I shiver as I walk from my car to the aquarium entrance. In the dim January light, the building looks more squat and gray than ever. The golden glow of the gift shop, which I never noticed from the outside when I worked there, is the only color around. Walking inside, the heat hits me so fast I start sweating under my coat. This place was never good at temperature control.
It’s been a few weeks since I was last here. After a two-week stretch in October in which we didn’t see each other due to schoolwork and family stuff, Georgia became concerned that we’d stop being friends. So we made a pact to meet here on the second Saturday of every month. It turned out to not be necessary. We talk every day. And we see each other a lot, just like I knew we would—sometimes hanging out with Serena and Matt, and every once in a while with Toby, but mostly just the two of us together.
Still, though, I’m glad this is the place she wanted to go, rather than Buona Tavola or my parents’ house. I always come early and say hi to Jenny if she’s around, chat with Toby a little, walk through the aquarium. Today, the woman at the front desk tells me the next tour will be starting in twenty minutes, but I know the schedule.
“I’m just gonna wander, if that’s okay,” I say.
She nods. She’s used to this.
I walk through the rooms with the fish, past the two lonely turtles and the empty tank they’ve been cleaning for months. In the jellyfish room, I sit, lean my head against the wall, and wait for Georgia.
I have come here a lot since Jake and I broke up. More than the once a month Georgia required. Some weeks so often that Jenny asked if I was hoping for my old job back, which I wasn’t. It’s only a half-mile walk from a bus stop on the route home from school. Sometimes I visit Jenny, bring her a smoothie and talk about school and the store, or just sit and watch TV in her office. When it was still warm, I’d do my homework on the back patio sometimes, the silence strange in comparison to our summer lunches. Now, I just come to this room, to be alone in the wide chill blue.
Jake didn’t take it well when I told him I wasn’t going to Kentucky. He yelled and threw his suitcase across the room. He said he didn’t understand why I had changed my mind so suddenly. He said no when I asked him to stay. He called me names I hope he regrets.
But the worst part was when he fell back onto the bed and started crying. I had never seen him cry before, and it broke me down. I started crying too, both of us sitting there sobbing. He kept asking me why, and I couldn’t answer. The fact is, there were hundreds of answers, spread throughout the summer—things he had said and done that I was only just starting to see for the hurt they’d caused, like bruises rising on my skin. But I couldn’t articulate any of them. The best I could do, finally, was to say, “It just doesn’t feel right.” Even to me, it was a truth that sounded weak.
I crawled up into bed with him and held him close, told him I loved him. Then I got up and left, thankful I’d had the foresight to borrow my dad’s car instead of asking Jake to come pick me up. I drove a mile away before I stopped and pulled over and cried for what seemed like forever, until I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see.
It was over by noon on Sunday. I spent the rest of the day in bed. When Mom came to check on me, I said, “I broke up with Jake.”
“Oh, baby,” she said, but I shrugged her away when she tried to rub my back. She sat back and hesitated before saying, “Did anything happen? In particular, I mean?”
I almost told her everything. The whole story, from April onward. But then I imagined her reaction, and the horrifying truth of what I had almost done came crashing down with renewed force. I thought about her and Dad walking into my bedroom and finding a note, Dad picking up the phone, Mom shaking. I thought about being with Jake and two unfamiliar adults in the middle of nowhere. How I would have wanted to talk to my mother. I sat up and hugged her fiercely.
“I’m sorry,” I sobbed.
She stroked my hair and said, “Sweet pea, you have nothing to be sorry for.”
I did, of course. But as I played out the first few days of that alternate future in my mind, I couldn’t bear to tell her. I was too ashamed. Instead, I let her hold me and murmur comforting words, and I promised myself I would tell her later—when I was older. When I could explain myself. Because I could not explain myself to anyone right now.
Georgia texted me too, several times, asking first, did you do it??, and then, are you ok?, and then, I’m really, really sorry, Caroline. She offered to come over. Only when she texted me, okay I’m getting in my car, I’ll be there in ten, did I respond, no no, it’s okay, I’m fine, I just want some time alone.
Finally, as the sky was getting dark, Mom knocked on my door with a plate of food.
“I know you don’t want to, sweetie,” she said gently, “but we probably ought to get you ready for school tomorrow.”
I rolled over, nauseated.
“Senior year! It’s pretty exciting.”
