“It’s grown,” I say.
“Online deals are a dangerous thing. Remember my cousin Mi Na? I always stay with her for a couple days when I’m in Seoul? She sent me a link to this beauty website based in Busan, and it is seriously so cheap. They ship internationally.”
Finishing the Klondike bar and licking my fingers, I position myself in her desk chair. A few summers ago, we did this all the time, and then things started getting in the way: too many swim practices, too many duties at the camp. I ask, “So who am I going to be today?”
“Elsa.”
“From Frozen?”
“Bingo.”
“I hate Frozen.”
“No one hates Frozen.” A pause. “Well, the whole white-beauty-standards-shouldn’t-be-the-standard thing . . .”
“And the songs suck.”
“They do not!”
“Oh, ‘Let It Go,’ Hana.”
“You’re impossible.” She grins. “Oh! How about we think a little bigger?”
“Bigger?”
“Just close your eyes.”
Downstairs, her little brothers’ shrill screams pierce the air, followed by Mrs. Chang’s voice: “NO, NO, NO, YOU CANNOT USE THE KETCHUP AS A SQUIRT GUN!”
I say, “I think I’ll keep them open.”
Hana lays out her color palette and plastic prosthetics on an old beach towel by my feet, setting up the camera in the corner of the room and training the lens on my face. “I’ve always wanted to do this one,” she says, working quickly but methodically, first dipping a small brush in liquid latex and dabbing it in sharp teardrops across my forehead. “Oh my actual God, this is so cool.”
“It feels like you’re turning me into . . . a lizard?”
“Nope. Quit moving.” She repeats the process on my cheeks, then plugs in a blow dryer and blasts cool air on the latex to speed up the drying process. When she picks up the blue cream makeup, it finally clicks into place.
“Mystique,” I say, throat clamming up. “X-men.”
“Bingo.”
Hana doesn’t know this, but X-Men: Apocalypse is one of the last films I saw with Dylan and Reed. It was raining, so we’d gone to Winship Cinema, ordered a jumbo popcorn, and split it among the three of us. When I remember this, all the other memories quake back into my bones.
As Hana gently daubs the paint along my hairline and down toward the tip of my chin, she says, “Did I tell you my parents booked me a ticket to Seoul for August instead of May this year?”
“How come?”
“My mom wants to go, and she has to manage this big finance overhaul at the hospital in May. It’ll be hellishly muggy by the end of the summer, but I’ll still get to visit all my cousins, and Mi Na and I are going to Haeundae Beach, so the date change is totally worth it.” She selects a smaller brush, dragging a so-blue-it’s-black eye shadow underneath my lower lash line.
“What about your grandma? Doesn’t she usually go with you?”
“Oh, she’s going. With seventeen of her friends.”
“Jeez. She’s popular.”
“I swear, she knows half of Palisades Park.”
“You think your family will ever move back to New Jersey?”
“Oh, my grandmother would looove that. Every time she gets me on the phone, she’s all: You’re too far away! Families shouldn’t be that far away! Then I remind her that once upon a time she moved almost seven thousand miles from her family to go to school in the states, and that she could move to Maine—but she’s, like, queen of the neighborhood in Jersey and won’t budge. And honestly, Winship is home now. I know it isn’t great about accepting outsiders, but my brothers are too young to remember living anywhere else. Plus,” she says, shading the scales on my forehead with glittery eye shadow, “why would I ever want to leave somewhere you are?”
I fake-punch her arm. “You’re ditching me in August.”
“And I will reward you handsomely with gifts.” She steps back, ostensibly eyeing her work. “Start thinking about your list now.”
“K-pop socks.”
“Done.”
“And my mom will probably want some ginseng.”
“Okay. What about Fern? Do you think I should still pick up a pack of that stationery with the bunnies?”
I visibly squirm. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Quinn?”
“Yeah?”
“Tell me how you’re really doing.”
I blink up at her through four layers of eye shadow, and suddenly it’s all I can do to keep my heart in my chest. “Hana . . .”
