“If you didn’t leave, what?” Leigh looks at me expectantly.
I shrug. “I don’t know.”
“Please. You know Wil Hines better than you know yourself.”
“The thing is, I don’t. Not anymore.” I wriggle away from her. “Ever since—I can’t read him like I used to. He’s all—I don’t know. Cloudy.”
“You’ll figure it out. Keep shaking that eight ball.”
But I’m not sure. I know this: Sadness can make a person strange, unknowable. When Micah’s dad left our mother, he broke her, literally—her skin split into rays around the eyes from all the crying, her shoulders knotted. Her brain emptied itself of important details, like how Micah’s dad was kind of an asshole who only had a job sometimes and didn’t like any of us very much.
I didn’t blame her. She was only twenty-four and she was alone again. She was sad and angry, and she felt sorry for herself and for us. Two kids, two dads, and she couldn’t seem to pick a good one. Sometimes I’d hear her say under her breath, when she thought no one was listening, “What’s wrong with me?” and it felt like my insides had just been ripped out.
Back then, I had this recurring dream: Adult Me in a white coat, surgically removing her grief. It was a shiny black blob that tried to sneak its way back into her again and again, but I was ruthless. I wish I could do that for Wil.
After a long moment, Leigh stands up and stretches. “We interrupt this depressing-as-hell programming to bring you backbreaking labor in the name of graduation credits.” She hands me the broom and tells me to sweep. While I drag dead leaves and cigarette butts to the edges of the concrete slab, she pulls the blow-up pool into the grass. It takes both of us to move the stone benches. Leigh fills the bucket with water from a spigot on the back side of the building while I target the spray with my dish soap. We dip the scrub brushes into the bucket and the colors swirl in the soapy water: mauves and yellows and turquoise, the color of Wil’s eyes.
“Just scrub the slab down first.” Leigh rolls up the sleeves on her T-shirt. “We’ll prime it after it dries and I’ll start painting tomorrow. You can come, too, if it’ll keep you out of dive bars.”
We kneel next to each other and she sloshes water on the pavement. I scrub as hard as I can, as angry as I can, as sad as I can.
“I think this might be it.” My muscles sting, and I scrub harder. “For us. Between us.”
“Okay.” Leigh stops scrubbing and pushes her dreads out of her eyes. “So what if this is it?”
“What do you mean?” I sit back on my heels. Hearing her say it is ten times worse than saying it myself.
“I mean, what if this is really it between you and Wil? What if this is the end of your story? What if you were only supposed to come into each other’s lives for a certain period of time?”
“Bullshit.” My voice cracks. “If we were supposed to come into each other’s lives for some big karmic reason, this would be that reason. This time, right now. He needs someone now, someone to help him pack up his father’s . . . books . . . and spare change . . .” I swallow a sob. “And someone to help him take care of his mom. He needs—”
“You,” Leigh says.
“Me.” I breathe. “I love him.” My lips form the words silently, again and again, a pleading prayer to the water and sky. “I’ve tried not to, but it’s fucking useless.” I wait for the pinch of surprise. It doesn’t come. I have always loved Wil Hines and I always will, and it’s no surprise to anybody.
“Of course it is.” Leigh sighs and falls back on the shiny, wet concrete. I lie down next to her, and the warm water soaks the back of my T-shirt and gives me goose bumps. “Completely fucking useless. Are you saying you want to be friends again? Or you want to get back together?”
“I don’t know,” I say, even though I do. “He has a girlfriend. A nice one.”
“Fact.”
“What am I supposed to do?” I stare at the sun until my field of vision is nothing but gold.
She rolls onto her side. “You can love him from far away.”
“I don’t want to,” I say.
She sighs. “You might have to, though.”
And she’s right. I know she’s right. But I know this, too: I know that Wil and I are bigger than one night on a dock. I know that we’re more than a few damn good years. We go longer, farther, deeper. We are not finished yet. We can’t be.
BRIDGE
Spring, Senior Year
I don’t fall asleep that night until the sun peeks over the water. I dream about Wil, swimming out far past the breakers, and me behind him, screaming his name, begging him to come back. But he keeps swimming, until he’s nothing more than a dot or a piece of driftwood or a lost seagull.
When my eyes snap open, the house is quiet. My skin is damp. The room is hot and the sun is too low. I check the clock. Sunday, almost four P.M.
“Oh my God.” I sit up and press my feet into the ground. “Mom? Micah?”
Silence.
Downstairs, the light on the coffee maker is still green. I’ve told Mom a million times she’s going to burn the house down one of these days. I pour myself a cup.
I take my coffee to the front stoop and watch barefoot middle-school girls in triangle bikini tops and cutoffs racing up and down the streets on their bikes. They leave the air smelling like strawberry gum and temporary tattoos.
On instinct, I reach for my phone. Nothing from Wil: no apology texts, no calls.
“Hey. Sleeping Beauty!”
Leigh is leaning over the front gate in a black bikini and a gauzy long caftan. Her dreads swing just above her shoulders, and she’s wearing purple hippie shades and carrying a giant straw tote. She looks smiley and a little high.
“I just woke up,” I admit, raising my coffee mug.
“I can tell.” She fiddles with the gate until it springs open. “My mom made me play singles with her this morning. She got an eight A.M. court at the club. Apparently, it was an important opportunity for us to spend quality time together before I abandon my family for the completely inaccessible and faraway land of Georgia.” She settles next to me on the stoop. “And I got the courtyard primed after lunch, no thanks to you.”
I rub my temples. “Sorry. What are you up to tonight?”
“You mean, what are we up to? We’re going out. This is the obligatory forget-that-man blowout.”
I consider arguing and decide against it. I need this, and Leigh knows I need this. Anything to take my mind off Wil. Anything to get out of my head.
“Should I even ask where we’re going?” I sip the last of my coffee.
“Bonfi—”
“Nope.” I shake my head. “Nothing school related.”
“You don’t have to drink, but you have to go,” she says firmly. “Wil Hines is having a rough time right now. And we feel for him, but we are not going to stop living our lives.”
“Aren’t we?” I groan. The space between my sheets beckons.