I wait till he’s finished before responding. “I don’t know if I know her that well,” I say.
Zack smiles. “You’re cool,” he says, patting the spot next to him for me to sit down. “And smart. And pretty.” Then he pats a spot on his lap.
But that haunting sense of something missing doesn’t go away; it seeps deeper into the walls and the carpet and the big-screen TV and the bed, until I know for sure there’s no way I can have sex with Zack, partly because I don’t really know how to have sex—at least, not good enough for someone like Zack, who’s done it with dozens of girls, and probably even a few women. But I also can’t make out with Zack because the truth is I like someone else more. And even if sometimes I veer pretty close to being an Unlikeable Character, I’m at least aware of the fact. Which means I have the chance to stop what I’m doing and change, before I become so unlikeable that the reader gives up on me, shuts the book, and sends it flying across the room, disgusted.
I’m not really sure what to do now, though. Zack doesn’t seem ready to drive me home yet; he asks if I want to watch TV, and if he can take off my shoes and rub my feet. What do you say to that? So I surf around the channels while he massages my soles with his fingertips. It feels incredible, much better than kissing, and I drift away for a minute, not into sleep but some kind of foggy bliss.
I start picturing Foster. I conjure him in my imagination, but deliberately—because I want to imagine him. I don’t want to keep being like Zack, searching for substitutions.
A few minutes later I rouse myself, slip my shoes back on, and stand to go.
Then finally it hits me what’s missing, what’s been lacking this whole time. It’s so simple: Shelby. This entire scenario—the social hangout, Zack’s parents’ house, Zack lying in bed with his arms folded behind his head, waiting for me to lie down—they’re all lacking the Right Girl, Shelby, or whatever girl out there is supposed to come after Shelby. A Different Girl.
But I’m not this Different Girl, I’m Eva, and he’s not the guy I want, he’s Zack.
Here’s something else I know: I don’t belong here. And if I don’t belong here, then it’s time to leave.
45.
PASSPORT
SUNDAY MY MOM’S sorting through a pile of old mail when she comes across an envelope addressed to Courtney and opens it without asking: it’s my sister’s passport. The problem is that six months ago Courtney told us at dinner that she’d picked up her new passport at the DMV and that everything was totally taken care of. My mother calls her downstairs to confront her, which Courtney deals with by literally backing up into a corner, claiming we misunderstood what she said. Then, when she tries to grab it, my mother holds the passport above her head, dangling it just out of reach like she’s scolding a badly behaved child, and shakes her head, disappointed.
Eventually she lowers her hand, but not before launching into a speech on procrastination, which morphs into a speech on appreciation and gratitude and blessings.
My mother’s never been to Europe, even once. She’s been to Mexico (Cancún, on her honeymoon with my father) and Canada, but so long ago she never needed a passport. So her speech about appreciation, which began as a speech about procrastination, eventually transforms into a speech about reverie. Or not about reverie, but of reverie, my mother’s reverie, her musings on the haves and have-nots of her life, the people who got it all and wasted it, and the opposite too.
Mom tells us what she would’ve done if she’d been given the chance to take a trip to Amsterdam, or even Boston, when she was young, her whole life ahead of her. The chance to live abroad, or across the country, even if only for a short time. The speech gradually transitions into other semi-related concepts and emotions, and slowly I realize it’s not my mother’s memories I’m listening to, but her lack of memories.
Lacking—it’s everywhere!
At some point I stop listening, worried by the feeling that, underneath everything, maybe I’m just not appreciative enough, not grateful enough for the opportunity I’m being given. How can you make sure to get the most out of college—or at least get your parents’ money’s worth? I run down my fall semester class schedule: Intro to Brit Lit, Writing the Personal Essay, Oral Narration, Geology. They feel like the names of my campers when I first read them: signifiers without meaning. Emerson College is just this abstract thing I’ve committed to be a part of, and so far it’s committed nothing to me except these four classes, which hardly sound life changing or door opening or mind expanding. What do I know about making the best of a situation when it seems obvious that I’ll just keep avoiding what I’m prone to avoid, which is basically everything outside of what I already know, which is still barely anything at all?
