Don't Ever Change

by M. Beth Bloom

I keep trying to untangle the hoop, get it free, but I can’t see my hands, can’t tell what I’m doing, if I’m getting closer or just making it worse. I wonder if Lindsay will have something wise to say about it, some easy advice like she shared with Courtney.

  And then she does.

  “Let go, Eva. I need you to let go.”

  59.

  YOU WITHOUT ME

  ON MONDAY I set my alarm for six thirty, because seven is when the copy shop opens. I’m the first one in the door, and when the bell chimes, it’s like the bell chiming in my head, Happy Day, Happy Day.

  I make ten copies of each of my pages and then take the fat stack of pages up to the counter.

  “Can you bind these into ten books?” I ask. “And can you use the spiral binding, and can you make it with this Curl Powder page on the cover and this dedication page on the back?”

  When the zines are finished, I carefully write each girl’s name on the top of her copy in my fanciest cursive, with my coolest colored pens, and then personalize each one with a note and a Love, Eva. Then I gather everything up and drive to Sunny Skies with no real plan. As I’m cruising up the entrance, four big yellow buses rumble past me going the opposite way. I U-turn and follow them as they cross up and over the mountain, heading for Zuma Beach.

  Once we’re there I park at the edge of the lot and stay in my car, watching kids pour out of the buses and sprint across the sand toward the ocean. I see Booth; I see Melly; I notice Christy/Katie laying a towel down. Then I spy Rachel holding hands with Alexis, leading the rest of my girls to a little dune, where they all drop their beach bags and snacks. Alyssa’s in a purple bikini, holding a bottle of sunscreen. Closer to the water I make out Corey and his group, and Foster.

  Maybe I technically don’t deserve it, but I feel like I belong out there on that beach. There’s an Eva-Shaped Hole in this scene, and it’s all wrong. I’ve never felt so apart from something I wanted so badly to be a part of.

  This lack, this Eva Absence, starts to depress me in a way I can’t deal with, so I turn up the radio, some song about being a teenager. It takes a few verses before I hear Alyssa calling my name.

  “Eva!” she yells, jogging toward me, barefoot. “Hey, Eva!”

  She knocks on my window, and I roll it down.

  “Alyssa, you should go back to the group,” I say.

  “What are you doing here? Why are you in your car?”

  “I got fired.”

  “Duh,” she says. “No duh.”

  “So, I don’t think Steven would want me out there, around you guys.”

  Alyssa hops from one foot to the other, her feet burning on the hot asphalt, and I’m about to ask her if she wants to get in the car, but then worry that’d seem really sketchy, and I didn’t come here get in any more trouble, I came here to do the right thing. I slip off my sandals and hand them to her.

  “Thanks,” she says, putting them on. “What’d you do anyway?”

  “To get fired?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I wasn’t a very good counselor to you guys, that’s all.”

  “That’s horseshit,” Alyssa says.

  “Hey,” I say. “C’mon.”

  “You’re my favorite counselor I’ve ever had.”

  “How many counselors have you had?”

  “One million,” Alyssa says, and sticks out her tongue.

  “How’s Corey?”

  “You mean how’s Foster?”

  “Alyssa,” I say, holding her wrist, “if you were four years older, you’d be my best friend and I’d worship you.”

  “I know,” she says.

  “So how is Foster?”

  “A little sad, I think. Corey told me he tried convincing Steven to let you come back for a day so you could say good-bye.”

  “Guess that didn’t work.”

  She shrugs.

  “I miss you guys,” I say, looking out across the beach where Rachel’s helping the girls bury Alexis in the sand. “I don’t like seeing you guys without me.”

  “Rachel’s nice, though.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “But she’s kind of boring, and she makes us do all the stuff on the schedule and even forced Alexis to jump off the high dive without her goggles or nose plug.”

  “Was she okay?”

  “Obvi, Eva.”

  Obvi. Obviously I screwed up majorly. I feel sicker, and sorrier.

