A Million Junes

  “For biting your collarbone.”

  His smile is faint. “Come on, Jack. Let’s get you home.”

  That’s the best idea anyone’s had all night. The lobby might be empty now, but soon a more heavily trafficked movie than Axe Murderer is bound to let out, and I don’t need to be standing here with Saul Angert for all of Five Fingers to see.

  We walk out into the hot night, and some of the tension between us dissipates as we cross the lot to a dumpy black Saturn. Things feel almost normal, friendly. “This is your car?”

  “That impressed, huh?” he says. “Maybe I should start hanging out with high school girls.”

  “Not impressed, Saul. Mystified. Perhaps no one’s told you: You live in northern Michigan. It’s unsafe to drive a tin can up here.”

  He climbs in, but when I pull on the passenger door’s handle, it’s locked. “Sorry,” he says, his voice muffled by the glass. “I can’t in good faith let such precious cargo ride in my tin can. Too dangerous.”

  “Too dangerous for you, Saul,” I say. “Jacks are hardy stock.”

  “Got it.” He unlocks the door, and I get in. “Angerts: small, weakling babies. O’Donnells: muscular, demigod Michiganders.”

  His grin glows in the half light, and I can’t help but smile too as the silence stretches out.

  During the two hours we spent watching body parts and blood spurt across the screen, the sun has slunk low on the horizon. Its nose barely juts between the trees, and the moon already hangs in the rapidly deepening blue, stars poking through like pinpricks in a sheet of colored paper. As we pull away, Saul manually cranks his window down, which I take as permission to do the same.

  The air is stiffer than it’s been all week—summer’s last cry before fall crushes it—and as we slice through the night, I feel like we’re being enveloped in a fleece blanket fresh from the dryer. We’re quiet for a while, the hazy sound of the suburbs fading behind us and night a deep, yawning indigo unfurling ahead.

  The air pulls my hair from behind my ears and whips it around, tickles me to the point that a laugh slips out, and when I glance at Saul, he’s watching me, one corner of his mouth quirked. “I like having you around, Jack,” he says over the snap of wind, and I grin like the maniac I’m quickly becoming.

  “Why’d you come back?” I ask.

  He looks my way again, takes a deep breath, slowly exhales. “My dad’s sick.”

  “Oh,” I say. “God, I’m sorry. Is it . . . ?” I trail off, thinking of Bekah.

  “Cancer?” He shakes his head. “Alzheimer’s. Runs in my family, but with him, it’s happening fast, or—I don’t know—maybe it’s been happening for years. His agent just told me. If I waited any longer, I might’ve lost my last chance for him to recognize me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say weakly. It’s not enough. That’s what I learned from losing Dad: There are no right words. There’s nothing another human being can say that makes it better or eases the pain. Sorry is a white flag, an I can’t help you.

  “Yeah.” Saul swallows. His fingers tighten over the steering wheel. “We were never close. My sister was his pride. But.”

  “Still,” I say.

  “Still.”

  “I know another sorry’s nothing,” I say. “I’d give you something better than that if I had it.”

  “I’d give it back,” he says. “You know what they say about Angerts and O’Donnells. Your violent blow from the universe might be right around the corner, and then I’ll have nothing to give you either.”

  “I think mine’s already come for me,” I murmur toward the glass, then turn to speak to him directly. “I thought you didn’t believe in that.”

  I also thought I did, but would I really have gotten in the car with him if that were true? I glance at the windshield, almost expecting a tornado or out-of-control semi to come shrieking toward us, but we’re alone on the road, slinking through a peacefully swaying copse of trees.

  “Old habits,” Saul answers. “Or, I don’t know, maybe it’s being back here. It’s like nothing ever changes.”

  “Some things do.”

  His mouth curls up, and his eyes flash between the road and me. “Some things do.”

  “You’re making it hard to hate you,” I tell him.

  “All part of my evil plan.”

  “Did you hate leaving school?”

  “Nah,” he says. “That was the easiest part of all this.”

  “You know, I had a brief career as a writer.”

