Four Summers

by Nyrae Dawn

  Brandon shifts and watches still hot as ever Sadie as she heads over to the group of people about our age. This tall guy grabs her hand. Sadie looks over her shoulder and the smile on her face is nothing but smug. Yeah, she definitely has something to prove.

  “What went down with you guys?” I ask. When we’d come home I just assumed he was still talking to her the way I continued to speak to Charlotte. It wasn’t like they would stay together. We hadn’t planned to come back. Plus they were sixteen and nine months apart is a whole hell of a long time, but I figured they were still cool.

  Brandon shrugs. “I kind of didn’t call her or anything.”

  My brother is a fucking idiot. Not that I didn’t end up doing the same thing to Charlotte, but it was different. I hadn’t been having sex with her. Plus, I was talking to her until everything went down.

  “Did she call you?”

  “Didn’t answer.”

  “Are you shitting me?”

  He just shakes his head. It’s going to be a long summer.

  I don’t leave the porch when Charlotte comes out, Alec right by her side. They aren’t holding hands or anything, but I can’t help but wonder if they usually are. If she wants to be. Maybe she’s changed and this is what she wants, and she and Alec will end up together, running The Village one day like everyone expects they will.

  I shake my head. No, not her. Not that there’s anything wrong with it, but it’s not her dream.

  Last year I would have just walked up to her. Found my way to the middle of their group or by her side and cracked a joke or whispered something in her ear. Anything just to be a part of the group because it was easy for me.

  This year, I don’t do that.

  All their friends laugh and talk. They dance some of the time and Charlotte dances with Alec. Her dad steals her away to help him every once in a while and she leaves her friends to do whatever he needs, like always.

  He never asks Sadie.

  My hands tighten into fists. It’s shitty that it’s like that for her.

  I turn my music on and Brandon throws his football to himself.

  Yet again, I feel this crazy, unexplainable pull to her. Questions swim around in my brain and I wonder if she still likes stars or if her feelings for Alec have changed or if she’s still scared of her mom and Sadie leaving her behind.

  Even though I know I shouldn’t do it, I can’t stop myself from pushing to my feet. Then, turn off my music.

  “Where you going?” Brandon asks, but I don’t answer.

  I feel my brother step up behind me and I’m pretty sure he thinks I’m about to do something stupid so he’s here to have my back. Maybe it isn't the smartest decision, but I’m still going and don’t stop until I walk right up to their friends.

  “Hey! What’s up?” a guy with a shaved head asks. We all played night games and some football with him last year, but I don’t remember his name.

  I pull the hear buds out of my ear and shove them into my pocket.

  Everyone’s saying hi. Sadie is giving Brandon the evil eye and he isn't so much as looking at her. Alec’s jaw is tight and I see him step closer to Charlotte. Is it just me or did she move away?

  I want to ask her to leave with me. To go to our spot so I can talk to her, but I know Alec won’t let her go and that just pisses me off more.

  “Can I talk to you?” I ask her. She still has those few freckles on her cheeks and her skin blotches red. I wonder why she’s embarrassed.

  “We’re busy, man,” Alec says.

  “She knows how to answer for herself.”

  I feel a little guilty but he’s been an asshole to me since the first time we met. I’m not stupid. I know he’s never liked me.

  Alec takes a step toward me, but Charlotte grabs his arm. I study her holding him for a second, before I pry my eyes away to look into hers. What am I doing? I don’t know. I want to talk to her. It doesn’t feel right to be here if I can’t talk to her.

  “I just want to talk, Charlotte. Dance with me.”

  Her eyes go wide and she gasps quietly. I wonder if it’s because I called her Charlotte or because we’ve never danced. Or maybe it’s none of those reasons at all. Maybe she hates me.

  I hold out my hand and try to plead with my eyes. I just need to talk. I’m sorry. A girl giggles, but I ignore it. Sadie huffs, but that doesn’t matter either. She looks at me as though she expects me to turn away. Like she’s not worth holding my hand out to her and I wonder why no one pays her more attention. When I don’t turn away, she places her hand in mine. Her fingers quake gently and it reminds me of how her lips trembled when I kissed her.