  We listen to the waves crash a little. Alyssa squints in the sun. She seems kind of anxious now, like she doesn’t know whether she should stay here with me longer or go back to the group. She glances in Corey’s direction and then inside the car at me. I must look upset, because she pats her hand on my shoulder, like she’s reassuring me.

  “You’re stoked for Boston, right?” she asks.

  “Obvi,” I say. “What about you? Stoked for high school?”

  “Pbbth,” she says, rolls her eyes.

  I reach over to the passenger seat and grab the thick brown envelope with the zines inside.

  “Listen, Alyssa, take these and give them to the girls for me. At first I was trying to edit and improve them but later changed my mind and whited out all my notes. So this is just everything, as is. Every page you gave me is in here.”

  “Even Lila’s crappy poem?”

  “All the crappy poems,” I say. “Every one.”

  “That’s cool,” Alyssa says.

  “You should go back.”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t tell Corey that you saw me.”

  “I won’t,” she says, smiling, and slips my sandals off and takes off running across the parking lot.

  But I can’t stand it, letting them all go like that, so I jump out of my car and run after her, catching her as she gets to the edge of the sand.

  “Tell the girls to sneak off over by the showers. Go, I’ll wait there,” I say.

  Alyssa nods and leaves, and I jog toward the beach showers. It’s blazing out today but I have on a hoodie because, once again, I’m hiding from people. I loiter on the shady side of the shower building, my head down, my hood up, waiting for nine girls who I know for a fact move very, very slowly.

  For some reason I think of Tiffany Lee and her valedictorian speech. If she’s right, and the University is the Universe, then my Universe is only just about to begin. What an amazing feeling. Because my life so far, even with the bad parts, has been pretty great, which means everything I’m about to do should be even more amazing.

  I think of all the side characters I’ve known, and still know, that make my story layered, complex.

  I imagine my readers, and how they’ll judge me, and I think ultimately it’s okay to be judged, because all that truly means is that you’re being thought about, looked at, considered.

  I think about what I know, what I’ve learned, and it’s not a lot. But it will be, eventually.

  Then I think about the lesson of charades, about teaching yourself to communicate without speaking, without writing, for the times when you don’t have the right words, or when what you’re trying to express is too huge, too deep. When you’re faced with the Whole Thing.

  That’s when my girls jog up, a squealing, open-armed mob. I crouch down and let them crush me, a frenzy of Curl Powder and Whirled Peas, and then I hug them one by one, squeezing until my arms feel sore, and it’s time to let go, for good.

  60.

  IMAGINE ALL THE PEOPLE

  ON THE DRIVE home I break the law and scroll through the contacts on my phone. I call Steph first just to touch base, to tell her flat out that I love her.

  “I love you.”

  “What’s wrong?” she asks.

  Then I call Michelle. “I love you, Michelle,” I say when she answers.

  “Totally,” she says, not exactly paying attention. I’m happy with that; I’ll take it.

  After that I’m on a roll—I can’t stop checking in. I text both Lindsay and Shelby noncommittal single-word messages: hi, hey. I text my mom,
Comin home soon. Then, on a long stretch of empty highway, I call Courtney, recite every word out of Alyssa’s mouth, and a third of the words out of mine, but she says to save it.

  “Save it for what?” I ask.

  “Savor it,” she says, and I can hear her smile.

  I hang up just as I’m pulling off the freeway. I’m wearing my glasses for dusk driving, even though this particular route’s basically ingrained in my sense memory. I could probably do this route blindfolded, because patterns you’ve traced a thousand times stay burned in your memory forever. As long as I can count, I can see. One, two, three, four speed bumps, and then a left. One, two, three weeks, and then I leave.

  I pass Agoura Road, Foster’s street, which makes me miss Foster’s voice: the lowness of it, humming through my phone, tickling along my neck. The best way to break the ice is with a hammer, my dad always tells me—not a hemmer or a hawer. What he means is you shouldn’t hold back.