  “Oh yeah? How’d that go?”

  “Quickly. Jacks are more doers than thinkers. I got a D on my first assignment and haven’t touched the second.”

  Without a moment of pause, he says, “Do you want help?”

  “Are you offering to take out a hit on my teacher?”

  “Yes,” he says. “And to tutor you.”

  “Oof. Hi, Mom, here’s my new tutor. He’s the tattooed twenty-one-year-old dropout formally known as Saul, the youngest living member of Dad’s least favorite family.”

  “Twenty,” he says.

  “What?”

  “You said twenty-one. I’m twenty.”

  I swallow the knot of heat in my throat. “Twenty. Okay, yeah, I think she’ll totally go for it.”

  Saul nods in time with the yellow lines shooting past our car. “Okay, remember how you were definitely not going to put me in a weird situation or turn me into a creep?”

  “Fifteen minutes ago? Vaguely.”

  “What if we don’t tell your mom who I am? How would she know I’m an Angert? I haven’t been here in years, and hardly anyone knows I’m back. How would you and I have even met?”

  “In a mirror maze, Saul! That’s the first place she’ll guess!”

  He laughs: husky, warm. “Good point. Look, I’m not telling you to lie to your parents. But if you want help, I’ll help you. Even if that includes lying to your parents.”

  “Your resolve against being put in a weird situation sure lasted long.”

  “I’d do anything for the written word, Jack.”

  “Really?” I lean over the middle console and rest my chin on my hand. “’Cause I’m kind of over art.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” He pushes my face away with his hand. “Low blow, Junior.”

  At the sound of my name, whole forests grow from saplings into moonlit redwoods beneath my collarbones. I can’t wait for this feeling to stop, so I can be on Dad’s side like I always have been.

  But I also never want this feeling to stop.

  “You wanna do something fun?” he asks.

  I study his profile. “Such as?”

  He flips on his blinker and follows the corkscrew road toward the street lined with million-dollar vacation homes overlooking turquoise water. “Break into one of the vacation homes’ pools for a swim. I used to all the time in high school.”

  So did I, every summer including this last one. Sometimes with visiting boys I’d never see again. Or with the friends Hannah and I grew apart from since that last day of the summer before sophomore year, when we all (except Hannah) got tipsy on five-dollar champagne and swore we’d be friends forever. Or, most often, with just Hannah, whenever I itched so badly to do something risky that I pushed until she caved. We did it three weeks ago, on my birthday, floated beneath the moonlight in inflatable donuts, drinking Jones Soda and boxed pink wine Hannah’s cousin got us.

  “Don’t you have somewhere to be?” I ask Saul.

  “Yeah, tons of plans. I’m a busy guy.”

  “I just mean, you had your chance to go swimming at the falls and you passed. Or were you really so determined to land Nate that date?”

  “Yeeeeah,” he says. “Okay, so this is weird because I’m a grown-ass man and all—at least, kind of—but my parents always had a rule about the falls. They were fr
eakishly strict about it. Basically convinced me I would die if I went. Again, old habits.”

  “No way.” I don’t realize my hand has snapped out to grab his arm until I see his eyes fixed on it. I retract it immediately.

  “I know—not the parenting style you’d expect from the New York Times best-selling adventurer Eli Angert.”

  “No, I mean, my parents had—have—the same rule.”

  “Huh.” Saul rubs his collarbone through his faded black T-shirt. He seems a little less put together than he did a week ago at the fair. I’m a fan. “A hint about why our families hate each other?”

  “They never told you?” I say.

  He laughs. “Oh, they’ve told me. It’s because O’Donnells are arrogant, self-righteous assholes who thrive on my family’s misfortune.”

  “Well, that’s all true, but there’s more to it. You don’t know this?”

  “June.” He fixes me with a reproachful look. “Think about whatever story you’re about to tell me, which no doubt makes my ancestors out to be fork-tailed demonoids, and ask yourself whether it explains why my family would hate your family back.”

  “It’s about the cherries,” I say confidently.

