Georgie, All Along (19)

Last night, lying on my parents’ bed, I tried to call to mind any time I’d seen Levi Fanning around town when I was a teenager, but I couldn’t think of a single one, and that’s saying something, given how interested I was in anything having to do with Evan. It’s a sign of how fully off the grid Levi was by the time I’d gotten deep in the weeds of my crush.

So it’s pretty strange, how back he seems to be now.

“He seemed all right,” I say, smoothing out the T-shirt. It’s another marathon souvenir, which is approximately fifty percent of the shirts. “My dad said I should let him stay.”

Bel rolls her eyes. “Your dad would.”

Bel’s the only one I’d let get away with this snark, and that’s because I know she loves my dad as much as I do. He’s responsible, after all, for Bel and I being best friends, since I first met her when my dad was repainting her mom’s house the summer I turned nine. They’d been new to town, had moved to Darentville after Bel’s mom divorced her Grade A jerk of a husband. It’d been one of the first times I’d gone with my dad on a job, right around the time my mom’s arthritis symptoms started in earnest. I’d been disappointed, sullen—I’d wanted to go to my regular day camp at the pool, but it’d been shut down for cleaning because Jenny Westfeld swam in it with impetigo the day before. My dad had promised I could paint my name and whatever else I wanted on the side of the house while he worked on the trim, though, as long as I knew he’d cover it up by day’s end, and that seemed sort of fun. There I’d been, swiping big, uneven stars all over the parts of the old siding I could reach, smudges of paint all over my arms and face, and then I’d heard the crunch of dry pine needles behind me. When I’d turned around, there had been Annabel Reston, big eyes blinking at the mess I’d made of her house.

I’d never thought of myself as a shy kid; my parents were the kind of people who’d talk to literally anyone, and they definitely weren’t the “children should be seen, not heard” type of parents. At mealtimes, we always talked a lot—about our days, about music, about plants and projects my mom was doing, about people my dad met on the job. And I talked at school a lot, to my detriment. But that first day I’d met Bel, I’d felt shy, either because she was more reserved or because I had the instinctive sense that I wanted to be her friend.

So it was my dad who’d had to break the ice for both of us. He came down from his ladder and talked a blue streak to Bel, boring stuff about the type of siding on her house, as if a nine-year-old cares, but it was a tactic. After a while she was desperate enough not to listen to him anymore that she asked if I wanted a popsicle, and then we were off to the races. I went on that job with my dad for six whole days, even after the pool reopened. I only ever got Bel to paint something on the siding once, but when she did, it was the word shit in small letters, and we’d laughed and laughed and become best friends forever.

Still, it’s not fair for Bel to lay this at the feet of my dad, because even though he did tell me Levi was a good guy—“a real standup fella, who’s in a mess with the pipes beneath his house”—the truth was, I’d already decided I wasn’t going to toss Levi out, and it wasn’t because he was as attractive as I’d remembered from my brief staring problem in Nickel’s. No, it was because he’d looked . . . he’d looked how I felt. Tired and out of sorts at the end of the longest day. He also looked like I’d punched him in the stomach when I’d called him Evan.

The thought of sending him back out to find somewhere else to stay felt like leaving someone in the checkout line without money for their milkshakes.

Plus, he had that nice dog, no matter that the goofy, brawny pit bull had gotten into my underwear. He’d still been a convenient scapegoat for the stuff I’d left all over the floor, and the sound of his toenails on the kitchen floor this morning was weirdly comforting as I’d dozed in bed, time-zone rattled and vaguely confused about my whereabouts.

“I didn’t mind having him there. I think he’s going to get a hotel for the rest of the time, anyway.”

I get another guilty pang for not raising the suggestion of my decampment with Bel, but then again, I’m pretty sure the hotel option is what he’d prefer. He didn’t look that comfortable with the thought of taking my dad’s help if it would mean putting me out. If he’s booked one, though, he hasn’t yet texted me about it, and I hadn’t asked for his number back last night.

“Guess The Shoreline isn’t an option, huh?” Bel says.

The Shoreline is the name of the Fannings’ inn, and it’s been in their family for at least a couple of generations now. It’s on a prime piece of real estate in Iverley, a jutting peninsula on a particularly wide part of the river. Around the county, it used to be known for serving out-of-towners only; most people around here never even went to its fancy restaurant unless they had a job there. I know from my parents that it’s expanded since I moved away, but they’ve never gone into detail about it. Then again, they also never told me they knew Levi Fanning, let alone that they knew him well enough to have him as a houseguest, so who knows. Maybe The Shoreline is a behemoth now.

“I guess not,” I say, unsettled. If he didn’t go there, or if he didn’t go to his own parents’ house, the black sheep situation is surely still on. I think again of that look on his face when I called him Evan, and wince. I should’ve known better than to mix them up; if Evan Fanning had grown up to look like that—all haunted eyes and tense, cautious bearing—I would have been shocked. But he had been on the forefront of my mind, what with the fic . . .