“And, I mean, I lived in New York, so I definitely knew girls who were gay. Just no one I liked. At least, not when I was brave enough to act on it. And I was dancing, like, all the time. There wasn’t time for much else. Like I said, this is my first real party.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. Depressing, isn’t it?”
“Kissing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”
Her eyes widen. “For real? Because it looks freaking awesome.”
I laugh. “Okay, you caught me. It’s pretty great.”
“Just as I suspected.”
Laughter explodes behind us. Turning, I see Jay, bare-chested, twirling his shirt around his head to a Beyoncé song like he’s a stripper or something. Girls flock around him, waving dollar bills and honest-to-god squealing.
“Good lord, he’s totally smashed,” I mutter, getting to my feet and brushing the sand off my butt.
Eva reaches out a hand to me, and I help her up. Her fingers grip mine a little longer than they need to. But maybe that’s all in my head. Maybe every look and smile and flirty smirk is forever and always in my head, just like it was with Natalie.
Ugh. Ugh infinity.
“Time to go?” Eva asks, ticking her head toward the bonfire. Jay’s belt buckle now hangs undone, football-printed boxers on display.
“I’d say so. You going to head back to Emmy’s?”
She nods and lets out a sigh. “Home sweet home.” But she doesn’t move. She just watches the water roll over itself, her eyes hazy in thought. There’s no doubt in my mind that Emmy and Luca, even Macon and Janelle, are really trying to give Eva a good home. Make her feel loved. Watching Eva, there’s no doubt in my mind that it’s not working. Maybe nothing can work right now.
“You want to meet me at the lighthouse later?” I ask before I can think better of it.
She turns to me, her eyes brightening. “Yes.”
No hesitation. No doubt.
Yes.
Chapter Twelve
THE NEXT MORNING, I’M BRUSHING MY TEETH, HALF AWAKE, when I hear my mother unleash a string of curses loud enough to rattle the windows.
It’s the ass-crack of dawn—I’m up early for my first shift at LuMac’s—so I’m pretty surprised she’s even out of bed. She and Pete weren’t home when I got back from the bonfire last night, but I waded through a trail of fresh beer cans when I sneaked out to meet Eva after midnight.
As always, my heart rate gallops and my feet itch to hurtle me toward my mother before my brain can catch up, slow me down, prepare me for whatever tiny nothing or huge something I’m about to face. I spit out a mouthful of foamy toothpaste and follow the eff-bombs.
Mom’s in the kitchen, a soldering iron in her shaking hands. My stomach sinks to my feet when I see an open can of Bud Light close to her elbow. I’m already inching closer, wondering if I can slip the can into the trash without her noticing, when I spot three pieces of thin, triangular sea glass, all hued in various shades of aqua. Next to them lie skinny strands of copper, ready to be mixed with the solder. I feel an annoying flare of childlike joy.
Approaching the table, I pick up a familiar and ragged notebook open to a drawing of a necklace. In the picture, the pieces of sea glass fan out on a delicate, nearly translucent chain. The copper, a rusty red color, encases each piece. I’ve seen this necklace in its final form so many times, and the effect is magical.
I love this necklace. Mom designed it a few years ago, and it’s her most popular item in her Etsy shop. For a long time, she’s been promising to make me one, but most of the time, it takes every bit of initiative in her bones to get her to fulfill an order, so making a necklace for zero profit—even for her own daughter—isn’t likely. It even became a sort of running joke. Every time she’d get an order, she’d smile at me and say, “Another call for the Precious.”
“Gollum is so demanding,” I’d say.
“But we needs it, Precious,” she’d say in a freakishly accurate impersonation of Gollum, and we’d laugh and I’d help her get out all her materials, and the world was small and okay and ours.
“Goddammit to hell,” Mom says now, pulling my eyes from the sketch. She’s attempting to edge a sliver of gorgeous blue-green in the soldered copper but keeps smearing it onto the surface of the glass. That stuff is hot, too. Her fingers are red from little burns and flecks of copper.