  Alec curses and we walk away. I don’t go to the dance floor, but not too far away either. Off to the side of the party, close to the same stretch of beach she walked down that first night we really talked.

  They’re playing a slow song and I pull her to me. My arms wrap around her waist and hers around my neck. People are all around us, some I recognize from last year and others are probably new guests. We’re silent as we move together. This is the quietest my thoughts have been in months.

  I want to tell her what happened. That I’m sorry. That I’m a jerk and she really is my best friend and I shouldn’t have turned my back on her.

  I want to know how things have been here for here. Like if she’s told her parents she wants to leave one day, Or if she's learned anything new about the stars she can teach me.

  What comes out first is, “Are you and Alec…?”

  “No.” She answers quickly, honesty in her features.

  My muscles relax. I would have felt like a jackass if I asked some other guy’s girlfriend to dance.

  I feel her hand knot in the back of my shirt. I don’t understand it, but I’m glad if I’m giving her some kind of support. Someone to lean on.

  “I’m a jerk,” I tell her.

  “Yeah.”

  It feels good to laugh.

  We keep moving in a circle. I let my hand move up and down her back and she buries her face in my shirt.

  “I missed you, Star Girl.”

  She stiffens and I wonder if I went too far. Maybe I shouldn’t have assumed or shouldn’t have pushed, but it’s the truth and I want her to know it. I need her to, so I keep going.

  “A lot happened and I was in a bad place, but I shouldn’t have stopped talking to you.”

  She pulls away to look at me. “What happened? Are you okay?”

  I think maybe I might be. I mean, I had to have been, even from the beginning, but right now I actually feel it. “Yeah…I’m okay. It’s just…” How do I say it? How do I tell her what I let happen?

  “Charlie Rae! Come here for a few minutes! I need your help.”

  Something in her dad’s voice tells me he’s calling her for more reasons than needing her.

  “I gotta go.” She pulls away.

  An urgent need takes me over and I blurt out, “Do you still sneak out?”

  She nods.

  “Meet me tonight and we’ll talk. Shit…I never said sorry. I wanted to tell you sorry first.”

  “Charlie Rae!” her dad calls again.

  Charlotte backs up a few steps, turns, and takes a few more. All I can think is she never told me if she would meet me or not. She never said if it was okay.

  As though she could read my mind, she stops and glances back. “I…I missed you.”

  And then she runs, kicking up sand behind her.

  She doesn't hear me say, “I missed you, too.”

  “You’re sneaking out with her already? I thought she hated you.” Brandon sits up in his bed and turns on the bedside light.

  “Shh. You’ll wake up the house, and that’s not how it is. I just need to talk to her. It’s not like what we saw you doing last summer.”

  Brandon’s face pales. I swear to God he’s about to get sick. His mouth drops open and then he lunges off the bed at me.

  “What the hell!” I hiss as he grabs my arms.

  “
Did you tell? What did you see?”

  I rip away from him. “You’re tripping the hell out. Like I’m going to tell Mom and Dad you screwed Charlotte’s sister. I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t be here right now if I had.”

  He lets out a heavy breath and falls back onto the bed. “I just…” he trails off. “It kind of got out of control. She started talking all serious about her moving with me when she turned eighteen and all this stuff. And it’s just…she’s not… It’s not like I want to hurt her, but it was just so easy with Sadie, ya know? I wanted it to work out. Maybe.”

  I look at my brother, not sure where all this opening up is coming from. “You’re seventeen. You don’t have to be serious about anyone. It’s not like—”

  “—You don’t get it. You know what? Never mind. I’m tired. I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about.” He turns off the light and gets back into bed like we weren’t just talking about, whatever we were talking about.

  “Want me to stay?”

  “Shut up. Go get laid,” he replies.

