakes her head. “Is that okay?”
I shrug. “I’m not in any rush.”
We pass through Times Square, stopping to watch a magician performing for a handful of German tourists. After we buy twist cones at the Dairy Queen, we head back up Estero until we reach her street. “Do you want me to walk you home?”
“I don’t want to go home.”
“Harper—” I start to tell her that she should face what’s bothering her, but what business do I have telling her what to do when I have no idea how to face what’s bothering me? “Okay.”
“It’s just—if we get down there and her car is still in the driveway…” Harper trails off. “I don’t have a problem with Alison, but a little warning would have been nice, you know?”
I nod. “That’s what I told your dad.”
“You did?” Her face and voice go soft, and she kisses me right there on the street corner. Until a passing car honks and someone shouts that we should get a room.
“Do you want to go back to the hotel?” I ask.
“What if the room is… occupied?”
I shudder at the mental picture of Kevlar and Amber, and Harper grimaces as if she’s imagined the same thing.
“Yeah, never mind,” I say. “Let’s go to my house.”
The sun is bright through the slats of the blinds when I open my eyes the next morning. The clock on the bedside table says I’ve slept later than I can remember sleeping since before I went to boot camp. And I feel good. Rested. Like I’ve—
I’ve slept all night.
No insomnia. No nightmares. No pills.
No Charlie.
“Hey.” Harper’s voice is husky with sleep beside me, her arm across my chest. Paige never spent the whole night—she always snuck out before my mom woke up—and I’ve never brought anyone else here.
Last night I did things with Harper that I leapfrogged when I was fourteen and having sex with Paige in the horse barn behind her house. It’s not that I regret it. I don’t. It’s just—being with Harper is like getting a do-over.
“Hey back,” I say. “You give good sleep.”
“Is that what the boys have been saying about me all these years?”
“Yeah, I read it above the urinal in the locker room.”
She yawn-laughs. “What time is it?”
I pick up my cell phone. “Almost ten.”
“Oh, no!” Harper scrambles out of my bed and re-knots her hair. “I’m going to be late for work.”
My mom is in the kitchen when we go downstairs. Her eyebrows shoot up when she sees Harper, then she pins me with a death ray stare loaded with silent scolding. Travis Henry Stephenson, you better not have been doing what I think you were doing. Not with a sweet girl like Harper Gray.
“Harper,” she says. “What a surprise.”
“Yeah, um—nice to see you, Mrs. Stephenson.” Harper’s face is pink with embarrassment, even though she’s got nothing to be embarrassed about.
“Long story,” I say. “We’ve gotta go.”
I drop Harper off at the Waffle House and meet up with Kevlar and Moss at the beach. Moss is asleep on a lounge chair, but Kevlar is propped up with a beer in his hand. I’d laugh at his Afghani-tan—tanned face and neck, white everywhere else—but I have one, too. Charlie was the one who dubbed it the Afghani-tan.
“You missed one helluva night, Solo,” he says. “We went to this strip club called Fantasy’s. Did you know Amber is an exotic dancer?”
It doesn’t surprise me. Taking off her clothes for money is within her skill set. I peel off my T-shirt and fish a beer from the depths of the icy cooler. “Dude, she’s a stripper.”
“Don’t be a hater just because your girlfriend is a goddess,” Kevlar says. “Amber is a very amenable girl, if you get what I’m sayin’.”
“What you’re saying is you probably paid sixty bucks for three lap dances, then came back to the hotel alone to liquidate the inventory.”
“Fuck you.”
“Did you or did you not close the deal, Kenneth?”
“I don’t think I want to tell you now.” He crosses his arms over his scrawny freckled chest, all huffy, and turns his nose up, pretending to ignore me.
“Kevlar, man, I thought we were BFFs,” I say. Moss doesn’t open his eyes, but a chuckle rumbles out. “I still have my half of the necklace, and last night I wrote in my diary, ‘Dear Diary, Kenneth is my BFF. I hope he gets laid, because it’s a special night when a man loses his virginity and contracts a sexually transmitted disease at the same time.’”
“Hey! I used a condom.” A shit-eating grin breaks out on his face and I know he wants to rattle off every detail, but just… no. I don’t need those nightmares, too.
“Aw, Moss, our little boy is all grown up.” I shake my can. “We should celebrate.”
“Solo.” Kevlar jumps off his chair. “No.”
He runs down the beach and I chase, but he’s not faster than I am. I catch him, put him in a headlock, and spray beer in his face. “Congratulations, dude. It’s about damn time.”
We hang out on the beach for a couple of hours, until my friends have to head back to North Carolina. I sit in the room with them while they’re packing.