“Can I help?” I ask, pushing the beer out of her reach.
She startles in her chair. “Oh, baby. I didn’t hear you come in.”
“Alas, I am here.” I look around for an order form to get some idea of how much time we have until it needs to ship, but there’s nothing but the notebook and materials. “Who ordered the Precious this time?”
Not even the hint of a smile. She doesn’t look up, just cleans the glass with some Goo Gone and starts edging again.
“Mom?”
“What?”
“The order? How long do you have to make it?”
“Um . . . there’s no time limit.” She finally gets the edging right and moves on to the next piece.
“Oh.” I fight a smile, finally understanding why she’s acting so weird. I start to back away from the table. “I’ll just pretend I didn’t see all this, then.”
She finally glances up at me. “Why would you do that?”
“Because. The necklace.” I sweep my hand over the table.
Mom frowns at me. “Yes. The necklace. I’m making it for Eva.”
My stomach plunges to my feet. “What?”
“Eva. I told you I thought of some things that might make her feel more at home.”
“And that thing is . . . a necklace.”
She shrugs, her eyes never leaving her task. “You’d be surprised what makes you feel loved when you lose the person you love the most.”
I blink. Over and over again, hoping the scene will change, but it never does. When I don’t move or say anything else, she looks up.
“Ugh. Baby, don’t look at me like that.” She returns her gaze to her noble task. “Can you help me, please?”
I keep staring at her, her too-big tank top hanging off her shoulders, her long fingers growing more and more steady as she works. She always gets better, more confident, the longer she sticks with something, her chronic creative paralysis fading with each motion. I know this about her.
It makes me wonder—what does she know about me? What would she say if someone asked her my favorite food or what scares me or about a sure way to get me to laugh? Would she have an answer at all?
“Gracie?” she says when I don’t answer. “A little help?”
Closing my eyes, I inhale through my nose and let it out slowly, something Emmy taught me to do a few years ago when I’d get stressed about piano recitals. When I feel a little less violent, I open my eyes and find Jay standing in the doorway to the kitchen. He flicks his eyes from me to my mom to the necklace and back to me. He looks concerned, and I wonder how long he’s been standing there and how much he overheard.
The violence floods back in, but it’s a childlike kind of violence. The kind that wants to stomp my feet and bury my face in my mother’s skirt and ask her—beg her—to see me.
But I can’t ask her to do that.
Because if I do, she’ll tilt her head at me and smile, maybe even cup my face in her hands and kiss my forehead.
I do see you, baby.
And that answer is almost worse than nothing at all.
“I have to go to work,” I say flatly.
Mom doesn’t say goodbye as I walk out the door.
Jay stops me when I’m halfway down the driveway. I don’t hear his feet eating at the gravel until he’s right next to me, hooking a hand on my arm and swinging me around. I jerk away from him, nearly losing my grip on my bike, and keep walking, pushing it along next to me.
“Grace.”
“I have to go to work, Jay. Shouldn’t you be asleep or playing Mario Kart or jerking off or something?
”
“Nice. And I have work too, you know.”
“No, I don’t. And I don’t care.”
“Jesus, I’m just trying to check on you. Your mom—”
“What, run out of flirty material to try out on her?”
“You’re impossible.”
I stop, turning to glare at him, my fingers white on my bike handles. His hair is all mussed and his eyes have turned soft. I remember how he used to whisper my name, over and over, while he kissed my eyes, my nose, my ears, my mouth.
Grace. Kiss. Gracie. Kiss.
What a load of shit.
“I’ll be impossible if I want to,” I say. “And you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
His gaze turns hard. “And whose fault is that, huh? But I do know your mom’s a bitch who needs to grow up.”
I shove him. Hard, in the chest with both hands. His eyes pop in surprise, and he stumbles back a few steps. Early-morning sunlight spills over his hair, turning it into gold. I shove him again.
