They Wish They Were Us(20)
But there were unspoken things, too. I didn’t tell Nikki about the nightmares, how visions of Shaila haunted me more nights than not, or that I often woke in the middle of the night, sweaty and panting, a scream caught in my throat. And she never knew that I could hear her crying in the bathroom to her mom, begging Darlene to come home from whatever business trip she was on.
Neither one of us could admit that we were scared of forgetting Shaila. Sometimes we would start sentences with “remember how . . .” just to test our memories.
“Remember how she walked like she was on a mission? Or how she always farted when she sneezed? Remember how she she ate her pizza backwards, crust first?”
We were desperate to recall the details of her, but we were also desperate to move on. The forgetting was nice sometimes, because we started laughing again, too, first by accident at stupid reality TV shows, then on purpose, until our stomachs ached.
That was the odd summer, the black mark on our perfect records, the one three-month span we just had to push through so everything would be all right when it came time for college applications. Just get through this now, everyone said, and you will be fine.
And so, I had been given the summer off for the first time in my life. No science camp, no job tutoring middle schoolers, no girls in STEM program at the community college. At the advice of Headmaster Weingarten, Mom and Dad just let me be, and that is how I learned what boredom was, and how it mixed so devilishly with grief. Together, they became a thick, silky slime that was only remedied, it seemed, by vodka cut with splashes of flavored fizzy water, and joints as thick as my pinky finger, rolled by random Cartwright boys who claimed to have the dankest shit in the tristate area. What an enormous relief to realize that everyone else’s parents had also agreed to this non-treatment of trauma.
Together the six of us were quarantined to the beaches of Gold Coast. Only Henry had a job, being a stringer for the Gold Coast Gazette. Instead we felt like normal kids, riding bikes over rocky gravel and searching for horseshoe crabs stranded on the sand. We would beat this infectious disease, everyone decided, and by September we would return to Gold Coast Prep bright-eyed and ready to ace our AP classes. And even though we had suffered such a loss—What a tragedy! What a terrible, terrible horror!—this was all we needed. One summer of dicking around with no consequences and no stress.
Just get it out of your system, Nikki’s mom said to her when she finally returned from Singapore. Then we would be back on track and ready to grab the futures that dangled in front of us. All of us but Shaila.
Adam had been in London that summer, studying at the National Theatre with some Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright I’d never heard of, but he came home for a week before leaving for Brown. He said I was his first call when he touched down on American soil.
“Such bullshit,” he said. “Expecting you all to just get over it.”
I mumbled my agreement, but turned away. We were stretched side by side on the pebbly beach next to the Bay Bridge Lighthouse, where the coast makes a hard right angle before it retreats into the brush. The waves in front of us were more like gentle ripples and the water was so clear, you could see tiny fish from where we lay.
“Come on.” Adam stood and pulled his shirt off in one motion. Little rocks rained down. He held his hand out to me and I grabbed it with reluctance.
I peeled off my shorts and tank top, leaving no time to be self-conscious of the rumpled bikini I’d thrown on that morning—or to ogle his clearly defined six-pack. I staggered behind him to the water. Within seconds Adam was gone, sinking below the surface.
“Screw it,” I said out loud, and waded in, dunking my head completely.
The water was warm like a bath from the August sun, and for the first time since Shaila died, I was alone. It was exhilarating. I opened my mouth and screamed into the silence, letting moss and dirt and sediment flow in and out of my body. I imagined Shaila there with me, clenching my hands in hers and shaking her head back and forth, shrieking with rage and delight.
When I bobbed to the surface, Adam was already back on the beach, the sand around him damp and dark.
“Feel better?” he called out.
“Not really,” I yelled.
“It helps though.”
I swam to the shore and flopped down beside him. The ground stuck to my wet skin like Velcro.
“It’s fucked,” I said, though I wasn’t sure what I was talking about—Shaila’s death, Adam’s imminent departure, or the idea that we’re supposed to live and die all in the same life. Doesn’t that seem like too much for one person to bear?
“What do we do now?” I asked, trying to silence the screams in my head.
“We go on,” Adam said. “We keep going.”
I nodded but I did not ask my next question. How?
SIX
YOU SURE YOU don’t wanna come to Quentin’s tonight? I type, trying to find the line between obsessed and friendly, desperate and chill. Adam never wants to come to Player parties now that he’s in college, but after seeing him at Diane’s, I wish he would.
Nah, you do your thing. Not sure those guys need me hanging around anymore. See you next time.
My stomach sinks. I miss him already and he’s not even gone.
I shove my phone into my pocket and push the lock down on Quentin’s front door. The house sits on a tiny, tree-lined street straddling the border between Gold Coast and Clam Cove. Everyone calls this area Gold Cove for short. The houses here are smaller, painted in the same four colors—navy, crimson, birch, or gray—because they’re registered as landmarks with the historical society. They all date back to 1825 or earlier.