Eighteen

eighteen

It’s unusually chilly the next morning, when I’m lining up by the shore in my swimsuit with the two dozen other campers who were harebrained enough to sign up for the camp’s weekly Polar Bear Swim. My teeth are chattering, but maybe it’s not the cold—maybe it’s just the expected brand of mortal terror that comes with deciding today is the day you’re going to tell your best friend you have feelings for him, and alter the flow of the resulting space-time-friendship continuum for the rest of your lives.

I cut a glance at Leo, his eyes bright even with his hair still rumpled from sleep, and feel a cinch in my heart—something gleeful and terrifying, something that chased my dreams all night and woke me with a jolt this morning.

It’s going to be today. It has to be. I just don’t know when.

Before I can think about it too much, the whistle goes off, and I take off like a rocket with the first wave.

The cold is a heart-stopping zap. My legs pump under the frigid water and my arms flap like they’ve forgotten how to be arms, but for a freeing, very long second, it’s like it is happening to someone else. I breathe in and there’s fog in my lungs and ice in my blood, and it pushes out everything in its path—every embarrassment, every confusion, every doubt—frozen and sloughed right off.

I start running back out of the water before I’m even fully immersed, and straight up to where Leo is prepping the hot chocolate. He stops in the middle of whatever he’s saying to Mickey, his eyes wide with alarm.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I pant. “Um—I just wanted—can I talk to you?”

“Uh, yeah, of course,” says Leo, scanning me up and down like he’s not quite sure I’m intact. We take a few steps away from Mickey, and he lowers his voice. “Actually, I had something I wanted to talk to you about, too. What’s up?”

“I…” For once it’s not that I’ve lost my nerve, but my teeth are chattering like one of those wind-up skull toys on Halloween. I need a beat. “You go first.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, yeah,” I say, hopping between my feet and shivering with violence.

Leo glances around us, and something flips in my rib cage. A stupid little hiccup of hope that maybe, just maybe, we are about to tell each other the same thing.

“The thing is, Abby … last week I got off the waitlist at another culinary school.”

The words are so unexpected that there’s no room for the disappointment that follows. I blink dumbly at him. “I thought you’d only applied to the one.”

“Just the one in Seattle,” says Leo quietly. “This one’s in New York. And yesterday, I … I sent the deposit. I leave in September.”

The ground feels uneven under my feet, like someone suddenly tilted it.

“Oh.” I try to smile, but it’s wobbly and wrong. “Congratulations, Leo, I … wow.”

He leans in, talking in the too-fast way he does during his legendary information dumps, except now he’s wringing his hands and saying it like an apology. “I didn’t think I’d go, but this past week, cooking with Mickey—it’s been like a dream. Like this whole world opened up. And this school has all these international exchange opportunities, and an instructor whose Filipino dishes are like, world-famous, plus all of the classes come with an academic session for cultural context,” he says. “I think I’m supposed to be there. The opportunities are— Abby, I couldn’t pass it up.”

“Of course not,” I blurt. It sounds graceless and throaty, but at least it’s genuine. I really am happy for him. I’m proud of him. We’ve all lived in Shoreline our whole lives, so this decision couldn’t have been an easy one. And Leo was so torn between choosing culinary school or an academic track. Now he’ll get to do both.

But underneath that happiness, that pride, is a hurt so deep that I can’t find the start of it, let alone an end. It’s like sitting down in the place where your chair has always been and falling into nothing.

“You’ll be so far away,” I say, without realizing I’ve spoken. I catch myself before I say the thing that presses into me like a bruise: And you didn’t think I was important enough to tell.

The “lost chance” Connie was talking about—it was about this. It was never about me.

“Yeah. I know.” He puts a hand on my shoulder, and it should steady me, but I’m reeling. “But it’s not going to change anything, right? We’ll always be best friends.”

