Twenty Boy Summer

by Sarah Ockler

  I stick my hands in my pockets, feeling the cold, smooth glass between my fingers, remembering something I’d read in one of the trinket stores on Moonlight Boulevard with Frankie and Jayne.

  “Pieces of sea glass are supposedly the tears of a lovesick mermaid,” I tell Sam. “She was banished to the bottom of the ocean for all eternity by King Neptune because she fell in love with a ship’s captain and saved him from a storm.”

  Sam nods. “Yeah, I’ve heard that before. There are all kinds of sayings like that around here. But sometimes you gotta just take things for what they are and appreciate them, not try to label it or explain it. Explanations take the mystery out of it, you know?”

  “I guess.” I crouch down to scoop up a square of turquoise glass I spot beneath my toes, and that’s when I see it, dark and deep, poking out of the wet sand. “Oh my God, look!”

  I stand and hold out my hand for Sam to inspect.

  “Wow,” he says, taking the glass and holding it up to the sun. “Red is, like, the rarest color there is. You’re totally lucky you even saw it.”

  I take the deep red, half-dollar-sized piece from him and smile, looking out across the ocean. I told Matt in my letter before we left that I’d find a piece just for him, but now that it’s actually here, sparkling in my hand, I know he’d want me to do something else with it.

  I raise it above my head and throw it as hard and as far as I can into the sea.

  Let someone else have a lucky day, Anna.

  Sam laughs. “Hey, crazy, what’d you do that for? You’ll probably never see something like that again in your entire life.”

  “Right. But I did see it. And now someone else can, too.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  I shrug and smile. “Explanations take the mystery out of things, right?”

  “Um, right.” Sam laughs and wraps me up in a warm hug.

  We walk the rest of the way to Eddie’s house with our arms around each other, a happy exhaustion threatening to overtake us. My skin has goose bumps from the morning chill, but I’m warm and buoyant on the inside, giddy from lack of sleep, the way I feel next to Sam, and the red sea glass — sign from the universe or not.

  As we approach the house, a shock of shimmering auburn hair shines from the stairs leading up to the backyard. When I see the light blue camisole, I know.

  “It’s Frankie. She must have waited up for me or something. I wonder where Jake is?”

  “He has an early class — he probably had to leave. Speaking of which, I have to be at work in three hours myself. I’m on a double tonight.”

  “You can barely stand up!” I shove him lightly, knocking him off balance to prove my point.

  “Nah. I just need like an hour’s sleep, then I’ll have some coffee. I’ll be fine.”

  “Okay.” I wave to Frankie. She’s sitting on the stairs watching us, waiting for me to pay attention to her.

  “Will we see you guys later?” Sam asks.

  “Maybe we’ll come for smoothies. Otherwise, definitely tonight.” He smiles and hugs me close, kissing me on the lips and forehead before jogging down the beach, and I catch myself smiling.

  Just that I could possibly.

  Love him.

  Forever.

  Judging by the state of pollution at the bottom of the stairs, the party migrated from the backyard to the beach after we left. I pick my way through a debris field of bottles and paper plates to reach Frankie. Her head rests against her hand on the railing and she looks like she got about as much sleep as I did.

  “Hey,” I say, waiting for her to notice something different about me. “What are you —”

  “You.” She doesn’t move when she speaks, and there is nothing warm or happy in her tone. “You need to stay far away from me.”

  “Frankie, what are you talking about?” I try to remember anything I might have done or said last night to upset her, but nothing comes. She was fine when I left with Sam. And getting me to ditch the A.A. was her mission, anyway. “What’s going on with you?”

  She stands to face me. Her expression, like her voice, is empty and flat. Black, dried mascara streaks the skin below her eyes. Immediately, my heart seizes.

  “Frankie, what happened? Is it Jake? Did something happen with him? Did he hurt you?”

  She stares hard, unblinking, her breathing even and calm. Her eyes are beyond angry. Beyond hurt. Beyond caring.

