“You aren’t going to open it?” she prodded.
“Not with you standing there.”
She chose to tease me rather than be offended. “I only wanted to . . . check for anthrax. Can’t be too careful these days.”
“Good night, Mom.”
She blew me a kiss. “Don’t stay out here too late.”
Thankfully, she left me in peace. When she stopped watching through the kitchen window, I slid my finger under the flap and ripped through the envelope as I read the front. My name was typed, but there was no address. Weird. Maybe it was a prank. Or a late birthday card. Gina or Gray might have dropped it off. They were the most likely candidates since I’d fallen off the radar of my other friends. Max sent a few real cards and a package at Christmas, but if he’d mailed this from El Salvador, it would have had stamps.
I removed a single piece of typing paper from the envelope. As I unfolded it, I scooted my chair toward the bulb in the center of the porch, expecting to have trouble seeing the words. There was no trouble at all. In the middle of the page was a single typed sentence.
I turned thirteen years old today and I went skinny-dipping with Trent McCall.
I dropped the sheet of paper and covered my mouth with my hand.
“Sweet Jesus.”
I wrote that sentence four years ago. Four years ago on a scrap of notebook paper. On a scrap of notebook paper that I put inside Big. Big, who was three parts stuffed animal, one part journal, and all parts mine. No one had ever seen it before.
Someone clearly had.
CHAPTER THREE
Rage. (n.) that gut feeling of disgust when your parents interfere with your life.
I wasn’t certain when Mom and Dad decided it was acceptable to go through my personal belongings, but we were about to have words.
“Mom!” I yelled as I entered the kitchen. And since she didn’t do this alone, I put Dad on the hook too. “Dad!”
They clearly hadn’t anticipated my anger, as they were lounging in the TV room watching their latest Netflix obsession. I wanted them at the kitchen table. I wanted an explanation. Yelling as much, I watched them enter the room and eye me as if I were a Bigfoot they needed to tranq. I flung the envelope down. “You had no right to do this.”
Dad’s head tilted to the side. He spoke in a calm but stern voice. “Sit. Down.”
I sat. Once I was down, I threw the envelope across the table. Paper looks angry when it’s thrown.
“Would you like to tell us what this is about in a civil—”
I civilly interrupted him. “This is about you going through my stuff.”
“No. This is about you cooling your jets, young lady,” Dad answered.
Not one time in the past year had we taken these tones. Mom and Dad had been patient, supportive partners in my surgeries, recovery, and therapy. On the whole, I had very few complaints. But going into my room, pilfering my personal thoughts, typing them out like this . . . No one would be okay with that invasion of privacy. No one.
“You want to tell us what’s going on?” Dad began.
I pointed to the envelope. “That’s what’s going on.”
Dad started to remove the page. It was about then that I realized my parents appeared utterly clueless. If I’d gotten this wrong, my dad was getting ready to read a sentence I’d have a hard time explaining.
“Wait a minute.” I snatched the paper away and looked at Mom. “You gave this to me on the porch. Where did you get it?”
“From the mailbox.”
“It was just in there?” I asked.
“It was just in there,” she repeated.
Time to backpedal. “Somebody played a joke on me.” I pasted on a fake smile. “I thought it was y’all. Family meeting over. Go back to House of Cards. I’m really sorry I raised my voice.”
Mom stared at the envelope. Dad looked uncertain how to proceed. I saw him wondering what it was about the envelope that had caused me to unhinge.
“Would you like to talk about it?” Mom asked.
I shook my head. “No. I’m sorry. I thought . . . I just thought wrong.”
After a moment of uncomfortable silence, Dad said, “Honey, is all this”—he waved at my emotions as if they were another person in the room—“about the anniversary?”
“Don’t talk about Trent, Dad. Please, I . . .” My voice shook, but I kept the tears in check. I missed Trent like I missed the person I used to be.
Makeup covered parts of my scars, but nothing covered up grief. My dad saw it on me.
