Invincible Summer(39)

This will be our constant.

He’s quiet. “When do you think we’ll stop coming here?”

“I guess when we grow up.”

“God, I’m twenty years old, Chase.” He messes with his hair. “You’re almost seventeen. This whole growing-up thing, when does it happen?” “Not for a long time, hopefully.”

He laughs. “You’re always the same. What’s that that Melinda calls you?”

“Chase Everboy McGill.” Another minor chord.

He’s still laughing. “Yeaaaah.”

“Okay, but what’s wrong with that, per se? Where is it written that we have to grow up?”

“I think J. M. Barrie wrote that.”

I laugh a little. “No disrespect to Mr. Barrie—”

“—I think he might be Sir Barrie.”

“If he’s not, he should be.” I do love Peter Pan, and I love the story behind it even more. “But . . . J.M. Barrie is not Camus.”

“What if we had chosen J. M. Barrie instead?”

“To be our guide?”

He whistles a few bars of that song from Pinocchio. I try to play along, but he’s going too fast.

“Yeah,” he says.

“One of us would have died in an ice skating accident.

How old was Barrie’s brother when he died? Eight?”

“Something like that.”

“No ice skating accidents for us, though.” I set down my guitar. I can’t concentrate. “That’s a winter thing.”

“Uh-huh.” “And we’re Camus boys.”

“God, why did we even choose Camus?”


It feels sacrilegious to even ask. “I don’t know. Because that’s how it worked out, I guess. And we can’t get out now.

Stuck here forever and ever. Stuck in the summer.”

Noah sighs and looks out over the sand . “‘I learn that there is no superhuman happiness, no eternity outside the sweep of days’.”

“Days and days and days,” I say.

Noah looks down. I wonder if he’s sore. “And days.

And days.” f i f t e e n

I don’t go out to the beach much in the first week we’re here. There’s nothing to do out there. Shannon is working or studying all the time, Bella’s asleep whenever she’s on the beach. Noah’s always over at Melinda’s, f*cking or fighting, and Claudia never wakes up before two. So I just hide in the house for a few days, waiting, dreading, hoping for the day Melinda eventually seeks me out because she’s tired of Noah or tired of not pissing him off enough.

It’s not like I’m hard to find. But so far, she hasn’t come.

On Tuesday, Dad makes me take the car to the hardware

store and pick up some shit for our project. The roads seem slower and dustier than before—I guess that’s the effect of driving on your own. I’m not used to it, not even at home, where Claudia tags along even if I’m just running to the drug-store. Now she’s too busy working on her tan.

I’m lugging the boards and hammers I bought back into

the house, sweat pouring into my shirt collar, when Melinda shows up and stands on my driveway, sucking on a popsicle.

“Can I help you?” I say.

She shrugs. Her toenails are painted lime green.

“Want to give me a hand?” I say, definitely not expecting her to say yes.

She doesn’t, just licks a drop of syrup running down her hand. “You haven’t been over yet.”

“No.”

She sways back and forth, making those awful sucking noises. Only Melinda could remind you of sex by acting incredibly unsexy. “Noah’s been over practically every day.”

“I’ve been busy.”

“Doing what?’

“Babysitting.”

“Noah doesn’t babysit?”

I snort. “No.”

Boards, saws, nails, screwdrivers. I wish I hadn’t bought so much stuff. I wish I had Noah-muscles and I could carry this all in one trip. Instead of, like, forty. Or maybe Noah himself or my other worthless brother could come out here and help me. Or, hey? Dad? Finish what you started?

Oh, he’d just tell me the same thing.

I wonder where you’re supposed to draw the line. When

am I allowed to give up? Give up on hauling construction tools in one trip. Don’t give up on a marriage. Don’t give up on your brother. Give up on Melinda? Line in the sand is such an appropriate cliché.

She says, “Noah’s not as good as you.”

“You tell him the same thing about me.”

“Oh, come on, Chase.” She drops her popsicle on the ground and takes my sweaty shirt between two of her fingers, like it doesn’t weigh anything. Like I don’t weigh anything, and she can just close her eyes and wish for me to go somewhere and I’ll go.

I pull away.

“You’re Noah’s,” I say.

Her face squishes into a ball. “I’m not anyone’s.”

She’s making her rape victim face. I don’t how to react to that. It always makes me angry, just like when she cries.

I know that’s an astoundingly inappropriate response, but I can’t help it. I always get the feeling like she expects me to apologize every time I say something that reminds her of it.