“Yep.”
“Okay.”
“Cool . . .”
Neither of us moves. Seconds tick by and they feel like years.
“Would you . . . I know it’s getting late,” he says, “but do you want to possibly go somewhere?”
My breath quickens. “Somewhere like . . . ?”
Studying me for a second, he runs his teeth over his bottom lip, his hands in his pockets. “Anywhere,” he says, voice like a plate about to crack. “Absolutely anywhere you want to go.”
As Alexander waits in the front garden, I tell Mom, “I know it’s a school night, but I’ve finished all my homework and I promise we won’t be out too late and it’s Alexander’s birthday and—”
I think she’s so delighted that I’ve made a new friend that she practically pushes me out the door.
Since Reed’s out with Charlie in the Time Machine, we take Theia’s Volvo—Mrs. Atwood’s old car. The interior is all black leather, ripped at the seams, and it smells vaguely of cigars. Alexander doesn’t have his license yet (he says that he takes the bus or “the Tube” everywhere in London), so I drive.
“Where’re we going?” he asks.
“My favorite place in all of Winship.”
But when we get there ten minutes later, Alexander pinches his eyebrows together. “This is your favorite place?”
“Yep.”
“You’re taking the piss.”
Huh? “Just trust me, okay?”
A bell above the door chimes. Humidity wallops us—and continues to wallop us—as we make our way down the first row of washing machines at the Royal Winship Laundromat. It feels like the warmest day in summer. On the ceiling are elaborate tin tiles, and around us, bright white sheets spin in sudsy water. Besides Alexander, there isn’t another soul in sight.
At the end of the row, I turn right, hop up on one of the orange lounge chairs, and climb on top of a dryer, sitting and swinging my legs triumphantly. “See?”
Following my lead, he plops next to me. “Right . . . so this is the secret life of American teenagers. I suppose I suspected drugs, gambling. A keg, at the very least.”
“Nope, just laundry. Although laundry can be very rebellious. What if you don’t separate your whites and colors?”
“Anarchy.”
“Precisely.”
Alexander cranes his neck back and forth down the aisles. “So where is everyone?”
“It’s duvet-and-blanket-washing night for the Faircrest Inn. It’s the only hotel in Winship that stays open in the winter. Housekeepers drop off everything and then come back later. Guess it doesn’t make sense for them to wait around, but . . . it’s peaceful, you know?”
“Do you come here a lot?”
“Not a lot. Sometimes. It’s kind of dorky, but the ceiling tiles are pretty cool. . . . Lean back for a second.” Our shoulders find the warm metal of the dryer top as we rest our heads inches from each other. The dryer jolts, shuddering down our spines. Steam billows around us, and I take a deep breath of it. “I’ve always thought the ceiling tiles look like the ocean, when the blue paint’s chipping like that, in a certain light . . .”
Why am I telling him this, exactly?
What I don’t say is that, when Fern and I were little, we used to go camping as a family, and she absolutely despised everything except seeing the stars. She liked looking up at them and feeling small and infinite at the same time. I’ve always thought it’s kind of the same thing with the ocean. When you’re in the water, you’re one thing, but part of something unimaginably wondrous and large.
I don’t know.
I’m glad I don’t say it out loud.
“It’s kind of dorky,” I repeat.
But Alexander just shakes his head and says quietly, “Not dorky at all. . . . Thanks for bringing me here.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Normally I hate birthdays.”
“Do you not like parties or something?”
“No, I almost always have a party.” He breathes out. “Just that my parents are never there.”
“Oh.”
“This year they didn’t even call.”
I sit up and look at him. “Really?” The way he’s lying there—hands lazily behind his head, chest rising and falling in that black sweater—makes me awash in feelings that I don’t exactly understand.
“And it’s”—he checks a nonexistent watch on his wrist—“well past midnight in London, so my hunch is that it’s not coming.”
“Jeez, that’s shitty.”