“Look, kiddo.” He knocked his knuckles on the table. “You’ve got to buck up.”
“Tony.” My mom tried to stop him, but he ignored her.
“No, Tara,” he warned my mom in the same stern voice he’d warned me in earlier. “She’s got enough courage in her, and we’re going to help her get it out. We’ve talked about this.”
“Hello, I’m right here.” I waved, annoyed.
Dad turned his attention back to me. “I’m not trying to be insensitive. Just the opposite. I’m worried about you. . . . We’re worried about you. Mom said we shouldn’t push you back into school, but this outburst, or whatever it is, is more proof you need to be around people. This summer . . . you’re going to be around people.”
My stomach dropped into my toes. My voice quivered. “You’re going to make me, aren’t you?”
Mom and Dad exchanged a glance. “Yes,” they said together.
I got up from the table and quietly pushed in my chair. “You don’t understand—”
“We do.”
It was a solemn chorus, a firm decision.
Mom stood and walked toward me. Her arms folded around me, stroking my hair. Her heart pressed into mine. I felt it beating against me, fast and strong, afraid and confident. Heartbeats are a dichotomy. I left my hands at my side.
“This isn’t a punishment,” she said. “We almost lost you. We’re not going to stand back and watch you lose yourself.”
“I get it. I get it,” I mumbled.
I broke the embrace and walked down the hallway to my bathroom. I stripped myself down to skin and scars and stepped into a cold shower.
I didn’t understand that paper, but I understood my mom and dad. Understood that they wouldn’t budge, and my screaming And if I don’t? would only force them to lay down more consequences. But I wanted to argue. I wanted to fight some more, and I didn’t know why. I wanted to be furious at them, but some part of my brain said they were probably right.
I wouldn’t be making lists in the sand if they weren’t.
When a bad habit became a rut, people noticed. Especially when that rut was the size of the Grand Canyon.
The shower calmed my muscles but not my emotions. I retreated to my room and eyeballed the traitor, Big.
The stuffed blue ostrich sat, floppy and worn, in the middle of my pillows. Just where I’d left him this morning. It wasn’t exactly public knowledge that I’d removed much of Big’s polyfill stuffing and replaced it with paper scraps of my random thoughts. Actually, it narrowed the whodunthisshit to Gina, Gray, Max, Fletcher, Metal Pete . . . Who else? There were maybe a couple of girls from school who had seen Big on an overnight trip, but surely none of those people had time for something like this.
Big was soft in my hands and crinkly to my ears as I squeeze-checked him. He sounded and felt full. Digging carefully into the hole, I removed the first scrap and read. Shame is a fast emotion; I felt it within the first five words I’d written just last week.
I will stop drawing baseball threads around my scars with a Sharpie. I will stop.
I hadn’t stopped yet. Three nights ago, after a deflating doctor’s visit—“No, we can’t do more surgery right now”—I’d gone back to the habit.
Folding the paper into a tiny square, I placed it on my nightstand and removed another. This was a tedious process. The papers weren’t uniform and the hole was small. Ideally, everything—memory, secret, or thought—went in and stay
ed in.
When I unfolded the next one, I laughed. It was much older.
I have now watched every single episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Twice.
God, why couldn’t the sender have picked that one?
I didn’t even remember writing that. It must have been a while ago; I’ve seen the series five times now. There was no telling all the crap I’d shoved into Big over the past five years. As I held him, I realized there was no way to know what was there and what was missing. No way to know if someone had read everything or just that one thing. Searching for the skinny-dipping slip and hoping to God that, somehow, someone had seen it fall out and had returned it to me discreetly was the only choice I had.
Of course, if that were the case, they wouldn’t have typed and delivered it like a cloak-and-dagger asshole.
Still, I wished for a simple answer.
