Ryan looked disoriented the moment he stepped out of his car—he surveyed the empty lot, and the empty lot next door, with a look of confusion.
On our walk to the beach we passed Spud McGee’s. It was shuttered. Hot Diggity had a sign taped to the window: SEE YOU IN THE SPRING.
When our shoes touched the sand, his grip on my hand tightened. He looked up and down the beach, taking in the choppy water, the same dull gray as school trash cans, and the vacant sand. I could see the pier from here. The roller coaster and Ferris wheel that glowed so brightly in his stories were unlit and unmoving. The track of the coaster stripped bare of its cars and stark against the mottled gray of the cloudy sky.
I pulled him forward a few steps, leaning into him and out of the wind. It was cutting through my clothes and raising goose bumps, which rasped against the fabric of my jeans.
The wind ruffled the ocean’s surface too. Making it look like it was being prodded with a million paint brushes—nothing like the smooth, easy, blue-green waves from the photos I’d seen of Ryan, Chris, and the girls spread out on crowded sun-drenched sand.
“This is it.” Ryan finally spoke, pulling me to stand in front of him as he did so. Wrapping his arms around me and rubbing his hands up and down my arms. I was grateful, not just for the warmth, but because I didn’t want to have to see the lost expression on his face. “But it doesn’t look anything like it did. I guess I just thought … I don’t know what I was thinking. I know half the staff weren’t local and it’s hardly beach weather. Even the guard stands are gone. I guess they pull them in for the winter. I can’t even tell where mine was anymore.”
The wind turned wet. Spitting a fine mist of spray that made my lips taste salty and the flyaway strands of my wig frizz.
I felt cold. Colder than the temperature really warranted. Even this, even this good thing I’d tried to do, was just more ruin.
I couldn’t reclaim my summer any more than I could prevent my future. All I’d done today was taint the memory of a place Ryan loved.
“Let’s just go home,” he said.
My teeth were chattering too hard to agree, so I just nodded and slipped my hand in his.
Trips to Iggy’s made my before list too, and the next day when Mr. Bonura questioned me about making up a calc test, I told him I needed to go to the nurse. Instead, I got Ryan out of his class and we went for midmorning, midweek pie. He didn’t hesitate or deny me anything now, but asked often, “Are you happy, baby? Are you feeling okay?” I remembered Chris’s comments about Ryan never smiling, how he’d never seen him like this, and I was scared to turn these questions around and ask them back. Ryan wasn’t happy; he wasn’t okay.
I was doing the best I could to change this, doing the best I could to prove that I cared for and appreciated him more than I could express. And needed him. There was a constant tugging in the back of my mind, saying that if I just tried harder, I could fall in love with him. I could just never quite reach it—and the night of our beach trip I spent half the hours until morning trying to convince myself I could. The other half I spent trying to sleep and trying to ignore the Gyver-shaped hole in my life.
I suggested we didn’t need to go to homeroom the next morning—it was Thursday, exactly one week since the tarot cards spelled out my future in five grim letters. Instead we went for coffee at Bean Haven, a chic bakery in Cross Pointe I’d always wanted to try. I ordered the largest size and drained the pink cardboard cup and—despite Mom’s warnings of its chemical poisons—it didn’t make me keel over. It did give me enough energy to make it to all of my afternoon classes and paste a placid smile on my face while I doodled in my notebook and ignored my classmates and whatever the teachers wrote on the board.
Chapter 41
“Mi, wait up.”
I ignored Gyver and kept walking. I didn’t want to be in the building. I didn’t want to think about school. I didn’t want to discuss what he’d walked in on Monday night either.
He caught up with me outside the school’s double doors, wrapping his fingers gently around my arm and pulling me to a stop. “Mi, I was calling you all down the hall. Didn’t you hear me?”
I shook my head.
“Don’t you need a ride home? I thought The Jock—sorry, Ryan—drove you, and it doesn’t look like you want to wait around for soccer practice to end.”
“Thanks.” I headed down the stairs to his Jeep.
“Wait a minute. You okay? I heard you had a big academic meeting.”
“Not so big.” I tapped my foot, anxious to keep walking. Standing still took effort.
“Mr. Bonura asked if I’d tutor you. Why didn’t you tell me you needed help?”
“I don’t. It’s not a big deal.” I was in danger of failing history and calculus. My English and science grades weren’t much better. “Can we go?”
The progress report from Principal Baker was wrinkling in the bottom of my bag. I’d already forged Mom’s name and would turn it in on Monday.
Gyver froze, oblivious to the roadblock he created at the stop of the stairs.