“Don’t forget your bathing suit,” she said. “Our maintenance guy called yesterday and it’s official. The pool and hot tub are both up and running.”
“Oh, God,” I said, glancing down the hall at my bag, sitting by the bed. “I totally forgot about that. I’m not even sure I have a suit anymore.”
“We can pick one up for you,” she replied. “Actually, there’s this really cute boutique on the boardwalk in Colby that my friend Heidi owns. We’ll stop in there if we get in before they close.” There was a loud wail in the background. “Oh, dear. Connor just dumped a bowl of Cheerios on Madison. I’d better go. I’ll see you at four?”
“Yeah,” I said. “See you then.”
Her phone went down with a clatter—she always had to get off the phone in a hurry, it seemed—and I hung up mine, sliding it back in my pocket. I turned around just in time to see my dad coming back in, Chuckles’s car pulling away in the window behind him.
“So,” I said as the door swung shut, “I hope this is a good time to let you know I’m going to be needing a new bathing suit.”
He stopped where he was, his face tightening. “Oh, for God’s sake. He told you? I asked him specifically not to. I swear he’s never been able to keep his mouth shut about anything.”
I just looked at him, confused. “Who are you talking about? ”
“Chuckles,” he said, annoyed. Then he looked at me. “The Hawaii job? He told you. Right?”
Slowly, I shook my head. “I was talking about the trip today. Mom has a pool.”
He exhaled, then ran a hand over his face. “Oh,” he said softly.
We just stood there for a moment, both of us still. Coffee, Kona, aloha, not to mention Luna Blu’s apparent reprieve and his date with the councilwoman: it suddenly all made sense. “We’re going to Hawaii?” I asked finally. “When?”
“Nothing’s official yet,” he replied, moving over to the couch and sitting down. “It’s a crazy offer anyway. This restaurant that’s not even open yet and already a total mess . . . I’d be insane to agree to it.”
“When?” I said again.
He swallowed, tilting his head back and studying the ceiling. “Five weeks. Give or take a few days.”
Immediately, I thought of my mother, how I’d averted the custody issue with my promises of this trip and weekends, not to mention how things had improved between us since. Hawaii might as well have been another world.
“You wouldn’t have to go,” my dad said now, looking at me.
“I’d stay here?”
His brow furrowed. “Well . . . no. I was thinking you could go back home to your mom’s. Finish the year and graduate there, with your friends.”
Home. As he said this word, nothing came to mind. Not an image, or a place. “So those are the options?” I said. “Mom’s or Hawaii?”
“Mclean.” He cleared his throat. “I told you, nothing is decided yet.”
It was so weird. Just then, suddenly and totally unexpectedly, I was certain I was going to cry. And not just cry, but cry those hot, mad tears that sting your throat and burn your eyes, the kind you only do in private when you know no one can see or hear you, not even the person that caused them. Especially them.
“So this is why you’ve been with the councilwoman,” I said slowly.
“We’ve just been on a couple of dates. That’s all.”
“Does she know about Hawaii?”
He blinked, then glanced at me. “Nothing to know. I told you, no plans have been made.”
“Except for the meat order going from monthly to weekly,” I said. He raised his eyebrows. “Doesn’t bode well for the restaurant. Means you’re either running out of money, or time. Or both.”
He sat back, shaking his head. “You don’t miss much, do you? ”
“Just repeating what you told me back in Petree,” I said. “Or Montford Falls.”
“Petree,” he replied. “In Montford, they had time and money. That’s why they made it.”
“And Luna Blu won’t,” I said slowly.
“Probably not.” He rubbed a hand over his face, then dropped it, looking at me. “I’m serious about what I said, though. You can’t just pick up and move halfway across the world so close to finishing school. Your mother wouldn’t stand for it.”
“It’s not her choice, though.”
“Why don’t you want to go home?” he asked.
“Because it’s not home anymore,” I said. “It hasn’t been for three years. And yeah, Mom and I are getting along better, but that doesn’t mean I want to live with her.”
My dad rubbed his hand over his face, the sure sign that he was tired and frustrated. “I need to get to the restaurant,” he said, starting out of the room. “Just think about this, okay? We can discuss it further tonight.”
“Mom’s picking me up for the beach at four,” I said.
“Then when you get back. Nothing has to be decided right now.” iv width="1em" align="left">He got to his feet, then turned to start down the hallway. I said, “I can’t go back there. You don’t understand. I’m not . . .”
He stopped, then looked back at me, waiting for me to finish this sentence, and I realized I couldn’t. In my head, it went off in a million directions—I’m not that girl anymore. I’m not sure who I am—each of them only leading to more complications and explanations.
My dad’s phone, sitting on the table, suddenly rang. But he didn’t answer, instead kept looking at me. “Not what?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said, nodding at his phone. “Never mind.”
“Stay right there. I want to keep talking about this,” he said as he picked it up, flipping it open. “Gus Sweet. Yeah, hi. No, I’m on my way. . . .”
I watched him as he turned, still talking, and went down the hallway into his bedroom. As soon as he was out of sight, I grabbed my backpack and bolted.
