Sunscreen & Coconuts

by Eliza Lentzski

  “Fine!” I relented.

  I ended the call after we decided on a place and time. I was only seeing her again to find out about the money, I told myself. It wasn’t about wanting to see her again. Definitely not.

  + + +

  I had agreed to meet up with Kate at a small diner located in the neighborhood close to my school. My day typically started early, but I’d had to get up even earlier than usual to meet up with Kate. She would have had at least an hour or more commute into the city from Gloucester, so I realistically expected her to be late because of traffic or to miss our meeting entirely because of the early hour. That was why I was momentarily taken aback when I entered the diner and saw her already seated at a booth near the front door.

  Kate wiggled out from behind the table when she saw me. As if an afterthought, she tugged off her skullcap like she’d done when we’d met in my neighborhood liquor store. She passed the hat from one hand to the other. For some reason the nervous action endeared me to her. It made her look so unsure of herself when normally she appeared like she had everything under control.

  I noticed her first, but as I approached, I also noticed that muffins, bagels, scones, scrambled eggs, and pancakes blanketed the table at which she sat—each on their own individual plates.

  “What’s all this?” I asked.

  “You’ve never let me buy you breakfast.”

  I remained standing and eyeballed the crowded table. “Did you buy one of everything?”

  She shrugged as if it was totally normal. “I didn’t know what you’d like.”

  She remained standing while I removed my coat. I would have come to our meeting in jeans and a t-shirt if it had been possible, but instead I wore the skirt, shell, and cardigan I would be teaching in that day. I felt her eyes on me, but whatever she thought about my outfit, she kept to herself.

  I scooted across my side of the booth while she returned to her own.

  “How have you been?” she casually opened as if she hadn’t recently donated an undisclosed amount of money to my school.

  “How have I been?” I echoed. I reached into my workbag and produced the still-green coconut. It rolled around unsteadily amongst the breakfast pastries and bagels. “I’ve been confused.”

  “About what?”

  “Where did the money come from?”

  Kate’s eyes were focused on the coconut. “You know the answer.”

  “No, I don’t. You said you weren’t rich.”

  “Not rich …” she hesitated, “…exactly. My parents send me a monthly stipend. I never asked for it, but they like knowing I’m provided for. I’ve never needed the money though, so it just sat in my bank account.”

  I felt my mouth go dry. “How much?” I managed to rasp.

  “$5,000 a month since I’ve been on the island.”

  “You’ve lived in Curaçao for how long?”

  “Seven years.”

  I computed the numbers aloud. “$5,000 for twelve months, times seven years.”

  She did the math for me. “$420,000. I kept $20,000 for myself though—rainy day fund.”

  I shut my eyes, feeling lightheaded. “You gave your nest egg to my school.”

  “Yeah, but I kept $20,000,” she repeated.

  I finally opened my eyes. “Why?”

  She shrugged, maddeningly nonchalant over nearly half a million dollars. “You needed it more than I did.”

  “You can’t …” My protest fell away, knowing it would only land on deaf ears; and there was no real way I could give the money back.

  “Did your school need the money?” she pressed.

  “Of course! All public schools can use extra money—especially mine. We might have had to close our doors early this year—maybe even get turned into a charter school.”

  Kate sat back in her seat, some of that characteristic swagger and cockiness returning to her body language. “Then what’s the problem?”

  “You can’t … you can’t just do that.”

  “It’s my money,” she stubbornly resisted.

  “Yeah, but—”

  “I really like you, Mercy,” Kate interrupted. “And not just because you made me cum.”

  I dropped my gaze and my face felt warm with the flush of embarrassment. When I looked up again, Kate looked neither embarrassed nor amused by my reaction. Instead, her intense stare remained locked on my features.

  “Do you remember that night on the island when you asked if I had a crush on your friend, Racy?”

  I wanted to deny the memory. If I could refuse remembering that conversation, I could deny recalling how jealous I’d felt, which had only made our failed sex even more disheartening. But instead of lying to her, I chewed on my bottom lip and made a noise of confirmation.

  “There was no way I could have had a crush on your friend,” she noted. “I had a crush on you.”

  “You did?”

  Kate ducked her head and averted her eyes. “I got embarrassed. I thought you could see right through me. I thought you knew about my massive crush on you and were teasing me.”

  “I had no idea,” I said in truth. “I like you too, Kate,” I murmured. “But we don’t even know each other.”

  “Then give us the chance to get to know each other,” she implored.

  “How?” I challenged. “I could hardly get in contact with you after I found that coconut, and you hadn’t even gone back to Curaçao. Do you have a phone down there? Do you have the internet? You’re not on any social network sites,” I ticked off. “I don’t think you even have an e-mail address. Do you get mail delivered to your house? And don’t even suggest that you could move to Boston. You chose to leave for a reason; you’d only end up resenting me later.”

  Now it was Kate’s turn to look uncomfortable—I couldn’t blame her though; I’d unloaded my frustration with the situation on her.

  She dropped her gaze to the tabletop and squirmed in her seat. “We could figure out a way to make it work. People do long-distance all the time.”

