JAKE

He skipped the first week of school. This was surprising. All he’d wanted was to leave Australia and get home. Together his parents had jumped through all kinds of hoops to get him home in time, and yet when the morning of the first day arrived, he found himself unable to go. He worried that his father might have been right after all; maybe he should have stayed in Fremantle and finished up at the American School there. Because the thought of returning to the halls of Nantucket High School without Penny spooked him. He had been many things—an honors student, president of the Student Council, editor of the newspaper, star of the annual musical—but none of these things mattered or made sense without Penny. It was his senior year, he had to endure it, he didn’t have a choice, and yet what he kept thinking was, Why bother?

What he thought was that there would be memories of Penny everywhere. Every single kid at that school would know about his loss. He would have to face people like Winnie Potts and Annabel Wright and Anders Peashway. He would have to face Hobby.

Australia, he thought, would be better. Anonymity and loneliness would be better.

To his father, he punted. “I don’t know how to explain it,” he said. “I’m just not ready.”

“They’re expecting you,” Jordan said. “I brought you all the way home for this. You told your mother this was the only thing you wanted.”

“I know. I’m going to do it. Just not yet.”

“I’ll give you a week,” Jordan said. “One week. Then you go. Am I understood?”

“You are understood,” Jake said.

He went to the cemetery and sat by Penny’s grave. As he’d predicted, grass had grown in over the rich, dark soil. Her headstone had been erected: Penelope Caroline Alistair. March 8, 1995–June 17, 2012. Beloved daughter, sister, friend.

Headstones, Jake decided, were stupid and pointless. They told you nothing. When you looked at this headstone, you didn’t know that Penny had bluebell eyes or that she had perfect pitch or that her favorite word in French was parapluie. You didn’t know that her favorite color was lavender or that she wore flip-flops right up until Christmas because shoes made her feet feel trapped, or that she’d had her first orgasm on the catwalk of the auditorium their sophomore year, during a break in a rehearsal for Guys and Dolls.

Jake sat at Penny’s grave and thought about how, in many ways, Australia had been like a dream—Hawk and the ferals around the bonfire and the gurgling fountain in the backyard and his half-Aboriginal cousins and his mother’s happily dousing her fish and chips with vinegar and ogling the statue of Bon Scott. Had any of that been real? Real enough, he supposed, because his mother had stayed behind. She was keeping the Ute and the rental house on Charles Street, and she was adopting a baby girl from China. She and his father were getting divorced. It was weird to think about, his parents’ being divorced; they had been miserable together, but the thought of their splitting hadn’t seemed feasible. But his parents had been cool and unified in their decision; this would be better for everyone, and Jake would go back and visit Ava at Christmas.

Jake had learned something about love just from saying good-bye to Ava at the Perth airport. He’d learned that when you loved someone purely enough, all you wanted was for that person to be happy. Jake knew that his mother was making a tremendous sacrifice in letting him go home. She wanted him to be happy.

There were things about being back on Nantucket that Jake loved: the familiar streets of downtown, the Bean (where he got a cup of American coffee), the flag snapping at Caton Circle, the peppermint stick of the Sankaty lighthouse, the offices of the Nantucket Standard, which smelled familiarly of ink and dusty paper. The Jeep was totaled, and there wouldn’t be another car for Jake, so he’d been riding his bicycle. He’d biked past the Alistair house the day before. Zoe’s car was in the driveway and the front door was open and Jake could hear music playing and he remembered all the times he’d driven up to the house and heard Penny singing inside. Sometimes she sang scales or vocal exercises (“Red leather, yellow leather!”), but other times it was “Fee” by Phish (“In the cool shade of the banana tree…”), or Motown (“Stop! In the Name of Love”), or something folksy, like “If I Had a Hammer,” which was the song she was singing at age eight when Mrs. Yurick first discovered her voice. The thing Jake always thought when he heard Penny singing was that he could listen to her forever, and it would always feel like a privilege.

