Until . . . Until I didn’t anymore. And I didn’t know what to do with that.”
Did I know, deep down? Maybe. This weird feeling I’ve had this summer . . . I thought it was because things were different—me the third wheel, not a threesome anymore. But maybe I somehow knew that we really were, really, not a threesome anymore.
I lean my forehead on the steering wheel. “But Spence, Viv?
Why him—of all people?” I turn so I can see her, flipping my hair away from my face. “Did you do it to . . . to hurt Nic? Is that what this—Spence—is about?” As I ask, I feel an unwanted pang of sympathy for Spence, the handy weapon in someone else’s war. Again.
“No. Not at all.” She flushes. “But hell, Gwen . . . I thought Nic and I were . . . in this together. And then he’s all . . .
‘well . . . eight years from now, we’ll’ . . . Eight years! What am I supposed to do, while he’s off having adventures, meeting girls who . . . I don’t know. Dangle from tow ropes with their teeth? He’s supposed to stay impressed with the girl who keeps everyone’s water glasses filled? Screw that. I . . . can’t compete.
And I . . . don’t want to. What’s wrong with wanting to be here? If what I want is a little less big, less noble, than what he wants . . . does that make me a loser? That’s the thing. I don’t feel like a loser with Spence. He . . . I . . . Al got that contract to work with the Bath and Tennis Club late this spring . . . and it seemed like everything he did there, we’d run into Spence, because even though his dad owns it, his dad is kind of . . . out of it. At first I started talking to him just because of business.
But then . . . he’s not who I thought he was. At all.”
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I’m starting to wonder who is. But to be fair, I have to weigh the six or whatever girls in the hot tub against Cass’s unflinch-ing loyalty and those flashes of perceptiveness I’ve seen myself.
“I started feeling . . . really liking him . . . that’s why I wanted the ring. I thought it would make me stop thinking about Spence and focus on Nicky.”
“You do know that’s incredibly messed up, right?”
She raises her hands in defense. “You don’t get to be the only one who can be stupid and blind, Gwen.”
“Yeah, welcome to my world.” I’m laughing despite myself.
But then I sit up and look at her, my lifelong friend, with the cartilage piercings at the top of her ear that Nic hated, but never told her because she wanted them, and I hurt so much for my cousin—what he had, what he lost—that I have to fold my arms against my stomach to keep the pain contained. “Viv?
Did you ever really love Nic?” I ask it, and then wish I hadn’t.
I’m not sure I want to hear the answer.
“I’ll always love him.” She responds so quickly that I know it’s true. “He was my first . . . everything. I never thought—I never planned—he’d be anything but my only everything. But these few months, and especially the last few weeks—it’s not the same. He’s . . . not the same.”
“Maybe it’s just that he’s really tense,” I say, “maybe . . .”
Then I stop. Viv puts her hand on mine, clenched tight on the steering wheel, squeezes. Maybe I stop talking because I don’t know what to say. Or maybe I stop because I finally get that sometimes we hold on to something—a person, a resentment, a regret, an idea of who we are—because we don’t know what to reach for next. That what we’ve done before is what we have 377
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to do again. That there are only re-dos and no do-overs. And maybe . . . maybe I know better than that.
We can’t find Nic anywhere. We try the same old places in another loop, but no luck. We text and call him. Nothing. Viv’s eyelids begin to droop, and as I’m driving over the causeway yet again, she falls asleep, cheek pressed against the passenger door, so I carefully maneuver the car to the Almeidas’ house, shake her awake and urge her into the house. Luckily, Al and her mom are out, so I just have to get her to her room, take off her shoes, and cover her up with the puffy green blanket she’s had since we were little.
He has to be at the creek. He must have been walking through the woods before and now he’s there. Of course that’s where he’d go. Dangerous, but familiar. I pull the Bronco up, get out so fast I don’t even shut the door, run to the bridge, looking out at the dark rushing water. But it’s a cloudy night and there’s not enough moon to see anything, so I pull the Bronco closer, snap on the headlights and run back.
The lights cast stark shadows. It’s high tide. I stand at the place we always jump from, scanning the water, but there’s nothing but the dark outline of Seal Rock and the gradual wid-ening of the creek shore as it empties into the ocean.
When Nic and I were little, people who didn’t know us would ask if we were twins, even though I was tanner skinned and darker haired than him. Now I wish like anything we were and had that twin bond you hear about.
I wish I could reach out with my mind and know—just 378
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feel—where he is. But when I think . . . all I feel is scared.
Mom and Grandpa Ben both jump up from Myrtle when I come in, looking over my shoulder, faces falling when they see I’m alone. Emory’s awake, cuddling Hideout, staring big-eyed at the television, which isn’t even on.
“No panicking,” Grandpa says sharply to Mom, despite the fact that he’s reaching into the cabinet in the kitchen where he keeps his pipe, pulling it out and packing it with rapid, jerky movements completely unlike himself.
“I shouldn’t have gone out with Patrick.” Mom’s twisting her hands nervously. “All we did was talk about Nico, but still, I knew better. You should have seen Nic’s face when he told him.
Like his last dream had died.”
Sometimes the melodramatic phrases she picks up from her books are so not helpful. “Well, it didn’t,” I snap. “He’s eighteen. He’s got plenty of time to dream. He’s still got the Coast Guard Academy.”
But not Viv.
Which Mom and Grandpa probably don’t even know. I’m not going to tell them because the rush of worry in my head is dark and loud as the creek water. They don’t need to be there too, staring into the shadows, afraid to see what they’re searching for.
I sit on our steps, looking up and down the road, waiting for Nic’s broad-shouldered figure to appear out of nowhere, illu-minated in the orangey glow of the porch light. But there’s nothing except the dark road, the distant waves, the hulks of houses, the Field House rising a little higher than the ones before it.
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