Courtney’s stopped listening too, distracted by her passport photo, her face faintly flushed with panic.
I glance at the photo but can’t tell what’s wrong; Courtney just looks like Courtney, standing against a white wall—it’s no disaster. “Hey,” I say, reaching for her hand, “you’re really doing it.”
“We’re doing it,” my mother chimes in, huddling us all together, proud, the soft-lit glow of reverie still beaming in her eyes.
“Aren’t we annoying?” I joke to Courtney. “You definitely won’t miss this,” I say, laughing, poking her playfully.
But Courtney’s too wise to believe it’s that simple. She knows it’s not the absence of memories that keeps a person from being happy; it’s the absence of certain people from the memories you’re making. Traveling forward means leaving behind. Stamp the passport, write it all down.
46.
DEADJA VU AND THE CURSE OF THE COYOTE
WE’RE ON OUR way to the sporting goods storage closet to get bases and a ball for kickball. I wave at Foster as we pass by the amphitheater, where he and his boys are painting the benches for Parents’ Day. He holds up his arm in a vague salute, but it’s not quite a wave. It’s one of those extra-hot, sweaty days, and my girls are feeling it, bleached and parched and straggling behind me. Alyssa’s brooding and won’t make eye contact—not when she hands me today’s schedule and not even when she coldly informs me she’s going to the bathroom and will be gone awhile.
“The bathroom?” I ask, dipping my head, trying to catch her eyes.
“Yes.”
“Alone?”
“Fine, I’ll take a buddy.”
“I’ll go,” Rebecca says.
“I want to go,” Maggie says.
“No one’s going,” I tell them.
“You can’t, like, outlaw me from using the bathroom,” Alyssa says.
Of course I can’t. So instead I stall, poring over the schedule. The truth is I actually feel apologetic but I’m being antagonistic, and coming off as petty, which is embarrassing even in front of a bunch of nine-year-olds. I was praying Alyssa would be over it by now, but since she isn’t, I can’t be either, and that’s frustrating. When you can’t be the Bigger Person, you end up the Same-Size Person: pretty small. I kill almost a full minute just tapping my pen against the clipboard, pretending to examine our itinerary, hoping that by the time I look up, the girls will be bored and oblivious to me and Alyssa’s looming showdown.
“Fine, I’m going,” Alyssa says, sick of waiting. The rest of the group watches.
“No way.”
“Um, yeah.”
“Here’s the keys to my car,” I say meanly, shoving my keys into her hand. “Why don’t you just take Corey there?”
“I have to piss,” Alyssa says, throwing my keys in the dirt. “And shit,” she shouts, grinding the keys into the ground with the toe of her sandal.
The girls gasp. I don’t. I’ve heard thirteen-year-olds say a lot worse, so I can take it. And that’s what I’m going to do: Take It.
“Oh, I had no idea,” I say, mock-concerned. “Please go ahead then.”
But Alyssa just stands there, fuming. The girls huddle closer, hypnotized by the drama.
“Fine,” I say to her, “hold it i
n.”
Alyssa huffs, but the moment passes. Suddenly I’m sick to death of Sunny Skies, sick of summer in general. It feels like we’ll never get to the ball closet and back to the amphitheater, back to Foster. I miss him. I want to lift whatever weight might be between us. I don’t care about motivating my group anymore—I don’t want to waste another minute here.
What’s worse, I wonder: summers that race by breathlessly, or the endless kind? Mine feels all monotony, yet no routine.
“Come on,” I say, walking ahead, not even checking to see if the girls are following. But they are. I hear their sluggish, flip-flopped feet shuffling to keep up.
When we get to the playing field, I pause. We don’t need to play kickball—this summer’s already kicking us around. We have an hour to kill, but Foster’s boys are covered in paint and won’t be done for a while. There’s no place else to go really, except up to the lookout at the top of the hill, with all the brambles and the dead shrubs and the holes in the ground where furry groundhogs pop out and little ankles get caught and twisted.