  Saul snorts. “Isn’t it always?”

  “My great-great-whatever, Jonathan Alroy O’Donnell, came to Five Fingers looking for somewhere to grow cherries,” I explain. “Your great-great-whatever owned the land Jonathan planted our first tree on. Ancestor Angert traded Ancestor O’Donnell the land for a basket of cherries. Jonathan wanted to build a farm nearer to the water, where the soil was sandier, so he talked Ancestor Angert into renting him more land. They shook on it, agreed on a fair yearly payment, swore on the land itself, and—what?” I interrupt myself to ask when Saul laughs.

  “This is so rehearsed. You’ve clearly heard this story a million times.”

  “Anyway, as I was saying before I was brutally Angerted, they swore—”

  “On the land itself.”

  “Right. Now fast-forward a couple of generations and your great-grandfather Jacob came to my great-grandfather Jack the First and demanded he pay him in full what the land was worth then. Like, fifty years later. Jacob told Jack he could either buy it or vacate it, but Jack had put every dime he’d made back into the farm, so he didn’t have the money. Jacob kicked him off the land. He took everything Jack the First had, my family’s entire legacy.”

  “Bullshit,” Saul says immediately.

  “What?”

  “You want to know my family’s version of that story?”

  “The lie version?”

  “Jonathan O’Donnell agreed to lease the land. There was a handshake and an oath on the land itself. Only, a couple of generations later, the O’Donnells hadn’t paid in literally years. They’d send Jacob boxes of cherries instead of payments, and Jacob put up with it out of pity for a long time, until he stopped by the farm and realized Jack the First just kept buying more stuff. Equipment, tools, trees, employees. It was a huge operation, and Jack wasn’t paying even pennies for it. Jacob gave Jack six months to come up with a down payment to buy the land. Five months into that, Jacob’s son had a major breakdown. He needed full-time care. Medical bills piled up. Jacob needed the money, but Jack told Jacob he needed at least six more months. So Jacob evicted him. And rather than let the farm be sold, you know what Jack did? He burned the trees to the ground. The people who bought that land started all over, and for years the cherries tasted like ash.”

  I stare at him, hard, and he glances at me sidelong as he eases onto the break in front of one of the gated mansions. He holds my gaze, like we’re playing eye chicken.

  “You don’t believe that, do you?” I say.

  “No, June. That’s the point. Eli can spin a story too. This is Five Fingers—everyone can. That was the tail end of the Great Depression. Times were tough for everyone. It doesn’t justify being terrible to each other for three generations after that. Either something else happened or our families are assholes.”

  The idea that something else could have happened, something Dad didn’t tell me, eats at my stomach like acid. I shake my head. “If your family destroyed my family, that would—”

  “Even if they did,” Saul says, “did I destroy your family, June? Did I ever hurt you?”

  The longer we hold eye contact, the higher the pressure in the car rises, until the air feels so thick we’re swimming in it.

  I used to think what happened to Dad was somehow the Angerts’ fault, or at least that they’d celebrated my loss.

  But if that were true, then what about what happened to Bekah? Was that somehow my fault? Did Mom and Toddy revel in her death? The day I heard, I went home sick from school. I couldn’t eat, sleep, do anything but lie in bed staring at the stars on my ceiling.

  “Do you?” I ask. “Think I destroyed your family?”

  His smile unspools like fishing line, nearly invisible yet luminescent all the same. “Every time you make fun of me, you cut me to my core. But no, June, I don’t hold you personally responsible for anything bad that’s happened to me or the people I love. In fact, if you’re a fair representation of what a Jack O’Donnell is, I feel a little cheated.”

  Heat swarms my cheeks, and I’m grateful for the cover of dark. “If only you’d saved my life that day with the wasps. Could’ve saved you years.”

  “Nah, that wouldn’t have worked out in my favor. You would’ve liked Bekah way more than me. I was the boring twin.”

  His easy smile fades, sending an ache through my center. “Well. I wish I’d had the chance to like her more than you.”

