First There Was Forever

by Juliana Romano

  “So what happened?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure, but I think Tyler started to like me, too,” she said. “He would text me and stuff. And he just gave me more attention than the other guys did. You know what I mean?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It sounds like he liked you.”

  “Maybe. But I’ll never know,” she said.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “My brother read one of Tyler’s texts to me and flipped out,” she said. “And the text didn’t even say anything bad, it was just some inside joke we had. But my brother was pissed. He told both of us to stop talking and texting and everything. And I don’t think my brother is friends with Tyler anymore, even though they still see each other on the beach all the time.”

  “That sucks for you, though,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she agreed. “It does. I mean, I’m really picky. I’ve never really liked anyone else besides Tyler.”

  “And you never got to kiss him or anything?” I asked tentatively.

  Emily shook her head. “Nope. But . . . well . . .”

  Her voice trailed off.

  “What?” I asked, curious. “Tell me.”

  “There was this one time when I felt like something almost happened,” she said. “We were the last people out of the water. So we were, like, sort of alone. I mean, my brother and the others were, like, twenty feet away, but they weren’t paying any attention to us.”

  “And?” I pressed.

  “It’s gonna sound really stupid if I say it out loud,” she said, blushing.

  “No it won’t, just tell me,” I said.

  “Okay, well, he helped me undo my wet suit,” she said, smiling a little. “He just unzipped the top part, like the part on my back that I can’t reach. And he did it really super-slow. And then when I looked at him afterward, I felt like he was about to kiss me. Like if we’d been alone, he would have. Is that crazy?”

  “No,” I said. “I bet he would have.”

  Emily laughed. “Oh my God, I’m so embarrassed I told you that.”

  Emily’s story reminded me of how things felt between me and Nate at the beginning of the year, before I knew for sure what was happening. Up until our first kiss, every single time we touched hands or bumped into each other, it was like my whole body got set on fire. Now that we had done everything, touching was different. It was a trade-off. All that anticipation and suspense had been replaced with something else. Something less exciting, but more steady and meaningful and better.

  “Anyway, my brother and I are really close, so it was horrible when he was mad at me. I’m so glad it’s over,” she said. And then she added, “Hailey might get over it, too.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  Then I scooted my straw around the waxy bottom of my milk-shake cup and sucked up the last, sweet drops.

  chapter

  seventy-seven

  Days came and went quickly during the last week of school, a blur of tests and papers and lame end-of-the-year pizza parties. After my last final, I ducked into the patio behind the administration building to dump my notebooks in the big trash bins. Later, Mom and I would shake my backpack out on the beach. All the dusty crumbs of graphite and ground-up paper that had worked their way into the seams would blow away. Then she’d toss it in the washing machine and lay it out flat on the back deck so the sun could dry it. That’s how I’d know it was officially summer.

  I was sorting out my recyclables from my trash when Hailey stepped out of the administration building.

  We looked at each other and froze.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi,” she said, her voice pinched.

  I pursed my lips together, trying to smile, but it kind of felt more like a grimace. “What are you doing back here?”

  “I had to get this thing signed,” she said, waving a loose piece of paper she was holding in her right hand.

  There was a pause.

  “How were your finals?” I asked. We were like strangers. No, we were worse than strangers. It occurred to me that maybe the worst kinds of strangers are the people who used to be your friends.

  “Fine,” she said, and started to leave.

  She walked right past me, looking straight ahead. I watched her back as she approached the small gate that lead to main campus. I noticed she was wearing this big yellow scrunchie in her hair that she had had since seventh grade. It was her good-luck scrunchie. She must have worn it for one of her finals. I felt a pang of love.

  “Hey, Hailey!” I said suddenly.

  She stopped and turned around to face me.

  This time, I really smiled, and my voice didn’t sound strained. “Have a good summer.”

  She seemed to relax a little bit. “Yeah, you too.”

  “And, you know,” I said. “If you ever, like . . .”

  “Yeah, I know,” she said quickly.

  I didn’t know what else to say. I just stared at her.

  “I gotta go, Li,” she said.

  It was startling to hear her call me that. For a second, it felt like nothing had changed. Like we were still just Lima-and-Hailey.

  “Okay,” I said. “Bye.”

  She turned again and disappeared back onto campus.

  When she was gone, I let out a huge sigh. I hadn’t realized it but I had been holding my breath that whole time.