It had been a privilege. That was painfully obvious now.

The week went by, then the weekend. Jordan had gone back to work at the paper, and he came home with two pieces of startling news: first, he told Jake that Demeter Castle was spending thirty days in a facility off-island where she was being treated for alcoholism. Then, two days later, he came home to say that Hobby had gotten Claire Buckley pregnant, and the two of them were having a baby in March.

Jake accepted these bulletins with close-lipped, wide-eyed wonder. He’d been away for less than two months: was it really possible that things could have changed so dramatically in his absence?

On Monday Jake had to go to school. That was the deal.

“I’ll drop you off,” Jordan said.

“I’ll ride my bike,” Jake said.

“Jake.”

“I’m serious. I’ll ride my bike. I’ll be fine.”

“Hey,” Jordan said. He clapped Jake’s shoulder, and Jake thought, Oh no, not the shoulder thing again. “I know you’ll be fine,” Jordan told him.

He wore a pair of the jeans that Penny had written on, and he wore the sneakers that Penny had written on. His father regarded the jeans and the shoes with suspicion, and Jake saw his point and thought about changing into something else, but he couldn’t make himself do it. He wanted to wear Penny + Jake 4ever because his reality would, in some way known only to his heart, always be Penny + Jake 4ever, even when he was an old man, married to someone else for decades, with children and grandchildren. He decided it was better just to announce this, as if he were a walking billboard, than to hide it away.

He locked his bike at the rack in front of the school. Kids were clustered together, he could hear them talking, and as he swung his backpack over his shoulder and headed for the front door, he heard the conversations stall, then quiet down, then completely stop. He was wearing a pair of his father’s sunglasses, Ray-Ban Wayfarers, so he looked like Tom Cruise or some other old-time movie star, and he figured it probably took people a few minutes to realize it was him. He didn’t look at anyone directly. He just wanted to get inside, see Mrs. Hanson in the front office, get his locker assignment and his class schedule, and go to school.

He was about ten steps from the front door when he heard a shriek.

“Jake?”

He turned, despite the time he had put in at home rehearsing not reacting to this kind of thing. It was Winnie Potts. Of course. She’d straightened her brown curly hair, and it had blond highlights now. She was wearing a white top that pushed her boobs up and out. She looked older and sexier. It was her senior year, and Penny Alistair was no longer an obstacle to Winnie’s goal of being the Queen Bee of Nantucket High School. Jake thought about how high school was two things. It was school—he would learn calculus and read Macbeth and The Canterbury Tales—but it was also a social universe with its own rules and hierarchy. How he would have loved to get a hall pass from this second aspect, how he would have relished just being able to go inside and learn and then, at the end of the day, go home, eat pizza with his dad, talk about current events, read his assignments, and go to bed!

But this just wasn’t possible.

“Hey, Winnie,” he said.

“Oh. My. God!” she said. “I thought you were never coming back. I thought you’d moved away for good. I mean, you moved to Australia, right?”

“I did, sort of,” he said. “But we’re back now.”

She crushed him in a bear hug that she executed with her elbow and her bosom. “I. Am. So. Psyched. You’re. Back.” She pulled away and eyeballed him. “Are you doing okay?”

“Sort of, yeah,” he said, though already he felt his eyes burning, and he was grateful for the sunglasses.

“So you’re still pretty hung up, then?” Winnie said. She pulled away and sniffed. “I see you’re wearing the jeans.”

Still pretty hung up, Jake thought. Well, Penny hadn’t been dead for even three months yet. Maybe Winnie had forgotten about her, maybe she had come to terms with the accident, maybe Winnie, like so many other teenagers, had been cursed, or blessed, with a short attention span. She had been saddened by Penny’s death, but it was old news now, and she was moving on.

Jake pulled away from Winnie, but she didn’t seem to notice. She whipped out her phone and began madly texting. Probably broadcasting the news of his return. In ten seconds everyone would know.

