“At what point do you finally get fed up and just, I don’t know, not be there when she comes running back to you?”
“Maybe some other time?” I blurt out to Julie before I can stop myself.
She beams back at me. “Sure. Whenever you’re ready, I’m around.”
And as I walk out of the employee break room, I can’t help but wonder if I’ll ever be ready.
CHAPTER 12
IAN
The first time I ever threw a punch was the day we received the medal from the army.
It had been a week since we’d gotten the phone call politely informing us that my father was dead, and my mother’s screams were still constantly echoing in my ears.
I didn’t know what to do. I tried to comfort her, but there was no room for that. All of her brothers and sisters were so tightly crammed around, it was almost impossible to get to her. Like they’d built a fortress of bodies and I didn’t know the password.
The first few days I was numb. I couldn’t play guitar. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t feel. I could sense the emotions on standby, leaning impatiently against the door, waiting until I turned the knob and they all came tumbling into my life.
I was able to keep them at bay for almost a week. Then the medal came. My mother opened the package and fell apart all over again. It dropped to the floor and spilled out of its little box. My eyes tracked it as it bounced twice in slow motion before coming to rest near the foot of the coatrack, where my dad’s winter coat was still hanging, reminding me that he would forever be cold, from that moment on.
All I could focus on was how gold the medal was. So bright and shiny that it hurt my eyes. Like looking directly at the sun. I knew my dad had received it because he’d been courageous. Because he’d sacrificed his own life for the lives of his men. Somewhere out there people were living because of him. Somewhere out there people were eating, drinking, breathing, running, jumping, sleeping, waking, laughing, crying, while all we had was this shiny piece of shit on the floor of our crappy apartment.
I turned, right then and there, and rammed my fist into the door.
It hurt like hell. I sprained three fingers. I couldn’t play guitar for a month. And yet I didn’t even cry out. I didn’t feel a thing.
My dad had tried to teach me to fight my entire life, and I would never partake. He signed me up for karate when I was seven; I quit after one class. He installed a punching bag in my room when I was twelve; I used it to hang clothes on. When we would come to Winlock Harbor in the summers, Grayson and Mike were the ones he would wrestle with and play army base with on the beach, while I sat in a nearby chair and read. When I turned eighteen, he tried to get me to enlist, but I had no interest.
Even though he would never say it, I think he was always disappointed that I hadn’t inherited his competitive streak. His need for physicality. I always thought it was stupid. Punching something to release your anger.
I guess I had just never been angry enough.
Despite my one-hit-wonder punching match with the apartment door, I’ve never actually been in a real fight before. Something I might have been wise to remember before I dove through the window of Whitney’s bedroom like a wannabe action star.
But I wasn’t fueled by wisdom at that moment. I was fueled by something else. Something I hadn’t felt since that day they delivered my father’s medal.
I catch them both by surprise when I tumble onto the hardwood floor. They’re on the bed. He’s on top of her, pinning her down with his hands. Her tank top is pushed up, revealing her bra underneath, and her jeans are unbuttoned.
Something animalistic comes over me and I lunge forward, grab the guy by the shoulders, and rip him off her. He’s on his feet in a second, throwing the first punch. I dodge that one easily and feel pretty good about myself. Until the second punch hits me in the side of the face and knocks me right off my feet. Even though I’ve never fought before, I know that being on the floor this early is a bad thing.
I scramble to my knees just as his foot makes contact with my stomach. I let out a groan. I suddenly wish I had paid more attention in that one karate class.
I can write a ballad that will sweep a girl right off her feet, but when it comes to actually saving her, it turns out I’m pretty useless.
The guy gets in two more blows to the stomach before I collapse again. I cough, and blood trickles out of my mouth.
I can hear my dad’s voice in my head. Get up, Ian! Fight back!
But I’ve already given up. The guy has already won. I’m just going to have to live with the fact that I tried to rescue Whitney and I failed. If Grayson were here, this would be another story. He’d have the guy pinned and pleading for mercy by now. Even Mike would have thrown a stupid punch. I just stood there and let myself be taken down.
I cover my head and brace myself for more blows. He’ll want to finish me off. He’ll want to make sure I’m really down.
I try to disappear. I try to escape this moment by retreating into my head, so I don’t have to be here. So I don’t have to acknowledge the fact that I’m a big fat failure. That I let my dad down in more ways than one.
I think about my mom dancing the Macarena on the beach. I think about my grandparents cooking breakfast together in the kitchen the way they do every morning. I think about fishing with my father. I think about Whitney beating me with a straightening iron.
Then suddenly my thoughts are interrupted by a loud, girly shriek.
Panicked, I lift my head and pop to my feet, discovering an untapped well of strength.
But what I see stops me cold.
The guy is on his knees, hunched over, his forehead resting on the ground. He’s moaning in agony. I recognize the sound of that agony. It’s a pain only another man can fully understand.
Whitney stands next to him, breathing heavily.
“What did you do?” I ask dazedly.
“What do you think I did? I kicked him in the nads.”