“Shut. Up. You don’t know a damn thing about my mother. Your oaf of a father might be in her life for now, but that doesn’t give you the right to make judgments, to comfort me like we’re some sort of sick family. You don’t have a right to anything, Jay. So butt out.”
He straightens his shirt, his expression an angry cloud. “What the hell, Grace? Look, I’m sorry about the other night, okay? You think I’m happy about this whole act our parents are putting on? I was supposed to be in Chicago with—”
His expression darkens even more and closes up. He takes a deep breath, hooking his hand on the back of his neck as he stares at the gravel.
“Look,” he goes on, “I knew you moving in here would piss you off, so I went with it, okay? But now I’m just trying to help. Jesus, I’m trying to say you deserve better.”
My next string of words gets stuck in my throat. I hate Jay Lanier. He betrayed me out of spite. Took my right to move on from him and turned it against me. He mocked this situation we’re in, like it was all a big joke. Even when we were together, in those quiet name-whispering moments, he never knew me. Never. And yeah, that was my fault, my choice, but it still stings that he never even realized it. Never knew I was holding back.
“Don’t pretend like you give a shit, Jay. Just don’t.”
And then I toss my leg over my bike’s seat, the knot in my throat thick enough that it pushes hot tears out of my eyes. I pedal away from him and convince myself it’s just the salty wind making them water.
Chapter Thirteen
IT’S NOT HER FAULT.
It’s not her fault.
It’s not her fault.
As Luca babbles on and on about the right way to roll silverware, this phrase echoes in my mind over and over again. I watch Eva weave through LuMac’s tourist-packed dining room pouring coffee through a smile, tucking her tips into her aqua-blue apron.
Well, that will pair just beautifully with the necklace . . .
Ugh. Stop. It’s not her fault.
And it’s not. I know this. It’s not like Eva threw herself into my mother’s arms and begged her to love her and share with her all the secrets of life. She’s not even aware of how fucked up my relationship with Maggie actually is. On top of that, I know Mom gets like this—she hooks herself on to a sad story and rides it until the bitter end.
But this is the first time that story has been a person I know, someone I have to see and interact with and work with. Usually it’s cats at the animal shelter and orphans in some war-torn country or flood victims along the Mississippi. Usually I can ignore Mom’s fluttering and heart-clutching, and she’s over it in a couple weeks. Usually it’s not quite so . . . real.
Okay, that one time Mom brought home a worm-filled dog from the pound was pretty real, because I was twelve and I had to take care of him, get all attached to him, and name him Noodles because of his curly, sand-colored fur, only to realize there was no way we could afford him and then I had to find a good home for him and say goodbye. That was pretty real. But still. Noodles was a dog.
Eva is a whole live girl.
“Hey,” Luca says, bumping my elbow. “Earth to Gray.”
“What? Sorry.”
He follows my gaze over the counter to where Eva’s delivering an armful of plates to table . . . eleven? No, twelve.
“Uh-huh,” he says after few more glances between us.
“What?”
“Did you hang out with Eva last night?”
“Yeah,” I say, dragging out the word. I’m just going to assume he means the bonfire and not the lighthouse at two a.m.
“What did you talk about?”
“Stuff.”
“Stuff.”
“Yes, Luca, stuff.”
“Like, serious stuff or fun stuff?”
“Oh my god, pry much?”
He shrugs and presents his palms. “Just wondering. You’re not exactly Cape Katie’s Miss Congeniality, but you and Eva . . .”
“Me and Eva what?”
“Seem to get along. Damn. Sensitive much?”
I take a deep breath, rolling up some more silverware. “Sorry. And yeah, we do get along. She’s cool.”
He nods, smiling an infuriating little smile.
“What?” I ask.
“Did you share things?”
“Luca, I swear to god, I’m about to stab you with this knife.”
“It’s a butter knife—it’ll barely break the skin.”
“Try me.”
“I’m just asking if you talked about yourself at all. Your mom or whatever. Jay didn’t even know your middle name.”
