Invincible Summer(8)

I swim out to Shannon, and he pulls his head out of the water to look at me. Like he can read my mind—and would

that really surprise me after this long?—he says, “Where’s Noah?”

“I don’t know.” I pulse my legs like a jellyfish. “I never know.”

“I guess him splitting all the time means you won’t miss him too bad when he goes to college, yeah?”

No, him splitting all the time means I’ve missed him since he was old enough to walk. I sink underneath the water and open my mouth. I taste all the salt and the micro-scopic creatures.

Once I’m out of the water and finished drying out my

ears, I flop down in the sand next to my father. He’s tearing through his battered copy of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, sunglasses tucked into his blond hair.

“Hi,” I say.

He sets down the book. “ That was the most morose ‘hi’

I’ve ever heard in my life.”

“I want Noah to be back for my birthday.”

“That’s nearly a week, Chase. I’m sure he’ll be back by then.”

We’re leaving right after my birthday this year, which sucks. Normally we stay at least a week after. “This summer’s too short.” “You don’t want your new sister to be born on the beach,

do you?”

I look at Mom, practically bursting through her mater-nity swimsuit, chatting with Mr. and Mrs. Hathaway, sipping a Diet Coke. By the ocean, Shannon’s holding Gid by his waist, twirling him around, and Claudia’s crying, “He’ll get dizzy! He’ll get dizzy!”


I kind of can’t think of a better place for her to be born, but I know that’s stupid of me. I know babies need hospitals, but right now I can’t imagine anyone needing anything more than this.

Dad kisses the top of my head. “Where do you think Noah goes?”

“Anywhere. He sits in bookstores or sleeps on people’s couches or something. He doesn’t care where he goes. I get that part.”

“You get that part?”

I nod, tracing my initials in the sand.

“Which part don’t you get, Chase?”

I clear my throat. “Why he goes.”

When I wake up in the middle of the night, two days later, I first think it’s because I forgot to close Noah’s window, and it’s chilly. Then I hear clip . . . clip . . . clip like tiny, slow-motion horses. “Chase.”

I crawl over to Noah’s bed and kneel on his unmussed

covers. I lean out the window and there he is, up to his ankles in the sand beside our house.

“Let me in, man,” he says, in that quiet voice that’s so low it sounds loud.

“Noah, it’s three in the morning.”

He smiles, and it’s like his mouth is producing its own light. “That’s why I’m throwing rocks at your window, dumbass, and not Mom and Dad’s.”

It’s your window, dumbass.

“Dad’s sleeping on the couch,” I say. “He’ll hear you come in.”

“They fought?”

“Yeah.” They fight so much that these are usually the only ones we worry about now: the fights that last long enough for them to sleep in different places.

“Shit.” Noah exhales slowly, then shrugs. “Oh, well. Maybe he’ll be happy I’m home.”

Dad is not happy he’s home. He’s rarely happy about anything when Mom’s exiled him, but he’s really, really pissed when Noah wakes him up sneaking through the front door.

“Noah,” he says. “Noah. Where were you?”

Noah shrugs, his hands in his pockets. “Just walking on the beach. I visited the Hathaways. Got some pizza. Walked down to Dewey—”

“You’ve been gone for . . . do you know what time it is?”

Noah groans and goes to the kitchen for a soda. “God. I’m eighteen, Dad.”

“It has nothing to do with—”

“No, it has everything to do with that, man! I’m eighteen and I don’t smoke and I don’t drink and I don’t do goddamn drugs, and if I want to get away for a little while, just let me do it!” He shakes his head, goes upstairs. “Jesus.”

“Shitdamn.” Dad lies down and fusses angrily with his quilt. “I don’t even know what to do about that boy—”

“Brunets,” I say, and shrug.

Dad looks up at me. “What is it? Does he just hate us?”

I don’t know if he means us as a family or just him and Mom, but I shake my head.

“Then what is it?”

I don’t know.

Upstairs, I repeat Dad’s question in Dad’s voice. “What is it?”

I ask Noah, sitting on my bed while he changes out of his sticky clothes. I’m still cold, but I’m sweaty now, and I’m feeling every grain of sand I tracked between my sheets.

He says, “There’s no it, Chase. I just need to get out of here sometimes. This combination of drama and no drama, it kills me sometimes, man. It’s the silence and the not silence, do you get it? We make all this noise when there doesn’t need to be noise and then when our father’s sleeping on the couch, when there’s an actual problem—do you hear that?”