  “Me too.” He stares at the steering wheel for a second. “Anyway. Now or never, June.”

  I balk. “What?”

  He tips his head toward the glowing aquamarine pool visible behind the mansion beside us. “Up for a swim?”

  The thrill in my chest fizzles at the memory of that day at the pool years ago, when I almost drowned and Saul dislocated his shoulder. Maybe it was just a freak accident. Maybe Saul’s right about all of it, but I still feel guilty being here with him, especially without knowing for sure how Hannah would feel about it. “I probably shouldn’t.”

  He holds my gaze for a beat. “Yeah, I probably shouldn’t either.”

  I stifle a wave of disappointment. What did I expect, for him to beg me to go after I already said no?

  “Some other time, maybe,” he says. “If you want.”

  “Another time,” I agree.

  “Wow, that was easy.”

  “What can I say? I’m eas—not going to finish that sentence, because I didn’t think it through.”

  Saul laughs more loudly, more openly than usual. I can almost see the dotted line that connects the quality of the sound to Nate for a second. It makes me appreciate Nate’s bark more.

  I smile involuntarily, and Saul smiles too, turning his eyes back to the road and drumming his fingers on the wheel as we pull away from the curb. In the moonlight, his tattooed arms make me think of ravine-riddled glaciers: icy white and etched in shadows of blue-black. “What are all your tattoos?” I ask when he catches me examining him.

  “A whole lot of bad decisions, mostly.” He shakes his head. “Next time I turn eighteen, I’m listening to everyone who tells me to wait awhile.”

  “They look pretty cool.”

  “Really?” His eyebrows pinch, and he inclines his forehead toward me as he lifts his forearm in front of his eyes, revealing the inked outline of a camera held between hands. It makes it look like he’s taking a picture of me. “This is cool?”

  “Wow, that’s . . . a camera. Did it mean anything to you at the time?”

  He smiles, nods, glances in his rearview mirror. “Yeah. It did.”

  I wait for him to go on, but he doesn’t. We reach the mouth of my driveway, and he clicks the headlights off, duck
ing his head to look up at the farmhouse.

  I try to see it how a stranger might. White, rickety. Lattice overgrown with ivy. The wild garden that Mom and Toddy rarely touch sprawling before the porch. A green-shingled roof, warped and sun-faded, and the first Jack’s Tart tree leaning right, its branches like a gnarled umbrella. The plywood chicken coop off to the left and some of the Girls, as Dad called them, asleep in the grass beside it. Some beams partially chewed by termites, though never enough to warrant an exterminator—even the pests cooperate in thin places.

  “It’s beautiful,” Saul says.

  “Yeah,” I agree.

  “Can I walk you to your door?” His dark eyes meet mine, and I shake my head. He nods once. “Good night, June.”

  “Good night, Saul.”

  Twelve

  THE following Tuesday I’m sitting on the blue metal table outside the cafeteria where I’ve eaten lunch every reasonably warm day for four years, glaring at the red C- Needs more plot! More conflict! burned into my latest creative writing assignment, when Stephen Niequist walks past on his way to the parking lot.

  He jerks his chin toward the paper in my hands. “Ms. deGeest?”

  “The one and only.”

  “She’s a real ballbuster. She gave me a B,” Stephen says. “On the one hand, it’s like, if she’s going to ruin my GPA, maybe I should drop. But on the other, I’m obsessed with getting that perfect grade from her.”

  I couldn’t reach a perfect grade with a space shuttle. “Yeah.”

  Stephen messes with the strap of his messenger bag. “Anyway, you and Hannah are, like, best friends, right?”

  “Yeah.” I fold the story in half. “Why?”

  “Is she dating Nate Baars?”

  “Noooo.”

  “Good.”

  “Good? Why, are you interested?”

  Stephen snorts. “Nate’s one of my oldest friends. He’s liked Hannah for years.”

  “And so she shouldn’t date him?”

  Stephen lifts his eyebrows. “Not if she doesn’t get how real it is to him.”

  “What do I owe you for the advice, Stephen?”