“What was that for?” I ask when we pull away.
She tucks a blue-black strand of hair behind her ear. “I told you I’d hug you the next time I saw you, remember?”
I do. I do remember.
“Thanks,” I say.
“BFFs,” she says.
My breath feels shaky, but I try to hide it by smiling extra big at her. She’s got on a different bikini today—this one is black with little yellow suns all over it.
“I like your suit,” I say.
She glances down at it and grins. “I wore it for you.”
“You… you did?”
“Hello, there are sunshines on it. Really bright and pretty ones, don’t you think?”
“Um… yeah.” They are pretty. They’re super-bright yellow and the rays are curled like they’re waving in the breeze.
Quinn smiles at me and I smile back, or I think I do, but my chest feels all warm and my belly feels all fluttery and it’s distracting. I’m about to say something really funny and clever, something like Well, I’ll need to find a suit with some Quinns all over it, but she starts pulling a third chair over to ours and then I’m all confused.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Margot came over to our cottage this morning with her dad to check the refrigerator—it’s making this really weird noise, like a dying bird or something—so I invited her to come.”
I blink at her. Then I blink some more, hoping she said Pargot or Hargot or pretty much any name other than the one I think I heard.
But no such luck. While Quinn lines up three chairs and then lays out her fluorescent pink towel, I see Former Best Friend flouncing toward us in a super-chic black-and-white polka-dotted tankini like she’s the queen of… of… of something really cool.
I rub my forehead and tell my thoughts and my heart—not to mention my gag reflex—to chill.
“Hey,” Margot says when she reaches us.
“Hey, you made it,” Quinn says.
I glower.
“Yeah, thanks for inviting me,” Margot says.
I glower some more.
“Sunny, you okay?” Quinn asks.
I snap my spine straight and nod, focusing on laying out my towel.
“I heard you gave Sam Blanchard a black eye,” Margot says as she sits down on the chair next to me and takes out a tube of SPF 15.
“What?” I say, but I heard her. My cheeks catch on fire and my mouth starts watering like I’m about to puke. Of all the people I never, ever, ever wanted to get wind of the Sam Blanchard Debacle—as I shall now always think of it—Margot is at the top of the list. “Where’d you hear that?”
“From Sam,” she says. “I saw him on the beach yesterday. His face is about five different colors. He said you gave him a bra to wipe his nose?”
I don’t say anything. If I do, I’ll start crying. Or spew fire. Neither is a great option. Instead I take off my cover-up and make sure the SPF 4,000,000,000 that Kate put on me this morning is all rubbed in. I’m still in my boring one-piece, but I’d rather have a boring one-piece than deal with people staring at my scar. Then I plop down onto my chair and take out this comic book called Lumberjanes that Dave brought me the other day and bury my face in the inky pages.
“That must have been embarrassing,” Margot says, and I glare at her. She’s looking at me all wide-eyed and concerned, though. Her face reminds me of when Jack McCoy dared me to pull out my barely loose tooth in second grade. Not one to back down from a dare, eight-year-old me yanked that tooth right out. It bled so much on the playground, blood all over my light blue tunic dress, that I started bawling right then and there. Margot held my hand the whole way to the nurse, telling me how no one would remember anything by the next day.
“Why do you care?” I ask now.
Margot frowns at me, a glob of creamy sunscreen in her palm. “Why wouldn’t I?”
I shrug and flip a page in my comic, waiting for my throat to stop aching. “I don’t know. Don’t you have cooler friends to worry about?”
She huffs a big breath. “I can have more than one friend, you know.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.” She smacks her palms together, spitting sunblock all over her towel. She rubs the cream into her legs. “You hated it when I started hanging out with Eliza and all of them.”
I open my mouth to tell her that’s totally not true—that she’s the one who didn’t want me around her new friends—but I can’t. Because it is kind of true. It had been Margot and me for so long, maybe I didn’t know how to share her. Especially after I was already sick. Well, I sure can share her now. Her swim team friends can have her.