The air was sharp, clear, and I felt it fill my lungs like water as I sucked in a breath and started around the house to my shortcut to the bus stop. The grass was wet under my feet, my cheeks stinging as I pushed myself forward through the yard and into that of the building behind us.
Dusted with frost, it looked even more bereft than usual, and when I got to its side yard, the bus stop in sight ahead, I stopped, then bent down, putting my hands on my legs, and tried to catch my breath and swallow back my tears. I could feel the cold all around me: seeping through my shoes, in the air, moving through and around this empty, abandoned place beside me. I turned, taking a breath, and looked over, seeing my reflection in one of the remaining windows. My face was wild, lost, and for a second I didn’t recognize myself. Like the house was looking at me, and I was a stranger. No home, no control, and no idea where I was, only where I might be going.
“Mclean. Wait up!”
I bit my lip at the sound of Dave’s voice, calling out from behind me. Between studying and some extra credit work I needed to do before the end of this, the last day of the grading period, I’d managed to avoid just about everyone for the entire school day. Until now.
“Hey,” I said as he jogged up, falling into place behind me.
“Where have you been all day?” he said. “I thought you cut or something.”
“I had tests,” I told him as we moved with the rest of the crowd through the main entrance. “And some other stuff.”
“Oh, right. Because you’re leaving.”
“What?”
“For the beach. Today. With your mom.” He looked at me, narrowing his eyes. “Right?”
“Oh. Yeah,” I said, shaking my head. “Sorry. I’m just, you know, distracted. About the trip, and everything.”
“Sure,” he said, but he kept his eyes on me, even as I focused my attention steadily forward. “So . . . are you leaving right away or are you coming to the restaurant for a while?”
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“Cool. Ride with me.”
Being alone, together, at right this moment, was exactly what I didn’t want to do. But lacking any way of getting out of it, I followed him to the parking lot, sliding into the passenger seat of the Volvo. After three false starts, he finally managed to coax it out of the space and toward the exit.
“So,” he said as we turned onto the main road, the muffler rattling, “I’ve been thinking.”
“Yeah?”
He nodded. “You really need to go out with me.”
I blinked. “I’m sorry?”
“You know. You, me. A restaurant or movie. Together.” He glanced over, shifting gears. “Maybe it’s a new concept for you? If so, I’ll be happy to walk you through it.”
“You want to take me to a movie?” I asked.
“Well, not really,” he said. “What I really want is for you to be my girlfriend. But I thought saying that might scare you off.”
I felt my heart jump in my chest. “Are you always so direct about this kind of thing?”
“No,” he said. We turned right, starting up the hill toward downtown, the tall buildings of the hospital and U bell tower visible at the top. “But I get the feeling you’re in a hurry, leaving and all, so I figured I should cut to the chase.”
“I’m only going to be gone a week,” I said softly.
“True,” he said as the engine strained, still climbing. “But I’ve been wanting to do it for a while and didn’t want to wait any longer.”
“Really?” I asked. He nodded. “Like, since when?”
He thought for a second. “The day you hit me with that basketball.”
“That was attractive to you?”
“Not exactly,” he replied. “More like embarrassing and humiliating. But there was something about it as a moment. . . . It was like a clean slate. No posturing or pretending. It was, you know, real.”
We were coming into town now, passing FrayBake, Luna Blu only a few blocks away. “Real,” I repeated.
“Yeah. I mean, it’s impossible to fake anything if you’ve already seen the other person in a way they’d never choose for you to. You can’t go back from that.”
“No,” I said. “I guess you can’t.”
He turned into the Luna Blu lot, parking beside a VW, and we got out and started walking toward the kitchen entrance. “So,” he said, “not to sound pushy or desperate, but you haven’t exactly answered—”
“Yo! Wait up! ” I heard a voice yell from behind us. I turned just in time to see Ellis’s van sliding into the spot beside the Volvo. A moment later, he was jogging toward us, his keys jingling in one hand. “Am I glad to see you g. I thought I was late.”
Dave glanced at his watch. “Actually, we’re all late.”
“By two minutes,” I told him. “I don’t think she’ll flog us or anything.”
“You don’t know that.” He pulled open the back door. As Ellis ducked in, and I followed, he said, “This is Deb we’re talking about.”
“Actually,” I said, stopping in front of my dad’s closed office, “I need to stop in here. I’ll catch up with you guys.”
“Uh-oh,” Ellis said. “She was our sympathy vote.”
“But now we can say it was her fault,” Dave said. To me he added, “Take your time!”
I made a face, and then they were gone, the door that led into the restaurant banging shut behind them. I leaned a little closer to my dad’s door: I could hear him inside talking, his voice low.
“Wouldn’t knock just now,” someone said, and I turned to see Jason standing down the hallway, clipboard in hand, in the narrow room where they kept all the canned and dried goods. “Your dad said no interruptions until further notice.”
“Really,” I said, looking at the door again. “Did he tell you what was going on?”
“I didn’t ask.” He nodded, checking something off his list. “But they’ve been in there for a while.”
I was about to ask him who was with my dad before deciding against it. Instead, I stepped back, thanking him, and headed upstairs.