“You won’t talk about Fern and Reed and what happened, and you’ve been cutting class, and you’ve been busy and— Tell me.”
So I push it through the cotton in my mouth. “I’m repairing the boat.”
A pause stretches and stretches and stretches before she asks, “The boat?”
“The boat,” I confirm. “And then I’m going to try to find the sea monster.”
There a million things I love about Hana. She gives me one more:
“Can I help?”
June
Clang of the Heart
The basketball clanged against the rim.
“Damn it,” Reed said, and then peered around, embarrassed, hoping that none of the campers had heard him swear. From my plastic pool chair on the side of the court, I watched him chase the ball into a patch of goldenrod, dust off the pollen, and try again from the three-point line—clang.
It was two days after my birthday. We’d had seafood sausage for lunch. I remember that specifically, Dylan, because you made the ketchup bottles talk to the sausages, and it turned out they didn’t get along. The fight culminated in the ketchup bottle storming off, calling the sausage the wurst.
Reed wasn’t in the mess hall.
And he wasn’t hanging around Dogwood Cabin, or the boathouse, or the ropes course. I didn’t see him again until ball-sports hour, where he arrived on the court with a humongous bag of basketballs and told the kids to go at it. Doug Nation, the other ball-sports counselor, had come down with the summer flu; I was helping to supervise in his place. Which basically meant watching from the sidelines and blowing a whistle if the campers started chucking the balls at each other instead of at the hoops.
Another shot from Reed—clang.
As kids, he and I would have competitions to see who could hold their breath the longest underwater. The sudden silence between us felt like that: Who was going to come up for air first? I dragged my knees almost to my chest, the backs of my thighs aching from the chair straps. Over the giggles and screams of the campers, I called to him: “Are you okay?”
Reed paused, then walked a bit closer to me. He wiped a trickle of sweat from his forehead. “Yeah, why?”
“Because you never miss three shots in a row.” And you rarely get angry.
“I’m just off my game, that’s all.”
“Yeah,” I said, throwing his own question back at him, “why?”
He dragged a hand through tufts of his blond hair. “It’s . . . nothing.”
“Doesn’t sound like it.”
“Just— It’s fine.”
“Reed. Come on.”
“Well . . . I guess . . . did you hear about Dylan and Fern?”
Crickets jumped in my rib cage. I schooled my voice into neutral territory. “I saw it, actually.”
“Oh.” Dribble, dribble of the ball. “Did it look like . . . ?”
I knew what he meant, Dylan: Did it look like you kissed her back? And the answer was no. She’d leaped forward with her lips. She’d pressed her tiny hands to your cheeks. If I’m honest, it was brave. If I’m honest, I’d also have to say that—in the split second before you gently pushed her back—darkness wrapped around me like a scarf.
I told this to Reed, minus the darkness.
He drew in a breath and let it out slowly. “Why’d she have to . . . ? It’s not like he . . .” He couldn’t finish the words. And that was when I suspected.
You and Reed were filling up water balloons with three campers behind the boathouse: a hundred green balloons and a hundred blue, for Color Wars. From a distance, I could see the two of you fist-bumping. I’d learned over the years that this was how you and my brother communicated: through fist bumps, shots back and forth on the basketball court, and funny anecdotes from your years together. You called each other dude.
“Sawyer,” you said when I approached. Your soaked T-shirt was drying on the dock. Obviously I’d seen you shirtless before, seen those clusters of freckles on your shoulders. But, well . . .
“Can I help?” I asked, grabbing a few balloons and one of the hoses.
“Sure thing,” you said, returning quickly to your conversation with Reed. “Remember that time Gerard woke up in Vermont after our tournament?”
“Our tournament in New Hampshire,” Reed said, “with no idea how he’d traveled thirty-six miles after the game?”
“Or how he was wearing someone else’s clothes?”