He looks so earnestly worried that whatever I should or shouldn’t say loses steam before I can say it. New York. I’ve never even left the West Coast. It might as well be another planet. And here I am, working up the nerve to tell Leo I’m in love with him, when Leo’s been working up the nerve to tell me he’s leaving my life for good.

“Of course,” I say, but I don’t believe it. Everything’s already changed, enough that I’m not even sure if we can use the words best friend anymore. Best friends don’t lie. Best friends don’t keep secrets this monumental. I thought we told each other everything, Leo told me, only a rock’s throw from this exact spot. But I lied to Leo, and Connie and Leo have both lied to me.

“You said you had something, too?”

I nod, and the last of my hope goes with it.

“Just, uh, Savvy and I … we’re good.”

Leo’s face eases into the kind of smile that breaks storms. “That’s awesome.”

“Yeah,” I manage.

Just then the first wave of polar bear swimmers makes it back to shore, and Mickey calls to Leo to help with the hot chocolate distribution. Leo reaches out and grabs me by the hand before he goes, pulling me in too fast for me to stop it and holding me close even though I’m soaking wet. I crush my eyes shut into his chest, and I let myself have this. Just for a moment. Whatever it could have been.

“We’ll catch up tonight,” he says, pulling away.

I turn back to the shore as he goes, feeling so separate from the next wave of runners getting ready to jump in that I might as well be a ghost. Someone touches my arm.

“Hey,” Savvy says quietly.

A beat passes, and I’m praying she doesn’t say anything, because I don’t know how much longer I can hold it together. Then Savvy—fully clothed, her hair all done up for the day, her eye makeup applied with doll-like precision—grabs my hand and pulls, and we’re both running, matching each other’s strides, smacking the water with the same splash.

I look for Savvy, but find Finn first, his cackling cutting through the mist. Then there’s a hand on the top of my head, pushing me fully into the water. My cheeks immediately go numb and my legs start kicking out from under me, and when I break the surface, I’m gasping right into Finn’s face.

It’s a nice face. And my heart is beating in every nook and cranny of me, angry and confused and too overwhelmed to remember which way it’s supposed to beat. And maybe I should do something about it. Maybe I should break the hold Leo has over me, solve one problem with another, do the thing that is obviously occurring to me and Finn at the same time and kiss him.

Finn licks some of the water off his lips, the smirk sliding off his face. I don’t have to look back to know Leo is watching, and for this fleeting, selfish moment, I’m glad. Finn leans in, and maybe I am, too—and I get an eye full of water instead.

Finn lets out an indignant crow and splashes back in the direction it came from. Savvy lets out a little shriek, backing away. I catch Savvy’s grin, wider than I’ve ever seen it. Full of the little kid freedom of letting yourself get lost in a moment. It’s the Savvy from the old camp pictures, the one everyone else knows, who I’m still filling in the edges of—someone I can actually see myself in.

“You’re supposed to get back out after you jump in, you bunch of masochists,” Mickey calls from the shore.

Someone blows the whistle and we all scramble back out, shivering. Mickey immediately holds out a towel for Savvy, rolling her eyes at us both. I look around for Finn, but he’s nowhere to be found.

“Looks like a cold Day in July,” says Leo, offering me some hot chocolate.

I let out a sharp breath of a laugh, still wheezing from the run in and out of the water, and take the Styrofoam cup from him. Leo wraps an arm around my sopping wet shoulders again, this time with an unfamiliar tightness—briefly I think it’s because he knows I’m upset, but just unsubtly enough, he tilts us, so Finn can get a full view.

I stiffen, and so does Finn, meeting my eye—no, meeting Leo’s. Finn blinks away from him so fast that I almost miss it before he turns on his heels toward another group of campers.

I pull away from Leo.

“You’re gonna get soaked,” I tell him, even though he already is.

Leo reaches out his arm. “I don’t mind.”

