What Happens Now(8)

Just saw Camden Armstrong at the lake. Went into the men’s restroom by accident. Call me.

Those days, I was always looking for things to connect over with Kendall. Our friendship was like the drawstring in a pair of sweatpants, always slipping out of sight and out of reach. We always knew it was there. One of us merely had to retrieve it with that safety-pin trick until next time.

I waited for a reply, looking out at the lake so I wouldn’t have to watch Camden come out of the restroom, so maybe he wouldn’t see me back. He was here. I had spoken to him. I wasn’t sure what I felt other than an overwhelming urge to dive into the lake, swim past the far boundary rope, then keep going and never come back.

My phone chirped with a message from Kendall.

Bad reception here, can only text. But now very intrigued.

I was in the middle of typing out more details when Dani bolted up the beach from the water, full-body shivering, lips nearly blue.

“Make me a burrito,” she demanded, as if she knew I needed something else in my brain that moment. I put my phone down, grabbed her towel and wrapped it tight around her body and arms, tucking in the end corner at her neck so only her head and feet stuck out. Then I pulled her into my lap as she giggled.

“Mmmm. I’m so hungry. And look at this delicious lunch!” I pretended to take a bite of her belly.

My mother never pretended Danielle was a burrito. If she had, it would have had to be a whole-wheat one, with no sour cream because that adds too much fat and dairy. I loved giving Danielle these moments she never got from Mom. That I never got from Mom. It was like I was giving them to both of us.

I heard a noise on the diving board, a loud whoop, and looked up to see Camden backflipping into the water.

As if the last year had never happened. As if someone had rewound the tape, and here we were, in the exact places we’d been exactly twelve months before.

But I’d become a different person since last May, and a switch inside me flicked on. There was a blinking YES in neon lights.

Oh God those green eyes and those shoulders and the shaggy straight hair, and oh God.

And that thing that took place in the restroom, that ridiculous and horrifying thing we shall not talk about ever again, did that count as a conversation?

They say, there are no do-overs in life.

I say, anything is Possible.





3




“What are you thinking about, ducky?” asked Richard the next day.

I was kneeling in Aisle 2 of Millie’s Art Supply, staring off into space.

“I’m thinking there are way, way too many colors of craft sand in the world,” I said.

My stepdad didn’t bat an eye. “Yes, I agree. War, poverty, climate change, and craft sand. Times are bleak.”

I really loved him a lot.

“Look,” I said, pointing to the bottom shelf and the bags I’d already arranged in official rainbow order. “I went all ROY G. BIV, and then I opened the last box and found this. Turquoise!”

Richard sighed. “I’ll help you make a space between the green and the blue,” he simply said, and sat down beside me on the linoleum floor.

Working together like that, stacking bags of craft sand in swift, efficient movements, it was easy to feel that what we were doing was important. Like an aesthetically perfect shelf display could change someone’s life. (And who says it couldn’t? It totally could.) It was these microscopic here-and-now moments that had helped me the most. I had a lot of them in my job at Millie’s, which Richard owned. Three afternoons a week and all day on Sundays.

Which of course was going to make it that much harder to quit.

Finally, we got down to the last two bags of turquoise. “If there’s a box we don’t know about,” said Richard as he balanced them on the pile, “and it’s filled with, say, eggplant-colored sand, I may have to kill someone.”

It was almost six o’clock and closing time. He patted my back and stood up slowly, stretched, then walked over to lock the front door. He took a moment to carefully smooth down the lost-dog notice someone had posted inside the vestibule. FIND VERA! it shouted at us all day.

“Come on,” said Richard. “Mom and Dani are waiting.” We were supposed to meet them at the restaurant next door for our regular Sunday session of “all of us sitting down in the same place at the same time,” occasionally known as dinner.

“Will you do me a favor in there?” I asked as we headed out the back. “When the moment’s right, can you ask me if I’m excited about summer?”

We all had our things at Moose McIntyre’s.

My mother liked to line up the scalloped edge of the paper place mat with the edge of the table, as if she could get this one thing to be perfect, everything else in life would follow.

Richard always studied the menu intently, right thumb stroking his right eyebrow, even though he ordered the same exact thing every time.

Danielle did the maze on the kids’ menu, then the word search, then colored the turtle who was named Shelly and wore a sailor suit for reasons nobody ever understood.

I sat next to the window, counting every familiar face that walked by outside. My record for a single meal was forty-eight.

After we got our food, but before everyone was done, Richard gave me a look and I nodded.

“So, Ari,” he said. “You’ve got what, two more weeks of school? Excited about summer?”