  “I’m not sleeping with her, you prick. She’s my friend.”

  “Whatever. No one spends as much time together as you two if you’re not going at it, but whatever.”

  Ignoring my brother, I open the window and climb out to go meet Charlotte.

  I wait off to the side of her house because we weren’t able to decide where to meet. After about twenty minutes, I start to wonder if she either ditched me, or if she went to one of our spots to wait.

  Finally I see her sneaking around the building. A smile tugs at my lips. She’s wearing a baseball hat with her hair sticking out the hole. I love how she’s comfortable like that. It makes me miss wearing mine. I don’t know why I don’t anymore.

  “Hey,” I whisper.

  “Hey,” she replies.

  “Where do you want to go?”

  She shrugs. “I don’t know… The creek?” The way she looks down, I wonder if she’s blushing, but I don’t want to shine the flashlight in her face to check.

  I lead the way; surprised it comes back to me so easily. We twist and turn through the woods until I see the little wooden fort she made with her dad when she was a kid. Those are my favorite things about her. That she does all these cool things. She works harder than any guy I know and she’s just as rough and competitive, but she’s also all girl. Especially in the way she melted against me when I kissed her.

  It’s not like Charlotte was my first kiss. I’ve done more than that with Roxi, but I still remember how it felt when my lips touched hers.

  I’ve definitely thought about doing it again.

  We get to the fort and she leads me around back. The moon is so bright out here that it’s easy to see, especially with our flashlights.

  I stop when I see there are two wooden chairs behind the building with a little table between them. I know she said she used to come out here a lot when she was a kid, but I didn’t realize she still did.

  “Where’d these come from?”

  Charlotte sits in one of the chairs. “It was a project for my dad and I this year. He says he needs to keep busy because he’s getting old and doesn’t want to lose his touch. Which I think is ridiculous. Guest are always coming and going all year around. No one keeps as busy as my dad and—”

  “—Charlotte?”

  She looks up at me, face awash in moonlight. “Yeah?”

  “You’re rambling.” Before I probably would have laughed. Maybe said more to make her laugh, but I don’t. Instead I only sit in the chair next to hers. She pulls her knees up so her feet are flat on the chair, and wraps her arms around her legs. She does that when she’s nervous, like when we sat out here and she told me about her parents and how she wanted to leave.

  I guess it’s my time to man up and talk to her, too.

  “It wasn’t you.” As soon as the words leave my mouth I know it’s a stupid thing to say.

  Charlotte laughs. “Is it one of those it’s not you, it’s me speeches? I didn’t realize those went with friendships, too. Unless you think it’s because we kissed, but it had been months so that doesn’t make sense.”

  She rambles more this year than she did last. It’s cute. “It’s not because we kissed. It’s not you that I wanted to stay away from. I was just…having a hard time.”

  “And I would have made that harder through emailing? If you didn’t want to talk anymore, that’s fine. I get it. But I deserved at least a kiss off email—”

  “—A girl got hurt because of me, all right? She got attacked and could have died and I’m the one who set up the fucking meeting!”

  Charlotte goes quiet. The only sound around us is the water in the creek and the rustle of the trees mixed with crickets. Those words were so hard for me to get out. I know it’s stupid. They’re just words, and if I could live through what happened, I could say them, right?

  “Nathaniel…”

  “Chrissy was Roxi’s best friend. She was my best friend, Adam’s girlfriend. He’d been acting kind of different, and not in a good way, but I didn’t realize how much different. I guess part of it was playing Varsity as a freshman and then sophomore. I don’t know, but he started turning into a prick, but he was my friend and I didn’t want to just bail on him.

  “Anyway. They’d been fighting a lot. Adam cheated on her and she broke up with him. Adam kept trying to get Chrissy back, but she wouldn’t talk to him. He talked me into getting her to meet me. He wanted me to tell her I wanted to talk to her. And because she trusted me...she agreed.”