  I’ve only seen her like this one other time — in the hospital lobby when the doctor came out with the chaplain to tell us they couldn’t save Matt. Jayne just fainted, and Red, holding a plastic bag full of Matt’s things, screamed, “No! No! No!” over and over. Frankie just stared at her parents, the same ghostly face, no sound, tears spilling out over her cheeks.

  “Frankie, talk to me. Did something happen at the party? What’s going on? Should we call someone?” My voice is shaky, moving fast. If I touch her, she could shatter. I wish Sam was still here. “Please talk to me.”

  I take a chance and put my hand on her shoulder, triggering an invisible switch. She flinches, coming back into her body from wherever she was visiting. Her eyes go wild, raging. Her face turns red and her shoulders shake violently, barely containing the fight in her.

  “Talk to you? Talk to you?” she asks. “Okay, I’ll talk to you, Anna Reiley. So, where were you last night?” Her voice is high and forced, mocking.

  “Frankie, I was with Sam at the Vista. I told you that before I left. Remember?”

  “With him? As in, with him, with him?”

  I’m suddenly embarrassed and ashamed. I did not expect my best friend to react like this when I told her about last night. “I was trying to tell you —”

  “Oh, please. Save it. You weren’t gonna tell me shit.”

  “Frankie, you know I wouldn’t keep something like this from you.”

  “Is that so,” she says, rather than asks. “Just like you told me about this?” She reaches back to the steps behind her and pulls something up to my face, her hand white-knuckled and shaking. When I see the purple rectangle, it takes a minute for me to realize what it is, to put the pieces together. It’s like when Aunt Jayne rearranged Frankie’s room last time. All her stuff was still there, but it wasn’t where it was supposed to be. We kept waking up and forgetting where we were.

  The image of Frankie’s tan fingers wrapped around my journal is something out of a science fiction movie. Those are her real fingers. That is my real journal. But the juxtaposition of two formerly unconnected objects doesn’t belong in this dimension.

  “That’s my — my —” I can’t speak. My knees go wobbly. That old hot, prickly feeling runs up my back and neck. The sound of the waves on the shore is amplified. I can feel the blood running from my heart through my veins and back again. I am hyperaware. Slow motion. Guilty and mad.

  I lunge at her, reaching for the journal, but she’s quick on her feet, backing away toward the water.

  “Here’s a good one,” she reads from a random entry. “‘Dear Matt, There is so much I want to say to you. Every day something happens at school that I want to come home and tell you about, but I can’t.’ Or how about this one. ‘Dear Matt, Sometimes I wonder if it’s ever going to stop hurting.’ ”

  Frankie’s flipping through the pages, shouting my fears and dreams and memories across the vast ocean, releasing them from their flat paper prisons and breaking me into little bits.

  “Frankie, please stop!” It’s barely a whisper.

  ‘Dear Matt, Your sister is out of control. I wish you were here — I don’t know how to help her. Last night she went out with this guy from school to the soccer field and…’ ”

  “Stop it!” I try to shout, but it still comes out as a whisper. “You think you know everything?” she yells. “For your information, I didn’t even sleep with Johan! We got all the way out there, and he didn’t even want to be with me!”

  “What?”

  “It didn’t happen! I didn’t sleep with him! And
while we’re on the subject of truth, I didn’t sleep with Jake, either. Happy now? You wanna put that in your little book report?”

  I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I open my mouth to say something cold and angry, but no sound comes out. All I can do is claw at the air for my journal, my written thoughts like the lost children of my soul.

  Frankie takes another step back, still thumbing through pages.

  “ ‘Dear Matt, We finally made it to California, and it’s just like you told me. I feel you here with us — I think Frankie does, too.’ How dare you write about me in here! How dare you write to my brother! You think just because you fooled around a few times he cared about you? You think he wouldn’t have ditched you the second he found some new girl at Cornell? Get over yourself!”

  Tears are hot on my cheeks. My throat has closed up. My heart is broken, and I am utterly paralyzed.

