He paused in her doorway. “Don’t get smart with me,” he said.
She went anyway, even though on most nights, she and Aubrey did nothing at all, lounging on the couch, watching bad reality TV and painting each other’s nails. They drove downtown and ducked inside little shops at the harbor. Last summer, Nadia had worked there at Jojo’s Juicery, smiling plaintively while people squinted at the rainbow-colored menu above her head. She had daydreamed while following smoothie recipes on laminated index cards taped to the counter. She served rich white people, mostly, who strolled with pastel sweaters tied around their shoulders, as if carrying them was too much work. She had never been inside any of the harbor restaurants like Dominic’s Italian or Lighthouse Oysters—fancy places she could never afford—but she joked with the waiters sometimes when they came inside Jojo’s. A waitress at D’Vino’s told her how a Hollywood producer had yelled “Al dente! Al dente! That means ‘to the tooth’!” at her and sent his linguine back three times until it was firm enough. He was trying to impress his date, a weathered blonde woman who barely reacted, which just seemed sad—what was the point of being a Hollywood producer if you had to yell at waitresses to impress women? At least no one would try to impress a date at Jojo’s. During work, she liked to stare out the glass at the boats docked along the harbor, their colorful sails furled, but sometimes it made her sad. She’d never been inside a boat and they were docked twenty feet away. She’d never been anywhere.
Some evenings, she stayed after work to help Aubrey volunteer. They packed food baskets for the homeless and cleaned Sister Willis’s classroom, scrubbing the chalkboards and scraping Play-Doh off the tables. On Friday nights, they hosted senior bingo, dragging in stacks of metal chairs, setting up snacks, and calling out numbers the seniors asked them to repeat at least three times. Other nights, the girls sipped smoothies along the harbor and peered into shop windows at trinkets. In the coming darkness, the boats bobbed and swayed, and later, when she crawled into Aubrey’s bed, Nadia felt like one of those boats, bobbing in place. She was leaving for college in two weeks. She was drifting between two lives, and as excited as she felt, she wasn’t quite ready to lose the life she’d found this summer.
Sometimes Kasey grilled and they all ate dinner in the backyard, then walked down the street for Hawaiian shaved ice. Monique told them stories about work, about a hallucinating man who’d gouged his own eye out, a woman who’d fallen asleep at the wheel and crashed into a fence, nearly impaling herself on the post. One evening, she told them about a girl who had taken illegal abortion pills from Mexico and couldn’t bring herself to admit it until she almost bled out on the E.R. floor.
“What happened to that girl?” Nadia asked later, while they all washed the dishes.
“What girl?” Monique handed her a wet plate.
“That girl. The one who took those pills from Mexico.”
She still couldn’t bring herself to say the word abortion. Maybe it would sound different falling out of her mouth.
“Horrible infection. But she pulled through. These girls are so afraid to tell someone they’re pregnant, they get these pills cheap online and no one knows what’s in them. She would’ve died if she hadn’t had enough sense to get help.” Monique handed Aubrey a plate. “Don’t you girls ever do something like that. You call me, okay? Or Kasey. We’ll take you to a doctor. Don’t ever try to do something like that on your own.”
Nadia had read online about abortion pills, forty dollars and delivered to your door in a plain brown box. She would’ve ordered them herself if Luke hadn’t found her the money for the surgery. You didn’t know how desperate you could be until you were.
“Do you think it’s bad?” she asked Aubrey later. “What that girl did?”
“Of course. Mo said she almost died.”
“No, not like that. I mean, do you think it’s wrong?”
“Oh.” Aubrey flipped off the lights and the other half of the bed lowered beneath her weight. “Why?”
“I don’t know. Just asking.”
In the darkness of the room, she could barely make out Aubrey’s outline, let alone her face. In the darkness, talking felt safe. She lay on her back, staring up at the ceiling.
“Sometimes I wonder—” She paused. “If my mom had gotten rid of me, would she still be alive? Maybe she would’ve been happier. She could’ve had a life.”
Any of her other friends would have gasped, turning to her with wide eyes. “Why would you even think that?” they would say, chiding her for entertaining such darkness. But Aubrey just squeezed her hand because she too understood loss, how it drove you to imagine every possible scenario that might have prevented it. Nadia had invented versions of her mother’s life that did not end with a bullet shattering her brain. Her mother, no longer cradling a tiny, wrinkled body in a hospital bed, an exhausted smile on her face, but seventeen and scared, sitting inside an abortion clinic, waiting for her name to be called. Her mother, no longer her mother, graduating from high school, from college, from graduate school even. Her mother listening to lectures or delivering her own, stationed behind a podium, running a toe up the back of her calf. Her mother traveling the world, posing on the cliffs of Santorini, her arms bent toward the blue sky. Always her mother, although in this version of reality, Nadia did not exist. Where her life ended, her mother’s life began.
—
THAT SUMMER, the girls drove to Los Angeles to explore different beaches. Somehow, sun and sand and salt water seemed better, more glamorous even, in the shadows of Hollywood. They wandered down Venice Beach, past weight-lifting jocks and weed dispensaries, T-shirt shops and churro stands and bucket drummers. They swam at Santa Monica Beach and drove through the winding cliffs to Malibu. Other places they went: downtown San Diego, where they rode trolleys across the city, window-shopping at Horton Plaza and walking around Seaport Village and sneaking into nightclubs in the Gaslamp district. Nadia sweet-talked a bouncer who let them into an underground club where shot glasses glowed red over the bar, industrial fans spun lazily overhead, and she had to scream into Aubrey’s ear to talk. They met boys. Boys tossing footballs on the beach, boys hanging out of car windows, boys smoking cigarettes in front of water fountains, boys, barely still boys, offering to buy them drinks in clubs. Boys bunched around them at the bar, and while Nadia flirted, Aubrey seemed to shrink within herself, her arms folded tightly across her chest. She’d never had a boyfriend before but how did she expect to ever find one if she never loosened up? So on one of her last nights in Oceanside, Nadia knew exactly where she wanted to take Aubrey: Cody Richardson’s house. Aubrey had never been, and in her waning days at home, Nadia felt nostalgic enough to return. Besides, if she was honest with herself, she also hoped she might see Luke. She’d imagined their good-bye—not dramatic, they weren’t dramatic people, but some final conversation where she would see, in his eyes, the realization that he’d hurt her. She wanted to feel his regret, for leaving her, for not loving her like he was supposed to. For once in her life, she wanted an ended thing to end cleanly.
The night of the party, she sat on the edge of Aubrey’s bed, helping her friend with her makeup. She tilted Aubrey’s face toward her, gently sweeping gold eye shadow across her lids.
“You have to wear the dress,” she said.
“I told you, it’s too short.”
“Trust me,” she said. “Every guy’s gonna want to hook up with you tonight.”
Aubrey scoffed. “So? That doesn’t mean I want to hook up with them.”
“Don’t you at least want to know what it’s like?”
“What?”
“Sex.” She giggled. “Just don’t expect it to be all beautiful and romantic. It’s gonna be awkward as hell.”
“Why does it have to be awkward?”