  I stop talking, feeling more like an idiot as I go along. Why did I listen to him, anyway? It wasn’t my business to get in the middle.

  “What happened next?” Charlotte asks.

  “It was at a party, which again, stupid, but I wasn’t thinking. We’d all been drinking so she comes and we meet in this room, and then Adam comes out with flowers and stuff for her. She was upset at first, but then he gave her the flowers and said he was sorry and started to beg her to talk. I left them in there and I went outside. It wasn’t long that I was gone, but…damn, I don’t know. I guess I just had a bad feeling so I went back in and the door was locked. I knocked, but nobody answered and I started freaking out.

  “I’d been in there a million times though and knew they kept keys on top of the doorway so I unlocked it and he had his hands around her throat, Charlotte. He was choking her and her shirt was ripped.”

  My heart is thundering like it did that night.

  “I pulled him off of her, and she was crying, and he kept saying he was sorry and he had too much to drink. Over and over he kept saying he didn’t mean to hurt her. She ran out of the room and I went after her. She didn’t want to tell anyone, but I kept seeing the look in his eyes. The hold he had on her. I could hardly get him off, so I kept pushing her to tell. We stayed out all night and I drove her to the police station to file a report. Things were a mess after that. Half the town was pissed at her—she went in the room, she’d been drinking too, it was an accident and shit like that. They all kept saying how Adam was a good kid and a good ball player. It was like that stuff you see on TV, only real.

  “So yeah, I testified against him. People lied and said it was because I liked her and all sorts of other things that don’t matter. We ended up moving and I just…I couldn’t talk to anyone. Not even you. I just felt like—”

  “It wasn’t your fault, Nathaniel.”

  I want to smile at the way she seems to read my mind, but I can’t make myself do it.

  “Feels like it is.”

  She shuffles beside me and I wonder if she’s going to get up and leave, but she doesn’t. Charlotte reaches over and grabs my hand. I thread my fingers through hers, hold her tightly, and think maybe…just maybe everything would have been a whole lot easier to deal with this whole time, if I’d had her hand in mine.

  When I get up the next morning, my brother isn’t here. Our parents decided to go get massages in the city, which is all kinds of screwed
up if you ask me. We just got here yesterday. I’m not sure why they need a massage already, but if it keeps them from getting on my case, I'm not going to complain.

  I wonder what Charlotte is doing. I'll feel like crap if she has to work with her dad today after how late we were out last night. We didn’t go in until after three—just sat out and talked. She’s good for that. Telling me about life in The Village and her stars. She never expects me to do more than listen unless I want to and it’s not the same as it is with everyone else.

  Mom and Dad might not try to get me to talk because they’re not really good at that kind of thing, but I know they’re always trying to figure me out. Trying to decide how to be the kind of parents who sit down and open up to their kids when we both know they’re not. Whatever. It’s cool. It doesn’t bother me.

  But with Charlotte, I can just chill.

  Brandon’s sitting outside with his stupid fucking football when I go out, and I wonder if he’s had the thing surgically attached without me knowing. I don’t know what it is about him and that ball, but I know it was important for him to bring it and he’s been screwing with it since we got here.

  “What’s up?” I ask him. “Sadie come and bust your balls yet?”

  “Fuck you. And what’s up with you? Why are you all chatty all of a sudden? You’ve been walking around like a kicked puppy for six months and all of a sudden you’re cracking jokes. ” He’s palming the ball tightly between his hands.

  I look at my brother, who’s usually one of the most laid-back people I know, and frown. It’s not like him to lose his temper. All he usually cares about is football and having a good time. Did I miss something these past few months? No. Not with Brandon. He’s never been able to keep anything to himself.

  “What’s your problem, man? You’re being a douche.”

  Brandon drops the ball to the ground and pushes me. Caught off guard, I stumble before lunging at him and pushing him back. My brother hits the ground and I know it’s more from shock than the fact that I’m stronger than him. We screwed around and got in fights when we were kids, but not in a long time.