Not everything I removed from Big required an in-depth read. I bypassed plenty on Trent, the wreck, Gina and Gray, funny memories, ridiculous theories, and a slightly embarrassing number of overdramatic thoughts about everything from my period to my parents. Forty-one tries later, I hit the jackpot.
I turned thirteen years old today and I went skinny-dipping with Trent McCall.
I hadn’t expected to find it. But there it was. Despite my worries over who and how and what, the memory itself made me laugh.
I stared at my window now—wishing for a tap, tap, tap.
The night I wrote about started when Trent raised my windowpane a little after midnight. It had been my birthday for three minutes. “Sadie May, come with me. I have a plan.”
Trent was good with plans. I hopped down beside him rather than ask what it was. He always had bread crumbs in his voice, and I followed them like a fairy tale.
Sneaking out was a novelty we both enjoyed, and so far, we hadn’t been caught. We biked the two miles to the end of Santa Rosa Boulevard, then the remaining few miles toward Destin. Traffic on 98 zipped by us, but Trent never slowed down. I kept my eyes on the pavement as he pulled into the public parking on our side of the Destin Bridge.
“What are we doing?” I asked as we chained our bikes to a sign.
“Smoking, drinking, and skinning.”
“Excuse me?”
He tapped his backpack. “You’re a teenager now. We have to make it real.”
“We didn’t make it real when you turned thirteen,” I argued, but really, I was pretty damn excited for whatever came next.
“That’s because you weren’t thirteen yet.”
We laughed at his logic and walked through the soft sand toward the water’s edge. The west jetty stretched like a long rock finger into the Gulf, creating a semi-boundary between the bay, Destin Harbor, and the open ocean. The jetty, like most things at the beach, looked closer than it was. Piers and markers often tricked your eyes, but Trent and I had made this walk to fish and snorkel plenty of times. Lights from the bridge and a nearly full moon accented the water with golden stripes. At one of the nearby bars, some wannabe Jimmy Buffett strummed his guitar and sang about pirates. The music and the moonlight and the wind felt like our best friends.
Trent interrupted the walk with words. Questions. Always questions. What did I want for my birthday? (A visit to FSU’s planetarium.) Were we going to see my grandmother? (No.) Did I think Gray would get me a cool gift? (Yes. He’d given me a gift early—a metal stamped necklace with the longitude and latitude of the Fountain of Youth Park.)
“Balls, that’s cool,” Trent said of the necklace.
We made it to the jetty in about forty-five minutes, sticking close to the shore, even though it was tempting to check out the bird sanctuary when there was no one around to tell us not to. Getting caught by our parents was one thing; getting caught by some surveillance camera was another.
Trent must have known I worried a little about us getting away with this, because he said, “It’s your birthday, Sadie May. Even if we get caught, we’ve practically got a free pass.”
He made a good point.
Laughing, we stepped up on the rocks and checked our balance, and it felt like we were walking on water. The ocean lapped around us, and I wondered if the tides were going in or out. After scrambling thirty-five feet down the jetty and being careful with the slick places and the barnacles, Trent sat down and unzipped his backpack.
“We’re not going to the end?” I asked.
“No need.”
Unsure of what was about to happen, I watched him remove a cigarette, a lighter, and a thermos. I sat down next to him in anticipation.
“Now, what we have here is a unique opportunity.” He lit the cigarette and passed it to me.
I didn’t have a clue what to do, and I told him as much.
“Just inhale and then blow out.”
I did.
I coughed.
He laughed.
I tried again.
I blew zero smoke rings in my two triumphant drags.
He took the cigarette back, puffed one cloud (also not a ring), and then stubbed it out against the rock. “One down,” he bragged. “Now, this.”
“Are you going to get me drunk, Trent McCall?”
“On a cup of wine? Hardly. This is for the experience. We have the rest of our lives to get wasted.”
“Are you going to bring Gina out here for her birthday?”
“Maybe,” he said with a wink. “Tonight’s your night, little sister.”
