No One Here Is Lonely
Page 6
We’re supposed to be making plans, figuring out our precollege to-do list, but I’m afraid to make more plans when I don’t know why they changed in the first place.
“I wish you’d have just told me,” I say. “Before I went for my interview and all that stuff.”
Lacey sighs again, leans down so she’s lying on her back against the tiles on the roof. “I don’t know,” she says. “You were so excited about going. God knows why—but I swear I didn’t mean to miss the interview. I really did plan on doing it.”
She offers me the Nutella, but I shake my head. I lie on my back now too, cross my legs at the ankles.
“You don’t know why I was so excited?”
I’m incredulous.
I feel her shoulder lift against mine, a shrug.
“When’s the last time you felt, I don’t know, free?” I ask. “The last time everything was simple, and you could be whatever and whoever you wanted to be.” The last time everything was possible.
For me, it’s the last full day we spent at camp. Me, Lacey and this girl named Kelli who completed our trio that summer. We were the oldest group of campers that year, it being our last year, and we walked around like we owned every inch of Camp Rowan. We rolled up the sleeves of our camp T-shirts so they folded at our shoulders. A group of younger campers followed us around everywhere while we did mandatory junior counselor duties. In the dining hall, we sat with a bunch of other kids our age, the only co-ed group in the whole cafeteria. Lace and I always sat together, and on either side of us there’d be boys with hair that fell into their eyes, whose unending fart jokes we pretended to be repulsed by. Kelli was dating one of them, and they held hands under the table, since dating was strictly forbidden at Camp Rowan. There was a loosely enforced thirty-centimeter rule that had turned into a running joke—partly because it was centimeters, thanks to the camp directors being British, but also because there was never really any consequence for crossing this arbitrary boundary. Whenever two people were spotted walking together or sitting close together, particularly a boy and a girl, somebody would teasingly call out, “THIRTY-CENTIMETER RULE!” and wedge between the couple.
As a secular camp, Camp Rowan rejected the more popular “leave room for the Holy Spirit” phrase, but the sentiment was the same. And, presumably, thirty centimeters was more than enough for the Holy Spirit.
I know it’s pathetic for the best time of my life to have happened when I was fourteen—and really, it’s not like I don’t have hundreds of other good memories—but there’s something different about the time I spent at Camp Rowan, something pure and timeless, a freedom that I haven’t experienced since. I know it would have been different going back as a counselor, but even just for nostalgia’s sake, just for the proximity to all those memories before we left it all behind for good, it would have been worth it.
“The last time I felt free?” Lacey repeats. “Last summer, in LA.”
Her answer doesn’t surprise me, but it is a little disappointing.
“You’re such a weirdo,” she says, nudging me with her shoulder. “You act like everything good that will ever happen has already happened.”
“It feels that way sometimes,” I admit.
“No way,” she says. “Like, we’re free for real now. We can get tattoos.” She waves her phone, with our list on it, and wriggles her eyebrows at me. It’s number two on the list: get a tattoo.
“I can go back to LA whenever I want. I can go and start working on my music and my mom can’t do a thing to stop me.”
“Aren’t you forgetting a little thing called college?” Lacey has a deal with her mom that after she gets a degree, she can do whatever she wants, devote her life to music like she’s always wanted to do.
Lacey doesn’t answer for a moment, then she says, “Speaking of college, what did you say happened to Mia?”
“Oh my God,” I say. “She’s like a totally different person. She got dreads. She wears makeup. Makeup. I swear, she even does her eyebrows.”
“Oh, well, if she does her eyebrows,” Lacey quips.
I laugh. “No, I’m serious. I wouldn’t be surprised if she does something other than study twenty-four/seven. She might even sleep.”
“My God,” Lacey gasps, clutching her chest. “Not our Mia.”
“Right? Mom has been too busy with the party and then with getting ready for that presentation, but it’s only a matter of time till the s-h hits the fan.”
We are quiet for a moment and then I say, “If one year in college can change Mia, I wonder what will happen to us in a year.” I wonder if we’ll be sitting here on Lacey’s roof in a year’s time, home for the summer with new stories and adventures, new lives under our belts.
Lace is more concerned about this summer, the one she seems to feel is spooling out too quickly around us.
“I can’t believe you chickened out,” she says. “What am I supposed to do, skinny-dip twice? Or just watch you skinny-dip?”
“We could just cross it off the list and consider it done. Say you took one for the team.”
Lacey harrumphs. “Yeah, that’s not happening. You’re not getting out of this. There are only five things on the list. Five. We both have to do everything on it.”
“I thought that meant doing it together.” From the moment she got the idea for it a few months ago, the list has always intimidated me. The one comfort—the one thing that made it okay—was that we’d be doing it all together.
“It would have been together, if you’d joined in,” she retorts.
“Well, if we’d gone to Camp Rowan, we’d have gotten the road trip out of the way,” I shoot back, and then we are both silent, a standoff.
“We’ll take another road trip,” Lacey says. “Maybe the drive to State.”