My brother was full-on grinning. It was nice. So, so nice. After Reed came out sophomore year, you were one of the only guys who never treated him any differently. Around you, he could gush about Star Wars and break out his Wookiee impression over dinner. He could jabber on about soil conservation. He could obsess over free-throw statistics for the Boston Celtics and practice jump shots with you as night spread across the basketball court. He didn’t have to choose between labels, between jock and nerd.
It broke over me like a water balloon: the way Reed was smiling, the way he was looking at you.
How did I miss something so big?
November
Happy Thanksgiving
The third week in November, as another cold snap kicks in, I find my sister’s photos.
A corner of one’s sticking out from underneath the dust ruffle. I creep over, bend down, and pull.
Dylan.
The next one, Dylan. And the next. And the next.
She kept them. She kept them?
It’s a Sawyer family tradition to burn things at the end of summer, things we don’t want to carry with us into the new season. Dad builds a monstrous campfire in the pit, and Mom puts on her séance face and reads a few lines of poetry from a once-borrowed-now-stolen library book. Usually we toss in everything we don’t want, but given how shitty this summer was, we’d probably be walking around buck-naked in an empty house. So we burned one thing each.
Me, my hospital ID tag.
Reed, his and Dylan’s tickets for the Garth Brooks concert.
And Fern flung in—rather aggressively, I might add—a manila envelope stuffed with all the torn-out photos from her scrapbooks.
The ones of me. The ones of us. But apparently not the ones of Dylan.
His Instagram is still active, but there’s the matter of all the condolences: an endless string of We miss you, man and I can’t believe you’re gone beneath every photo. Holding the prints in my hands is . . . not better, exactly. It feels more personal and more removed at the same time.
Footsteps down the hall.
I scramble back.
Fern’s in the doorway, her ballet bag shrugged over one shoulder. “What’re you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“Doesn’t look like nothing.”
Preemptively, I position my headphones just below my ears. I don’t dare glance beneath her bed, where the photos are slightly askew from where she left them. “Well, it was.”
“Whatever. Mom says hurry up before you’re late again.”
Outside, sleet’s falling in hard little pellets, bouncing clear off the ground. I open my umbrella and tilt it to one side, try to stave off the frozen onslaught. A few pebbles of sleet slip down the neckline of my jacket, prickling my spine as I haul ass to Hana’s minivan. Normally she doesn’t give me a ride because she has to drop off her little brothers at school first—and their bounciness takes up a lot of room. But Seojun and Young-soo are sick, so it’s just Hwan in the back, playing Candy Crush on Hana’s iPhone.
“Turn the volume down,” she tells him. “The adults are speaking.”
His tongue pokes its way through the gap in his teeth—sticking it out at her.
“We still up for some epoxying this afternoon?” she asks, sort of a formality, as she’s been dropping by anyway to help with the boat project. Not that I mind—I really, really don’t mind. Her sandpapering and epoxying skills are lacking, but it’s not about that. It’s about the company.
“Yeah, sure,” I tell her.
“Cool. I’ll probably have to head off after an hour, though. Elliot wants to take me ice skating.”
“How is everything with you guys? Are you, like, official yet?”
“Hwan,” Hana says, “earmuffs.”
From the back: “No!”
“Earmuffs!”
“No!”
“HWAN, YOU WILL COVER YOUR EARS RIGHT NOW!”
And there’s really no arguing with that.
As we turn down Whippoorwill Avenue, sleet rattles the windshield. Hana flicks the wipers to a faster setting and drops her voice. “It’s good, I think? We talk loads. We even decided to apply for that Oscar Mayer Wienermobile thing together. You know, traveling the country after high school in a giant hot dog? So I guess we’re official? He’s brought up going camping with his family next summer.”
“You? Camping?”
“I know. It’s one thing to sleep in a cabin at The Hundreds, but I draw the line at pitching a tent and using the bathroom in the woods.”
“Still, that’s kind of serious, though. Making plans so far in advance.”
“Yeah, but . . . we haven’t kissed yet.”
“KISS-KISS-KISSING!” Hwan shouts from the back seat.