“Who’s Eliza?” Quinn asks quietly.
“Margot’s best friend,” I say before Margot can answer. “She tells them all her secrets. Even mine.”
Margot’s mouth drops open. She blinks at me and I look away. I can’t tell if she understands that I know that she told them all about my wonderings, but I don’t really want to know. I just want her to go away.
“Um… okay…” Quinn says, and I feel bad. I’m making this awkward and Quinn doesn’t deserve that. “So, what’s your comic about, Sunny?”
I lower Lumberjanes and look at the cover. Margot is still staring at me. I can feel her eyes trying to bore right through my forehead and into my brain. I don’t look at her. “It’s about these five girls at a camp, and they—”
“I thought you only liked reading kissing books,” Margot says.
My eyes snap to hers. Her jaw is all tight and her green eyes look cold and hard, like emeralds.
“What?” I ask.
“Kissing books,” she says slowly. “You love them. That’s all you used to read, remember?”
Breathe, Sunny. Breathe.
“Did you?” Quinn asks, smiling at me.
“I—”
“She totally loves all of Kate’s YA books,” Margot says. “Especially the ones with kissing in them. Remember that one you read with the two girls making out?”
This time, my mouth drops open. A weird silence wiggles in among all three of us, and my heart is about to bust out of my chest. I glance at Margot, expecting her to be grinning in triumph, but she looks away and her cheeks are all red. I stare at the pool, the blue water blurring as I try to think about what to say. Of course I remember that book. It was a great book. It was cute and sweet and was about these two girls who were the only two drama counselors at the summer camp for little kids. They really hated each other at the beginning, but then they started liking each other. Like, liking each other like that. I remember crying when I finished it, but I don’t know why. The story just made me feel… well… I don’t know.
Normal, maybe.
But then I had to open my mouth and tell Margot all about it. Then Margot had to go and make promises she never, ever meant to keep. Then everything changed that night in my room two weeks before her terrible, awful slumber party.
“It was a good book, right?” Margot asks softly when I just sit there and gulp the air as quietly as possible. I’m not sure what she’s trying to do. Her voice sounds all comforting and encouraging, but she knows me and she has to know I don’t want to talk about this. She has to know I’m about to scream.
I sit there, fists clenched, trying not to think about that book. Trying not to care that Margot’s totally embarrassing me right now. I’ve got a brand-new heart and this one doesn’t wonder about kissing girls anymore. I bet I could read that book about the girls falling in love and just think it’s a nice story now. I bet I wouldn’t cry at all. I bet I’d just be happy for them and then fall asleep dreaming about having a boyfriend.
“Yeah, it was good,” I say, keeping my eyes on Lumberjanes and my voice nice and even. I’m breathing hard, but I can get it under control. I can.
“What was the title?” Margot asks.
I flick my eyes to Quinn, who’s staring at me. I can’t figure out what kind of stare it is, but I’m not taking any chances that it’s
the kind that’ll get me laughed at.
“I don’t remember,” I say, even though I do.
“It’s cool if you like that book,” Margot says. “Any of those books.”
She’s staring at me now, her face all soft and hopeful, and it makes me so mad. It makes me feel like I’m made of fire.
“You didn’t think it was cool at your slumber party,” I say, my voice low and mean.
Her eyes go wide, just like I knew they would. We stare at each other for a few seconds and I know that she knows that I know. Quinn stares at her lap and bites on her lower lip.
“Sunny,” Margot says, her voice all trembly. “I didn’t… I—”
“I’m burning up,” I say, standing, which isn’t a lie. I’m sweating bullets.
“Hang on,” Margot says, her face falling into her serious-talk look. A look I’ve had enough of, to be honest. “Do you think you and I could—”
“I’m going in,” I say, ignoring her. Then I bolt toward the pool before she can say anything else. Because I may be done wondering about all that stuff that made her betray me, but I’m not done being mad at her for it.