  I had been so focused on avoiding Hailey for the last couple of weeks that I hadn’t really allowed myself to think about what was actually going on with her. Where was she headed today? Maybe she’d celebrate the first day of summer with Skyler. For the first time since our fight, I really tried to picture what her life would be like without me. And without Nate to chase after.

  She would go to her dad’s wedding. She would probably bring Skyler. She would cry about something that weekend, but being Hailey, she would bounce right back. She would find something to make fun of. There would be the sneaking of alcohol, the flirting with someone’s cousin, the small, harmless chaos of an evening. And there would be inside jokes. New memories. New adventures that she would share with someone who wasn’t me. The knowledge that I would ultimately be replaced was at once hurtful and comforting. As jealous as it made me feel, the truth was that I didn’t want Hailey to be unhappy.

  My cell phone vibrated and I pulled it out of my jeans pocket. Mom had texted that she was waiting in the car-pool lane. I must have lost track of time. I tossed one last broken shard of pencil into the trash bin and headed out of school.

  chapter

  seventy-eight

  When I got home, I collapsed on top of my bed. It was hard to believe tenth grade was over. High school was already halfway done. I rolled that fact around in my mind, trying to get a hold on it, but it kept slipping out of my grasp.

  I stood up and opened the window. Air from the beach got sucked inside, as if my room itself was a giant lung, inhaling. It was already after four. Nate was coming over at six to have dinner with me and Mom and Dad. What was that going to be like? What would we talk about? I paced around my room nervously for a moment and then sat down awkwardly at my desk. After such a busy year, it was weird to have no homework and absolutely nothing I needed to do.

  I turned on my iPod and flipped through my music, landing on a playlist that Meredith had made me called Lima is the girl from Ipanema. I pressed play and Leonard Cohen’s ragged, deep voice ripped through the quiet in my room.

  There are so many ways for people to disappoint you. Meredith had turned out to be such a disappointment. But I guess I had disappointed her, too, in the end. And she wasn’t the only person I had disappointed. My parents. Hailey. Myself.

  I crossed my room and sunk down onto the edge of my bed. Maybe I’m not better or worse than anyone, I thought. Hailey, Meredith, Walker, Lily, even Nate, we were all mixes of good and bad. We had all played our parts i
n the things that had happened over the course of the year. No one person was to blame. Maybe growing up was about being able to live with the fact that things weren’t ever totally black and white.

  Suddenly, I missed Hailey. She would have taken an empty afternoon like this one and filled it, turning it into something bright and meaningful. I pushed back against the feeling. She’d been a bad friend to me all year. I replayed the mean things she had said to me on New Year’s Eve. But it was no use. I just missed her, I couldn’t help it. I missed everything about her. Her spastic, self-deprecating humor and her way of being so disarmingly honest at the most unexpected times. And other, less describable things, too. I missed watching her zone out in front of the TV. I even missed how she’d sometimes try too hard to be cool in front of people who she wanted to impress. It was all a part of Hailey, and I missed all of it.

  When Nana had died, the hospital gave Dad a cardboard box containing the clothes she had been wearing when she was admitted. A flowered dress and a pair of canary yellow sandals. There were imprints of Nana’s feet on the insoles of her shoes and seeing that had made me sickeningly sad. Missing Hailey made me feel like I was those shoes. Permanently empty.

  My phone beeped. It was a text from Nate.

  What should I bring tonight?

  It made me smile to think about him getting ready for dinner and maybe being a little nervous. He’d probably wear that cute button-down shirt that I loved. The thought made me blush. I texted him back.

  Just you xx

  I took a deep breath. The sharp feeling of missing Hailey had mellowed. It wasn’t gone, but it had softened. It didn’t press at my insides like a big boulder the way it had a moment before. I wouldn’t miss her so much if I hadn’t loved her as much as I did. And loving someone like that just had to be a good thing, even if we had to give each other up.

  Outside my window, the glowing afternoon sun hung low. The sky was fading from blue to lavender and the ocean beneath it was a shimmering dark blue. Suddenly, all I wanted was to go swimming. Jumping into the bright, rough water would be like rinsing the remnants of the school year away.

  • • •

  Mom was reading on the back deck when I stepped outside in my bathing suit a few minutes later.

  “I’m going in,” I said, skipping past her to the sand.

  “Be careful!” she called after me. “I’ll be watching you from here.”