When I didn’t respond, she continued. “I bought you some new notebooks and binders, but we can go to the store after school tomorrow if you need more. Now, what were you thinking for an outfit? Let’s get more light in here so we can see properly. Goodness, it’s getting dark earlier and earlier these days.”
She went over to the closet and pulled out the blue dress she and Dad got me for my birthday, and I realized I never got to show it to Jake. It was the dress I was going to wear the next day, for our long, long drive. “How about this?” she asked. I shook my head. A wave of cold shivered through my body, followed by overwhelming heat, as if I had a fever. “You’re right, probably too nice for the first day.” She put it back in the closet. “Maybe separates. What do you think?”
I didn’t answer.
“Caroline,” she said, putting one hand on her hip. “Work with me here.”
I pulled the covers up to my chin, and my eye caught on a white T-shirt with the aquarium logo, crumpled on the floor. They made promotional shirts to sell in the gift shop, except the printing company got the words wrong, so they say Get wet! At the Boneville Aquarium. We were allowed to take the reject shirts for free. We made “Boneville” jokes for weeks.
“That one,” I croaked, pointing. Mom picked it up and wrinkled her nose.
“Really? This one?”
I nodded.
“Well, okay, Caroline, it’s up to you.”
School was almost as bad as I’d expected, except it turns out my old friends didn’t hate me. When I told them I broke up with Jake, they didn’t crow in delight. Chandler gave me a hug, and Erin spent the whole lunch hour asking questions.
All the attention felt awkward, and I tried to deflect questions back to them. Erin told us about her friends at camp, and I could sense the wistfulness in her voice when she talked about their late nights around a fire. Chandler had met a guy in Rhode Island, where she went to stay with her mom every summer, but he’d ended things when she left. Both of them seemed kinder than they used to, and I wondered whether they had grown up or I had been wrong.
I texted Georgia a lot. The first day, she woke me up before my alarm with a text that read: I KNOW YOU’RE NOT EXCITED ABOUT SENIOR YEAR BUT IT SEEMS LIKE YOU DON’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT JAKE SO WOOOO SENIOR YEAR WHAT IS YOUR CLASS SCHEDULE. We texted at lunch and after school and made plans to get dinner at Buona Tavola on Friday. That first night, while I was doing my homework, she texted me twelve hearts in a row, and when I asked, what was that for?, she said, I’m just really, really glad you’re still here and I hope you are too. Looking down at my math worksheets, I hesitated for a moment and then typed back, I am.
I tried texting and calling Jake on Tuesday to see if he had made it, to no response. I tried the next day too, and the next, and the next, and then a few weeks later, and then again a week after that. He never responded, not even once, and he blocked me on all his social media accounts.
I gave up on talking to him. Instead, I talked about him. All through the fall, my and Georgia’s conversations kept coming back around to Jake. Unlike in the summer, though, we mostly talked about his flaws.
It wasn’t intentional at first. I didn’t bear him any ill will. But Georgia did. One day in mid-September, we were at my house, and I was taking down everything on my bulletin board, placing each item carefully in a shoebox to make room for a new set of pictures. More than half of the photos were of me and Jake. Most of the rest were pictures of the places I’d hoped to go with him.
“I’m glad you’re taking these down,” Georgia said as she highlighted something in her history book. “He was never good enough for you.”
“Well…” I started, and Georgia cut me off with a look.
“Just look at what was up on this board,” she said. “You had all these dreams. Of all these amazing places you wanted to be. And he used your dreams to get to his dad. He is…” She paused to choose her words. “Unbelievably selfish.”
I opened my mouth to protest, then closed it again. She was right. And I didn’t have to defend him anymore.
It kept coming up. One weekend, Georgia and I were eating pizza with Serena and Matt, and I mentioned something I had done with Jake earlier in the summer.
“Oh my God,” Serena said, “he was the worst.”
“What did he do to you?” I asked, a little alarmed.
“Nothing to me,” Serena said, “but that one time we hung out at bowling, he was so obnoxious. And didn’t he make you invite him to the Great Adventures trip?” She shook her head.
“That fuckin’ sucked,” Matt added. “That trip was for us.”
“It just seemed like he was never okay with you having your own friends,” Serena said.
“The lady is correct,” Georgia said definitively.
“Y’all are being a little harsh,” I said. They dropped it, but I knew they weren’t wrong. I just wished I had known it earlier.
After these conversations, I always found myself wanting to talk to him. Sometimes I wanted to yell at him, or ask him questions, or make him explain himself; sometimes, I just wanted to know how he was doing. If he was happier without me.