“Maybe,” I say, though hell would probably freeze over before my parents passed on personally escorting me to college.
We are quiet then, and my thoughts trail off until they wind up where they’ve kept drifting to for the past three weeks.
“I can’t believe Will is never going to college.” He’s never going to play lacrosse for the Bruins on the scholarship he worked so hard for.
“Maybe he’s playing somewhere better,” Lacey says, reading my thoughts, and I turn to her, surprised.
“Better than at State?”
“Maybe,” she says.
“Lace,” I say, voice shaking. “He’s dead. How can you say that?”
“I just mean,” she begins, “we don’t know where he is. Maybe it’s someplace better than here. Hopefully it’s someplace better than here. We have to believe that, right?”
“Right,” I say, but something still feels wrong about what she’s said. He’s dead. He’s not coming back.
No matter where he is, he’s no longer with his family, with his friends. Will didn’t want someplace better than here; he wanted to play lacrosse in college.
I can’t get over the unfairness of the fact that he will never get his wish.
With the conversation turned to Will, I remember In Good Company for the first time. Signing up in Lacey’s bathroom while she slept, a week ago. I still haven’t told her what I did.
I start to say something, but Lacey is speaking over me.
“So who kissed who?” she asks. “That night. Who made the first move?”
My mind flashes back to the night he died, to Brendan’s party, to Will’s lips millimeters from mine.
Lacey could never stand the way things went with me and Will, the silent pining, the quiet wanting, the waiting for him to notice me. She thought I should have done something, should have made him notice me. Should have told him straight out that I was in love with him.
“I did,” I say. Lace keeps watching me, waiting for more, but I’m not really in the mood to talk about it. What does it matter who kissed
who?
I’m never going to see Will again. I had five years to make something happen with him, and I wasted them being afraid—that I wouldn’t say the right thing, that I wasn’t good enough, that I wasn’t the type of girl he went for, that he wouldn’t like me back, that he would. All of that no longer matters.
Everything we could have been died that night along with him.
Lacey shifts beside me, but neither of us speaks.
In the silence that follows, I have my chance to tell her about calling Will, the way it felt to hear his voice again, but for some reason, I can’t make the words come out.
EVEN IN THE summer, I never have enough layers for the ice rink. After all these years, you’d think I would have developed a system, but I’m still always at least one layer short. Today, as soon as Sam peels off her sweater to go out onto the ice, I steal it and pull it on, even though it’s about three sizes too small.
It’s Saturday, so the rink is open to the public, which means it is teeming with families and couples. A few people are on the bleachers, spectating like Mia and I are, but most of them are here enjoying the coolest place in Erinville today.
If anyone had asked, I would have given a hard pass to the notion of spending my first day off all week watching Samara’s practice. And I’m sure Mia would have too. But no one did ask, and my mother did “suggest” we all come, and so we are here. Sam and her dance partner, Ty, are practicing a new routine with Sergiy while my parents and Ty’s mom lean over the wall and try to watch them through the mess of people on the ice. From this far away, I can hear Ty, ever the diva, complaining about bumping into people when he spins out of his twizzles, and my mother keeps holding out Sam’s bottle every few minutes to remind her to hydrate. It’s not an official practice—those are normally three days a week after school, and a little more sporadic in the summer—but they apparently had to practice today because they are behind on some new choreography. If it was an official practice, parents would not be allowed to lean over the walls. I once saw Sergiy yelling at a mom for trying to get on the ice to fix a bow on her daughter’s costume during a lesson. “This,” he said, drawing an invisible circle around the rink with his finger, “is my classroom.” He pointed toward the bleachers. “That is your space.”
In his defense, she was a complete stage mom.
But if Sergiy hadn’t won an Olympic medal for Ukraine, like, twenty years ago, and if he wasn’t the only decent ice dance coach in the vicinity of Erinville, parents might pull their kids out. Granted, for every parent who considers Sergiy a tyrant, there’s one who thinks he hung the moon and stars and calls him “Buns and Thighs” behind his…well, buns and thighs.
It is one of the grossest things in the world, sitting through a practice or an ice show where people my parents’ age are drooling over their kids’ teacher. Serg is not completely innocent in this, though. He is definitely aware of his best features, frequently playing them up in tight black pants and tight shirts that show off his biceps. He’s probably just as obsessively dedicated to pumping iron in the gym as he is to flawless lifts and perfect synchronicity in his students.
“Why did you decide to move here, Serg?” Mom asks every few lessons, thanking her lucky stars. “Don’t get me wrong, we’re grateful. So grateful. But why Erinville? Of all places!”
I think it’s because he has family nearby or something like that.
“For a long time, we were worried we might have to let go of the sport, or move, if Sam was going to continue,” Mom had said in a low voice at the last lesson I came to.
“If I hadn’t come, you better have moved,” Sergiy had responded, pointing at the award-winning duo of Paulsen-Wolfe. “It would have been a waste. A big shame.”