I loved it when he called me family. Trent and Max weren’t just next-door neighbors. Mom and Dad teased that they got stuck with me, but they chose the boys. We’d been fighting and getting in trouble and eating mac and cheese together all our lives. Mac-and-cheese bonds are stronger than blood swears.
Trent twisted the thermos lid and passed me the container. Tipping my nose toward the liquid, I recognized it. Pinot grigio. My parents drank it after dinner, and no self-respecting kid with a box of wine in her fridge resisted sampling the wares.
I took an easy sip and said, “Cheers,” even though there were no glasses to clink.
Trent tipped up the thermos and echoed my cheers. He returned it to his pack. “Now, you don’t have to do the next part if you don’t want, but I totally think we should because we’ll laugh our asses off about it someday.”
“I’m up for anything.”
Trent popped me hard in the biceps. “You sure about that?” He peeled off his shirt.
Skinning. Oh, right. I hadn’t asked what he meant by that earlier because I hadn’t wanted to know, but now, I had a very good idea.
He slid off his shoes.
He shimmied out of his cutoffs.
“Too far?” he asked.
“Um . . .”
“You don’t have to.” He shook his head convincingly. “I was only going for the trifecta of adulthood.”
“No. I’m game. As long as we get in before we really strip down.”
More relieved than surprised, I set to work, removing my shoes, T-shirt, and shorts, until I had a bathing suit that was an underwear edition. We were awkward with a side of awkward. Like two kids at camp who discover the showers don’t have doors.
I jumped in first. The water was July-warm and perfect. Trent cannonballed in next to me, laughing as he resurfaced.
“I can’t believe we’re doing this.” I splashed him in the face.
His face pinked. “Gray said the same thing.”
Awesome. He’d done this with Gray.
“And you’re going to do it with Gina,” I said.
He giggled.
I shouldn’t have used the words do it.
Trent stopped laughing and said, “Don’t tell Gray I told you. Okay? Or Gina.”
“Okay.”
“Swear,” he said, and put out his pinkie.
We swore all the swears we knew.
Trent claimed pinkie swears should be rated R. Then, without further discussion, we turned our backs to each other and took off the rest of our clothes. I held mine in my han
d. I’m not sure what he did with his.
There I was, naked with Trent McCall. Technically, I was naked near Trent McCall, but it seemed like a pretty legit skinny-dip to me.
“Are we going to turn around?” he asked.
“Don’t ask me. This was your idea. You think it counts if we don’t?”
“Yep.” He sounded truly nervous now.
“What do we do?” I asked.
His voice crawled out of him. “Put our underwear back on?”
We did exactly that, swam back to the rocks and hauled ourselves out, dripping and laughing. “I didn’t think you’d strip,” Trent said.
“And miss out on the trifecta of adulthood? I don’t think so,” I teased.
“But we’re not going to tell anyone?”
“Naw,” I promised.
And I hadn’t. Except now, it seemed like I had.
CHAPTER FOUR
I opened my computer, hoping to wind down the night with Max.
The connection at the convent compound where he’d lived for the past eleven months could be pretty sketchy. We were lucky enough to live in the same time zone, but El Salvador didn’t do daylight saving time, so he was actually an hour behind me. It was nine forty-five his time. I opened a chat window and waited to see if he would respond. If not, I’d email.
Me: You there?
Three little dots appeared.
Him: Yep.
Me: What’s up?
Him: I have a surprise for you.
Me: I need a good one. Rough night around here.
Him: Tell me about it.
I opted to leave him out of the mysterious Big business and go straight to the most worrisome thing on my mind.
Me: My parents are currently the spawn of Satan.
Him:
I laughed. Max and his small victories of making heavy things light.
I explained that they were making me go back to school in the fall and that they wanted me to be social this summer.
Him: What do you think about all that?
Me: It would be easier if you were here.
I didn’t want to say too much on the topic because Max felt really isolated.