I look over and catch a small but noticeable smile playing on Ringo’s skyward-tilted face. He looks more than a little pleased. Not that I’m surprised. Ever since I hit puberty, guys have been into me. I don’t think that’s cocky of me to think either. I’m not one of those gorgeous girls who doesn’t know how pretty she is. I know exactly how pretty I am, but it’s just another fact about me, like being right-handed or a decent surfer or above average on a skateboard. But maybe it’s not just Ringo that’s changed. Maybe I seem different to him too. I reach over and give him a semigentle smack in the gut with my nonplastered arm. “My boyfriend is dead, need I remind you? It’s terrible.”
Ringo grunts and pulls his knees up. “Jesus! I know, I know. But, you know what they say, there’s no right way to mourn.” He props himself up on his elbows. There are specks of sand dotting his hair and he’s wearing the same sly smirk that he sported in the waiting room. This time, though, despite the fact that I actually had smacked him, the urge to do so is less strong.
“Did Dr. McKenna teach you that?”
“Yeah.” He dusts sand from his elbows, and some sprays onto me. I squint to avoid getting it in my eyes. “I really think you might need some tutoring in this whole therapy thing. Frankly, you’re way behind.” He switches to sitting cross-legged beside me. All business now. “All right, so, choosing. You need a methodology.” I look over at him, confused. “My mom was a professor,” he explains. “What I mean is, you need some sort of system. Criteria that you can use to make your decision.”
“That sounds so…impersonal.” I call up images of Will and Penny. Will with his shaggy hair and sunburned cheeks, plus his ridiculous desire to make everyone happy in the grandest way possible. Penny, earnest and well meaning, who would get teary any time she saw either of us cry—and trust me, she’d seen it plenty. I can hardly consider splitting them up into a series of checkmarks and categories: Penny—humanitarian. Will—brave. No, that isn’t going to work.
Ringo shakes his head. “It doesn’t have to be. Think about it for a second.” He holds up a finger. “What’s one thing you think you’d need in order to make your decision?”
I glare at him. I might as well have lost something, and he’s the person standing there asking me where the last place was that I had it. But he holds my stare, and it’s me that breaks first.
“To talk to each of them again,” I say at last.
He nods. “Okay, but how about something more within the realm of possibility. I’m not a goddamn magician, Lake.”
I close my eyes and think so hard, it hurts my brain. “Will…my boyfriend…” I say, eyes still closed, concentrating. “He was planning this thing for my birthday. I wish I knew what it was.”
“Like a cake?”
I let my eyelids open a sliver and peek out at him. “Will would never do just a cake. Unless it was twenty-tiered, with a conga line dancing out of it.” I take a deep breath.
“Okay, so you think if you just knew what it was it would be like Will speaking to you again?”
“Yes…no…I don’t know.” Geez, Ringo really has been to a lot of therapy. “He gave me a hint. He said it was a hunt. And he was talking about…wishes.”
“So, wait, like a scavenger hunt?”
I look up, surprised. “Exactly like a scavenger hunt.” Now that is a plan with Will written all over it. “And the wishes.” The last word barely escapes above a whisper because I haven’t phrased the two pieces in my mind like this before. But now a memory is bubbling up of Penny, Will, and me. “There was a full moon right before my fifteenth birthday,” I begin. “Penny had insisted we go camping for the night so that we could hike these trails she’d read about. We stayed near this old cougar’s den that was actually really cool and Penny forced us to do some weird friendship ritual that Will and I thought was dumb but we went along with anyway. Then at the end, we each…we each had to make a wish. For our life.”
I run my hand through my hair. I don’t care that my fingers are sandy.
“I’d completely forgotten about them,” I continue. “I bet that’s what would’ve been at the end of the scavenger hunt.” I scrunch up my forehead. “I don’t remember exactly what happened to them. But I think maybe one of us kept them. As a time capsule or something.”
“Wishes, huh?” He doesn’t sound impressed. “What was yours?”
“I…have no idea actually.” I feel my eyes beginning to dance with excitement. “But maybe, maybe if I knew what each of them wanted with their life, it would…it would be like…” I shake my head, trying to break something free up there. “I don’t know what, but it would help.”
But all I can think of is finding this lost piece of Penny and Will, a part of them that is only rightfully mine. It feels big and important. It feels like a map back to them.
Ringo scratches under his chin. “That’s great and all, but I was thinking something, like, more internal to you maybe?”
“No, you were right.” I drop onto my back. The sun doesn’t feel sweltering anymore.
“I just don’t want you to get, you know, all your hopes pinned on—”
“No, Ringo, this is it. This is perfect.”
He sighs and drops back next to me. “Okay, then, um, yeah, it’s perfect.”
I listen to the crash of waves on the shore, to how the shells tinkle musically as the tide pulls them out toward the horizon. The sadness is still burrowed deep inside me, but I try for a moment to feel what it would be like for the weight to hover just above my skin, barely enough, just so that I can do what I need to do, navigate the next few weeks and make the hardest decision of my life.
If I don’t think about it too long, perhaps it’s possible I can get through this. After all, I’ve already made one gut-wrenching decision and that was not to help Matt. The thought makes my stomach cramp in pain. I try to convince my pulse not to ratchet up, up, up again.
I roll onto my side and stare at Ringo’s profile. Maybe it wasn’t the worst thing in the world that I’d nearly killed us. Then I realize that of course it wasn’t, because the worst thing in the world already happened.
“So, I guess it’s official,” I say. “We’re both crazy?”
“Batshit,” he says. “But since I’m slightly less so”—he pauses to wait for a protest, which I don’t make—“you should probably let me drive.” And after a while he starts to hum again, and I listen to him and the ocean, waiting for my pulse to return to normal and the shaking to leave my joints. “Definitely an ‘Across the Universe’ day,” he says.
And I say, “Sure, whatever that means.”
I let Ringo drive, but that still leaves me with the way home. I drive eight miles under the speed limit, mind the yellow lines between lanes, and jump whenever any car honks or moves to pass me—which, on account of my slow speed, is a lot. I’ve never been scared of anything physical that I can think of—new people, being ignored, social niceties, sure, but this?—and yet there’s fear coursing through my veins like the aftereffect of hard drugs and I have to keep talking myself down to rational thinking.