If they hadn’t been doing so well, I’d have said Serg’s words were proof that Mom’s kissing up was paying off, but the past three years that Ty and Sam have been dancing together have proven that he is right.
Future Olympians, competition judges have told us.
Born performers.
Gifted beyond their years.
Sergiy’s goal—and Mom’s and Ty’s and Sam’s—is to make Paulsen-Wolfe a household name someday, and they are well on their way.
Right now, my parents are talking with their heads close together, laughing as they watch the kids perform. I wonder if they are tempted to rent a couple of skates and glide out onto the ice themselves, disappear into the crowd like the lovesick teenagers they sometimes act like. My parents have always been PDA-prone, but they’ve taken it to a new level since Dad’s TIA. It’s as if realizing what almost happened has made them hold on to each other that much tighter.
Beside me, Mia gives a big sigh and shifts in her seat. “I could have been prepping for the summit right now,” she says. And it reminds me that she’s only here for a couple more weeks. Soon, she’ll be gone for the rest of the summer. My sisters and I have never been the closest, but up until Mia went to college, we at least always knew about each other’s lives.
I don’t know whether she’s made friends or whether she likes her classes or why she suddenly looks so different. She doesn’t know that the boy whose picture has been splattered all over the news for weeks is the same boy I’ve been in love with since I was thirteen. She doesn’t know that I heard his voice again a week ago or that I’m thinking about him almost every time I’m silent.
And now she’s leaving again.
“Are you excited?” I ask, knowing what her answer will be. Spending the entire summer in DC, going to Congress and doing whatever else she’ll be doing, has been one of Mia’s dreams since she was a kid.
To my surprise, she only shrugs. “I don’t know,” she says. “It feels like it’s so soon.”
The unexpectedness of her response reminds me again of how different she seems, how different she looks, and I have to ask her about it.
“So what’s Stanford like, Mee? Yah,” I add when she turns to glare at me.
Mee-yah. She’s always hated any and all nicknames.
“Big,” she says, giving nothing away.
“I can’t believe out of all of us, you ended up in California,” I say. Mia, who refused to go to Camp Rowan and spent all her summers at science day camps, both because she loved science and because she could never deal with sleepaway camp. She missed home too much, missed Mom too much.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asks, offended.
“I just mean…Lacey’s, like, obsessed with LA.”
“She’s going to State, though, isn’t she?” Mia asks, and I nod.
That’s the one thing that makes the thought of college less daunting. The fact that I’ll be with Lacey, that I already have a roommate, a partner for class assignments, someone to brave the cafeteria with.
When I say this to Mia, she says, “You talk about it like it’s high school. It’s so…different.”
“How?” I ask.
“I don’t know. But nobody gives a shit what you do. It’s like for the first time in your life, you get to make your own choices, your own mistakes. And you have absolutely no one to hide behind.”
I stare at her as she speaks, at the way her face is rounder, the sleek gloss on her lips. “That sounds lonely,” I say, because that’s all I can think. Is that how Mia has felt all this time, being away at college?
She shrugs.
“Maybe it’s different when you go in knowing people,” I say gently.
“Maybe,” she says.
“Has Mom said anything about your hair?” I ask now, because I have to know.
“Nope. She’s very deliberately not saying anything about it,” Mia says with a smirk, and it surprises me, the fact that she’s not terrified of pushing Mom’s buttons. That she seems to genuinely not care what Mom thinks of her dreads.
Mia pulls out her phone to check something.
“Can I borrow someone’s phone?” she asks, a strain of panic in her voice. Mia throws her phone down to Sam, whose eyes immediately become fixed to the small screen in front of her.
“Oh my God,” she says dramatically, dropping onto the nearest bleacher.
Mia and I exchange a look. “What’s wrong?” I ask.
“Ty had the stomach flu three days ago. He spent all day throwing up and he only just told me. I’m going to die.”
“Are you feeling sick?” Mia asks.
“Not yet,” Sam says, “but obviously it’s only a matter of time.”
“He’s probably no longer contagious.”
“You’re contagious for three days after.” Sam waves the phone impatiently. “We’re right at three days. How could he be so selfish? What if I throw up?”
“Pretty sure throwing up is not fatal,” I say, which is exactly the wrong thing to say, because Sam narrows her eyes at me.
As far as my younger sister has ever been concerned, throwing up is terminal.
“Did I say you could wear my sweater?” she spits at me. “Your arms are stretching it out!” She is not incorrect, but I don’t see any reason to admit that.
“You’re not even using it,” I point out.
“Right. Because you are wearing it,” she says, holding out her hand for it.
Seriously?
I roll my eyes and peel off the sweater, throw it down to her.
She slips it on before heading back onto the ice. Probably just to keep me from using it. Sam is as famously unaffected by the cold as Ty is incapacitated by it.
When she gets on the ice, she keeps her distance from Ty, until we hear Serg scolding them because you can’t exactly dance with a good five feet in between you.
Mia snorts a laugh. Then she says the most unexpected thing she’s said all day. “God, I’ve missed you guys.”