Someone Else's Summer

by Rachel Bateman

  A laugh rises in me, but I’m too nervous to let it out. I nod instead. “Four.”

  He pulls me even closer to him, if that’s possible. “I’m not going to let go of you till we hit the water, so that means you really have to jump on four if you don’t want to be dragged off this cliff.”

  “I’ll jump,” I say, sounding way more confident than I feel.

  “Okay, then. One.”

  My legs tingle.

  “Two.”

  My breath is coming too fast again.

  “Three.”

  Black spots push at the edges of my vision.

  “Four!”

  My knees are bending, my muscles contracting, legs working beneath me. My feet leave the ground, and I’m in the sky. Falling, flying. Anchored only by my hand tight in Cameron’s. Air rushes past me, pulling my hair from my back and into a wild swirl around my head. We fall forever. We fall for no time at all.

  The cold is a shock, pulling us under in a flash. Cameron pushes my hand from his, and I’m alone, twisting in the water. Instinct takes over, and I’m swimming, swimming toward the sky. The sun grows brighter through my closed eyelids.

  I break the surface, and laughter escapes me. True, lighthearted laughter. My body is buzzing with adrenaline, and suddenly I’m not sure my skin can hold me anymore. I tread water, spinning slowly to look up at the cliff above me.

  Holy. Crap.

  “You did it!” Cameron swims to me and throws his arms around my neck. We fall back under the water, my mouth filling with it. A tangle of arms and legs, we roll in the river, pushing off each other and crashing back into each other, until we finally find our way to shore. I cough out about a gallon of water.

  “Sorry,” Cameron says sheepishly as he climbs out of the river next to me.

  Around a cough, I say, “No worries.” I look at the cliff again. “I cannot believe I just did that.”

  “You were incredible!” He looks like he’s going to hug me again, but stands back, grinning excitedly instead.

  “I feel incredible! That was so…”

  “Incredible?”

  “Shut up. That was terrifying and amazing and… I can’t believe I did that.”

  “We can do it again,” he says.

  I laugh then cough as the water irritates my throat. “Don’t push it.”

  “Okay, no more jumping, but come on.” He grabs my hand again. When did we become so comfortable with each other that we’ll grab hands like this without a single thought? As kids, we held hands all the time, but then something shifted. Before high school, before the cheer squad, everything changed, and suddenly Cameron was a boy and I was a girl and holding hands meant something. I’m not sure when the shift happened, can’t track down when it all changed, but one day we were two kids playing make-believe, and the next we were awkward and distant.

  Now, he holds me tight as we make our way back up the cliff, my legs growing increasingly shakier each step of the way. At the top, he grabs the camera, never breaking contact with me, and holds it in front of us. “Smile,” he says. He wraps his arm around my shoulder, keeping hold of my hand so my arm crosses over my chest. He’s warm against my side. I lean my head against his chest.

  The flash pops, and the camera spits out the undeveloped film. Cameron lets go of me and pulls it out, holding it in front of us as we wait for the image to appear.

  Suddenly, I’m overwhelmed with the excitement of this day, and I can’t stand still for another second. “Come on,” I say and snatch the picture from his hand. I set it carefully on top of Cameron’s shirt. “That’ll take a couple minutes.”

  Hand in hand, we jump again.

  Chapter 12

  I clutch the picture between my fingers, staring at it. My hair is wild, wet and wavy around my face. My cheeks are flushed and my eyes bright. Cameron’s skin is pale against my tan shoulders, his arm tight around me. I trace the lines of our fingers with my eyes, following the tangle of how they link together. The muscles on Cameron’s arms and shoulders stand defined, and I wonder, when did the scrawny boy next door grow up into this man? He’s still the same Cameron I’ve always known—long and lanky, all sharp angles and stretched limbs. But wrapped in all that is a man’s body, and I’m surprised at how much that surprises me.

  “You’ve been staring at that since we got in the truck,” Cameron says. “Has it changed?”