I ignore the whatever and focus on the most innocuous part of his inquiry. “First of all, Jay didn’t care about my middle name. Second of all, what does my relationship with Jay have to do with Eva?”
He starts to say something, but I power on.
“And third, why would I tell her about Maggie?”
He frowns. “You’re not going to?”
“Again, why? Poor girl’s been through enough.”
His frown deepens, but he nods. Luckily, Eva chooses that moment to come over, a few credit cards and guest checks overflowing in her hands.
“Oh my god, does anyone tip with cash anymore?” she asks, brushing her hair out of her face with her arm.
“Nope,” Luca says. “Or anything over fifteen percent, at least in Cape Katie.”
“Lovely.”
“But you can expect some nice plum preserves around Christmastime.”
She blinks at him, and he shoots her a double thumbs-up, coupled with a goofy grin. They banter back and forth for a few seconds, but I don’t hear it. My eyes seem to have a mind of their own, traveling from Eva’s tired eyes and laughing mouth, down her long neck to the hollow of her throat where the necklace would rest next to her heart.
“How’s your first day going?” she asks, turning toward me.
“Fine, I think. I’ve mastered the very challenging silverware roll.” I hold up an admittedly sloppy creation.
“Lucky. Better than dealing with people.”
“How dare they want coffee refills.”
“Right? So entitled.”
We laugh and Luca bats his eyelashes at me over Eva’s shoulder. I stick my tongue out at him while Eva runs the credit cards.
“I’m exhausted,” she whispers, leaning toward me so only I can hear her.
“I wonder why.”
She smiles and nudges my shoulder a little. Last night we climbed to the top of the lighthouse again and talked about nothing. Stupid stuff. How Eva’s never been on a horse. My uncharacteristic love for Anne of Green Gables. Eva’s addiction to eating peanut butter right out of the jar. My irrational fear of water beasts.
“Water beasts?” she’d asked, barely holding back a laugh.
“Sharks. Giant alligators in tiny ponds. Piranhas traveling in packs. Dolphins.”
“Dolphins? Who’s scared of dolphins?”
>
“They have teeth. They’re freakishly smart. They wig me out, okay?”
She tossed her head back and laughed, and it was a little embarrassing how much I loved the sound.
We talked about all this nothing for a good two hours, steering clear of anything to do with mothers or future plans or girls or first kisses. Yes, we stayed far, far away from that. But it was so easy. Up there, I didn’t belong to a messed-up mother. She wasn’t the grieving daughter. We were just Grace and Eva.
“Secrets don’t make friends, ladies,” Luca says while he puts a fresh filter into the coffeemaker.
“Good thing I don’t care too much about making more friends,” I say.
“You’re so charming, Gray.”
I flip my hair dramatically. “You love me.”
His eyes soften on me. They flick to Eva once, who watches us with an even softer smile, before settling on me again. “I do.”
His sudden seriousness makes my throat tighten. There aren’t many things I’m sure of in life, but Luca’s undying loyalty is one of them. Honestly, I don’t think I’d be alive or half as functional as I am without him. I should tell him this more often. Should tell him I love him more than once every five years.
Instead I sock him in the stomach.
I mean, I do it gently, but I still punch him.
He releases a laughed Oof and pulls me into a headlock. Emmy blasts out the kitchen door just as he’s starting up his legendary noogie.
“Luca!”
He releases me, frantically trying to pick up some rolled silverware that clattered to the floor in our scuffle. Emmy just glares at him.
“I never know if you two are madly in love or hate each other’s guts,” she says.
I feel Eva’s eyes on me while Luca pretends to consider this. “I’m thinking somewhere in between.”
Emmy shakes her head at us. “Well, please keep that in between out of the dining room and show Grace how to work the POS.”
I frown. “Piece of shit?”
Eva chokes a laugh.
“Point of sale,” Emmy says, gesturing to the register, but she’s biting back her own smile.
“I’ll show her,” Eva says as she swipes another card. “I’m here anyway.”
How to Make a Wish Page 9