What Happens Now(88)

Usually, this time of year was when I started savoring every morsel of summer. But now I wasn’t sure I wanted to. Summer being over meant being able to seal the whole messy thing up and move on. Start school. Have a great senior year. Finish strong.

But first, I had to say good-bye to Kendall.

“Hey,” said my best friend as she approached the Crapper at the lake, carrying the rolled-up towel I’d instructed her to bring.

We hugged, and maybe it was my imagination, but she already looked changed.

“Did you pay yet?” she asked.

I shook my head. “I thought we’d go this way first,” I said, then pointed toward the entrance to the trail to the creek.

Kendall raised her eyebrows. I’d never told her what was back there.

“Where exactly does this trail go?” she asked. “I thought it just went a little into the woods.”

“You’ll see in a minute.”

We walked the rest of the way in silence, and then she did see. The creek opened up before us and Kendall stopped dead in her tracks. I gave her some time to take it all in.

“How can this be here without us knowing?” she wondered aloud.

“I know, right? The nerve of it.” We both laughed a little.

We went to the water’s edge and found a wide, flat rock. I didn’t want to go farther, out into the creek and possibly the rock where Max and Eliza had once ravished each other.

“Camden brought you here, didn’t he?” said Kendall after we unrolled our towels and sat down.

“Yes. If you keep going along the creek, you can actually see part of the lake.”

She nodded, staring at a spot where the water fell sharply, landing in a froth of bubbles before flattening out again.

After a minute Kendall said, “This summer has been . . . a summer.”

“Did we have all the fun?”

She gave me a puzzled look.

“That night at the gas station,” I added. “You said we’d have a lot of fun before you left. That we’d try to have no regrets.”

Kendall sighed. “It’s so easy to say that stuff at the beginning of something.”

We were quiet. It would have been a creaky, awkward quiet anywhere else but here. Maybe that’s why I’d chosen this spot, because I knew the scenery would fill in the blank spaces between us.

“But I did have fun,” she continued. “What about you?”

“Oh, yes.”

“And the regrets?”

I paused. “Only one, in the SuperCon parking lot.”

“Me, too.” After a moment she added, “I’m sorry I screwed everything up for you.”

“Eliza screwed everything up. Then I screwed it extra tight.”

“But if I hadn’t—”

“Please stop,” I said. I didn’t want to think about the what-ifs. “To be honest, part of me is glad I did what I did. Let that part of me come out. Because obviously, it needed to. Maybe I can really be okay now.”

“Good. But I’m still worried about you, a little,” said Kendall. “One of the things that made it easy for me to leave was knowing you’d made some new friends. Thinking you’d be with Camden and probably wouldn’t be around much anyway.”

“I’ll be fine,” I said, waving my hand, wishing I were really as certain as I sounded. “It’s only a few months.” I looked at her. “Although, you’ll be different when you come back.”

“God, let’s hope so,” she said, and I must have seemed surprised because she added, “But in a good way. Otherwise, what would be the point of going?”

“Or doing anything,” I added.

“Exactly.”

“I can’t stay much longer,” said Kendall. “My parents are driving me out to visit my grandmother at the nursing home. She doesn’t know I’m leaving. I’m kind of dreading telling her.”

“Okay. I’m just glad you were able to see this. And me.”

Kendall nodded and bit her lip, and I saw suddenly that she was scared. It was a big thing, what she was doing. I felt an overwhelming urge to give her something that would bolster her.

Maybe I wanted to give her an extra reason to come back.

“I have to tell you,” I heard myself saying. Kendall raised her eyebrows in curiosity and I continued. “When we dropped you off at your house that night of the SuperCon, you should have seen Jamie’s face. It wasn’t an I-feel-guilty face. It was more like an I-love-that-girl face. I think he really does have feelings for you.”

Kendall sat completely still. She didn’t react. For a moment, I thought perhaps she hadn’t heard me.

“Don’t,” she said sharply.

“No, really. If you’d seen him, you’d believe me.”

Now she doubled over as if I’d punched her in the solar plexus. “Why would you tell me this?” Her voice was high.

“I thought it would make you feel better about the whole summer.”

“Well, it does not.”

She covered her head with her arms and took a deep breath.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But if it were you who had information like that, wouldn’t you tell me?”

She took another deep breath inside her little self-huddle. “Yes.”