“Wish I was going back, too,” I say.
“Had all the family you can stand?” Moss asks.
They don’t know that Peralta “suggested” my extra leave. Or that Charlie, the only person I could talk to about any of this, is part of the reason I’m here. “Yep.”
“I love my mother,” he says. “But after about four days I had all the mothering I can take.”
“Don’t cry, Solo.” Kevlar comes out of the bathroom carrying all the little soaps and shampoo bottles. “We’ll see you next weekend.”
“What’s next weekend?”
“Kevlar, man, you didn’t tell him?” Moss smacks Kevlar in the b
ack of the head, then rummages through his bag. He pulls out a cream-colored envelope and hands it to me. “We all got them. If you had your mail forwarded, you’ll probably be getting it any day.”
Inside is a matching cream-colored card. An invitation.
In memoriam
LCpl. Charles Thompson Sweeney
The honor of your presence
is requested at a memorial service
Saturday, the fourteenth of August
at five o’clock in the evening
The White Room
1 King Street
St. Augustine, Florida
My mouth goes dry and when I swallow it feels like I have sandpaper caught in my throat. I really don’t want to go to a memorial service, but I promised Charlie I’d visit his mom and I haven’t done it yet. How do you tell your best friend’s mother that everything you could do wasn’t enough?
“This Marine is looking forward to pulling out the blues,” Kevlar says. “And watching the panties drop.”
Moss smacks him upside the head again. “Have some respect. It’s a memorial service.”
“Dude, if he were alive, Charlie would be the first person to exploit the situation to get laid,” Kevlar says. “He’d be all Wedding Crashers, Marine style.”
It’s a fair point. Charlie used to joke about how he was going to buy himself a Purple Heart on eBay so he could use it to get sympathy sex.
“I guess I’ll see you guys next weekend, then.”
They leave me standing in the hotel parking lot and I’m tempted to go inside to the bar and get wrecked, because the only other place I have to go is home.
* * *
My envelope is lying on the kitchen island when I get there. I tear through the expensive paper, even though I already know what it says, and a folded note falls out with the invitation. It’s from Charlie’s mom.
Dear Travis,
I hope you will be willing to say a few words at Charlie’s memorial service. While I was blessed to have him in my life the longest, you knew him best. He called you brother. He called you friend. I know this is asking a lot and I will understand if you would rather not, but please call me when you decide.
Always,
Ellen Sweeney
“Please don’t tell her, Solo.” Charlie stands next to me at the island. “She thinks I’m a hero. Don’t take that away from her.”
“I won’t.” I rub the heels of my hands against my eyes to make him go away, but he’s still there. “But you need to go away.”
When I open my eyes, my mom is watching me from the doorway. “Who needs to go away, Travis?”
“No one,” I say. “It’s nothing. Headache.” Lie. I’m not telling my mom my dead best friend was talking to me. Or that I was talking back. “Seriously. It’s all good.”
I’m not sure she believes me, but she takes a whole key lime pie—my favorite—from the fridge and cuts it into wedges. “I was a little surprised to see Harper Gray coming down my stairs this morning. I hope you’re not—”
“I’m not.” It doesn’t matter how that sentence ends. “She’s really…” I shrug. “I like her.”
It’s a crumb, really, but Mom brightens as if I handed her a whole loaf. She slides me a small plate with a sliver of pie on it. “I always knew you could do so much better than Paige Manning.”
Laughing, I cut my fork into the dessert. “Yeah, well, I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but she moved on to Ryan.”
“What? No!”
“I’m surprised Dad didn’t tell you,” I say. “They hooked up while I was gone.”
She sighs. “I try to be charitable, but I’m sorry. I really dislike that girl.”
“I kinda got that impression.”
Mom gets a resigned look on her face. “Well, I guess if she has to… hook up with one of my boys, I’d rather it be Ryan.”
My eyebrows hitch up. “Oh?”
“I know a mother is not supposed to play favorites, and I love you both, but I’ve always liked you better.” She swipes her finger through the whipped cream on the top of her pie.
At first this surprises me. For all the times she stood by while Dad got on my case about one thing or another, I’d never have guessed I was her favorite. “Even though I’m a disappointment?”
“You’re not a disappointment, Travis,” she says. “You took everything your dad heaped on you and never complained about it.” Tears build up in her eyes. “I could see how much you hated it, but it seemed so important to him that I didn’t interfere. I’m sorry.”
I shrug. “It’s okay.”