My eyes widen. That was him who screamed like that? I stare back and forth between Whitney and her attacker—who has now become the attackee—and I can’t seem to find the right words. Or any words, for that matter.
Whitney, however, doesn’t seem to have that problem. “You’re welcome.”
An hour later I’m holding a cold compress to the side of my head while Whitney is frantically cleaning her bedroom, trying to erase all signs of the struggle. Apparently I didn’t even realize I crashed into a lamp when I fell to the ground in my champion prize fight.
“Are you sure you don’t want to call the police?” I ask for the tenth time.
She sighs, growing impatient with me. “Yes.”
“I don’t get why you’d just let him walk out of here.”
“Well,” she says with a smile as she sweeps shattered pieces of light bulb into a dustpan, “he didn’t really walk. It was more of a hobble.”
“This is no time for jokes. He attacked you.”
She shakes her head. “It was a misunderstanding.”
“A misunderstanding?” I yell way too loudly. It echoes in my damaged brain, causing the room to spin a little. “C’mon, Whitney. I know you’re not that stupid.”
She freezes, her body hunched over the dustpan. I can’t see her face, so I can’t read her expression, but it doesn’t seem to matter, because a second later she resumes sweeping. “I gave off the wrong signal. Apparently that’s what I do. Apparently what I think is a profound, meaningful conversation is actually just foreplay.”
For the first time since this whole ordeal began—maybe even for the first time ever—I hear the fragility in her voice. I catch a peek at the vulnerability under her tough exterior. And it stabs me in the chest.
“You have to tell your dad,” I say quietly. “Or at least Grayson.”
She points the full dustpan at me. “And you need to keep pressing those frozen peas to your head. Maybe it’ll freeze your brain so you’ll stop coming up with boneheaded ideas.”
&n
bsp; “I don’t think you get how serious this is,” I go on. “If I hadn’t come in, he would’ve . . . he could’ve . . .” But I can’t even bring myself to say the words.
Whitney laughs. “If you hadn’t come in and kicked the shit out of him?”
I scowl. “You know what I mean.”
She dumps the glass pieces into a trash bag. “Look. I’ll make you a deal. You won’t tell anyone what happened here tonight, and I won’t tell anyone that you got your ass saved by a girl.”
“But if we tell the police—” I begin.
Whitney cuts me off, all the playfulness drained from her voice. “If we tell the police, the whole island is going to know what went down here, and then the whole island is going to be thinking, ‘Well, it’s Whitney Cartwright. What did you expect?’ ”
I fall silent.
Does she really think that?
“Whitney,” I begin hesitantly, “why did you stop coming to Winlock Harbor?”
She doesn’t answer. She just goes to work spritzing the hardwood floor with cleaner and wiping up my blood with a paper towel.
“Whit . . . ,” I implore, using Grayson’s nickname for her.
“You, of all people, Ian, should know what it’s like to have things said behind your back.”
I recoil. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
She rolls her eyes. “Don’t play dumb.”
“I’m not. What are people saying?”
“Only the truth!” she cries. “That your father is dead. That your mother is drinking. That you aren’t handling it well at all.”
“How the fuck am I supposed to handle it?” I roar, tears springing to my eyes. I swat them away. “What am I supposed to do? Erect a park bench? Join a grief support group? Here’s a news flash for you, Whitney. There is no way to handle it well. And what my mother drinks or does not drink is no one’s goddamn business.”
I storm out of Whitney’s room, stomp down the hallway to the guest room, and slam the door. It takes me a few minutes and several deep breaths to calm down, but once I do, that’s when I finally realize what just happened.
She manipulated me.
That sneaky girl.
I shake my head in disbelief and yank the door back open. I march back down the hallway, ready to give her an earful. Ready to let her know, quite forcefully if I have to, that I’m onto her games. She can’t just turn the conversation around because she doesn’t want to face what happened. She can’t just name drop my dead dad and borderline alcoholic mother to avoid dealing with her own crap.
I’m not falling for it.
Her door is closed. I try the handle but it’s locked. I rap hard and wait. There’s a long pause before she says, “Go away.”
“I know what you just did, Whitney. You can’t turn this around on me. This is not about me.”
Another really long pause. It feels like hours before she responds again. “I said GO AWAY, Ian.”
I let out a huff and plod back to the guest room. I pace the length of the room for a good five minutes, trying to work off the steam that’s rapidly rising inside me.
Why is that girl so infuriating?
And the better question, why do I even let her get to me?
I flip on the TV and navigate the DVR to the recorded episode of Crusade of Kings. Even though five people die in the first five minutes, I can’t sit still long enough to keep watching.
My fingers twitch. I try to shake them out. I make a fist and release it over and over again, but nothing works.
I know exactly what this feeling is. And I know there’s only one way to get rid of it.
I yank open my door again and practically run into Grayson’s room. I search every drawer until I finally find what I’m looking for—the key.
I open the hall closet, grab my guitar and legal pad, and carry them back to the guest room, then slam the door behind me and lock myself inside.
I sit cross-legged on the bed, press record on my phone, and start playing. Words and melodies and chords pour out of me so fast, I can barely keep up.
