“You’re welcome to go if you want.”
Mom rolls her eyes. “It could be fun. For you, not your fifty-seven-year-old mother.”
“Is Jamie going to be picking me up tonight?” I ask sharply, having had enough skinny-dipping encouragement.
“I think she has band practice,” Mom says. I’m grateful she let me change the subject, and grateful I’m out of the house instead of running the risk of further conversation with Ted and Mara.
I make a face. “Is it called band practice if no one ever plays an instrument?”
“Fair point.” Mom returns my phone to the cup holder. “Although I’m not complaining. I know I’ll miss her when she leaves, but right now her guitar is driving me bonkers.”
“Oh, we think she’s leaving?” I don’t conceal the skepticism in my voice.
Mom shrugs. “Eventually.”
For reasons I can’t identify, her empty response irritates me. I try to put the feeling into words. “Don’t you think it’s just a bit weird she’s behaving like a teenager?”
Mom crosses her arms over her white blouse. “What do you mean?”
I reach for the thoughts echoing in my head the past weeks of having Jamie home. “Remember Jamie in high school? And college? She earned top grades. She was on the newspaper and got a good job and everything. She had her plan. She had her life figured out. I just . . . I don’t understand what she’s doing right now. She keeps wanting me to walk to get coffee, or watch some Netflix show, or just . . . I don’t know.” I hear my own exasperation. “Like, what, she’s going to stay in the house for however long she wants, doing nothing? Shouldn’t you be worried?”
I hit my turn signal and guide Mom’s SUV into the drive down to the beach parking lot. Following the gravelly pavement surrounded by painted wooden posts, I find a parking spot next to a Mini Cooper where girls heft bottles of Coke from the open trunk. I’m unbuckling my seat belt when my mom speaks. “You leave the parenting to me.”
I look up, surprised to hear the seriousness in her voice.
She continues, watching me unwaveringly. “I know you’re seventeen going on thirty-five and you think you have everything figured out, but guess what, baby girl?” I grit my teeth at the nickname. “You’re a teenager,” she says. “I know you don’t like to admit it, but you are. In this, be the teenager. I’ll be the parent. Me, a woman with multiple degrees and an excellent career, who’s raised two wonderful, intelligent, independent girls. Jamie just needs time and space, and that’s my call. Not yours.”
Stunned by my mom’s rare reprimand, I say nothing. I don’t like being told my opinion’s worth less because it has only seventeen years behind it. Nor do I like conceding defeat in an argument. Most of all, I dislike the reminder that my plans and aspirations could crumble the way Jamie’s have and my mom wouldn’t push me to pull myself together. I know it intuitively, of course. It’s why I’m hard on myself. If I’m not, no one will be, and then what’s to keep me from being in the exact same place I am now in ten years? Life feels like a tightrope walk, but I want to reach the end, not lounge in the net.
“Sound good?” Mom’s words refocus me sharply.
“Yeah.”
When she next speaks, her voice softens, if only slightly. “Text me when you want me to pick you up.”
Twenty-Seven
I STEP OUT OF the car. The small parking lot overlooks a hill speckled with patches of grass and sloping down to the sand, which stretches out in a flat expanse pocked with footprints. The water is navy in the evening light, distant waves curling lips of foam and collapsing on themselves. I see the crowd forming for the bonfire halfway up from where the surf meets the shore.
When I reach the spot where people have started to congregate, I find the bonfire half built. The twenty-ish members of ASG members and volunteers here have started heaping wooden pallets onto the high pile we’ll ignite when the sun sets. Early partygoers wander up, receiving their necklaces in Fairview colors from Kevin Young, our enthusiastic freshman rep.
I know I have to set up the s’mores stand. First, however, I want to find Dylan. I search for her in the line of volunteers hauling pallets from pickups in the parking lot. There’s no sign of her, and I figure she’s not here yet or she’s finding parking.
Returning to the bonfire itself, I find Kristin Cole, our treasurer, who’s co-running the stand with me and who brought the ingredients. Dressed in leggings, flip-flops, and a windbreaker, she’s setting up the folding table on the sand. She straightens up when she sees me. “Hey,” she says.
“Hey.” I’m on friendly if somewhat removed terms with Kristin. She’s in my physics class, she plays soccer, and she’s been dating Bryce Wilson for two years. It’s funny how in the close-quarters, endlessly interconnected environment of high school, it’s possible to know fundamental details of a person’s life without being close to them.
I help Kristin set up the table and tape on the S’MORES SUPPLIES $2 sign Isabel painted in class yesterday. It’s lettered in dramatic gold-glitter paint, and it looks good, which isn’t surprising. You don’t get to be student body president without being an excellent sign maker. “You brought everything,” I say when we finish. “I’ll run the stand.”
Kristin’s eyebrows go up like she wasn’t expecting the offer. “Thanks, Alison. Text me if you change your mind.” I nod. Kristin doesn’t linger long, like I knew she wouldn’t. I saw Bryce in the crowd gathering, and I’m sure Kristin’s eager to enjoy the bonfire.
Opening packages of marshmallows, I search the sand for Dylan. It’s harder now since people have begun to fill the beach, some in Fairview face paint and color-coordinated clothes who’ve started an off-key rendition of the fight song, others forming loose groups near where the fire will be. The sun is setting, bathing the beach in orange.
Instead of finding Dylan, my eyes settle on Ethan. He’s dressed in “casual Ethan,” which consists of a crisp white polo under a gray quarter-zip fleece and chinos cuffed to the ankles. While I watch, he carries one of the wooden pallets with Isabel, who laughs at something he’s said. Ethan looks irritatingly pleased with himself.
When they toss the pallet onto the pile, Isabel’s phone slips from her pocket. Ethan springs to pick it up, earning him a smile from Isabel before she walks in the direction of the parking lot. Ethan’s eyes linger on her.
Since our conversation in my office, Ethan’s been his usual self toward me for the rest of the week—goading me, one-upping me, contradicting me every chance he’s gotten, and frowning whenever I’ve happened to glance in his direction. We’re a month and a half out from the reunion, and items seem to constantly come up—lighting, parking attendants, whether we’ll need extra servers. Ethan’s done everything he could to fight me on each and every one. Right now, though, he looks like his resentment’s entirely gone, like the footprints the wind’s covered over in the sand. I don’t know why, but it bothers me.