Finally, at Georgia’s urging, I went to visit Toby at the aquarium and asked him if he’d heard anything. He seemed uncomfortable. “Jake said he didn’t want to talk to you, and I don’t know if I’m supposed to tell you what’s going on with him, or what.” Eventually, though, he showed me the picture: Jake and his dad, broad smiles across both their faces, standing in a field and half-silhouetted by the setting sun. I felt all the residual doubts of the last few months well up inside me and fall away, a structure finally crumbling. “Thanks,” I told Toby and left.
Now, I am back here, waiting for Georgia. Meeting at the aquarium is just a formality today. We’re going back to her house to get ready for dinner—we’re going out with her family to celebrate. A few weeks ago, she got the letter telling her that she got into Stanford early action. She’ll be going to California in August. Her parents have been a lot more relaxed since then. For the first time ever, they lowered the standards of the green zone to include an A− rather than only an A.
I have not gotten any college acceptance letters. I didn’t apply anywhere early decision. At my mom’s insistence and Georgia’s gentle coercion, I did submit a few applications—some to in-state schools, including the one nearby, and some to farther-flung colleges that my parents and Georgia deemed the right balance of cost, quality, and likelihood to accept me. They are scattered all over the place, one in the northeast, one in the southwest, and one, yes, in California, just a few hours away from Stanford.
I don’t expect any letters until April. When Georgia got hers, I printed out a picture of the campus and put it on my bulletin board. It hasn’t been there long, but already it draws my eye, how bright the sun is, how green the trees. And equally it hides something I cannot think about: Georgia standing in that sun and me still here, so far away.
I have no idea if I’ll get into a college, or whether I’ll go if I do. I don’t like the idea of more school or starting out life as an adult with thousands of dollars of debt. But after months of conversations, Georgia has convinced me that a bachelor’s degree might be worth it. After I get acceptance or rejection letters, I’ll have a little time to decide where I want to be and what I want to do, and it is both a relief and a terror that whatever I choose, I’ll be alone.
It is a relief, too, to know that Georgia and I will both be working here next summer. We applied early to be JAC counselors. When I asked Georgia if she shouldn’t be doing an internship or something more serious, she shrugged.
“Maybe,” she said. “But there’s not a whole lot that’s interesting here, so I’d probably have to find a job and a cousin to host me somewhere else, and I think my parents are gonna miss me more than they let on. I’d kind of like to stay at home for one last summer. And there’s nothing more prestigious than working at Bonneville’s number one aquatic learning center.”
We both know this isn’t true. But I don’t try to argue.
Around me, the jellyfish drift in aimless groups. I press my hand against the glass, sticky and warm.
The doors beside me push open, and a tour group shuffles into the room.
“…my personal favorite room,” Toby proclaims. “Jellyfish are remarkably adaptable creatures. If the water around them gets rougher, they actually grow more of these long tendrils so they can propel themselves through the water rather than get tossed around in the waves. They also—shit, Caroline, didn’t see you there, don’t just lurk like that—”
“It’s not like I’m hiding,” I say. The entire tour group stares at me.
“Anyway,” Toby continues, “we keep our water pretty calm, so the jellyfish here all have pretty short tendrils.”
One woman murmurs to another, “I didn’t know that,” and I have to turn my face to hide my smile.
The final stragglers of the tour group come through, with Georgia bringing up the rear. She scans the room before her gaze finally catches on me, and she sidesteps the rest of the group while Toby continues to talk.
“There you are,” she says under her breath. “I thought you might be visiting Jenny, but you weren’t, so I had this extremely awkward encounter. She doesn’t really talk, does she? I ended up literally backing out of the gift shop. Anyway, come on, we gotta go get ready. I’m gonna let you put makeup on me, I hope you’re excited.”
The blue light filters over us, making the room feel like a dream. Georgia looks up at the jellyfish, translucent and slow-moving, placid in their heated water. For them, there are no seasons, no decisions, no passing of time. In here, everything is always the same. I feel an urge to rest my head against the glass and never move.
But Georgia’s foot is tapping, one hand drumming a piano rhythm on her hip, the other fiddling with the end of her long, thick braid. Her eyes follow the jellyfish for a moment, her mouth opening slightly as if about to voice a thought, and then she looks down at me again.
“Caroline,” she says, “come on, it’s time to go. We have so much to do.”
She stretches out her hand, callused and familiar. I take it and she pulls me up—leading me back into the world.