I don’t even hear them. I live inside them. I become them and they become me.
I don’t stop until the song is finished.
By then it’s four in the morning.
CHAPTER 13
GRAYSON
I find Harper in the beach club’s deserted kids’ camp. She’s sitting on the edge of the small kiddie pool with her bare feet in the water. She’s inched up her sundress so the tops of her thighs are visible. Her lean, tan legs look incredible in the pool lights. I force myself to look elsewhere.
It’s not the first time I’ve noticed Harper. After all, we grew up together. I remember the summer when my family came back to the island and she magically had breasts. Mike caught me staring at them once and got really upset. But can you honestly blame me? I was thirteen. And Harper is a knockout. She always has been. But from that day on I trained myself to keep my eyes above the neckline. Out of respect for Mike.
“You thought I was going after him, didn’t you?” Harper says as I approach. She barely even looks up from the water. I wonder how she knew it was me.
I shrug and sit down next to her, kicking off my flip-flops and dipping my feet into the warm water.
“I thought about it,” she admits.
“What made you change your mind?”
“That.” She nods to a garden shed designed to look like a small cottage just outside the pool’s gate.
I smile at the memory. It was six summers ago. We were twelve and decided to play Spin the Bottle. It was Harper’s idea. She’d seen it in a movie or something. She gathered Bree and Riley, two of her friends from school, and Mike gathered me and Ian, and the six of us sat in a circle inside the shed where they keep the lawn mowers and weed whackers and bags of mulch.
We didn’t have a bottle, so we used a flashlight we’d found.
Mike and Harper weren’t exactly an official item yet, but it was only a matter of time. They spent nearly every waking moment together. Their chemistry was palpable even back then.
Harper was the first to spin, and the flashlight landed on me. There was no room for interpretation. It was pointed directly at me. If the thing had been on, it would have been a spotlight. Instinctively I looked to Mike, but he was unreadable. His eyes were cast to the ground.
Harper started to crawl toward me, her lips pursed.
I knew, from her previous lengthy explanation of the rules, how this was supposed to work. I was supposed to meet her halfway. We were supposed to kiss in the middle. But suddenly I couldn’t move.
I remember how scared I was. This was going to be my first kiss. And it was going to be with the girl I knew Mike was in love with, even if he didn’t quite know it yet himself.
It didn’t feel right.
In fact, it felt so wrong, I thought I might throw up. I may not have been experienced with girls yet, but I did know that vomiting into a girl’s mouth was not the right move.
Bree nudged me with her knee. “That’s you,” she whispered. “Go kiss her.”
My mouth went bone-dry as I started to lean forward, as I started the slow crawl toward the center of the circle.
Time stood still.
I could feel Harper’s breath as her mouth neared mine. I could see her eyes close, because mine were still wide open. I could smell her cherry-flavored lip gloss.
But I never tasted it.
Because before our lips could touch, Mike jumped up from the circle. “I have a stomachache,” he proclaimed, like he was making an official statement to the press. Then he ran out of the shed. We all watched him in shock, none of us quite knowing what to do. Were we supposed to chase after him? Were we supposed to continue on with the game? Was I still supposed to kiss Harper?
Thankfully, she answered that question for me when she sat back down, a glum look on her face.
We all stared at each other for a few seconds, and then the game just kind of fizzled out and the group disbanded.
I didn’t see Mike for the rest of the day.
“I didn’t go after him then,” Harper says to me, bringing me back to the present moment. The kiddie pool. Her hiked-up sundress. The lights shining on her gorgeous legs. “Even though I knew he wanted me to. I was only twelve years old, and I knew that was what I was supposed to do. But I was too scared.”
“We all were,” I say.
“Tonight it was like the other way around. I knew he didn’t want me to follow him, and suddenly that was all I wanted to do. Then I saw the shed, and I don’t know, my feet just stopped moving.”
I nod but don’t say anything.
“Do you remember what happened after that? After he ran away?” Harper asks with a tinge of playfulness in her voice. She splashes water at me with her feet.
I feel my cheeks warm, and I lower my head to avoid her gaze. “Of course I do. How could I forget?”
We fall silent, letting the memory sit there between us like a third person.
“You’re a good friend,” Harper says after a while. “To Mike. You’ve always been good to him, even when I’ve been shitty to him.”
“Hey, you said it. I didn’t.”
She laughs. It lifts the mood a bit.
“I know what you think of me. You think I string him along. You think I play games with his head.”
I open my mouth to protest, even though I’m not sure why.
She holds up a hand to stop me. “And you’re right. I have strung him along. But don’t think for a minute that I haven’t felt awful about it. Don’t think for a minute that I haven’t hated myself for it. I’m not like you, Grayson. I don’t make the right decisions all the time. I don’t have successful footsteps to follow in. I’m running blind here, trying to figure it out as I go.”
I chew on the inside of my cheek for a second before finally mumbling, “I don’t make the right decisions all the time.”
She guffaws. “Yeah, right. What was your last big mistake? Choosing a Beemer over a Benz?”
“No,” I reply blankly. “It was crashing that Beemer into a tree after my mom walked out on us.”