by Claire Adams
“Cool. Oh, and if you’re not working tomorrow night, Amanda said she wanted to hang out. I’m supposed to forward her number to you.” Todd gave me an expectant look when I didn’t reply. “Amanda? Remember? Tall, blonde chick? Legs for days? Those tits that look fake but aren’t?”
I stifled a laugh. “Wait—you’re trying to hook me up with a girl you’ve already been with?”
“Who says I’ve been with her?”
“Uh ... you just did, if you’re telling me her tits look fake but aren’t.”
“We’ve never hooked up, though not because I haven’t tried. I just know I’m not her type. She likes the bearded tattooed guys. Know anyone who fits that description?”
“So, how do you know her tits are real?”
“I can just tell. But if you want ... you can verify it for me.” He pulled his phone out of pocket. “Here, let me send you her number.”
I didn’t say anything as he started tapping on the screen. I’d let him send me the number, but I probably wouldn’t call her, amazing tits or not.
“She’ll be expecting a call from you,” he said.
“You told her this? You want to be my personal assistant or something?”
He grinned. “I’m far too busy to be anyone’s personal assistant. But I’m always happy to help a bro get laid.”
“I don’t actually need any help in that area.”
“I know. But I figured after all the shit with Danielle, you at least deserved to sleep with someone who wasn’t a total head case.”
The thing was, I’d already slept with a few girls since Danielle. The sex itself had been great, but the other stuff ... not so much. One of them had a boyfriend, who somehow found out and had come down to the shop ready to fight, but once he got sight of me, he’d quickly changed his mind. The other girl had a four-year-old son, and while I certainly didn’t have anything against kids, I sure as hell didn’t want to be the step-father she was so obviously looking for. And the third girl had just been whiny and clingy and completely insecure, in spite of having supermodel looks.
I wouldn’t be able to properly explain it to Todd—and we didn’t talk about that shit really, anyway—but I wasn’t going to call Amanda, because I wanted a breather from all the bullshit. This was why, I suspected, that people got divorced after thirty-five years of marriage: at some point, you just got fed up with all the shit that some people brought to the table. I’d never been in a long-term relationship, but even the most casual of relationships could still come with strings attached.
So, what if, just for this summer, I took a break from all that? It’s not like I wouldn’t have plenty to do, with it being the shop’s busy season and the height of the mountain bike racing season. It would be like one of those thirty-day challenges that people are always posting about on Facebook—except instead of having firmer abs or being able to do a plank for two minutes, by the end of the summer, I might have some sort of peace of mind, which, after all the shit I’d been through, didn’t sound too bad at all.
2.
Chloe
I swear, Tara had some sort of psychic abilities or something.
She had texted me a few days ago about when I planned to get to my parents’ summer house, and I’d written back something sort of noncommittal: Not sure, still have some packing to do and other stuff to take care of. I’ll text you when I get there.
This wasn’t a lie; I had to clean out my studio and then go back to my apartment and tidy up a little bit there, too. Freshman year of college, I thought that I could do the Airbnb thing—rent out my little, Back Bay apartment to travelers, maybe to people on a budget or something, with Boston prices being so expensive—but my dad vetoed the idea the second he caught wind of it.
“You have no idea the sorts of people that might be living there,” he’d said, giving me one of his stern looks that still had the ability to make my throat go dry. “We’re not a charity, Chloe.”
What could I say to that? He was the one footing the bill for the apartment, so there wasn’t much arguing I could do. He and my mother already didn’t approve of me majoring in art; where was the money in that? That’s what they both wanted to know—neither of them saying, of course, that only the really talented or really lucky people ever made good money in art. Neither of which they thought I was, though they didn’t come out and say it.
But anyway. Tara. I had planned to give her a call a few days after I arrived on Cape Cod, to give myself a little bit of quiet time, because anyone who’d ever met her knew that Tara was anything but quiet. I figured I’d check out a few art galleries, treat myself to a latte and a new book, and spend a few mornings at the beach, zoning out to the sounds of the waves and the seagulls.
I’d only just pulled into the gravel driveway when my phone went off. It was Tara. I let it go to voicemail, only to get a text message a few seconds later:
Call me the second you arrive!
And just like that: instantaneous guilt. There was no reason for it, but I was already feeling bad for not calling her back. I turned the key in the ignition and sat there for a moment. Tara was just one of those people who was really good at getting what she wanted. She lived in New York, but our fathers had been playing golf together for about as long as we’d been alive. Her parents had a summer house a quarter mile from ours, and Tara and I had, by default, spent our summers growing up together.
If I didn’t call Tara back now, she’d probably end up driving by and seeing my car, or, she’d keep calling/texting. I sighed and picked up the phone. So much for a few days of quiet.
“Chloe!” she exclaimed. “Are you here?”
“Just got in,” I said. I got out of the car and went around to the trunk to get my suitcase. I could at least start unpacking while we talked.
“I’ve got impeccable timing!” I could practically hear her grin.
“Yeah, you do—I mean, I literally just pulled in.”
