Nantucket Blue

by Leila Howland

  “Except me,” I said.

  “I don’t mind that,” he said, and smiled. “That’s a good thing.” I jammed my heels in the sand, biting my smile. “What are you doing on Saturday?”

  “What’s Saturday?”

  “Fourth of July?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. Shit. I kept trying to forget about it. It loomed. A national holiday I was going to have to spend alone. I’d overheard Liz saying something about a party. Maybe I could tag along. “I might be going to a party on a beach. Nober…Nobersomething.”

  “Nobadeer?” His eyebrows rose. I nodded. “Careful. Those things can be kind of crazy. And the police are going to be everywhere this year.”

  “Police? Well, I’m not sure yet.” I buried my feet, patted the sand over them. “What are you doing?”

  “Did you meet Fitzy?” he asked. I nodded, shading my eyes with my hand as I looked up at him. “He’s having a little party on his dad’s boat. That’s where Jules and Parker and everyone is going.”

  “That’s cool,” I said, trying to sound neutral. I wondered what Jules had told him about the fight, but didn’t want to ask. It would’ve been almost worse if she hadn’t said anything at all. It occurred to me that Jules had erased me from her life, that she wasn’t thinking of me, that she had so much going on with Parker that she hadn’t noticed my absence. That she hadn’t actually been affected by it.

  “Seems boring to me. I don’t know if it’s my scene.” He looked out at the ocean. “Are you going to go in?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and stood up. I dusted some sand off my butt, then lifted my arms out to the side, feeling the air. “I’m not quite hot enough.”

  “Oh, you’re hot enough.” It took a second for it to sink in. He was smiling in this goofy, adorable way. I opened my mouth, but he spoke first. “I’ll race you to that rock out there.” I followed his gaze to the top of a rock not too far out.

  “Okay.” Zack drew a line in the sand with his toe and we struck runner’s poses. “On your mark, get set, go!”

  We were both grinning like idiots as we took off, though it was clear by the time we hit the water that Zack was going to win. Bikinis aren’t exactly made for racing.

  Nineteen

  “SHANE AND I GOT IN A MASSIVE FIGHT last night about the Fourth of July,” Liz said the next day as we made the beds. “He wants to go do a little backyard barbecue with just a couple of mates, and I want to go to the party on Nobadeer.” I’d been asking her about Fourth of July all morning, hoping for an invitation, and she hadn’t seemed to pick up on it. “But I really don’t mind the fighting all that much because the makeup sex is fabulous.”

  “That’s awesome,” I said, as if I had a clue. The truth was that I wasn’t exactly experienced. I’d only been to third base once with Greg Goldberg last fall, after we’d dated for three whole months. I hated to admit it, but I hadn’t actually felt anything that great. I thought that when a boy touched you it would feel amazing, but instead it was like he was programming his DVR with my vagina. I wondered if something was wrong with me. I could do this to myself, I’d thought, and not in that kind of a way, not in a touching myself kind of way. I just wasn’t into that, either, even though we’d been told in seventh grade by Mrs. Levander, the school’s sixty-nine-year-old nurse and self-declared earth mama, that there was nothing wrong with that. That we wouldn’t go cross-eyed or blind if we touched our “area,” no matter what anyone told us.

  That’s what they told me,” she’d said, shaking her head. “And I have twenty-twenty vision. Believe you me, I should be blind as a bat!” She threw her head back in a laugh. All of us were biting our cheeks or doodling in our notebooks with a kind of glazed-over madness.

  “Ooookay,” she’d said after realizing she was having a moment entirely separate from the rest of us. “Let’s see what difficult questions we have today.” She drew a question from the “difficult questions” box. It was a shoe box covered with shiny green wrapping paper where we were supposed to put anonymous, sex-related questions.

  Mrs. Levander’s eyebrows rose and she made an O with her lips. “Here’s an interesting one. ‘What does horny mean?’ Anyone want to share?” We couldn’t take it, we all laughed. I laughed hardest, of course, because it was my question.

  I was beginning to think that Liz and Mrs. Levander would really get along by the way Liz was going on and on in graphic detail.

