“This sucks,” you grumble.
My mom’s attempt at a peace offering is letting me be here to say good-bye. Then it’s back to being grounded from you all summer. You have these amazing parents who’ve embraced me, made me part of your family, and I have a mom who locks me up and throws away the key. It’s like I’m Rapunzel without the romantic tower and gorgeous hair.
“If I were a better parent,” your mom says to you, “you’d be grounded, too, after what you pulled, going to her house in the middle of the night.”
“You can’t ground me,” you say. “I’m eighteen.”
I feel like I will never be eighteen.
“I’ll ground you until you’re forty if I feel like it,” she says, trying to hide her smile.
You turn to me. “Don’t your mom and The Giant—”
Your dad swats you on the arm with his newspaper. “Don’t call him that.” But I can see the little glimmer in your dad’s eye.
“Don’t your mom and (cough) The Giant (cough) Roy”—you grin at your dad and he just shakes his head, his lips twitching—“realize that when they ground you, they ground me, too?”
“Yeah, I don’t think they care about that,” I say.
There’s a honk outside—your shuttle to the airport has arrived. The sound is like a punch to the gut.
You grab my hand and pull me toward your room. “We’ll be right back,” you call to your parents as they start bringing stuff outside.
“Don’t make me a grandmother!” your mom calls.
“Har-har,” you say.
She’s joking, but it’s her way of reminding us of boundaries and responsibility and all that. She doesn’t sweep sex under the rug. Your parents talk to us about it and they know we’re both virgins. Your mom even took me to Planned Parenthood because she knows my mom would never in a million years do that. It seems like those would be horribly awkward conversations, but they aren’t. Your parents are … cool.
When we’re alone in your room, you press me up against a wall and kiss me, hard. You taste like coffee and sugar and I grip your hair in my fists and rub against you.
“I wish I could slip inside your skin,” you murmur against my lips. “Be as close to you as I can.”
How often does that happen, where words you say to me become a song? You’ll play this one for me when you get home:
I wish I could slip inside your skin
Be as close to you as I can
Live inside your heart
Own it like a home.
We kiss a bit more and then you pull away, your hand lingering just under my shirt, gripping the spaces between my ribs. I love that your room is already familiar to me: the guitars on their stands, the amps, the little aquarium with two goldfish in it.
“You’re going to fall in love with an Australian girl in a string bikini,” I say. “I just know it.”
No girl can resist the power of the black fedora or that voice of yours. You’re bringing your acoustic. She’ll hear you playing and it will be like in those stories with fairies, where they lure humans in with their otherworldly music. Oh my god, you’ll write songs about her but later tell me they were about me.
“Why Australian?” you say, trying not to smile. “P.S. You’re being very silly right now, you know that?”
I shrug. “That’s just what my intuition tells me—Australian. String bikini. Yellow string bikini.”
“Come here.”
You wrap your arms around me and I sink into you. You rock me back and forth, call me sweetheart, my love. I like how you get old-fashioned when you’re most affectionate. There’s another honk outside—that’s your cue to go. I pull away and your shirt is off in an instant.
“Sleep in this every night,” you say, handing it to me. “Promise me.”
“Gav, I can’t take your Nirvana shirt.”
You smile. “It’ll be safe with you.”
You reach for a small box that has been hiding behind one of your amps and hand it to me as you grab another shirt at random from the pile of clothes on the floor.
“And wear this every day,” you say, nodding at the box in my hand.
“Gav—”
Another honk.
“Hurry.” Your eyes sparkle in that way they do when you know something I don’t. “I want to see it on you before I go.”
Inside the box is a small silver star dangling from a chain.
“It reminded me of our shooting star,” you say.
“It’s beautiful.” I reach my arms around you and hug you tight. You put it on me and we head toward the front door, hand in hand.
Just before you get to the airport shuttle you turn and grab my chin—not hard, but the way you do with a child when you want them to focus on you. It feels strange, being touched this way by you. Parental.
A siren goes off in the back of my mind, but I ignore it. (Oh god, Gavin, why did I ignore it? Why couldn’t I see through you?)
“I trust you, Grace. Even though I’ll be an ocean away and every guy in town is going to be buying cookies from you at the Honey Pot, I know you’d never screw around on me.”
I suddenly feel nervous, even though I have no reason to be.
I nod. “Promise you won’t make out with Yellow String Bikini Girl.”
You laugh softly. “I promise.” You lean in for a kiss, wait for me to meet you in the middle. “Call me every night,” you say.
“I will.”
And then you’re gone.
I watch the van turn the corner, then start walking home. I’m not crying anymore. I’m not even sad. Just confused.
Why does it feel like a weight has suddenly lifted?
NINETEEN
There’s this rule in the theatre that if you show a gun in the first act, it has to go off by the second or third, the idea being that there’s no way the audience will see that gun and forget about it. Something has to happen with it. After a whole summer of being grounded from you, I start to realize that you are that gun, that you’re going to go off and I’m not sure which one of us will be left standing in the end. Maybe a part of me has always been waiting for the other shoe to drop. You’re too good; this is all too good. It’s not my narrative—I was never supposed to be the girl who got the guy everyone wants. So I wait for you to end it, to come to your senses. In the meantime, I try to be there for you.
You’re sad. You say it’s like a black wave that drowns you and the only time you rise to the surface is when we’re together. I am your oxygen, your breath of fresh air.
But I’m not enough.
You’re angry. At yourself, at the emotions that spin inside you. They won’t leave you alone until you write a song and when you sing it to me I feel every inch of your pain. Sometimes you punch walls, doors, anything to break the skin that’s holding in the demons.
“I need to see you, Grace. This is insane!”
We’re on the phone when normal teens would be on a date, at the newest action movie, making out in a car. We’re only halfway through this miserable summer—there are thirty more days until I’m officially allowed to see you again.
“I know,” I whisper. “I’m sorry they’re so crazy.”