There was a song that Zoe used to play on the cassette deck of her Karmann Ghia called “Uncle John’s Band,” and the first line went like this: Well the first days are the hardest days, don’t you worry any more. Jake sang this to himself as he moved through the halls, fielding amazed and inquisitive Hey man’s from his classmates. Some kids’ names he’d completely forgotten. He tried to focus on the school part of school—the Calc, the Physics, the A.P. European History. The teachers, at least, did their best to act professional and nonchalant—or possibly they really were professional and nonchalant. They, after all, were adults, with mortgages and children, and aging parents, and water heaters that needed replacing. They were nice people and good citizens; they all knew that Penny had died and that Penny had been Jake’s girlfriend, and maybe they even knew that Jake had spent the summer/winter in Australia, but they didn’t feel inclined to take Jake’s emotional temperature—they were too busy and consumed with their own worries to meddle much in others’ lives—and for that, Jake was grateful.

On his way from European History to his elective, Personal Narrative, which was a sort of creative writing class (and one he was greatly looking forward to), he felt a hand on his shoulder. He feared for an instant that his father had popped into school to check on him, but when he turned, he saw the principal, Dr. Major.

“Jake,” Dr. Major said. “Welcome back.”

“Thanks, Dr. Major,” Jake said.

Dr, Major smiled at Jake kindly. His blue eyes watered behind his glasses. Was he going to cry? Dr. Major was known around school as the ultimate good guy, sometimes too good a guy to do some of the more difficult tasks his job required. Kids who got suspended often got their sentences commuted by Dr. Major. He believed that kids, more than anything, needed adults to listen to them. This openhearted approach worked out for the most part; the students of Nantucket High School felt protective of Dr. Major and generally tried not to let him down.

“How was your trip?” Dr. Major asked.

“It was weird,” Jake said.

Dr. Major tilted his head. The head tilt was his signature gesture, a cue to let kids know he was listening. Jake didn’t want to be the recipient of Dr. Major’s head tilt. Kids were streaming past them like water around two rocks. This wasn’t the time or the place for Jake to detail the oddness of his time in Australia.

“I can’t explain it,” Jake said. “Not right now, anyway.”

“Fair enough,” Dr. Major said. “Well, I have to say, this school isn’t the same without Penelope.”

Jake nodded once, sharply. “Right. I know.”

Dr. Major clapped Jake’s shoulder again. “I just wanted to tell you…” Here he trailed off, and his eyes filled, and Jake had to look away rather than see the man cry. “… If you ever need a place to take a moment away from everyone, you’re welcome to sit in my office. As you know, I’m rarely there.”

Yes, Jake knew this; everyone knew this. Dr. Major roamed the school, no crevice or alcove was safe or private. Dr. Major was likely to appear out of nowhere. “Going about my rounds,” he called it. He stopped in to the junior Spanish class and learned how to conjugate irregular verbs, and he entered the art room and asked for a demonstration of the pottery wheel. He didn’t like to sit behind his desk, he said. Four or five times a day, Mrs. Hanson’s voice would come over the intercom, paging him for a phone call.

“Thank you,” Jake said. It was nice of Dr. Major to offer up his office for what amounted to Jake’s own personal crying room. “That’s very nice.”

Dr. Major smiled. His eyes were brimming, but no tears fell, thank God. “We’re all rooting for you,” he said. “And we’re glad to have you back.”

At lunchtime, Jake wasn’t sure what to do. Seniors were allowed to go off-property for lunch; it was one of the things he and Penny had been looking forward to. They had talked about how they would hit the burger shack at Surfside Beach in September while it was still warm, how they would go into town to the Brotherhood on Fridays in the winter, how they would sneak back to Penny’s house on days when Zoe was working. It was going to be forty-five minutes of daily bliss.

But what now?