  “This is the best sex of my life,” Liz said as she unfolded a fresh duvet cover. We had to work as a team to fit the duvet back inside it. Because I was smaller, I was deemed the intrepid explorer, sent inside the cover with the corners of the duvet in hand. “It’s cinematic. It’s Technicolor. Do you know what I mean?” I thought that British people were all stuck up and only liked to talk about tea and crumpets and the queen.

  “Well, I wouldn’t exactly know,” I said from inside the duvet.

  “Wait a second,” Liz said. “Are you a virgin?” I froze, sensing this wasn’t cool in her book. Liz burst out laughing. “You are! You’re a virgin.” I felt her grab the corners of the duvet, and I crawled out, my cheeks on fire.

  “There’s got to be an easier way to do this,” I said, patting down my staticky hair. Liz stood on the bed and shook out the duvet in place. I smoothed it out and zipped the bottom.

  “Cricket’s a virgin,” she sang as she jumped on the bed. “I knew it. That explains everything.”

  “Oh my god, Gavin is like, wandering the halls!” I said.

  “You’re getting a bit old. How old are you?”

  “I’ll be eighteen in August.”

  “Eighteen!”

  “That’s normal,” I said. “It’s like, perfect, for a girl.”

  “Americans.” She stepped off the bed with narrowed eyes. “People think British people are prudes, but the truth is that Americans are. And why should it be any different for girls?”

  I didn’t know why it was different for girls. It shouldn’t be, but it was. I hated it when people pretended otherwise.

  “We’re going to have to fix this by your birthday,” Liz said. “I’m going to make it my mission.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. Liz ignored me, stuffing a pillow into its case.

  “Fourth of July, you’ll come with me.” At least I’d gotten an invitation out of this whole ordeal. “I’ll tell Shane, and we’ll get his friends in a lineup. You choose.”

  “No, no, no, no.”

  “I’m thinking Colin. His willy is just the right size. Not too big and not too small. It’s perfect for Goldilocks!”

  “No, no, no, no.” God, I regretted this conversation. What I wouldn’t give to take it back. “The thing is, and this is actually really important to me, I want to be in love.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Liz said, laughing. “You can’t expect to fall in love by August.”

  “Well, I want to at least really like him.”

  “Do you have any candidates?”

  “There was one guy, but”—I shook my head—“that’s over.”

  “Oh! What about that writer fellow?” She wiggled her eyebrows. “An older man knows how to please a woman.”

  “Gross!” I said, shaking a pillow into its case. “He’s married with a pregnant wife.”

  “You girls almost done in here?” Gavin stepped into the room with a pile of fresh towels. “Sometimes I think Bernadette is right about you two.”

  “You aren’t going to believe what I just learned,” Liz said, all lit up.

  “Liz.” My voice was low. “Don’t you dare!”

  “Cricket is an eighteen-year-old—” I smooshed the pillow in her face.

  “I don’t want to know,” Gavin said, dropping the towels on the bed and leaving. “And change that pillowcase.”

  Twenty

  “YOU’RE THE BEST,” George said, lowering the noise-canceling headphones from his ears as I put a six-pack of Coke Zero, peanut butter pretzels, and turkey jerky on his
desk—the three items he claimed gave him special writing powers. He was sitting in an old office chair that Gavin had found in the basement, behind his makeshift desk, which was really a card table, on which sat his digital voice recorder, laptop, a few files, four notebooks, and the laser printer his wife had shipped and I’d set up yesterday. The windows were all the way up, the door was propped open, and his good foot was in a bowl of ice water. But it was sweating weather inside the annex. George had started calling it the hot box.

  “Crack me open one of those sweet, sweet man-sodas,” he said, rubbing his hands together. I laughed, opened a Coke Zero, and handed it to him. He tipped his head back, guzzled half the can, and then held it up with a big smile like he was in a commercial. “Like a refreshing mountain stream.”

  “Wait, there’s more,” I said, and unveiled my big prize: a fan I’d found at the Nantucket Hospital Thrift Shop. It only had one speed, and the blade tips were covered with a layer of dust, but it would take the edge off.