  Frankie yanks on the cover and tries to tear it from its metal spirals, succeeding only partially. The cover flops sideways in the breeze like a broken wing, revealing the picture I’ve looked at every night since he died. Matt’s arm around my shoulders, bits of cake and colored chips and grass clinging to our clothes and hair, everything warm and pink in the glow of the setting sun, the whole summer stretched out before us.

  After he died, I spent hours staring at that picture, replaying the party in my mind, willing the two-dimensional images to come back to life, to bring us back there. We could tell Frankie right away. We could be together. We could skip Custard’s and go straight to the hospital and tell them to fix Matt before anything bad ever happened.

  I clear my throat and find my voice again, stronger this time. “Give it back, Frankie. You had no right to read it, and you have no right to rip it apart. Give it to me.”

  She looks at me with crazed, lost eyes. “No, I don’t think so.” I’m desperate. “Frankie, please give it back to me. Please. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, but it’s all I have left of —”

  “Anna, he was my brother. Mine. You have no right to have anything left of him!” As the declaration leaves her mouth, she turns her back to me and runs to the shoreline, arching her arm behind her, the rarest-red mermaid tear sparkling in her bracelet like the stone I gave back to the ocean only heartbeats ago.

  “Frankie, don’t!” I run toward her, but my legs feel weighted, like I’m stuck in a horrible nightmare. I catch her and snag the bottom of her camisole, knocking her down to the sand.

  But the journal is no longer attached to her fingers.

  It’s sailing through the air overhead, landing flat on the water with an uninspiring plop.

  It floats for a moment, lolling back and forth in the current, giving me one last chance to retrieve it. I scramble to my feet and run into the water after it, pulling through the tide with heavy arms and heavy legs, willing myself to swim and stretch and reach it.

  “Anna! Leave it! Let it go!” Frankie shouts from the shore, up to her knees in water.

  I keep swimming toward it, but the current is too strong, pulling on my legs and arms and burning my lungs until I can no longer keep my head above it without fighting. As I kick and yank myself back toward shallower water, the tide moves the journal completely out of reach, encircling it, giving me one last look at the warped pages before it pulls them down to the depths of the ocean.

  My heart pounds in a thousand shattered-glass pieces, each beating separately, painfully.

  I’ve lost him all over again.

  When I get out of the water, I sit down hard on the shore, put my head in my hands, and weep until I don’t have any bones. I don’t care what Frankie thinks. I don’t care if the party guests or the hotel staff see me out here. I don’t even care if Sam comes back and finds me here, eyes puffy and nose running and heart broken.

  My best friend is crumpled in the sand next to me like a wet paper doll.

  My virginity is gone.

  The ocean has swallowed up my journal.

  And it takes all the strength I have left not to dive back in and follow it down, down, deep to the bottom of the sea, lost for all eternity like the broken, banished mermaid.

  twenty-five

  The guilt of not telling Frankie about Matt and me is overwhelming, but it’s a pale second to the violation I feel that she read my most private, raw thoughts and destroyed them. She broke into my carefully guarded heart, stole the only remaining connection I had to Matt, and turned it into a monstrosity. To make things worse, during all the time she spent educating me on first times and undress rehearsals like the Queen of Love, she was carrying an equally heavy and awkward albatross; she was no more experienced than I.

  I can’t even look at her.

  For Frankie’s part, she can’t look at me, either. After we spill all of our silent tears on the beach, she heads back into Eddie’s house alone.

  We told Red and Jayne we’d be back just before lunch. If we show up before breakfast soaking wet and puffy-eyed, they’ll know something’s wrong. We have to wait it out here.

  I climb the stairs up to the backyard, legs and heart pressed with sadness and fatigue. A few people are camped out on the deck chairs that line the pool, passed out cold, unaffected by my and Frankie’s earlier battle cries. Through the back entrance, I step over the crumpled, sleeping pile of a guy whose clothes I recognize from the beer pong fan club last night. I take a few more steps into the kitchen before I’m stopped cold by a wall of funk and filth. The smell of someone’s puke announces itself proudly, reaching up and trying to choke me. Open pizza boxes and loose crusts litter the entire kitchen, the door-turned-table has been knocked off its barstools, and a layer of sand mixed with a sticky film of spilled beer coats every flat surface in sight.