“It’s okay,” he says, in a voice that I realize matches my own. It’s okay is code for nothing is.
“Is that . . . ?” I begin, wondering if I should finish. “Does that have something to do with why you moved to America?”
“Sort of.” He swallows. “Basically. My . . . uh . . . my parents view me as sort of an inconvenience? And I was always trying to do things to prove to them that . . . well, that I wasn’t. That I’m not. Sometimes as a chef you don’t have people cook for you a lot—you just cook for other people—so I planned it all out. I made this big dinner for my dad’s birthday with all my parents’ favorite foods, spent about nine hours in the kitchen, and they . . . didn’t show up. They knew it was happening, but they went out for drinks with their friends instead. So I was just sitting there, surrounded by all these dishes, getting progressively more and more pissed off, so I . . . invited some people over. Okay, I invited a lot of people over. I wanted someone to eat the food and just . . . be around? But it got kind of out of control; people started inviting more people . . .”
“Ugh,” I say. “That sucks.”
“It gets worse. When my parents finally came back, it was two days later. They’d gone to Paris or something. And the place was still trashed—there was just too much cleaning, and I couldn’t do it all. They called my yaya, and I can still hear my mother screaming from the kitchen, ‘You take him. You take him.’”
My heart plummets for him. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay,” he says again. “Apparently my . . . my yaya had been trying to get custody of me for about five years, and I just didn’t know it. I already spent every summer with her in Greece . . . and honestly, that’s where I thought I was going to live. But then Mrs. Atwood died, and she filled out paperwork to live in America, and . . . you know the rest of it.”
I let this sink in.
Alexander sits up. “I shouldn’t have said that. . . . I’m . . . I’m sorry. That was too much.”
“No, I’m glad you told me. I’d been wondering about it.”
“I still fear I’m the party pooper of the century.”
“This isn’t a party,” I say, nudging him. “This is just a Laundromat. I didn’t even get you a gift.”
“You made me cake.”
“I made you box cake. And it’s not something you carry with you, like, I don’t know, a sweater.”
At this, the corner of his mouth quirks up. “I just remembered. I have something to give you.”
“That’s not exactly how birthdays work.”
“Come on.”
Outside, snow’s falling again—a gentle dusting like powdered sugar. We make these perfect, snowy footprints across the parking lot, which is empty except for the Volvo; Alexander pops the trunk. I have no idea what I’m in for.
“What you need to understand,” he says nervously, “is that I was shopping with yaya for fabric for the fiber guild, and this happened to be for sale in the window.” I don’t know what I love more: that he just admitted, as an explanation, that he was fabric shopping with his grandmother; or the fact that there’s shiny red fabric, folded into a neat bundle in the trunk.
“You . . . uh . . . said you wanted one.”
A cape. He bought me a cape. I’m a bit dazed—happily dazed. “In the comic book, not in real life.”
“Technically, it’s a graphic novel.”
I pull the cape from the trunk, watching it unfurl in a long, silk
y sheet. Sweeping it over my shoulder and tying the strings around my neck, I laugh. “Thank you. I now feel like I can fight crime.”
When he splutters out, “Sure, sure, you’re welcome,” I get the distinct feeling that there’s something else he wants to say. “Enjoy it.”
So I do.
When three women in blue housekeeping uniforms return for their sheets, there are two kids in the nearly vacant parking lot: one of whom is exploding into a grin; the other is skipping around in a bright red cape, the wind at her back.
It is ten o’clock on a snowy Wednesday, and everything feels all right.
July
Edna
The night at the ropes course ended with the two of us retreating to our separate cabins, with me blinking up at the yellow rafters until the early hours of the morning.
Leaving. You were leaving?
I couldn’t imagine Winship without you, Dylan. And honestly, I couldn’t imagine you without Winship. You, in Arizona—so far away from us.
The next morning at breakfast, you broke the news to Fern, Reed, and Hana.