“Well, that’s perfect. That means you haven’t made any plans for tonight, right? Don’t let your mom talk you into going to that wine tasting tonight. My mom already tried to convince me that it would be exactly how I wanted to spend my Friday night, but honestly, that’s the last thing I feel like doing. And you’re twenty-one now! We can actually go to a bar or something.”
I’d turned twenty-one back in April, but I still hadn’t been to a bar. Pathetic, I know, but I’d been so busy with school that there just hadn’t been any time. And I knew Tara would be dragging me out to all the bars and clubs she could this summer—she’d had a fake I.D. since she was eighteen and knew all the best places to go.
“What did you have in mind?”
I walked up to the side entrance and went inside. My parents’ summer house was the sort of place you’d expect to see in some sort of luxury magazine, and I’d always felt like something of an imposter when I was here, despite the fact that I’d been coming here most of my life. The house was spacious and airy, with big windows looking out onto Oyster Harbors. My mother didn’t work, but she did have an eye for interior decorating and liked to say that if she were to ever enter the workforce, she’d be a design consultant. In the meantime, though, she was more than satisfied to tastefully furnish the summer home here and their apartment in New York.
“What did I have in mind?” Tara repeated. “Well, quite a lot, actually!”
“We do have the whole summer ahead of us—we don’t have to cram everything into one night,” I said, already feeling tired. She was one of those people who just seemed to have an endless supply of energy.
“I know we don’t have to do everything in one night, but we need our first night to be something spectacular, just to set the tone. Okay? And you better believe I’m going to get laid—I saw on Facebook Michael is still in Paris with that bitch, apparently still having the time of their lives. I need to meet a guy who’s even hotter than Michael and post a shit load of pictures so he can see that I’m completely over him and have moved on to better thing
s.”
“Michael was an ass,” I said. “And you’re better off without him. And why are you Facebook-stalking him, anyway?” I’d never been so relieved to hear that someone had been broken up with as I was when Tara called to tell me Michael had dumped her. He’d spent part of the summer with her last year, and there was something incredibly unsettling about him, despite his refined manners and fashion-model looks. He was the sort of guy my own parents hoped I’d end up with—a fact that they’d brought up endlessly last summer.
“I’m not stalking him,” Tara said, a hint of indignation in her voice. “The photos popped up on my feed and I checked them out. She’s hot, but not that hot. Anyway. You know how competitive Michael is; I just need to find someone better looking than him and sleep with him and that’ll be that.” She sounded infinitely optimistic, like it would be no trouble at all. Actually, for her, it probably wouldn’t be. “Enough about him. You and I are going out tomorrow night. Don’t make any other plans. We’re going to properly celebrate your twenty-first.”
“I’ve been twenty-one for months now.”
“I know that, but I bet you didn’t even go out to a bar. Am I right?”
I sighed. “You are.”
“So, I’ll come get you around seven, okay? We’ll do dinner and then drinks and then go clubbing or something. Wear something cute. This is going to be the best summer ever; I just know it! See ya!” She hung up before I could respond, or remind her that I didn’t own anything that she’d categorize as “cute” for a night out on the town.
There was a note on the marble countertop in the kitchen, in my mom’s flowery cursive: At the yacht club. Your father’s golfing. Will be back later this afternoon. Alicia made some snacks that are in the fridge. Xo, Mom
I crumpled the note up and tossed it into the trash. No doubt the snacks that Alicia made were something totally decadent and delicious, but I’d always felt weird eating food that had been prepared for me. It sounded strange, considering that my parents had employed someone to cook our meals for most of my life, but if I were to open the fridge and start eating whatever snacks Alicia had made, I’d feel overwhelming guilt because—wasn’t I more than capable of preparing my own snack?
I left the kitchen without eating anything, though, and went up the stairs and down the long hallway to my bedroom. Tara liked to give me a hard time about feeling guilty over having wealthy parents and a privileged upbringing, but it was something that had bothered me for a long time. But I also knew enough not to talk about it, because no one wanted to hear that sort of thing, and people would just sort of roll their eyes and think, Oh, poor little rich girl, which was exactly the sort of sentiment that I was trying to avoid. And it wasn’t as though I felt guilty enough about it to take a vow of poverty or not accept my father’s offer to finance my apartment and tuition for college. In a way, I guess I was a hypocrite, and that was maybe worse than being from a wealthy family. Tara made no apologies for it, spent her parents’ money freely, and enjoyed every bit of being from the upper class. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a part of me that wished I could just be like that, too.
I left my suitcase at the foot of the bed and looked around my bedroom, which hadn’t changed much since I was a kid. The few decorations that adorned the eggshell-white walls had been chosen by my mother because they’d been timeless (so she said, and neither of us had changed them as I’d grown up). In a way, being in this room felt as though I were stuck in some sort of time capsule that ten-year-old me might have put together. There was the desk in the corner that I rarely sat at, and a four-post bed with a canopy, a handmade quilt purchased from an artisan crafter at the county fair. The room could’ve been featured in Cape Cod Magazine or something; it was tasteful and pretty, but anonymous in that you it lent no clues about the person who inhabited it.