“Up?” I ask, but the girls don’t realize it’s a question—they just obey. So up we go.
Soon we’re outside camp; we’re above it. Up here it feels like I’m no longer the counselor and they’re no longer my campers. The transformation does us both good. We hold hands while we hike, carefully picking a path through the desert bushes and spiky plants. We bypass the hostile, alien cacti and the huge boulders that look poised to tumble down the hill and crush everyone below. We’re being active for a change. But we’re also escaping.
“Somebody say something,” Alyssa says.
“Something,” I say, and the group laughs.
“No, say something besides that.”
“Something besides that.” Everyone laughs again.
Higher up, the hill ramps at a sharper incline. I wonder for a moment if what we’re doing is safe.
“Maybe we should turn back,” I suggest, and the girls immediately agree, making me wonder if this was a forced march. We’ve only just begun slow-stepping our way back down when we see him: a gray-brown coyote, scraggly and skinny, facing us, panting in the heat.
I throw my arms out in the same motion my mother does when she slams the brakes at a sudden red light, her arm whipping across my chest to keep me from flying through the windshield. An involuntary protective impulse.
“Don’t move,” I whisper. “Don’t move and don’t run.”
“And don’t look it in the eye,” Alyssa adds.
“Why?” Zoe asks. “What happens if you look it in the eye?”
“You get cursed.”
“Alyssa, shut up.”
“It’s for reals,” she whispers, serious. “It’s like a Southwestern thing.”
The coyote just stares at us, its tongue lolling out like a dog when it’s hot. Alexis whimpers, faintly. I coo to her, “Shh, shh.”
“Hey,” I shout at it. “Go away!”
“That’s not going to work,” Billie says. “You have to really scream.”
“Please don’t scream,” Jessica pleads.
“You gotta jump up and down and throw stuff,” Billie says. “Coyotes hate people.”
“If we were a puppy, it’d eat us,” Lila says, her voice shaking, and then Renee says, “Or if we were a cat like Mr. Baggy Jeans, we’d be dead.”
“Don’t say dead,” Maggie says.
Then the coyote cocks its head slightly, staring at us sideways, and I get an eerie, creeping, familiar sensation: deadja vu. I’ve been feeling and refeeling it for weeks.
“Let’s all scream at the same time,” Billie says. “Let’s jump around like we’re crazy.”
It’s our best—though admittedly only—idea, and it’s Billie’s, not mine. I knew I wasn’t cut out to lead these girls. I don’t know any more than they do how to stave off evil coyotes and cruel summers.
“Yeah, let’s act crazy,” Jenna agrees.
“Someone count down,” I say.
Maybe seventeen is just one of those years during that annoying phase of life called Immaturity when you haven’t experienced much more than a nine-year-old but you’re supposed to act like you have.
“Three,” Rebecca says.
I’m smart, but I have no firm philosophies. Not like I did when I was ten, when I had it all figured out, and not like I will when I’m twenty-five, when I’ve lived through everything.
“Two.”
When someone calls you a Know-It-All, it’s only meant in a negative way. It sounds like it should be a compliment, knowing so much that you know it all, but in fact it’s a terrible thing.
“One and three-quarters.”
Man Versus Nature. Man Versus Self. I can still picture the words scrawled on Mr. Roush’s whiteboard, concepts to help us make sense of the writing we’re reading, and to make sense of ourselves, too.
“One and a half.”
Eva Versus Coyote.
“God, Becks, c’mon already,” Zoe says.
Eva Versus Eva.
“One!” Rebecca screams.
Turns out coyotes do hate people—especially screaming girls throwing sticks and pinecones and acting like lunatics.
It also turns out you don’t have to look them in the eye to get cursed.
47.
I AM IN TROUBLE
LATER THAT NIGHT Shelby texts me to meet for coffee drinks. We always order the exact same thing—her a chai iced tea, me a blended soy mocha—but predictability sounds comforting right now. At this point it feels like I should try and do all the stuff I usually do at least a few more times before I’m gone and can’t do it anymore. But then Shelby changes her mind, tells me about a vegan place in the city called Café Gratitude, and she’s not exaggerating or implying something, it’s actually called that.
