What I Thought Was True(68)
Long story short, the headmaster was not as much of a fan of historical accuracy as you’d think. That was that. Strike three.”
I’m laughing. “I hate to tell you this, but you’re going to have to work a lot harder to go to hell. Or even jail.”
But he’s unsmiling, clenching that fist again.
“Oh God. I’m sorry. I just don’t think that’s so bad. Honestly, if they had a sense of humor. I mean, I’m sure your family is very funny, I mean, not like funny-strange but like they—”
“I get what you mean. And they do have senses of humor.
But, uh, not about getting expelled. From a school that your dad and your brothers and your mother and grandmother all went to. Not to mention that my brother Jake is on staff there, a coach. None too cool to have your loser little brother booted.”
Loser? Cass?
“Ouch. I’m sorry.” I rest my hand on his, the one on the tiller, leave it there for a second, feel this shiver—each nerve ending, one after another, vibrating with awareness—spread up my arm. I yank my fingers away, busy them in twisting my hair back into a knot again.
“But I’m not. I’m not sorry.” His voice rises, like he’s drowning out someone else’s voice, not just the waves. “That’s the 234
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thing. Getting out of there was . . . right. It was not the place for me. SBH is—I like Coach better, the team is better, the classes are fine . . . I’m happy to be where I am.”
“Your family’s still mad? After all this time?”
I have this image of Cass’s dad bringing a bunch of us— summer kids, island kids, whoever wanted to come—out in their Boston Whaler that summer. He’d take a pack of us tubing or waterskiing, things we island kids never got to do.
Keep going out all day to make sure everyone who wanted a chance got one. He let us take turns being in the bow, hold-ing on tight as it rose up and slapped down, soaking us with spray. And once, when I stepped on a fishhook at the end of the pier, he carried me all the way back on his shoulders to the house they were renting so he could clip it off with pliers and ease it out, telling me these horrible knock-knock jokes to distract me.
“They’re not mad,” Cass says. “‘Disappointed.’”
In the universal language of parents, “disappointed” is nearly always worse than “mad.”
“After a year?” I ask. I should change the subject. The knuck-les of Cass’s fist are white. Clench. Unclench.
“After yesterday. My grandmother and my mom went and talked to the headmaster a few days ago. He said he regretted kicking me out, since he knew I would never have done that stuff myself, that it was all Spence’s bad influence. Which it wasn’t. But he said if I apologized and admitted I wasn’t the one who came up with it, I could get back in. Which would be great for my transcript and probably get me into a better college and . . . you know the drill.”
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His voice has deepened, mockingly, on the last sentence.
Clearly a lecture he’s heard often.
And I do—I know the drill. I know it exactly. Realizing I do, that I get it, is like cold, hard ocean spray in the face—a shock, but then sort of soothing. Sure, no one’s imagining me winding up at some Ivy—but it’s that same sense of what’s next. I look at Cass now, at his hair blowing all those shades of blond, at his eyes, focused, determined, the stubborn set of his mouth. And this is the hardest, weirdest part of not being that barefoot girl and that towheaded boy running down the sand to the water, all legs and elbows and unself-conscious.
Suddenly, you edge your way to the end of your second ten years and BOOM. Your choices matter. Not chocolate or vanilla, bridge or pier, Sandy Claw or Abenaki. It’s your whole life.
We’re suddenly this close, like Nic said, to the wrong move. Or the right one. It matters now.
His blue eyes are grim. I slip my hand over his now fisted one again. He turns his head sharply, closer to mine.
Then the Boston Whaler full of bikini-clad girls sweeps a wide horseshoe, zooms past us one more time. One of the girls is waving the top of a bright orange bikini in the air, sun gleaming on her wet skin. No sweatshirt for her. Or life jacket.
The waves slosh into the boat, surf slapping us in the face and we rock back and forth crazily.
“Friends of yours, Cass?”
I have this sudden awful fear that they are. Former class-mates, fellow Bath and Tennis Club buddies, whatever. The peo-ple he really belongs with. To.
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“Nope. Yours?”
“Despite the island girl rep, no. We usually save our topless antics for land.”
“We’d better head in, then,” Cass deadpans. I whack him on the shoulder as though he’s Nic, and he grins back at me with an expression that is . . . definitely not my cousin’s way of looking at me. And a slow smile that builds. I feel that race of electricity slip-slide over my skin again, and meet his eyes full on, the way we did in Mrs. Ellington’s kitchen. And that March night.
He tightens the line on the mainsail without looking away from me, waiting for my eyes to fall. But I keep watching him, noticing, in the small confines of the sailboat and the strange stillness of this moment, things I hadn’t seen before. A tiny white scar that cuts through the left corner of his dark left eyebrow. Faint flecks of green in the deep blue of his eyes. The little pulse beating at the base of his throat. I don’t know how long it is that we just look. When I finally turn away, everything on the water seems just the same. Except my sense that something has shifted.