Frankly in Love (Frankly in Love, #1)(93)

I dig the heels of my hands into my eyes until the ocean sounds like it’s roaring.

“You’re really doing this,” I say. “Our dads get into some stupid fight, and now you’re really just giving up and walking away.”

What is happening to my face? Whatever it is, Joy becomes slightly fearful of it. Do I look angry right now? Betrayed, and out for vengeance?

“We just graduated,” I say. “We only have three months of summer. If we’re just super careful and get coordinated and time things right, we can make the most of it.”

A touch from Joy stops my babbling. “Listen to yourself.”

“We can make this work,” I say.

“This is the situation,” says Joy, and clutches her hair. I’m sure it’s flashing green, but again: this light is so dim. “This is my life they’re messing with,” she says. “It’s yours, too.”

“So let’s just ignore them,” I say. “Fuck the tribe. Let’s just walk away.”

“You can’t just walk away.”

“You can do whatever your soul wills you to do,” I say. “Fuck everyone else.”

“Is that really what you want?” she says. “Just fuck everyone else? Do you even know what fuck everyone else would entail? It’s not just about me and you. I don’t want our families fighting. I don’t want things to get weird with my dad for god knows how long. I don’t want that for you, either.”

I laugh to myself. “You’re saying it’s not worth it.”

“What’s not worth it?”

I look at her. “Love.”

Joy looks hurt. “That is not what I’m saying.”

But I just keep looking at her—

“That is not what I’m saying,” she says again.

—because it is.

“I’m only saying there are other, bigger things to think about,” she says.

“There’s nothing bigger than love,” I say, and draw my knees in close so I can press my eyes into them until the green-and-black checkerboards appear.

Let’s just be in love, I think, and all I want is for her to say, If you say so, Frank, and bring everything back to the way it was with a single, long kiss. But instead she’s just staring at the waves tumbling and tumbling far below, preparing other words to say.

“You know how your dad had to choose between living shorter but better, and taking the chemo and living longer but worse?” she says.

I swallow to quell a rising lump of tears.

“We’re not taking the chemo,” she says.

I don’t quite get what she’s saying here—is she comparing us to cancer?—but it doesn’t matter because her words gut me anyway.

“But I love you,” I say. “You love me.”

“We’re a happy family,” says Joy, in the saddest singsong ever.

“So let’s just be in love,” I try.

“Frank, I can’t just, we—” says Joy, and covers her mouth because she’s run out of words. Or is she trying to keep them in?

“I love you,” I say. “You love me. It’s as simple as that.”

She buries her face and I hold her with one arm, then two, but she is already feeling strange to me. Some aura is slipping away. Joy is a campfire dying before my very eyes, and I am inept when it comes to campfires.

She peers through barred forearms. “The ocean is glowing—look.”

I glance out. Indeed, the waves are crashing blue.

“It’s peak sparkles right now,” I say.

“I always wondered what causes that,” mumbles Joy to no one.

“Dinoflagellates.”

Joy turns her head to face me through her hair. “How do you know that?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I say, and the last of our embers goes out.

But I don’t want them out. I stomp and stomp on them, because the moron inside me believes that stomping is the best way to stoke a fire back to life.

“You could start going on hikes,” I say, mustering the fakest pep ever. “Then I could meet you down at Crescent Cove—”

“I can’t do this.”

“It’d be perfect because you can’t even see the left edge of the beach from here.”

“What would Hanna think of your plan?”

“This is not like that.”

“Good night, Frank.”

And Joy just gets up and leaves.

I don’t watch her go.

It’s easier to stare at the dinoflagellates glowing blue, their minuscule, pathetic way of raging against the waves that simply refuse to stop bullying them around.

Asshole waves.

Asshole ocean.

If I stare at the ocean, I can pretend Joy is still sitting next to me. But she’s not. There’s barely a mark where she had been sitting, and that mark went cold quick.

I take the teardrop-shaped terrarium and hang it from a branch to swing madly in the wind. Its contents won’t last long.

Eventually I get up and leave the scraggly tent of cypresses. I walk down the hidden path, back onto the Songs’ deck. Joy’s window is closed. The blinds are drawn. I trip the blinding floodlight again and walk right through it.