  “Why do you even like me?” I suddenly wondered aloud.

  “Who said I liked you?”

  I arched an eyebrow. “So you’re always in the habit of donating nearly half a million dollars of your personal money to people you don’t like?”

  Her sheepish grin was dangerously adorable. How could a person be cute and sexy at the same time?

  “None of this makes any sense. It would never work,” I started to rant. “We’re too different. We come from different worlds.”

  “I’m pretty sure we’re both from the same planet.”

  “You know what I mean,” I scowled. “I’m a public school teacher and you’re-you’re …” I struggled with the label.

  “And I’m a struggling artist,” she finished for me. “With the exception of your school, I’ve never touched my family’s money. I’d go broke if Curaçao ran out of tourists or coconuts.”

  “You don’t honestly believe your family would let you struggle,” I accused. “They’re your safety net. You get to play the loveable expatriate because you know if something goes wrong, you can always rely on your family.”

  “Why are you holding that against me? They’re my family. That’s what family does.”

  “I don’t have a family like that,” I argued. I could feel my anger and frustration bubbling over. “They basically disowned me when I tried to bring a girl home.”

  Kate raised her voice to meet my energy. “So you’re going to punish me for having a family that cares? And who don’t care if I’m gay, straight, or whatever?”

  “I guess … I guess I am.”

  Kate dropped her eyes to the table where the buffet of breakfast foods she’d ordered on my behalf remained untouched. “I don’t suppose there’s anything I can say to change your mind.”

  I watched her work the muscles in her jaw and the way the smooth column of her throat jerked and twitched. She seemed a volcano of emotions, on the precipice of eruption, yet somehow she was able
to reign them all in.

  After a long, uncomfortable moment, she finally spoke: “I’ll get the check.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  It was easy to feel like my time in Curaçao had only been a dream. The new academic semester hit hard; between addition lessons, spelling quizzes, and teaching my students about the life cycle of butterflies, I had a hard time believing I’d ever left the classroom, let alone had had an adventure in a foreign country.

  Spring semester was consistently more challenging than the fall. Students tended to become wigglier as the weather grew warmer, reminding us all—teachers included—that summer break was only a few months away. Luckily for my own personal sanity, winter had dug in its heels and even as spring break approached, snow remained on the ground as the temperatures had only begun to creep above the freezing point. But the days were getting longer and the sun was rising earlier, which made my morning commute to school less depressing. Even still, most mornings when I arrived a full hour earlier than my students to prep for the day, I tended to second-guess my existence.

  I typically went directly home at the end of the school day, caught up on grading, and went to bed, but my principal, Grace, had convinced me to come out that night for one drink in celebration of being awarded the Emerson “grant.” I didn’t usually hang out with my colleagues after school hours; most of them annoyed me too much to have to spend extra time with them, and they grew increasingly bothersome after a few drinks.

  Teachers know how to party. Don’t let the sweet or stern demeanors fool you—once the final bell on Friday rings, the drinking begins. Boston didn’t have an official Happy Hour—too many shenanigans and over-serving in the early evening hours had compelled the state’s legislature to pull the plug on afternoon discounted drinks, but that didn’t discourage most folks from letting loose after a particularly stressful work day.

  On that particular Friday evening, my colleagues and I stood around our principal, Grace, with glasses raised as she gave a short toast.

  “Listen up everybody, listen up! I know everyone here is a naturally giving and kind person—you wouldn’t be educators otherwise—but I really want to urge everyone to Pay It Forward. Because of the outrageous, wonderful, and very generous Emerson family, we can afford to keep our doors open and provide our students with the resources and education they deserve. Never lose faith in the kindness of strangers. To the Emersons!”

  All around me, voices rose in unison and glasses clinked together. The words got caught in my throat and I was unable to join in the toast. I knew too much. I knew—intimately knew—our pseudo-anonymous benefactor, and rather than celebrating the gifted money with my colleagues, I only felt shame.

  I might have been better able to put my vacation in the rearview mirror, if not for that $400,000. The grant was all anyone could talk about at school; even my students and their parents had somehow caught wind of the unexpected finances. I vowed to myself never to tell them the truth. The truth was messy—it was far easier letting my principal believe that our school had a guardian angel.

  The motivation behind the money still perplexed me. Had Kate donated all of that money to impress me? To get me to see her again? Of course she could have simply wanted to do good with her family’s money, but the fact that she’d left behind a clue—a giant coconut-shaped clue—told me otherwise. It felt too calculated; too much like a game. What kind of person dumped $400,000 on someone she hardly knew? The impulsiveness behind her decision seemed unfathomable to me. I couldn’t even begin to imagine her mindset to have been able to casually part with that amount of money.

  Still, I couldn’t shake the guilt and indebtedness I felt towards Kate. And I hated that. I largely felt ashamed by how I’d left things between us. At the time I hadn’t known how to react or what to think about her overly generous gesture. Money made me nervous; it always had. I’d worked several jobs during college to pay for my tuition, determined to make it through school without relying on my estranged parents. I hated money. And I hated people who had it through no individual effort.