“HWAN, I WILL THROW YOU OUT OF THIS CAR!”
The earmuffs resume.
“Is that normal?” Hana asks me. “It’s been like three weeks.”
“I’m not sure there is a ‘normal.’”
“What would you do in my situation, though?”
My throat dries. “I’m not really sure I’m the right person to ask.”
Silence barrels around the car. “Okay,” she says eventually, “but . . . like, before.”
Before, I’d had two boyfriends. The first was Conner from the basketball team, who asked if he could take off my bra during a particularly intense make-out session in his car. We’d parked in the woods, far enough from both our houses, and I half wanted him to and half didn’t. It took a solid two minutes for him to undo the clasp, as I kept insisting, “Really, I can do it,” and by the time he got the darn thing off, I just wanted to cover myself up again. Then, in the summer before my junior year, I lost my virginity to Jeff Manning—a boy from North Carolina who I’d met at Leo’s. We hung out for three months straight, before his family went back to Raleigh. He was tanned and freckled, good and kind, but the magazines lie: it wasn’t this absolutely perfect moment that changed my life forever.
“I think it’s just whatever you’re comfortable with,” I say. “Everybody’s different. I mean, do you want to kiss him?”
“Well, yeah.”
I shrug as we pull into the parking lot. “Then you should.”
But at lunch, I’m replaying the conversation: Then you should. Then you should. Then you should.
Is that what I told myself?
The cafeteria windows are all frosted up, so a few members of the football team are drawing penises on the glass. Snapping out of my memory spiral, I try to focus on Alexander, who’s explaining the burn mark along his jawline. I watch how his Adam’s apple’s bobs up, down, up, down—how his blue-ink-tipped fingers are pressing around the scar.
“Baking pan,” he explains. “You see, my parents own a restaurant in London . . . uh, a few restaurants now, actually, but that’s beside the point. I was a small boy, it was after hours, and I tried to pull a pan from one of the top ovens. The unfort
unate thing is I caught it with my face.”
“Ouch. I’m guessing that hurt.”
“Bloody hell, yes. It was worth it, though.”
I frown at him, confused.
“It was karithópeta,” he clarifies, massaging the scar. “Walnut cake. And karithópeta is always worth it.”
Hana and Elliot are braving the mac-’n’-cheese-day lunch line. It’s just Alexander and me at our lonesome little table in the corner of the cafeteria. The two of us aren’t great friends or anything—more like casual acquaintances, friendly enough to fill a lunch hour with half-assed conversation.
He still hasn’t asked about last summer. I’m not entirely sure if he knows.
I examine his homemade lunch. While mine’s sprouted hippie food—ferociously green—his could be a three-course, fancy-schmancy dinner: orange salad, a lamb sandwich, and fried cheese cubes.
“Did you make that?” I ask, pointing to his elaborate spread.
“Uh . . . yes, in fact, I did.”
“That’s impressive.”
“Do you want some?”
“I’m not going to steal your food.”
He nudges one of the cheese cubes toward me on a napkin. “No, please, go on.”
I hesitate and then take a bite. The flavor explodes in my mouth. “Skills. You said your parents own a few restaurants?”
“Yes, they’re . . . my parents are . . . Would you mind waiting a second?” He pulls his phone from the pocket of his skinny jeans, fingers flicking across the screen. “Here.”
On-screen is a picture of a couple with Alexander’s dark hair and brown eyes, beaming into the camera. Both wear chef hats printed with Greek flags. I recognize them immediately. “No way.”
“Unfortunately so.”
“Unfortunately? Your parents are the Gourmet Greeks! Nana’s been watching them on TV forever.”
“So have I. And that was . . . you see, that was the problem.”
“You don’t like that your parents are famous?”
He scratches at the back of his head and runs his fingers nervously through his hair. It’s more than a habit—he just seems nervous all the time. “That’s not . . . that’s not it, exactly. But . . . uh . . . What happens at a summer camp in the winter?”
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