  So I don’t: I call Foster. As it rings I envision the conversation I’m hoping we’re going to have, one of those really sprawling endless ones that lasts so long it actually gets kind of boring, spaced with calm silences; the kind that ends with you each describing random items from your dresser, sunlight starting to bleach away the night, while he keeps reminding you there’s only an hour or two left to actually get some sleep and make it to work before the first camp song.

  I imagine all this while the phone rings: how to instigate such a connection after so much teenage tension, how to design my night so it seamlessly interlocks with his. But when Foster finally answers, he sounds rushed.

  “Eva,” he says. “What’s up?”

  “I just wanted to call. To talk, you know.”

  “Cool, yeah.”

  “Thought I’d let you know I got fired from our job. It was a pretty fair slash unfair firing.”

  “I was going to call,” Foster says. “I didn’t know what to say.”

  “You basically predicted it.”

  “Eva. I never wanted you to get fired.”

  “But you thought maybe I deserved it.”

  “No,” he says. “You’re wrong.”

  “Look, I just wanted to say I’m sorry,” I tell him, “for being so lame at that party. I could’ve tried harder. Or honestly, at all.”

  “The party wasn’t your thing, I get it. I didn’t mean to, like, force it on you.”

  “I don’t have a thing,” I mumble.

  Foster laughs, so sincerely it kills me, literally makes me die. Then I hear some clicking, followed by a spry computer bell, the bright ping of Microsoft saving a document.

  “We can talk tomorrow if you’re busy,” I say.

  “I’m just working on a new story,” he tells me. “I can take a quick break.”

  “No, don’t. You’re in the zone, keep writing.”

  “You sure?” Foster says.

  “Tomorrow,” I say. “I’m sure.”

  “You know I’ll be at camp till four.”

  “‘The horror! The horror!’” I say.

  “So you do remember Heart of Darkness.”

  “Impressed?”

  “Eva,” he says, before slumping into a soft, extended silence, during which my mind skips ahead to the end of some fictional future life in which the two of us are much older, and falling in love. “Always.”

  After he hangs up, I have a long talk with Foster anyway, sustaining the dialogue in my head like characters on the page, a scene from our story. I work on it all the way until sunrise, when I hear my father’s alarm go off, followed by the whirring of my mother firing up the coffee machine downstairs.

  That’s what lifts us up, us writers: we have our imagination, if nothing else.

  61.

  POSTCARD FROM THE ISLANDS

  LATER THAT AFTERNOON it hits me how much I need to see Michelle and Steph, because time isn’t holding on, it’s running out, and who knows what we’ll all be like by Thanksgiving, or if we’re not all home for that, Christmas? At first I’m brainstorming ideas on how to solidify this, like, fragile harmony we have going, even if only for a few hours, but then I stop because the truth is it’s not so fragile—they love me, I love them, and they’re not going to stop loving me just because I acted like an ass this summer and then moved three thousand miles away.

  I propose meeting at the mall food court, but Steph says she and Michelle have been at the mall all day.

  “We obviously would’ve invited you,” she says, “but we thought you were at camp.”

  “That’s over.”

  “What happened?”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “I just got back from Hawaii yesterday, actually,” Steph says. “That’s why I haven’t called.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Did you get my postcard?”

  “No.”

  “I sent one,” she says. “You have to believe me.”

  “I do,” I say. “I can’t wait until it comes in the mail.”

  “Let’s meet at Islands then. You can get a veggie burger.”

  “I think those veggie burgers have cheese in them—” I start to say, but then say, “Never mind, I’ll be there.”

  When I get to Islands, Michelle and Steph are in a booth with a tray of fries, already laughing. I love them. I’ve seen every movie they’ve seen; I’ve heard every joke they know. We don’t have plans to marry brothers or live on the same street when we’re older or anything corny like that, but we do have firm plans for New Year’s Eve that I’m really looking forward to. I pause in front of their booth, not sure which side to sit on, because neither of them scoot in.

  “What’s the grace period for being a jerk?” I ask.