“Wow,” Reed said, setting down his bagel. “I’m . . . um . . . happy for you, man. Just as long as we can still text about Celtics games.”
“Course,” you said.
Fern couldn’t stop blinking, like she had Vaseline on her eyelashes and was trying to flick it off. “I don’t get it. What will you do?”
You shrugged—same as at the ropes course. “Travel. Camp. Explore.”
“What did Mom and Dad and Nana say about it?”
“I haven’t really . . . told them yet. I know your dad worked so hard to get me into Winship U.”
Hana chipped in. “I think they’ll probably just be happy if you’re happy. College straight out of high school isn’t for everyone, anyway.”
“We’ll-throw-you-a-party,” Fern said really quickly, like the idea came to her in a blast. “When are you leaving, exactly?”
“After camp season ends. So, I figured the very beginning of August.”
“Okay. It’s settled. The last day in July, you will have the best party this town’s ever seen.”
Twenty-four days, I counted down in my mind. And then you’ll be gone.
We came up with a bucket list: finally conquering the strongman machine at Fun-O-Mania, biking down Piscataquis Hill without totally wiping out, and tasting all 111 ice-cream flavors at Jimmy’s—even clam.
But the rest of camp season passed at an alarming rate, and by the day of the party, we were still adding to the list.
“Wessie,” you said, grabbing a sweating bottle of homemade soda from the grass and taking a swig. All the campers had returned home; in the meadow across from the cabins, everything was so, so still—even the black-eyed Susans in full bloom.
“What about Wessie?” I said.
“Like those expeditions when we were little. Trying to find her one last time would’ve been nice.”
“Her?”
“I kind of always figured she’d be a she?”
“That’s incredibly random, but okay.”
“I’ve also always figured that she’d hate her name.”
“What should we call her, then?”
“Something more dignified,” you said. “Like Charlotte. Or Edna.”
“You want to name a sea monster Edna?”
You clinked your soda bottle against mine. “To Edna.”
“We can still look for her when you come home.” I stood up, brushing grass off the backs of my legs. “Because you are coming back to visit.”
It was then that Fern burst into the meadow, in a sundress with daisies all over it.
“There is a situation,” she said breathlessly, taking the last step toward us in a ballerina leap. “With a capital S and a capital ITUATION.” Especially when it came to parties, Fern and calmness went together like horses and roller skating.
She and Reed had hidden the booze behind the boathouse, so Mom, Dad, and Nana didn’t immediately think it was that kind of party. By an overturned canoe, in true Mainer style, was a twelve-gallon bucket filled with jungle juice—blue and glowing like nuclear waste.
“I swear,” Reed said, holding a bottle, “I thought this was vodka. Mom always reuses containers. . . .”
“What was it actually?” I read the bottle’s label: Kombucha Concentrate—Nature’s Divine Answer for What Ails You. “Ugh, so it’ll taste like concentrated vinegar. How much did you put in?”
“Three cups.”
“Jesus Christ.”
Fern folded her arms. “Someone needs to test the juice.”
“Since this party is technically for me,” you said, “I volunteer as tribute.” Fern passed you a Solo cup; you dipped it into the blue and took a sip. “Tastes like liquor and fruit punch . . . and vinegar.”
Reed clapped his hands together. “Good enough.”
And so it began.
Around nine o’clock, the party migrated from our house to the fire pit, where we roasted marshmallows for s’mores—sugary skins crackling black. Threads of orange light unspooled by our feet.
Someone turned up the music on portable speakers.
Rattle-your-bones music filtered through the trees.
Fern was there in a blue dress, her hair a bold braid that started at her temples, then snaked its way down her back. Her arms were doing this weird jive. Party Fern and Ballerina Fern were polar opposites. I preferred Party Fern, when she dropped the precision and got all fluid like a squid.
“Ha,” Hana said next to me, marshmallow goo on her fingers. “Fern in the wild.”
There was a groan on my left. “Man,” you said, “you started s’mores without me.”