  “What? What? Am I hallucinating?” George said as I propped it on his dresser and plugged it in. “I was told there wasn’t a single fan or air conditioner for sale on this god-forsaken island. The guy at the hardware store laughed in my face when I asked if he had any.”

  “I found it at the thrift store,” I said, getting on my knees to plug it into the circuit breaker. “It was way in the back, behind a framed poster of a whale they were trying to sell for four hundred dollars.”

  “You’re resourceful and intrepid, and I like it,” George said, pulling out his wallet and handing me a twenty-dollar bill.

  “It was only five dollars,” I said, dusting my hands off on my shorts.

  “Keep the change,” he said.

  “Are you sure?” I said, holding the crisp bill. “It doesn’t oscillate.”

  “I like my warm stale air blowing in a steady stream right on my face.”

  “Okay.” I folded the twenty and tucked it in my back pocket, then handed him a manila envelope from my bag. “And here are the pictures.” I’d gone to the Nantucket Yacht Club to pick up some old photographs of Boaty from when he was in his twenties and just married. There was one of him at a clambake, shaking hands and smiling thoughtfully, a golden afternoon glow on his serious face. The people around him gazed at him adoringly. One guy had his hand on his shoulder and was looking at him like he was his favorite son. Boaty definitely had what Edwina MacIntosh would call “star quality.”

  “He was so popular,” I said.

  “With most people, yes. But not everyone was a fan. Some people hated him.”

  “Like who?” I asked. “I mean, besides Republicans.” And my mother, I thought.

  He pointed to the guy with his hand on his shoulder. “That guy. Tom Frost. Boaty met him out here on Nantucket. Frost was the first person to hire him. He took him under his wing in the state Senate, showed him the ropes, treated him like a son. Tom Frost was gearing up to make a run for Congress. Boaty decided he wanted to do the same. And after five years of friendship, Boaty planted a story about him in the press.”

  “Oh my god,” I said. “What was it?”

  “An affair with the nanny.”

  “Sounds like a soap opera.”

  “It ruined Tom Frost, and Boaty got elected.”

  “That’s terrible,” I said.

  “Well, technically, Boaty didn’t plant the story. ‘His people’ did, but one of those ‘people’ told me Boaty signed off on it,” George said. “Some of that is just par for the course in politics, but not generally with people you know and love. Boaty had spent Christmases with the guy.”

  “Why’d he do it?” I said.

  “To win.”

  I thought that the feeling of wanting to be popular went away after high school. Our parents and teachers were always telling us that “winning” and “being cool” didn’t matter. What mattered, they said, was being a good, happy person who did the right thing. Edwina McIntosh gave the same speech every year, in which she took a poem about a man in the mirror and changed the words to be about a girl in the mirror. “The only person who needs to think you’re cool,” Edwina MacIntosh said, “is the girl in the mirror. The approval you need is your own.” So, were they all lying, not telling the truth about what it was really like to be an adult?

  “On the other hand,” George said as he cracked open another Coke Zero, “Boaty made huge strides in health care reform, and Tom Frost was an old fart. It’s all very complicated, which is why it will make a good book, which is why I need to get writing.”

  “Well, do you need anything else?” I asked.

  “I think that’s it for today. I’m good to go,” George said. “I just need to crank out another, oh, twenty pages, and I’ll be right on schedule.”

  “Good luck with that, and don’t forget to drink some water in between your man sodas.”

  “You’re a good influence, Thompson,” he said, and I was out the door—where it was a whole five degrees cooler—thinking of the beach, a yellow butterfly of anticipation circling my chest, half hoping, half dreading, that I’d see Zack again.

  As I walked back to the beach, I thought about the other day when I’d run into Zack. We stayed in the water for what felt like hours, just talking and swimming around, following the warm patches, until our fingers and toes were puckering. I knew Jules wouldn’t like me hanging out with him. And I know it had only been a week of feeling so alone in the world, but a week is actually a long time to feel like that.