  Cold waves washed over my ankles, my calves, my thighs, sending chills up my spine like electric shocks as I ran into the water. When I was in too deep to stand, I dropped in and swam. Underwater, my hands grazed the sand on the ocean floor, and it was unimaginably soft, like velvet, or fur, or sifted flour. When I came up for air, I tasted salt, and felt the minerals all over my skin like crystals.

  Off in the distance, the horizon line appeared to be swelling. A big wave was coming. I was too far in to go back. Dad had always told me it was better to dive a big wave than to try and run from it.

  I took a deep breath and waited as the wave took shape, the edge sharpening against the sky like a mountain range rising out of the water. After a quiet moment, the wave began to crest. Precisely at first, a string of foam as delicate as pearls, and then faster, ripping across the horizon with a deafening noise.

  When it was right in front of me, I dove. Underwater, my hands grasped at the sand. My eyes were sealed shut and darkness enveloped me. I stayed low while the wave passed over me. And then suddenly, everything was still. I paddled up to the surface, gasping for air. My head bobbed out of the water, and my eyes stung.

  I couldn’t see another wave coming, so I floated on my back and let the water rock me back and forth. I waved at Mom who was watching me from the deck, and she waved back. Behind her, our house looked strangely small. I looked up at my bedroom window. It was open, but I couldn’t see in. For the first time in my life, it really hit me that I wasn’t going to live there forever. In a few years, I’d go away to college and this house would just be a place that I would come and visit for weeks or months at a time. For some reason that realization seemed to make it shrink even more.

  This year had turned out to be all about watching the things I always thought were permanent unravel before my eyes. I was starting to understand that absolutely everything and everyone, including myself, only existed in time. First, there was forever. Now, I realized, anything could change.

  The current of the ocean twisted around my legs, as if it were alive. The hot sun mingled with the cold water. The ocean was another world. A parallel universe. It amazed me that it even touched our own. There I was, only feet away from my own bedroom and yet I was somewhere else entirely. I couldn’t wait for my internship at the aquarium to start in a few weeks. Mark had told me over and over again during the interview that the work of an intern wasn’t very exciting, but I didn’t care.

  I listened to the gentle sounds of water slapping water, and suddenly, an unexpected, vivid happiness bloomed inside of me. I wanted to shout at the top of my lungs. Tenth grade was over. The worst year of all time was officially done. And now there were so many things to look forward to: the internship, learning to surf with Emily, gardening all summer with Mom, and, of course, Nate. There was so much I wanted to share with him and so much about him that I still wanted to know. It felt like no amount of time that we could have together would be enough. The sky and the earth and the ocean stretched out in all directions around me. Colorful, incomprehensible ribbons of space and matter and time. I knew right then that everything was going to be okay. No, not just okay. Everything was going to be great.

  acknowledgments

  This book would not exist without my agent, Logan Garrison, and my editor, Stacey Friedberg. It’s amazing to work with people who always see the ways in which a story could get realer and more honest, and who love reading as much as you do. This book owes more to you two than I can explain in this small space.

  Logan, none of this would have happened without you. Thank you for believing in this story from the very beginning and for seeing the potential in it, even way back when. Your notes challenged me to be a better writer than I thought I could be, and you managed to support me through all of it at the same time.

  Stacey, you turned this manuscript into something beyond what I imagined. Thank you for your high standards and for your vision of what this book could be. I didn’t know before we started how many discoveries I would make during the editorial process—thank you for showing me how much more the book could grow.

  Thank you to everyone at the Gernert Company, Dial Books, and Penguin who have helped this book find its readers. Rosanne Lauer for the copyediting and Theresa Evangelista for the cover. And also, special thanks to Sarah Burnes and Lauri Hornik.

  Thank you to my two very first readers, Lauren Strasnick and Michael Leviton. Your notes gave me the tools and the confidence to keep working. To my friend readers: Caitlin, Jordan, Lauren, Lily, and Sara. Also, Emily Parliman, Susan Chumsky, and SCBWI. And to Tula for teaching me to paint (and see).

  I wouldn’t have known how to do this without the conversation and company of the artists and writers who I am lucky to know both in LA and NY. Especially my boyfriend, Joel, your creativity and your belief in art is contagious. Thank you for being so okay with me always being glued to my word processor.

  Finally, my family. This book is for you. My sister, Clarissa, thank you for inspiring me to write and for giving me the sentence that launched the whole thing. And thank you for always insisting You play, too. My parents, John and Nancy, a million thank-yous aren’t enough—words cannot capture my gratitude.

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