He Frisbees the hat in my direction. I catch it.
“Man. My skin gets itchy just looking at this thing.” I pull it on and it smells like Wilson and Christmas-tree air freshener. “I don’t know if this is a weird thing to offer, but if you need help with the packing . . .”
The words hang in the air. He looks past me. “You want to take a walk? I haven’t seen the water all day.”
“Yeah.”
There’s a careful amount of space between us as we head the few blocks to the water. We don’t know how to be this version of us. When the water appears, Wil asks about Micah and Mom. He doesn’t know to ask about Minna, which feels strange. I tell him almost everything about home, about how Mom’s studying for her real estate exam so she doesn’t have to work the front desk at the resort anymore, and about how for me, the most exciting part of her career change will be being able to buy shampoo in a regular-sized bottle like a normal human being. I tell him about how Micah’s been staying out too late, not doing his homework. I tell him I’m worried.
“He’ll get it together,” Wil says, his eyes on the ocean. “Besides, college isn’t for everybody.”
“I know.” When we get to the sandy part of the street, we step out of our flip-flops at the same time and scoop them up.
“I’m not going.” He squints into the sun. The pinks and oranges make him look like an oil painting of himself. “I want to stick around here. I want to work on boats. I kind of think it’s in my DNA.”
“Probably,” I say, relieved. At least one thing hasn’t changed.
He stops. “You ever wonder about that kind of thing? Like, how much of you is new and how much of you is just passed down and you were always going to be that way, no matter what?”
I almost elbow him and say, “Deeeep,” but when I look into his eyes, I realize he means it seriously.
I shrug. “I wonder about my dad sometimes.”
Occasionally at night, in the minutes before I fall asleep, I think about which parts of me came from my father. Maybe he kept Mom organized, too: made the grocery runs and told her when it was time to go to bed. Maybe he got tired of being the adult. But I doubt it. Responsible isn’t Mom’s type. It’s more likely that he’s the part of me that said screw it last year after Wil and I broke up, the part that sank into beer and boys.
“It seems kind of fucked up, doesn’t it? If we’re born a certain way and that’s just how we’re wired—”
“Yeah, but we have our choices. And those are ours, not our parents’,” I say.
He’s quiet for a while, and I wonder if the wind swept my words away. But then he says, “Maybe,” and that’s the end of it.
The beach is crowded for a late-April afternoon. A chocolate lab bounds toward us, tongue flapping, until a tennis ball catches its eye and it doubles back toward the jagged foamy waterline. There are kids building sand castles and screeching at one another in a language that only kids at the beach understand. The water is pink beneath the sun, and people are swimming in fire.
We drop to the sand. I draw hieroglyphics between us and try to think of things to say, things that are right and won’t make this worse than it already is.
“You can help,” he says quietly. “With the packing. If you want. I fucking hate having to do it by myself.”
“Yeah.” I pretend to rub sand from my eyes. “Okay. I will. Anything I can do, Wil.” My pinky finger is only inches away from his. There are one hundred grains of sand between us, maybe. I am acutely aware of this.
One of the little kids screams, “Nooo! Doon’t!” Suddenly, Wil’s whole body tenses and he jerks toward the sound. Like a magnet, my hand goes to his back. He shrugs me off and cups his face with his hands.
“Sorry,” he mutters into his palms. The hairs on the back of his neck are damp. “Sorry.”
“We can talk about it, you know,” I say softly. “Maybe it would make you feel better to—”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” Before I can tell him that it’s okay, of course it’s okay, that I’m sorry, he whips off his T-shirt and jogs toward the water. The closer he gets, the faster he runs. He leaps over the soft waves that lick the sand, and then he dives beneath the surface, his toes the last part of him to disappear.
He stays under long enough that I know what’s happening. He’d do this as a kid: get really upset, and go out for a swim to calm down, and when he came back, his eyes would be bloodshot and his face would be puffy. It’s from the salt water, he’d say before I could ask.
Fix it, Brooklyn.
I dig my toes in the sand, anchoring myself here. I’ll wait for him to surface. I’ll stay here for as long as I have to, until we find our way back. Until I fix us. I promised.
BRIDGE
Spring, Senior Year
FOR years, I knew Wil the way I knew my own name; the knowledge was automatic. Involuntary, even. I didn’t have to think about his most embarrassing moment of the first day of middle school (Spanish. Picking the name Manuel for his Spanish name, only saying it like Manuel, uhh . . . and being called Manuela by the teacher and the students for the rest of the year). I never asked stupid questions like what kind of cake he wanted for his birthday (pie, always) and where he wanted to live when he grew up (here, always). Because it was instinctual, the way I knew him.
“He feels like a stranger now,” I tell Minna later that night. I’m curled up on the settee, pretending to skim my physics textbook, but the words swim in front of me on the page. “I hate it.”
“You don’t understand him,” Minna says. “Of course you don’t. Has anyone ever come into your home in the middle of the night? Killed your family?”
I stare at the text again. “Obviously not, Minna.”
She shrugs. “How should I know? Families keep secrets.”
“I’d have mentioned that kind of thing.” I don’t know much about Minna’s family before she moved to Florida. I know that Long Ago, she lived in California and was married and had a daughter she named Virginia because that was a state she’d always wanted to visit. And then she wasn’t married anymore, and she’s never seen Virginia the state. Virginia the person, she hasn’t seen in twenty-seven years.