I dive into the deep end and keep going until my fingers hit the bottom and my ears pop. The water is cold and delicious and I wish I could stay under here forever. As fast as I can, I swim toward the nearest waterfall, trying to get under it before I have to come up so Quinn and Margot can’t see me. I kick like a frog and my lungs are about to burst, but I make it. I break the surface and hang my hand on the rocky wall right next to one of the slides to keep my head above water.
I turn and look out through the waterfall. The pool is getting more crowded and everyone is all blurry, wavy lines and colors. Every now and then, someone whoops as they zip down the slide. I want to whoop and zip, but my body feels all frozen. I press my hand to my heart, feeling the thrum-thrum-thrum going fast from all the swimming I can do now, and wonder if my donor ever dealt with an evil best friend. If they ever had someone who was supposed to love them no matter what, who had always acted like they did, and then turned on them like a flipped pancake.
Then, for some reason, all these supposed to love you thoughts make me think about Lena and how I can tell she’s super-happy to spend time with me and talk to me, but how she’s been gone for so long, so she can’t love me all that much, and now there’s water in my eyes that’s not from the pool. I squish closer to the white and gray and brown rocks and let a few tears fall, sniffling and snuffling like a baby.
“There you are.”
I gasp at Quinn’s voice and, wouldn’t you know it, my mouth is right where it needs to be to suck in a whole lungful of water. I cough and splutter, gripping the rock wall so I won’t slip under.
“Sorry!” Quinn says as she swims toward me and grabs on to the wall with one hand too, patting me on the back with the other.
I wave her off and hack a little bit more. “It’s fine.”
“You okay?”
I roll my eyes, so unbelievably tired of that question, a motion Quinn doesn’t miss.
“Sorry,” she says again.
“Stop apologizing,” I snap.
I don’t look at her to see if she flinches, but the silence that follows is enough to tell me she probably did. She doesn’t say anything else. Just holds on to the rock wall next to me, her legs swirling underwater as she watches me.
“I’m sorry,” I say, because I know I’m acting like a jerk. “Margot just… she bugs me.”
“Why? She seems nice enough.”
I snort.
“Did you two have a fight?” Quinn asks. “She said…”
She trails off, a frown wrinkling up her forehead.
“She said what?” I ask. My heart is a giant gong in my chest.
“She said you were best friends. For a long, long time. And then you just stopped talking to her a few months ago. Did her new friends—Eliza and all of them—did you not like them?”
I swallow hard, that memory of me spilling all my secret wonderings into Margot’s treacherous lap wiggling its way into my brain again.
I take a minute to breathe, my face to the rocky wall. I’m trying to figure out what to tell Quinn without telling her everything that happened with Margot at that slumber party, when she swims really close to me and lays her head on my shoulder. It calms my heart right down.
“Margot did something,” I say quietly. “She… she told her new friends some stuff. Stuff about me.”
Quinn lifts her head and looks at me. “Like what?”
I open my mouth to just say it—I used to wonder what it would be like to kiss a girl—but I can’t get the words out. I can’t do it. What if Quinn wrinkles her nose at me the moment I say it? What if she laughs? What if she swims away and never comes back? So I shake my head and lie. “Just… stuff about when I was sick.”
She stares at me for a second and I can feel my face go all red with the lie. I don’t like lying to Quinn, but the truth is worse.
Isn’t it?
“I’m sorry,” she says. “That had to be hard, on top of being sick.”
“It’s okay. I’m over it.”
Another lie.
She puts her head back on my shoulder. I breathe out and lean my head against hers. She really is the best. We stay like that for a few seconds. Our feet keep brushing underwater and my knee rams into hers once, but she just laughs and keeps her head right on my shoulder. It’s nice. It’s really nice.
“I read a book about girls liking each other once,” she says quietly.
I snap my head up and stare at her. “You did?”
“Actually, I’ve read a whole bunch.”