I make it to Larchmont right on time, at 7:58. Shelby’s standing by the hostess, her phone to her ear.
“I’m calling you,” she says.
“Why? I’m here.”
“They wouldn’t give me a table until the rest of my party arrived.” She rolls her eyes at the inhumanity of it.
The hostess leads us to a two-top by the door and leaves a pair of menus. Cool air breezes in every time a waiter enters or exits with dishes for the diners on the patio, and soon I’m shivering. Shelby passes me her cardigan without even asking if I’m cold, a move so smooth and intuitive I assume she picked it up from Zack.
“You’re cold in August—in LA,” Shelby says, laughing at me. “Good luck making it to Thanksgiving in Boston. You’re going to hate it.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“I just mean it’s going to be cold.”
“Yeah, I don’t know. You might be right. Maybe I’ll hate it,” I say. “It’s possible.”
Shelby’s been to Boston, and New York, of course, and she’s even been to Maui multiple times. Zack took her to Palm Springs twice, and one weekend he rented them a suite at the Luxor in Vegas. They used to weekend down at his grandmother’s beach house in Redondo too, and once in a while they’d invite me to come along, but I always declined. I don’t remember why; I think at the time it just seemed like something I wasn’t interested in doing. I guess if they were still together now I’d be interested, but now’s too late.
“Everything looks good,” she says, scanning the menu. Every dish is named like an affirmation: I Am Open, I Am Adventurous, I Am Transformed. “Writing anything?” Shelby asks, flipping the page to teas and desserts.
“No,” I say.
“That’s what you always say when you’re in the middle of something really good. You are humble,” she says, reading a dish: Indian curried lentils with spicy mint chutney.
“You think my writing’s good?”
Shelby looks up from her menu, smirks, and puts a hand on my hand. “I know what this is. This is about Foster, right? Now that you’re at camp together, he’s messing with your head. You’re starting to think you’re not as good as him.”
“Pretty off base,” I say. “About as off base as Alexis Powell during pretty much every sport.”
“Who’s Alexis Powell?”
“One of my campers. She’s fat.”
Shelby gives me a look.
“What?” I say. “She’s a fat little kid.”
“One archenemy at a time, okay?”
“Who’s my archenemy?” I ask, loud enough for the woman behind Shelby to swivel around and glance at me.
“Foster.”
“Hardly. And don’t say archenemy—it makes it sound like I’m in a comic book or Greek myth or something.”
Shelby shrugs. “How are Michelle and Steph then?”
“Fine, you can say archenemy.”
Finally the waitress approaches to take our order. I watch Shelby as she explains what she wants extra of and what she wants on the side, and try to soak in her whole aura so I have a mental image to refer to when I’m away. She actually looks really great, maybe better than she’s ever looked: tan, her bangs growing out in a chic way, her eyebrows elegant and manicured. I’ve always thought of Shelby as my best-looking high school friend. That’s not the sole reason she got Zack, but it’s part of it.
“What do you want, Eva?” she asks.
“Is it too late for I Am Satisfied or I Am Free?” I ask the waitress.
“Sorry, we don’t serve those for dinner.”
“I Am Happy is fine then.”
“You are happy,” the waitress confirms, writing it down.
“Oh, and an I Am Loved too, please,” Shelby says, pointing to the tea selection, “Iced.”
“You are loved, iced,” the waitress says, then walks away.
“What should we talk about?” Shelby wonders aloud, which reminds me of a reason I like her so much: she speaks her subtext. She’ll say, “Well, this is awkward,” or “I shouldn’t have said that,” and then pop an olive in her mouth or flip her hair, like oh well.
“We can talk about you,” I say.
Shelby’s fine with that. She tells me she’s dating someone new but doesn’t offer details on who or how or why. This is one of the things I don’t like about Shelby: she prolongs her gossip.
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