THE LAST ICED TEA OF SUMMER

Someone should have warned me about how awful it was going to be.

It was impossible to think that anything could be more stomachache-inducing than the feeling of knowing this was the final Saturday of summer, the last time Bahar and I would share an unsweetened iced tea at Colonel Jenkins’s Diner in Blue Creek, Texas.

As usual, the place was empty except for the two of us. And it seemed quieter than it had ever been before too.

Kenny Jenkins was just as surly and unwelcoming as ever. He predictably mumbled about how Bahar and I were the only people in the state of Texas who expected him to make tea without adding a five-pound bag of sugar to it, and how things like unsweetened tea were as uncivilized in these parts of the country as boys who didn’t like to play football. Kenny Jenkins never did get over the fact that James gave up on his father’s dream of football stardom so that he could go live with his mother in Austin and do what he wanted to do most of all, which was dance. And I’m sure Kenny Jenkins blamed me more than anyone else for the changes in his son.

And the thing that was even more frustrating to me was that Bahar and I didn’t talk about things the way we always had before. It was as though the pressure of this being my last Saturday in Blue Creek had somehow taken all the air out of the room and left us wordless. There was a lot that I wanted to say, but I didn’t want Bahar to feel bad for me.

The spiders hadn’t stopped running laps in my stomach for days. They weren’t just running laps; now they were also beating drums and setting off fireworks. The truth is, I was afraid of leaving home, even if I didn’t really like Blue Creek and everything it had been to me for my entire life. I had nothing else to compare Blue Creek to. Maybe Oregon would be nothing but endless abandoned wells to fall into.

And maybe James was right that there was something wrong with me, but maybe it wasn’t about Bahar, like he’d told me it was. Maybe it was about Blue Creek.

Maybe it was about facing all those good-byes.

“I guess we both must be exhausted after what happened last night,” Bahar said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well. You’re not saying much,” she said. “I detect the presence of an elephant in the room, Sam.”

“Maybe it walked over here from the Purdy House. Is it taxidermied and robotic?”

Bahar smiled, which momentarily seemed to increase the level of oxygen in the air.

I swirled my straw around in my tea, trying to fish out a lemon seed.

I said, “I’m just trying to get this lemon seed out of my tea.”

Swirl.

Swirl.

Lemon seeds are really hard to catch with a straw.

“You know what’s a great idea?” I said. “Wrapping lemon wedges in cheesecloth. I saw that on a show about a fancy restaurant in Europe one time, how they wrap lemon wedges there in this really nice cheesecloth, so that people never get seeds in the stuff they squeeze fresh lemons on. Anyway, I thought that was a great idea.”

“Oh.”

I kept fishing. “Yeah.”

“Kenny Jenkins would be run out of Blue Creek for doing something like putting cheesecloth on lemons,” Bahar said.

Behind the counter, Kenny Jenkins’s ears perked up. I’m sure he’d caught mention of his name. He glared at me. I looked at my tea, wondering if he even knew that his son was coming back to Blue Creek that day.

Bahar sighed. “Anyway, it’s pretty sad.”

“What is? That A. C. Messer turned out to be a—excuse me—jerk?”

She smiled again. Air.

Bahar said, “Well, yeah. That was pretty sad. But I was talking about you, how you’re leaving Blue Creek. It’ll be different here without you.”

“Yeah. What will Blue Creek be without the Little Boy in the Haunted Well?”

“You must be so excited.”

Now the spiders were running laps, beating drums, setting off fireworks, and playing lawn darts.⁸²

“I… Um…”

“You have to promise to text me as soon as you get settled in at your school, Sam.” My cell phone sat on the table next to my tea. Bahar touched it with an index finger.

I shook my head. “They don’t allow kids to have cell phones there.”

Bahar’s eyes widened like one of Mr. Blank’s babies. She said, “No cell phones? That’s as uncivilized as unsweetened tea in Texas.”

And that made me laugh, but I also felt my eyes getting a little puffy and steamy, too, and what the (excuse me) heck was happening to me?

I said, “I’m going to be lonely. I’m going to… miss you, Bahar.”

I still hadn’t given up on trying to snag that lemon seed with my straw, even though I was failing miserably. Then Bahar did something that instantaneously knocked all the spiders into a collective state of unconsciousness. She reached across the table and grabbed my hand.

We held hands.

And she said, “I’ll miss you, Sam. It won’t be bad, though. And you won’t be lonely, trust me. I know you, Sam Abernathy. Besides, you’ll come home for holidays and stuff, right?”

I couldn’t even talk. All I could think about was Bahar’s hand holding mine, and my hand holding hers back, how weird and magic it felt, and how I no longer cared about that (excuse me) dumb lemon seed swimming around in the iced tea I was having such a hard time tasting. And then I noticed that Kenny Jenkins was staring at us, watching us holding hands, and I felt myself getting hot and turning red.

My phone buzzed and rotated a thin sliver of an arc on the tabletop.

There was a text message from James Jenkins: Just got to Blue Creek. Still looks the same, sadly enough . We’ll be at your house in about 5 minutes. Can’t wait!!!

82. Lawn darts is a very dangerous game where people throw heavy, sharp things really high up in the air and try to get them to stick into the ground in the center of a hoop. It’s kind of like cornhole, except you could die.