“You have?”
“Yup. And it’s got me thinking.”
“You’re… you’re thinking about girls kissing?”
Her face goes crimson and she looks away. “Just kissing in general.”
I nod, waiting for her to go on, but then her eyes are back on me and we just stare and stare and stare at each other and I’m not sure what it all means but my stomach is doing that weird thing that it did in my room the other night when we were lying on my bed and I can’t decide if I’m about to cry or laugh or what.
“Anyway, I’ve been thinking about when we find someone we like,” she says. “What do we do then?”
“Um… I have no idea.”
“It’s always so easy in the books. Like, not easy, but there’s this perfect moment, you know?”
“Like at a party where they both feel lonely until they find each other.”
“Or while they’re studying in a corner at the library and one of them finally decides to confess their feelings.”
“Or on the beach on the Fourth of July and fireworks are going off over the ocean.”
She grins at that one. “Yeah. Or hidden under a waterfall at a pool.”
My stomach lurches and I look around. We’re tucked under the waterfall, yeah, but this area is also partly under the slide, so it’s kind of darker, like we’re in some magical cave, and all the pool water gives it this gauzy blue glow.
“This really would be a great kissing spot,” I say.
“It would.”
“What’s the first thing the two people who are about to kiss might do?” I ask.
“Once they know they want to kiss?”
“Yeah.”
She swallows really hard. “Well. One of them would probably touch the other person’s face. Have you ever noticed that? There’s always lots of face-touching in the books.”
I nod. “Like this.” Then I don’t even know what I’m doing. But I reach out and glide my thumb over Quinn’s cheek. Her skin is soft and so is her smile and it makes my breath all shaky.
“Exactly like that,” she says. “Let me try.” Then she slides her thumb over my cheek too and a super-nervous laugh falls out of my mouth. She drops her arm and laughs right along with me. There’s lots of laughing. Good thing, because I might puke if there wasn’t.
“They’d
probably hold hands too,” I say.
“Most definitely.”
Then we press our palms together and lace our fingers together and our breathing is loud and mixing together and everything is together, together, together. I don’t know what’s happening. We’re just walking through a plan, right? We’re just… thinking.
From the other side of the pool, a bunch of high school girls bust out laughing. I yank my hand from Quinn’s and look around, but no one can see us under the waterfall like this. I can only hear those girls. That’s enough, though. My stomach coils into a tight knot.
“Okay,” I say, “so that’s what we might do when we find a boy we like.”
Quinn doesn’t say anything, and for a second, I think she can tell how hard my heart is pounding and how my body is shaking all over. My hand tingles from holding hers and I shove it through my wet hair.
“Yeah,” she finally says. “That’s what we’ll do.”
I nod and keep my eyes on the blue water. “I’m cold. I’m going to go sit in the sun for a while. I’ll be on the lookout for some cute boys. Because, you know, we need a boy to like.”
“Sunny—”
But I’m already diving under the water. The world goes crystal blue and quiet as I leave her behind.
I don’t sit in the sun. I don’t sit anywhere. When I get back to the lounge chairs, Margot’s still there, but now, someone else is there too.
Eliza.
Swim team captain.
The girl who said she thought I had a crush on Margot. The girl Margot laughed with and gave all my secrets to. She’s sitting in Quinn’s chair wearing a plum-colored bikini, her dark hair all long and loose around her tan shoulders.
“Hey there, Sunny,” she says.
I ignore her. I grab my towel and stuff it into my bag. Then I shove my feet into my flip-flops and don’t even bother putting on my cover-up. I just toss it over my shoulder.
“Sunny, what’s wrong?” Margot asks, sitting up.
I ignore her too. I ignore Quinn, who I can see climbing out of the pool a few feet away. I ignore the way my heart feels like it’s caught in my throat and my eyes are blurring with tears. I ignore the whole world and walk away until there’s no one left to ignore.
The Mighty Heart of Sunny St. James Page 14