Automatically, I passed you half of mine. “Where’ve you been?”
“Just got caught up saying goodbye to people.” You lifted your Solo cup of jungle juice. “Cheers.”
“It’s worse than this afternoon, isn’t it?” I asked after you took a sip.
“So much worse.” But you took another swig. Then another. “How much’ve you had?”
“Just a cup.”
“Jesus, Sawyer. Do you know how strong this shit is?”
“I’ll survive,” I said, although even as the words escaped my lips, I could feel the bluish liquid swishing around my gut, everything going a bit hazy, buzzing like lazy bees.
One more sip. “Hey, do you want to take a walk or something?”
I peered at Hana, who said, “I have s’mores. S’mores and I are friends.”
“You sure?” I asked.
“Yeah, go on.”
So we left. Even though you and I’d trod this route a million times, around the fire pit and through the wildflower meadow, between the raspberry bushes and through the east side of the woods, my heart crept out of its cage. Its beat was hot and twitching and loud. You are leaving, and I haven’t told you how I feel. But my siblings—it would crush them if you liked me back. If . . . something happened between us.
“I can’t believe it,” I said when we emerged from the trees onto the cove.
“What?”
“Nana’s left the Chris-Craft out again.”
The moon had punched a white hole in the sky, and beneath its glow was a small wooden boat, bumping softly against the dock. It was Grandpa Michael’s favorite—and Nana had taken it out two mornings ago to test its seaworthiness, to see if the boat was worth fixing at all. Besides the dry rot, it had a bent engine shaft, and the propeller was too small. At lunch that day, Nana had confessed that she really should pull the boat out of the water, but sentimentality was getting the best of her. If she looked to the cove and glimpsed the Chris-Craft, in some small way, didn’t it feel like Grandpa was still alive?
None of us was supposed to bring it out to sea.
It didn’t maneuver well enough, Nana said.
But doesn’t it maneuver better than a canoe, which we’ve been floating in for years? And look, perfectly seaworthy out there!
I had
a lightning strike of an idea—a bright spot in all the haze. That drink was strong. “We should go find her.”
“Who?”
“Wessie. Or, you know, Edna. It’s not too late.” I gestured to the boat. “One last time, like when we were kids. We can do it right now. Let’s do it right now.”
“What about the party?”
“We won’t be gone that long.”
“Didn’t your nana say that—?”
“Just a short trip away from the dock. We could swim back if we needed to.” I knew I was being selfish. I knew I was being reckless. “Please?”
Your smile flickered more than the campfire. “Okay, Sawyer,” you said. “Okay.”
December
The Impossible and the Real
The morning after Alexander’s birthday, I wake up at five thirty as planned.
Nana is already at the breakfast table, as planned.
We borrow our neighbor’s big honking truck, as planned, and we hitch the Chris-Craft’s trailer to the back, pulling it out of the barn. Chilled wind creeps under the sleeves of my jacket, and I worry that if I bend my fingers too much, they might just snap off. My jaw hurts from stopping the chatter of my teeth. We circle around the woods, the radio playing “Christmas Lights” by Coldplay, and drive along a narrow motoring path toward the cove before making a slow U-turn and reversing the last few yards into the water. Hana meets us at the edge of the sea, as planned, delivering a cheery yet chilly “Morning!” The silver faux fur on the hood of her coat whips this way and that in a strong, strong breeze.
“Morning,” I tell her back, and the word is one big shard of ice and fear.
We’ve planned and planned and planned, but if there’s one thing I couldn’t have planned for, it’s the feeling in my belly when Nana says, “Ready, Cookie?”
Am I ready? Every cell in me is screaming no, but my lips say, “Yeah.”
Light is spilling across an orange-and-purple sky. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the sunrise—and I try to focus on that feeling: that wonderful, early-morning feeling, that Nana, Hana, and I are privileged to witness something special. Like, for this one moment in time, we are the only three people on Earth.
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