I duck out before he can touch me. I feel raw. Different. Like the cold has crystallized everything, made the things I didn’t want to see so clear that there’s no way to avoid them: it’s not just that Leo doesn’t want me. He doesn’t want anyone else to have me either.

I make myself watch the confusion streak across his face, the hurt, but it doesn’t do anything to chip at my resolve. It’s like Leo said when we were watching the lightning. There are some things you gotta own up to yourself.

“Leo,” I start, but he grabs my arm and pulls, pressing me into him right before Mickey and Savvy barrel right into us.

“I regret to inform you that we’re going to have to bury you in this,” says Mickey, trying to wrestle the wet sweater off Savvy’s body, “because it is permanently stuck to your skin.”

The heat of Leo against my freezing cold skin is so inviting that it lulls me, displacing me in time. I’m taken back to two winters ago, when we were sledding on a rare snow day and I went too fast and ended up landing face-first in a pile of someone’s driveway slush. Leo kept rubbing my arms to keep me warm while we were laughing and hightailing it back to my house. Back when things were simple. Back when I had no reason to think they wouldn’t always be.

Savvy lets out a squeal, bent over with her whole face swallowed up with fabric. “My hair is stuck on the tag!”

“Then hold still, you goofball,” says Mickey. “I swear to god, Houdini couldn’t get out of this. What brand sent you this death trap?”

“Jo gave it to me for my birthday!”

I shiver, and Leo pulls me in tighter. I tell myself I’m only letting him because we’re both distracted by Savvy and Mickey’s little show, but the lie is too shallow to take root. The truth is, this might be the last time I let him this close. I want to savor it, stamp it to my heart, and hold the part of him I can have, even when I can’t have him.

“Jesus, what did you do to piss her off?”

Savvy ducks her head down so Mickey can untangle the tag from her wet ponytail, but the two of them are cracking up so hard at how ridiculous Savvy looks with her head upside down and her arms extended out like she’s about to burst into the world’s most aggressive jazz hands that they aren’t making much progress.

“Probably fucked up the Gcal date schedule,” says Savvy, snorting.

Mickey is breathless, cupping Savvy’s head between her hands, trying and failing not to laugh. “Tell me you’re kidding.”

I pull away from Leo with absurd slowness, like maybe he won’t notice if it happens little by little. But I guess we’ve been pulling away from each other a lot longer than that. This time he finally lets me go.

He tries to meet my eye, but I don’t let him. I’m afraid of what he’ll see. Afraid of what he won’t.

Savvy shakes her head just beyond us, somehow tangling the sweater even more. “You know what she said?” she tells Mickey. “Why she’s not coming this weekend? Because apparently I messed up by scheduling it in pink instead of green, and— Oh.”

Whatever is happening, every single person in a ten-foot radius of us catches on before I do, because I have to follow their stricken looks to the source—a girl so tall, pale, and ethereal that I might never stop staring if her eyes didn’t look like they could cook me into charred Abby meat within a second of making contact.

Still, it doesn’t connect. Not the silence, or the way the girl looks laughably out of place in a pair of loafers and a plaid pantsuit, or even how Mickey has put so much distance between herself and Savvy in the time it took for me to blink that she might have teleported next to me.

“Jo?” Savvy manages.

Jo’s eyes narrow, stark and blue and seething. “Surprise,” she says. The sarcasm doesn’t do anything to mask the hurt.

“I’m— Shit.” Savvy straightens up, pulling off the sweater. “Jo, wait.”

“Save it,” Jo mutters, stalking off toward the parking lot in front of the main camp building. Savvy follows her, barefoot and shivering, not saying a word.

Mickey presses a pair of black sneakers into my hands. “She needs these,” she tells me.

I glance over, wondering why she’s given them to me, but she’s staring so determinedly at the shoes and not at any of us that I know better than to ask. I take them and she sets off in the opposite direction, leaving me on the shore with a pit of dread so low and distinct in my stomach, it seems impossible that Savvy’s problems haven’t always been tangled up in mine.