  “No,” I say, but I don’t look away from the picture. Because I can’t take my eyes from Cameron’s face: the smile softer somehow than normal, stretching his cheeks up toward faint creases around his eyes. He’s not looking at the camera. No, his attention is directly on me, and looking at this picture, I blush, as if he were still staring at me like that.

  “I’m pretty sure there’s a Sharpie in the glove box,” he says.

  I pop it open and riffle through the contents until I find the marker. It’s well loved, the writing on its case mostly worn away. I pull the cap off with my teeth.

  The marker glides smoothly across the slick surface of the picture. My handwriting is sloppy, nothing like the decorative scrawl I’m so used to seeing on Storm’s Polaroids, but the words I write over the image excite me:

  Today, I jumped.

  Cameron turns the truck down our street, two houses from my own. The Monte Carlo is still in the driveway, thankfully. I’m still riding the high of this afternoon, and I can’t go back yet.

  “Hey,” I say, turning toward him, “I know we’re almost home, but could you maybe take me to Aunt Morgan’s house instead? I just… I don’t wanna be home yet.”

  “Um, sure. But…”

  “But what?”

  “You know you’ll have to face them eventually.”

  “I know.” I look at the picture again, see the excited flush in my cheeks. “Just not yet, okay?”

  He drives to the end of the block then turns back toward town. It takes only five minutes to get to Aunt Morgan’s from ours, and Cameron knows the way. We ride in silence. He pulls into the driveway behind my aunt’s car and steps on the parking brake. “You going to mark that one off the list now?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t think so,” I say.

  “You were brave today, Anna.”

  “I know.” A smile spreads across my face. “But it’s like you said. It’s just the beginning. I don’t think I can mark it off the list until being brave is just how I am. Until it’s my normal.”

  He’s nodding, his smile matching my own. “Well,” he says, “here’s to a summer of being brave.”

  I push open the truck’s door, but don’t move to get out. “Hey,” I say.

  “Hey back.”

  “Thanks for today. I actually had a lot of fun.”

  “Me too,” he says as he shifts the truck into reverse. “I’ll see you later, Anna.”

  I watch him drive away then make my way up the sidewalk to the door. Knocking quickly, I open the door and let myself in. “Aunt Morgan?” I call into the dark house.

  “Office!” she yells.

  Her office is a mess. Boxes are scattered along one side of the room, and the massive desk she usually does all her paperwork on is covered in deep stacks of books. “Whoa,” I say, “did your office explode? Marco.”

  “Polo.” She groans and pulls herself off the floor behind the desk. “Sorry about the mess.”

  “What happened?” Aunt Morgan is hyperorganized. Her house looks like it should be featured in an issue of Real Simple. I’ve rarely seen a dirty dish in the sink, much less chaos like this.

  “Oh, you know”—she waves her arms around the space—“I thought it was about time to paint this place.”

  “And that involved an earthquake first?”

  She shifts a stack of hats off her office chair and drops into it. A couple years ago, Aunt Morgan decided that being an RN didn’t demand enough time, so she started a small business selling crochet hats and scarves online.

  “No. I had to empty the shelves so I could paint them, a
nd I figured as long as I already had all this stuff out, I might as well go through it and see if there’s anything I could get rid of.”

  “Let me guess,” I said, “you got sucked into looking through all your books and haven’t actually gotten anything done?”

  “Well, no.”

  “When is your next shift?”

  “In two days.”

  A stack of papers sits on top of a pile of books. I pick it up and flip through the sheets—orders to be shipped out. “Tell you what,” I say. “I’m calling Rosa’s for a pizza. I’ll help you get your orders out, and then we can paint together. I have some things to tell you.”

  Aunt Morgan was in nursing school the summer Mom and Dad spent at the hospital with Storm. She was living in a crappy apartment on the far side of town and had a horrible commute to class every day. So when Mom asked her to move into our house and watch me, she jumped at the chance.