  “You mean graceless period,” Michelle says. “One summer, I think.”

  “We were all jerks,” Steph says. “Some of us just tanner jerks.”

  “Will you sit on the same side of the booth?” I ask them. “So I can see both of your faces?”

  They move to the same side, and I slide in across from them. They’re sharing fries and smiling easily, and every impulse I have is to totally degrade myself so they’ll permanently forgive me. But I should know by now that you don’t have to do that for real friends, and I should also know that ultimately there’s no imbalance because we’re all equally awful and awesome, just at different times.

  “If there was one thing in the universe I could do to make you guys happy, what would it be?” I ask.

  “Write to us,” Steph says.

  “Write about us,” Michelle says.

  “I thought you hated that,” I say.

  “How could I really, though?” Michelle asks.

  “It should be flattering,” I say.

  “We know,” Steph says.

  “I wish we’d known each other when we were five,” I say. “I wish I had a million more stories I could tell about you guys.”

  Michelle and Steph smile and dip fries in ketchup.

  “I wish I knew every story in your lives. Or at least all the stories of your summer.”

  Michelle nods and Steph sips some water.

  “At least we have, like, ten days—right?” I ask. “That’s some time. We can hang out every day and do everything we want.”

  “My college starts next week, actually,” Steph says.

  “And I leave on Friday,” Michelle tells me.

  “No,” I say, crushed, but they both just nod.

  Then the waiter comes, and I order a bun with lettuce and tomato and guacamole and that’s it. Michelle and Steph cock their heads, shoot me knowing looks, those vintage Oh, Eva looks, and I shrug.

  “I’m saving all my changes for Emerson,” I say. “Once I’m there I’ll start eating cheeseburgers and writing about my childhood and getting into everything I used to hate, even beer.”

  “Don’t do that, Eva,” Michelle says.

  “Yeah,” Steph says. “Don’t ever change.”

  I wish I’d brought my yearbook.

  62.


  THE WEIRDEST DATE IN THE WORLD

  OVER THE NEXT few days I get a couple texts from Elliot—some sweet, some shameful—and even a couple from Zack—very sweet, very shameful. I don’t text back. What’s the point? I’m allowed to say that now—What’s the point?—since their chapters are over.

  I’m still playing a game with Foster, though, and that game is Who Texts First. I knew going into it I’d lose; I want to lose, right . . . this . . . second.

  I miss you.

  I miss you too, Foster texts. Want to c u.

  2nite???

  Can’t tonite.

  Oh ok.

  Unless yr free l8tr?

  I look at the clock. 9:18. How much latr? I text.

  Midnite.

  Just the word alone, misspelled, makes me feel sexy.

  Where? I text.

  U pick.

  What’s open?

  Hmm, Foster texts, and then there’s a few minutes where neither of us text. I open my laptop and type in the search bar: open 24 hrs Agoura Hills CA. The first result is CVS.

  CVS? I text.

  U want to go to a drugstore?? Ha.

  Yes, I text. Want to go n e where w/ u.

  At midnight Foster and I are the only ones in CVS. There doesn’t even seem to be one stock boy or security guard on the clock, which makes it feel intimate, despite all the fluorescent lights. My heart actually beats faster, like I’m on a date—a first date even—but we’re just standing by the magazine rack, flipping through a GQ, eyeing expensive suits and exotic vacation destinations. Tropical Muzak wafts down from tiny speakers in the ceiling.

  Foster looks at me. “So what do you need?”

  “In life, or . . . ?”

  “In CVS, Eva.”

  “Oh, right,” I say. “Something, I’m sure.”

  “Let’s shop then,” Foster says, taking my hand and swinging it.

  He seems a little nervous too—though not as much as me—because his palm is sort of sweaty and he’s reading aloud the names of pain relief pills we pass by: “Advil, Excedrin, Aleve, ibuprofen.”

  “Foster,” I interrupt, “I like you so much.”

  Foster smiles, caught off guard. “You should win,” he says. “That writing award, I mean.”