I caught sight of myself in the mirror above the dresser. I thought about what Tara had said on the phone: This is going to be the best summer ever! She said that every year, and I knew, if you asked her, every summer was the best summer ever—that is, until next summer rolled around. For me though, summers had basically amounted to hanging out with Tara, hanging out with my parents, and wondering just what it was that I was going to do with my life. Tara didn’t share that concern; so long as her parents had money, she knew exactly what she was going to do with her life: whatever she wanted. At the end of last summer, we parted ways, me heading back to art school, her back to New York, but only for a little while before it was on to an extended vacation in Europe and then a winter out at her parents’ ski lodge in Vail. And if she got sick of Vail, she could just ask her parents and they’d buy her a ticket wherever she wanted to go. Last year it had been Ibiza; this year she’d already mentioned the possibility of Thailand.
But maybe Tara was right; maybe I could make this the best summer ever, even though I wasn’t entirely sure what that would mean. I’d spent my whole life being the good girl, (mostly) doing exactly what my parents wanted—I deserved to have a little fun, too, didn’t I?
The girl looking back at me in the mirror was wearing a pair of old cut-offs and a white t-shirt splattered with old paint. I squinted, trying to see myself as someone else other than the same, old person I was used to, but I couldn’t. It was just me. Same old me that it had always been.
“Even if you just do one thing you wouldn’t normally do,” I said out loud, “that will be something.”
I felt a little foolish talking to myself out loud like that. That’s what crazy people did: ladies with wild hair and outlandish clothes and thirty cats waiting for them back in their apartment. But still. There was something comforting about hearing the words out loud, even if I was just saying them for my own benefit. And even though I had no idea what that one thing I wouldn’t normally do might be, it seemed like a good goal.
3.
Graham
Saturday morning was one of those nice, early summer days—warm but not humid, no annoying, biting insects, a refreshing breeze every once in a while. I met Todd down at the conservation area we rode at most often. He showed up in full kit, and of course he couldn’t resist giving me shit about my baggy shorts and t-shirt.
“You heading to the skate park after this?” he asked.
He wouldn’t be running his mouth so much once we got out on the trail, though. For unknown reasons, I was particularly adept at this style of bike riding, despite not doing any training for it or even using the “correct” equipment. It was fun, I didn’t have to wear Spandex, and I liked the rush it gave me to be careening through the woods, sometimes at twenty-plus miles per hour.
There was also a point when you had pushed yourself as far as you might have thought you could physically, when your mind would just sort of turn into this blank slate and your body would take over. That exhaustion you felt would completely disappear, and you’d be able to go harder and faster than you would’ve thought possible. It was a sort of magic, really, and just the possibility of obtaining the feeling was enough to get me back on the bike again and again. But I also rode because it kept me out of trouble.
We turned onto a fire road, which was wide enough for us to ride next to each other. Todd slowed until I’d caught up and we were side-by-side.
“So, did you call Amanda?” he asked.
“Dude! You just gave me her number last night. No, I didn’t call her.” I reached down and pulled my water bottle out of the cage and took a big sip. “I’m actually not going to, either.”
Todd gave me a hurt look. “Why the hell not? She’s hot. You’d be a fool not to. She’s way hotter than Danielle. What’s gotten into you, lately? Are you having some sort of weird, quarter-life crisis or something?”
“What the fuck is a ‘quarter-life crisis’?”
“It’s exactly what it sounds like, except it’s also total bullshit because no one should be having any sorts of crises when they’re in their mid-twenties, because that’s the prime of your fucking life! So get out there and
get laid, dammit!”
“You know, I appreciate your concern and everything, but I’ve actually been thinking about it—”
“That’s your first mistake—this isn’t something you’re supposed to psychoanalyze. If you think about it too much, you’re going to start getting all introspective and shit, and the next thing you know, you’re going to be writing poetry or fronting some awful emo-core band. Where’s your phone? Call her right now. Hell, if you won’t, I’ll call her and set it up. Do you see what I’m willing to do for you? I’ve got a date tonight, too, actually—this chick Melanie. And am I over here, analyzing every detail about it? Fuck no. Because if I started to do that shit, it would ruin it. It just would. So, I suggest you stop it, too, and just call Amanda.”
He wasn’t going to lay off, I could tell, so I responded by pedaling faster. We were side-by-side, until I started to pull ahead, which Todd responded to by pedaling fast himself. We had about half a mile to go before we reached the turn off for the singletrack, and I usually let Todd set the pace, but I knew if I pushed it right now, I could beat him there. Also, he’d have to exert himself so much he’d be forced to stop talking, so I shifted into a higher gear and let loose.
“Fucker,” I heard Todd grunt as I pulled away. “Goddammit, Graham, you know I don’t like riding like this when we’ve got a race coming up.”
*****
When Todd and I were done with the ride, I was famished, so I took myself out to eat, because the last thing I ever felt like doing after a long ride was cooking some elaborate meal. The place I liked to go was called Laura’s. It was a little, breakfast-and-lunch joint that was open year round, but mostly overtaken by the tourists during the summer. The locals stayed away until after Labor Day, but I still went there after every ride. It was also right across the street from Ocean View Realty, which was where all the rich people went to get secure their summer rentals.