  I could recognize that it was unfair of me to make assumptions or make judgments about entire groups of people, but that hadn’t stopped me from feeling at least a small amount of resentment towards Kate. Sure, she lived modestly and wore bargain store outfits, but had she ever really experienced hardship? Had she ever really worked to get ahead? The casualness with which she lived her life made me uneasy. It was unnatural, maybe even un-American to be satisfied just cruising through life—no attachments, no responsibilities. She couldn’t even manage to have a proper pet.

  I wasn’t in the habit of drunk texting. I wasn’t in the habit of getting drunk, period. But a few cocktails into the night, and my phone had wandered out of my purse and had made its way into my hand. I’d never texted her before, so I didn’t have an open text thread to consult.

  I wrote and deleted and re-wrote several messages. I wanted to tell her how my school was thriving. I wanted her to know we were celebrating her and that my co-workers were toasting in her honor. I wanted to tell her how everyone was giving her parents the credit. I wanted to thank her. Had I ever thanked her? I hated that I couldn’t be sure, and felt even guiltier that I thought the answer might have been no. I wanted to know how she was doing. I wanted to tell her I missed her.

  I typed and erased all of those messages and more until I finally settled on a text.

  Hi.

  No sooner had I hit send when my outbound message was met with a secondary message.

  Error Invalid Number. Please re-send using a valid 10-digit mobile number or valid short code.

  The number she’d covertly programmed into my phone was no longer in service. The familiar sting of nascent tears built in the corners of my eyes.

  I heard a concerned voice: “You okay?”

  I shoved my phone into my purse.

  “Yeah. Fine,” I choked out.

  Grace joined me at the table where I sat alone. Her features looked unconvinced. “Your face looked weird.”

  “I made the mistake of looking at my breaking-news thread,” I lied. “Let that be my punishment for being on my phone at a party.”

  My principal clucked her tongue against the roof of her tongue. “I’m glad you came out. It’s not every day our school gets saved.”

  I hummed in agreement.

  “It’s the strangest thing though. I keep wondering about how the money happened. No one on staff has come forward as the grant application’s author. And then I reached out to the Emerson family themselves. I wanted to thank them for their generosity and see if they wanted to come down to the school to see where their money went.”

  “And?” I hadn’t felt it necessary or appropriate to tell Grace the truth about where the money’s origins. I hadn’t considered she might do her own detective work, however.

  “They denied giving us any money. Whomever I talked to on the phone said she’d never heard of our school. Boy, to be rich like that—how could you forget about that kind of money?”

  “I don’t know,” came my weak reply.

  My response seemed to satisfy Grace for the moment, and she launched into her plans for how we might invest some of the extra money. I smiled and nodded and tried to be an engaged audience, but my thoughts continually drifted to the cell phone at the bottom of my purse.

  + + +

  I woke up on my couch with an uncomfortable feeling in my stomach and a faded blue ink stamp on my inner wrist. The TV was still on in the living room, and an infomercial promised perfect pancakes every time.

  God, what had happened last night?

  I could remember the first drink and Grace’s speech of gratitude towards the Emerson family. I remembered sending—or at least attempting to send Kate a text—but discovered that her phone number no longer worked. My disappointment had resulted in a second drink and then a third. Someone had suggested shots and going to a different bar, and beyond that I couldn’t remember much else.


  On unsteady legs, I walked around my apartment and attempted to retrace my steps, or at least try to remember how I’d miraculously made it home in one piece. I’d locked my front door, and my key ring wasn’t dangling from the door lock. My boots were carefully arranged on the welcome mat in the foyer and my wallet and drivers license were on the kitchen island. The dirty bowl in the sink suggested I’d made myself a bowl of cereal when I’d gotten home. I’d somehow had the clarity of mind to take my contacts out instead of sleeping in them, and my outfit from the previous night was in my laundry hamper.

  I hadn’t remembered to plug in my cell phone, so my battery was nearly drained. My screen was filled with texts from teachers whom I normally didn’t spend time with outside of school. I only had their numbers programmed into my phone because of Grace’s phone tree. We were expected to call each other if school got canceled for a snow day.

  What a fun night!

  We should do that again soon!

  I had no idea you were so fun, Mercy!

  One text caught my attention. It wasn’t from one of my colleagues; it was from my ex-girlfriend, Bethany:

  Sure! When did you have in mind?

  I opened the text to see to what she was referring. I hadn’t spoken to her since returning from Curaçao beyond a thank you text for keeping my fish and my plants alive.

  Do you want to go out?

  The text had been sent at 10:00 p.m. And apparently I had been the message’s author.

  “Oh, no,” I murmured aloud.

  I was never drinking again.

  + + +

  The blue hand stamp hadn’t yet faded from the inside of my wrist. I’d scrubbed long and hard at the stain in the shower, but was now resigned to the fact that only time would erase my uncharacteristic drunken night. Equally unfortunate, I hadn’t been able to take back the invite I’d sent Bethany. Rather than dwell on the drunken text message, however, I embraced the opportunity. Maybe this was the universe’s way of getting me back out there, not punishment for one night of over-indulgence.