  I’ve never smelled a decomposing corpse, but I imagine this house comes pretty close.

  The place is silent, save for the dissonance of a collective snore and the soft hum of stereo speakers all out of music. A ragtag bunch of last night’s Beautiful People are curled up in various states of disarray on the living room floor, stinky and hungover and smudged with makeup and beer.

  I find my way back to the hallway, opening three doors before finding the closet where I left my backpack next to Frankie’s. Hers is gone, but mine is there. I unzip it slowly, hoping beyond hope that the last few hours were just an illusion induced by a euphoric Sam-haze.

  The front pouch is empty. The middle part holds everything I packed in it last night, save for the one thing I actually care about.

  With my bag, I lock myself in the bathroom I discovered last night. Fortunately, no one is passed out in the tub, so I take a quick, searing hot shower, helping myself to the luxurious bath and body products lining the shower wall.

  After the shower, I pull on the boxers and pink T-shirt I brought to sleep in, shoving my soaked clothes in the middle pocket. As I wipe the steam off the mirror, my face comes into focus and looks, much to my surprise and disappointment, exactly as I remember it. Other than the newly acquired emotional hangover, complete with puffy bloodshot eyes and tired frown, it’s the regular old Anna face, same as last night — nothing new or improved about it.

  Back in the main part of the house, I scan the perimeter to determine that Frankie isn’t in the vicinity and find a spot of floor space near the den off the main living room. Across the room, Eddie is passed out on a leather couch, wearing a black lace bra stuffed with napkins over his green T-shirt.

  I listen to the ocean and the soft rattling snores around me. I close my eyes and slow my breathing, but sleep eludes me. Two hours ago, I imagined this moment very differently — lying on the floor next to Frankie, giggling softly as I recounted my evening for her, planning our activities for the final days of the A.B.S.E.

  Instead, thoughts of Frankie tighten my chest and pierce me with angry black arrows.

  My mind drifts between peaceful memories of Sam’s lips against mine and the intolerable sadness of being betrayed by someone I’ve loved and trusted my entire life.

>   I think I hear someone calling from the front door and wonder briefly where Frankie ended up. Before I can shake it off as my imagination, I hear it a second and third time.

  “Housekeeping! Housekeeping!”

  The announcement precedes a few swift knocks and the unmistakable jangle of keys in the lock.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Donovan? Anyone home?” The door opens, ushering in rays of sunlight that fall harsh on Eddie’s face, but he’s undisturbed. I scoot farther into the den so I can safely watch someone else’s drama unfold without getting sucked into it.

  “What the — good God, boy! Did someone die in here?” The housekeeper props open the front door with her industrial-strength vacuum cleaner and moves to the sofa where Eddie finally stirs.

  “Hi,” he yawns, a lone survivor in the aftermath of the party storm, stranded in the middle of a war zone strewn with bodies, bottles, cigarette butts, random articles of clothing, pizza crusts, plastic cups, shards of the obligatory expensive broken sculpture, and sand.

  “Edward, where are your parents?” she asks, folding her puffy arms across her chest.

  Eddie sits up slowly and surveys the damage. “Don’t worry, Maggie,” he tells her in his groggy voice. “You don’t have to clean this up. I’ll take care of it.”

  “Mmm-hmm. When do they get back?”

  “Tomorrow, I think.”

  “Must have been some kinda party,” she says, grabbing her chest with both hands and nodding at Eddie’s lingerie.

  “What the…?” Eddie reaches up to feel the lace against his body and shakes his head, clearly not remembering how it got there.

  “Okay then. You just call us if you need anything, Edward.” She kicks a bottle out of the doorway, drags away the vacuum, and lets the door slam shut. The bottle rolls across the floor and comes to rest against a pizza box near Eddie’s feet.

  “Shit.” He leans forward on the couch with his head in his hands, not making any effort to remove the bra.

  “Busted?” I ask, crawling out from my nest on the side of the room.

  “Nah, just a headache.”