  Having Aunt Morgan there that summer was amazing. She had always been my favorite aunt, listening to my stories and playing all the silly games I made up. That summer, she let me sleep in her bed with her at night and surprised me at school with McDonald’s for lunch—something Mom and Dad would never have done.

  Since that year, Aunt Morgan has been my “person”—the one I go to when I’m having a hard time or when I have a tough decision to make. After my first boyfriend broke up with me, she held me while I cried then got me a pint of Häagen-Dazs and stayed up late watching The Notebook with me, even though she had a twelve-hour shift the next day. When Jovani and I had sex for the first time, I came to her, and she listened without judgment then took me to the clinic for birth control.

  Now, we’re sitting on the living room floor, leaning against the couch, finishing off the pizza. Aunt Morgan has a very strict no-food-in-the-living-room rule, unless I’m in need of girl talk, so when I paid for the pizza and immediately carried it in here, she knew whatever I had to talk about was serious. We each grabbed a slice, and I told her all about the list: finding it, telling Cameron, cliff diving, everything.

  “So,” she says, wiping her fingers on a wrinkled napkin, “what’s the problem?”

  “It’s really not that big of a deal,” I say, trying to play it cool.

  “Banana, we better not be eating on my living room rug for ‘not a big deal.’”

  I sigh and pull my hair over my shoulder, winding it into a loose braid. “It’s just… I can’t do the list.”

  “Why not?”

  I reach for the last breadstick. “Did you know Mom and Dad aren’t getting me another car? And they want to sell the Monte Carlo.”

  “No… I didn’t know that. But—”

  “How am I supposed to take a road trip without a car? Half the things on that list I can’t do here in town.”

  Aunt Morgan stands. “You want some more root beer?” I shake my head, and she crosses to the kitchen. Pouring herself a full glass, she returns and says, “Have you told them about Storm’s list?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?” She drops onto the couch behind me and starts undoing my messy braid. Aunt Morgan loves playing with my hair, with anyone’s hair, really. Sometimes I wonder if she would have been happier if she’d become a cosmetologist instead of a nurse.

  “I dunno.” I sigh. “It’s just, they are so sad, you know? I feel like I can’t bring her up around them, like they’ll break or something.”

  “They might surprise you.”

  “Maybe.”

  We sit together in silence, her fingers in my hair, a half-eaten pizza in the open box on the floor. An old truck passes, puffing smoke out its exhaust pipe. On the sweeping oak tree in the front yard, a pair of squirrels plays tag, circling the trunk at Mach speed.

  “Hey, banana?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Have you thought that maybe…” She twists my hair into something complicated at the back of my head, lets it drop, and starts twisting again. All without saying another word.

  “Maybe what?”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t do the list?”

  I spin around to face her. My hair pulls at my scalp until she realizes what’s going on and releases it. “What? Why?”

  “I think it’s a really good thing you want to do. Just… maybe you should be having your own adventures instead.”

  I shake my head in disbelief. “These would be my adventures.”

  “Oh, I know, but they wouldn’t really be. This was Storm’s thing, not yours.”

  “It used to be both our thing,” I spit back. “Remember? We used to do this together. Every summer.”

  Aunt Morgan looks at me with that look of pity I’m so used to seeing, the one I hate. The one I’ve never seen on her face before. “Sweetie,” she says, and I hate how patronizing she sounds, “you guys haven’t done one of these lists in years.”

  “I got busy.”

  “I know, I know. But”—she hesitates, and I know she’s weighing the cost with telling me the truth against the cost of just dropping the subject—“did you ever think that maybe that wasn’t why?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When you got to high school, you tried so hard to do your own thing.”

  “So?”

  “Maybe your sister stopped giving you these lists so you could keep doing that—have your own life.”

  My vision blurs. “I don’t want my own life like this! I want what we had. Why did she have to leave?” I’m crying in earnest now.

  Aunt Morgan slides off the edge of the couch and wraps her arms around me. I snuggle into her soft body, fitting into her embrace perfectly, as if her arms were molded by all the other times she’s held me like this. She strokes my hair and rubs my shoulders. Kisses the top of my head.