The restaurant was empty and quiet. The only sounds were the beer cooler humming and the ticking of the fan over the hostess station, turned on too high a speed. I stopped at the end of the bar, looking down the row of tables, each neatly set and waiting for opening. Like a clean slate, I thought, remembering what Dave had said earlier. Even though each shift started the same way, on any given night, anything could happen from here.
It was surprisingly quiet as I climbed the stairs to the attic room, and I wondered if Dave and everyone else had left or something. When I got to the landing, I saw them all gathered around Deb, who was sitting with her back to me on one of the tables, her computer open in her lap. I couldn’t see what was on the screen, but everyone was studying it.
“. . . got to be some kind of joke,” she was saying. “Either that or just a coincidence.”
“I’m sorry, but they aren’t just similar. I mean, look at that one and then that one.” Heather reached forward, pointing at the screen. “It’s the same girl.”
“Different names, though,” Riley murmured.
“Different first names,” Heather said. “Like I said: same girl.”
“What’s going on?” I asked.
Deb jumped, startled, and shut the laptop, turning around. “Nothing. I was just—”
“—updating the Ume.com page for the model and linking our accounts to it,” Heather finished for her, opening it up again. “Imagine our surprise when we put in your e-mail and five profiles popped up.”div “Heather,” Riley said, her voice low.
“What? It’s weird, we all agreed on that ten minutes ago.” She looked at me as Dave and Ellis turned their attention back to the computer. “What are you, a split personality or something? ”
I felt my mouth go dry as the impact of what they’d discovered finally began to hit me. I stepped forward, my eyes narrowing to the screen on the table, and the list of names there. Five girls, five profiles, four pictures. MCLEAN SWEET. ELIZA SWEET. LIZBET SWEET. BETH SWEET. And at the bottom, just a name, nothing else for Liz Sweet. It was as far as I’d gotten.
“Mclean?” Deb said softly. I looked at her, still very aware of Dave studying the screen only a few feet from me. “What’s all this about?”
I swallowed. They’d all been so honest with me, so open. Dave and his past embarrassments, Riley and her dirtbags, Ellis and the Love Van, Deb and, well, everything. Even Heather had pointed out her house and talked about her dad, the technophobe Loeb fan. With this, they had perfectly good reason to doubt everything I had told them in return. Even if, I thought, looking at Dave, it was true.
“I . . .” I began, but no words came, nothing, just a gasp of breath, and then I was turning back down the stairs, picking up speed as I went. I moved quickly back through the restaurant, past Tracey, who was stacking menus at the bar.
“Hey!” she called out, a blur in my side vision. “Where’s the fire?”
I ignored this as I moved on, through the door and down the hallway to the back entrance. I was just pushing the door open, my palm flat on the flimsy screen, when I heard Opal come out of my dad’s office, behind me.
“You should have told me,” she said over her shoulder. Her face was flushed, angry. “You let me just go along here like an idiot, thinking things were okay.”
“I didn’t know for sure,” my dad said.
“But you knew something!” She stopped, whirling around to face him. “And you knew how I felt about this place, and these people. You knew, and you said nothing.”
“Opal,” my dad said, but she was already turning, walking away, pushing open the door to the restaurant with a bang and going through it. My dad watched her go with a sigh, his shoulders sagging. Then he saw me. “Mclean. When—”
“So it’s official, then,”
I said, cutting him off. “We’re leaving?”
“We need to talk about it,” he replied, coming closer. “There’s a lot to consider.”
“I want to go,” I said. “I’ll go whenever. I’ll go now.”
“Now?” He narrowed his eyes, concerned. “What are you talking about? What’s wrong?”
I shook my head, stepping out onto the ramp that led to the door. “I have to get back to the house. Mom’s . . . she’s waiting for me.”
“Hey, hold on a second,” he said. “Just talk to me.”
It was what everyone wanted. My mom, my dad, my friends upstairs, not to mention all the people in all the places I’d left behin. But talk was cheap and useless. Action was what mattered. And me, I was moving. Now, again, always.
Fourteen
“Sure you’re okay?” my mom asked, glancing over at me. “Not too hot? Too cold?”
I looked at the console in front of me, where there were buttons for seat heat, regular heat, fan, humidity control. Peter’s SUV, one of the biggest I’d ever seen, wasn’t a car as much as a living space with wheels. “I’m good.”
“Okay,” she said. “But if you want to adjust anything, feel free.”
So far, we’d been on the road for a little under an hour, and conversation had been limited to this topic, the weather, and the beach itself. The car was on cruise control, and I honestly felt like I was, as well—just going through the motions while the chaos of the afternoon receded, mile after mile, behind us.
I’d been right: when I got back to the house, my mom was waiting, busy distributing juice boxes to the twins, who were strapped into their adjoining car seats in the vast backseat. “Hello!” she’d called out, waving a plastic straw at me. “Ready for a road trip?”
“Yeah,” I’d replied. “Let me just get my stuff.”
Inside the house, I splashed water on my face and tried to calm down. All I could think of was everyone gathered around that laptop, with those versions of me up for scrutiny in front of them. The shame I felt was like a fever, hot and cold and clammy all at once, and no amount of buttons or adjusting would make a damn bit of difference.