  I honestly tried to walk away from the Zack situation twice, but the first time he’d made me laugh, pretending to rescue me when a tiny wave pathetically knocked me on my ass, and the second time, right when I’d gotten too cold and come to my senses, he promised me half of his Something Natural sandwich if I stayed. It was turkey with cranberry and avocado. “On sourdough,” he added. My teeth were chattering, partially because of the cold and also out of fear of what Jules would say when she found out we’d spent a whole day together.

  He looked up. “If the sun comes out in the next five seconds, you have to stay.” For some reason, I acted like this was a real rule.

  “Five, four, three.” We started counting, and by “two” I was squinting into bright sunshine, floating on my back, once again under its spell. We stayed until he had to go to work at Gigi’s, the restaurant where he was a busboy. We shared my towel because his was sandy. And then we shared his sandwich.

  When I arrived at Steps, I scanned the beach looking for him. He wasn’t there. I reminded myself that that was a good thing.

  Twenty-one

  Zack: Happy 4th!

  Me: You too.

  Zack: Where r u?

  Me: I don’t know!!! Not Nobadeer. Some other beach. Cops at Nobadeer.

  Zack: 40th Pole?

  Me: Let me ask.

  Me: Tom Nevers.

  Zack: K. Want me to come get u?

  Me: OMG. Yes pls.

  Zack: See you in 20. Meet me at shuttle stop.

  “I think I’m going to leave,” I said to Liz, who was downing her fourth beer in less than an hour. My first beer was still almost full and had grown warm in my hand. We hadn’t even tried to go to Nobadeer, because the cops had found out about that one. This was supposedly the secret, small, underground one. And yet, it was the biggest party I’d ever been to, even though Shane said it was lame compared to 2010, where there were almost three thousand partiers.

  I couldn’t tell how many were here now, but there were at least a hundred Jeeps parked on the beach, all of them filled with people in their bathing suits, all of the people getting shitfaced, blasting loud music, and peeing in plain sight. Shit, I thought when I accidentally turned my head and saw a gross, chinless guy whip it out to take a leak in the dunes.

  “But you can’t leave yet,” Liz said. “I haven’t introduced you to Colin! Where is that wanker? He said he’d be here by now.” She checked her phone for messages. “You shouldn’t go yet. You should stay and experience
this bacchanalia. This is just the type of atmosphere you need to loosen you up—literally!” She laughed.

  “Ha-ha,” I said. Nearby, a guy in stars-and-stripes swimming trunks threw up in the dunes, and he looked like a real adult, with a bald spot and everything. He wiped strings of vomit from his mouth with the back of his hand. “I really have to go, Liz.”

  “Suit yourself,” she said under her breath. “But you need to relax if you ever want to—” She made a circle with one hand and drove her index finger through it with the other.

  “That’s gross,” I said.

  “Wimp,” she said as I walked away.

  “Tart,” I called back, laughing.

  “I take that as a compliment!”

  I hadn’t seen Zack since our meeting at Steps. I closed my eyes as I waited for him at the shuttle stop, remembering how good it had felt to float around with him in the shallow water, how funny it was when he pretended to be the lifeguard, how strong he was when he picked me up and then flipped me in the deeper water, how it had finally, finally started to feel like summer.

  When I saw Zack coming toward me in the land yacht, I felt a happy relief at feeling known, recognized, understood, familiar, the same feeling I used to get at the sight of Jules in the cafeteria when we hadn’t seen each other all morning. He pulled up next to me, pretended that he didn’t know me, and asked me if I needed a ride. He wasn’t wearing a shirt. The feeling changed. It transitioned, spinning into a warm glow that spread up to my cheeks and to the last knob of my spine. I tipped back on my heels. Maybe the quarter of a beer I’d had in the sun had been too much. My heart picked up, but my pulse slowed down. Then the feeling changed again, into something brighter, something alive and jumping, like a sparkler in my chest, when I slid into the front seat next to him and our thighs touched.

  What is wrong with me? I wondered as the engine hummed under the hot vinyl seat. I flipped down the sun visor to see if my cheeks were as red as they felt. They were. And my eyes and lips were shining. Was I coming down with something? It didn’t feel like it. This was different. What was this feeling anyway? This need to move? This need to get a little more air, cross my legs, squeeze something? Had someone put something in my beer?