  “I didn’t mean to make you upset,” she whispers. “I’m sorry.”

  I shrug.

  “Banana? I want you to really, really think about this, okay? Maybe it’s best to just leave this alone. You should have your own adventures.”

  “No,” I say immediately. “I’m doing this. I’ll figure out a way. This list will give me the best summer I can have, I promise.”

  “I hope so,” she says, pulling me tighter.

  Chapter 13

  I make my way downstairs the next morning as soon as I hear movement in the kitchen. Mom and Dad still weren’t home when Aunt Morgan dropped me off last night, and when they finally returned, they went straight to their room without a word to me. I can’t remember a time when my parents were so upset with me that they wouldn’t even talk.

  The smell of coffee welcomes me to the kitchen. Mom’s back is to me as she cuts fruit into a bowl. She’s wearing her bathrobe, the deep purple one Storm and I bought her for Christmas last year. I watch her for a minute, taking in her familiar movements as she makes the same breakfast she’s eaten every morning for as long as I can remember.

  I clear my throat. Mom stiffens, but doesn’t otherwise acknowledge me. “Mom?” I say.

  “Yeah?” She doesn’t turn around, just keeps on making her breakfast.

  Taking a step closer, I say, “Can we talk? I’m really sorry about—”

  She turns, bowl in hand, but doesn’t quite face me. “It’s fine, Anna. I have a lot of work to do, so…” Mom breezes out of the room, never once looking at me.

  I fill a cup with coffee and sit at the table, but don’t drink. This is bad. After the accident, when Mom was walking around the house like a zombie, we didn’t talk for days. But this is different. Then, she was overcome with grief; now, she just doesn’t want to talk to me. To be in the same room with me.

  The floorboards squeak behind me, and I turn, expecting to see Mom. Instead, Dad stands just inside the doorway, already dressed for work in his khakis and button-down.

  He eyes my full coffee cup then looks down the hall, the way Mom went. “Wanna go grab some breakfast, kid?”

  We go to Marilyn’s, a tiny little diner down the road from Dad’s office. We pick a corner bo
oth in the back and order our usual—steak and eggs for dad and a waffle with strawberries for me. After the server leaves, Dad takes a slow drink of his orange juice.

  “What happened yesterday?” he asks.

  Even though I knew it was coming, his question somehow throws me. I stall for a minute, twisting my straw wrapper into a little worm then dripping water over it the way Storm taught me when we were kids.

  Finally, I say, “Do you remember the lists Storm used to make every summer?” He nods, and I continue, “She did one for this summer.”

  Dad’s eyebrows shoot up, and he leans across the table, closer to me.

  “I found it in her room a couple nights ago. I can show you when we get home if you want.”

  He nods, staring at the table between us. “I’d like that,” he says.

  Our food comes, and we take a moment to thank our server, but neither of us eats. After a few moments of strained silence, I say, “I’m sorry for how I acted yesterday. For what I said.”

  “Thank you,” he says with a tired smile. “Where did that outburst come from, Anna?”

  I shrug and spear a strawberry with my fork, but don’t raise it to my mouth. “It’s just… I want to do her list,” I say. “Me and Cameron. We want to do it together, the way we used to when we were kids.”

  “Okay?” Dad pokes at his food. The server comes by and eyes our plates. She looks like she’s about to ask if everything’s okay, and Dad gives her a tight smile and quick nod. She moves on her way.

  I’m not sure how to tell him what I need to, so I decide to just dive in. “When you guys said you were selling her car and that you didn’t want me to drive, I… I snapped. So much of the list”—I sigh—“There’s things like go in a lighthouse and this dive-in theater in North Carolina she wanted to visit. And I can’t do it if you and Mom want to keep me so close all the time—and if I don’t have a car.”

  “Pumpkin,” he says. He pushes his plate away. “Your mom is just—we are worried. That’s all. Can you understand where we’re coming from?”