“I went to see you play soccer once,” she says. After I quit the football team, I started playing Sunday soccer with the Mexicans out on Kelly Road. It was so much fun to just run up and down a field and not have someone yelling that I was doing it wrong. No game analysis afterward, either. We’d sit on the hood of someone’s car and flirt with the girls. “It was so nice to see you happ—”
“Why’d you take him back?”
She presses her fingertips against the stray bits of graham cracker crust dusting the countertop, then brushes them onto my empty plate. “You’ll be going back to North Carolina soon and Ryan leaves for Pennsylvania at the end of the month,” she says. “I just—I guess I’m afraid of being alone.”
“And being with the guy who cheated on you is better? Jesus Christ, Mom, stop being such a doormat.”
For a moment she only stares at me. Over the years I’ve ignored her when she was nagging at me, but I’ve never been outright disrespectful—even when she pissed me off. “This is not Afghanistan, Travis.” Her voice wavers and I can tell I’ve hurt her. I feel bad about it, but she needs to listen. “Maybe you can speak to your friends that way, but here—”
“This isn’t about my choice of words,” I say. “I know my going to Afghanistan was hard on you and I’m really, really sorry about that, but that’s no excuse for him to step out on you, Mom. I feel like it’s my fault when—”
“It’s not your fault.”
“I know it’s not,” I say. “But it’s not your fault, either.”
She picks up the envelope from the memorial service invitation and presses the back flap closed, even though the adhesive is long gone. “I don’t know, Travis. When I look back, maybe I neglected him and Ryan—”
“By sending me care packages and getting support from other Marine moms?” I ask. “Seems to me that Dad and Ryan were the ones who should have been supporting you.”
“But—”
“No.” I push the plate away. “There are no buts. I’m done. If you want to keep pretending he’s a stand-up guy, be my guest. But don’t expect me to do the same.”
“Travis—”
Ignoring her, I head upstairs to my room. On the way, I call Harper.
“What are you doing this weekend?” I ask, closing the door to my room.
“Working.”
“Do you think you can get out of it?” My laptop makes a chiming sound as I power it up. What am I going to say about Charlie at the service?
“Possibly. Why?”
“There’s a memorial for Charlie up in St. Augustine,” I say. “Will you go with me?”
“I’ll have to ask my dad,” Harper says. “I’m not sure how he’d feel about—”
“Tell him you’ll have your own room. On a different floor than mine if that makes him feel any better. Whatever he wants, Harper. Whatever you want. Just go with me? Please?”
I’ve never begged a girl for anything in my life, but nothing about this memorial is going to be easy. With Harper there… I don’t know. Maybe it won’t be so bad.
“Let me make some calls to cover my shifts,” she says. “If I can make it work, I’ll go.”
Next I dial Charlie’s mom. “Ms. Sweeney, this is Travis Stephenson.”
“Oh, Travis.” She sighs. “I was hoping to hear from you.”
“Yes, ma’am, um—I just wanted to tell you I’ll be at the memorial and
I can talk about Charlie if, you know, you want.”
“That would mean so much to Jenny and me.” Her voice catches in her throat and it hits me that as terrible as Charlie’s death was for me, it has to be a million times worse for her. “Do you need a place to stay? You’re welcome to stay with us.”
“No, thank you, ma’am.” I lie, “I’ve already booked a room.”
She sniffles back tears. “I’m so looking forward to meeting you, Travis.”
“I, um—thank you.”
“We’ll see you Saturday.”
I disconnect the call and look at the blank computer screen, wishing the words would write themselves.
Charlie Sweeney was
Chapter 11
Hours later the cursor still taunts me from the end of those same three words and I’m no closer to finding the ones that come next. I give up trying and flop down on the bed. My eyes are closed when the door creaks open, but I don’t open them to see who it is. I already know. “Go away.”
“What?” a female voice says. “You’re not talking to me now?”
Shit. I am not in the mood to deal with Paige.
The bed sags a little as she sits down on the edge and her fingers touch the button on my shorts. I can feel my body responding to her—just like it always does—but my brain isn’t playing along. Even though Harper isn’t officially my girlfriend, if she knew about this, she’d be hurt. Or mad. Probably both. And for the first time in my life, I care about that. My fingers close around Paige’s wrist, stopping her. “Don’t.”
She laughs at me in her typical condescending way. “What is it about Harper Gray that’s got you so twisted?”
“Why do you care? You dumped me for Ryan.”
“I’m not jealous.”
“Nobody said you were,” I say. “Yet you keep showing up in my room in the middle of the night when your boyfriend is down the hall.”
“You can be so stupid sometimes, Travis,” she says. “You were supposed to try to get back together with me. You always do.”