Good for You: A Novel (33)

“Where . . . is . . . your beard?” she uttered.

“Gone,” he said with a shrug. “You ready?”

She hoped he couldn’t see her swallowing hard from across the room. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”





SEVENTEEN


Luke had taken Aly camping at Warren Dunes the summer between her junior and senior years in high school. He had one more year at Notre Dame and had come home for a week before heading to Manhattan for an internship. He’d always liked to introduce Aly to the wider world, as he put it, whether it was having sushi for the first time or volunteering at a soup kitchen or browsing at expensive stores along Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. Aly had attempted to explain to Luke that she didn’t need to try camping to know she wasn’t a camping person, but he’d insisted that she at least give it a night before deciding. So he’d packed a cooler full of food, borrowed a tent from someone, and rented a spot at the campground adjacent to the Dunes.

In some respects, Aly had been absolutely right. She’d felt every lump and bump of the ground through her sleeping bag and struggled to fall back asleep after a thunderstorm woke them at three in the morning. Hot dogs did taste better when roasted over an open fire, but somehow sand had ended up in her bun and watermelon and even her water bottle. After a single afternoon, she’d gotten so grimy that she questioned whether she’d ever get truly clean again.

And for all that, she’d loved it. The Dunes, which stood more than two hundred feet above the lake and stretched nearly as far as a person could see, looked more like the Middle East than the Midwest. “It’s the kind of place where a person can think bigger thoughts,” he’d remarked after they’d hiked to the top of an especially tall dune. They were sitting beside each other under one of the few trees in the area, gulping down water and mopping their brows with their shirts. Lake Michigan looked so large that it took up the entire horizon, and the water was bright blue that day—nearly turquoise, really. Although she’d never been to the ocean before, Aly remembered thinking the lake looked like the photos she’d seen of it.

“Yeah,” she agreed. “It is.”

“What are you going to do with yourself, Al?” Luke asked. “I mean after high school. You only have a year to go.”

“I don’t know. Go into nursing, maybe,” she said, squinting beneath her straw hat. The local community college had a good program, and nursing paid a decent wage.

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but somehow I don’t see a word nerd’s true heart’s desire as poking people with needles and taking their blood pressure,” said Luke with a wry smile. “What do you want to do?”

He sounded like Ms. Perez, who’d encouraged her to take advantage of her natural talents. “I want to be an editor in chief of a magazine?” she said, as if she was asking him for permission—and maybe she was.

“I like it,” he said. “Which one?”

“All Good,” she said, wrinkling her nose because she might as well have just said she hoped to sprout a set of wings. “Or something like that,” she quickly added.

Luke bumped her lightly with his shoulder. “Don’t water it down, sis. Get specific.”

“Fine,” she said, smiling out of both pleasure and embarrassment. “I want to be the editor in chief of All Good one day. That seems impossible, since I’ll barely be able to pay for community college, let alone the kind of school where I could land a job like that. I’ve never even been to New York, and, well—” She motioned from left to right. “I have no idea how I’m going to get from here to there.”

“You don’t have to know the way,” said Luke, who’d been watching her with those wise gray eyes of his. “You just have to want it, and to start thinking it’s possible. I know you can do it. So even if you don’t believe that yet, borrow my belief.”

Aly adored her brother and his unshakable faith, and that’s why she didn’t tell him how unrealistic his advice was. She definitely needed to know the way. Without clear directions, she was sure to get lost. “Let’s just pretend that’s true,” she said. “Then what do you want, Luke?”

He didn’t say anything right away, and she wondered if she’d offended him by using the word pretend. Then he said quietly, “You’re going to think this is stupid.”

“Have we met?” she said, incredulous. “Sometimes you’ve got lofty ideas, but I’m the last person to think anything you say is stupid. I don’t even think you could pull off stupid if you tried.”

“Thanks.” The left side of his mouth lifted upward. “The thing is, Al, I don’t have an ideal career in mind like you do, and that’s kind of tricky at times. But I do know that I want to make enough money to make a difference in other people’s lives. Sounds cheesy, huh?”

Aly wrapped her arms around him. He was lean but solid, and she remembered thinking he felt unbreakable. She wanted to be unbreakable one day, too. “Not at all,” she said, hugging him. “If anyone can figure it out, it’s you.” She could still remember him, no older than eight or nine, making her a delicious dinner out of a can of tuna, a packet of Saltines, and some cheese that she was pretty sure he’d hidden in the freezer so their parents wouldn’t find it and eat it. He’d wiggled his way into a job at twelve, so he’d have money to buy them both new shoes and the occasional movie ticket. He’d managed to get a full ride to Notre Dame, even though he’d struggled with science. If he didn’t know how to do something, he worked at it until he did.