There wouldn’t be a senior in sight in the cafeteria. That might be okay, Jake would be able to eat alone, none of the underclassmen would be brave enough to approach him. But the younger kids would talk about him, and the things they said would be half true and half false, and Jake didn’t feel like cutting the kind of tragic figure who sat alone and pretended to ignore the fact that everyone was discussing him. He needed to leave the building, but having only his bike left him few options. If he biked all the way home, he would have time only to drink a glass of water before he had to turn around and come right back. He could bike to the beach, he supposed, but he was fairly certain that Winnie Potts and Annabel Wright and company would all be there, and he sure as shit didn’t want to run into them. Or anyone. He needed forty-five minutes of quiet, of alone time, and it did occur to him that he could take Dr. Major up on the offer of his office, but even then, he worried that Mrs. Hanson or Mrs. Coffin or one of the other secretaries might fuss over him.

He would bike to the cemetery, he decided, and sit on Penny’s grave. Whoa, that was morose, that was completely Emily Dickinson of him, but the cemetery was green and quiet and relatively nearby.

He strode out of the school, put on his sunglasses, and tried to look like he was moving with purpose, like he had somewhere to be, an important meeting or a date. He had to remind himself that Penny wasn’t actually at the cemetery. His father had effectively made that point when they left for Australia. There was just a box in the ground that held her remains, marked by a stupid headstone that told nothing about her—but whatever. It was all he had.

He saw other seniors making an exodus. He saw Winnie Potts in her red convertible Mini backing out of a parking space, and to avoid another confrontation, he ducked around a tight corner—and there, sitting on a granite bench with one leg straight out in front of him, was Hobby.

Jake stopped in his tracks. He hadn’t admitted it outright to himself, but he had spent all day subconsciously avoiding Hobby. He had breathed a long sigh of relief when Hobby hadn’t turned up in his Physics class. Claire Buckley was in his European History class, but old-fashioned Mr. Ernest had sat them alphabetically, and so Claire was on the other side of the room, and no contact was required. He had noted that Claire’s physique had changed enormously; she was all rounded curves now instead of sharp angles. So what Jordan had reported must be true.

Hobby started a little. “Whoa, Jake! I heard you were back, man, but I didn’t believe it!”

“Yeah,” Jake said. He wanted to run away, he couldn’t say why, but seeing Hobby was too much. Hobby was Penny’s twin, he was the closest relation she had, he had been present for all of it, her freakout and the crash, and he had suffered in ways that Jake couldn’t even imagine. Furthermore, Jake had told Hobby about his mistake with Winnie Potts, which in retrospect had been a foolish thing to admit to. After a couple of months of ruminating on this, what must Hobby think of him? That he was a faithless bastard, that he hadn’t been committed to Penny at all, that he was an utter hypocrite for showing up wearing marked-up jeans?

Hobby said, “I’d stand up and hug it out with you, man, but I’m kinda slow on the uptake.” He nodded at his stretched-out leg.

“Oh, right,” Jake said. He stuck out his hand, and they shook, and Jake didn’t sense anything but Hobby’s usual good-guy-ness.

“Great to see you, man,” Hobby said. “I mean, it’s really good to see you. When you walked out of my hospital room that day, man, I thought maybe that was it. I thought you were gone for good.”

“Yeah,” Jake said. “I thought that myself.” If it weren’t for the grace of his mother, he would be attending the American School in Perth, wearing a blue suit and skinny tie like a Mormon, reading Yeats and Auden alongside the sons of foreign mining executives.

“Sit down,” Hobby said. He scooted over on the bench and moved the brown-bag lunch that Zoe had obviously packed for him. Jake recognized the chicken salad with pine nuts and dried cherries, the container of her homemade broccoli slaw, and the slumped brownies wrapped in wax paper. His stomach complained. The funny thing was that in all his deliberation about where to spend his lunch hour, he hadn’t once thought about food. But there was food—meaning pizza and takeout Thai, which Jake and his father were once again eating in order to survive—and then there was Zoe’s food.

“Um,” Jake said. Could he tell Hobby that he was on the way to the cemetery to sit on his sister’s grave? No. Never. “I don’t want to bother you.”

“Bother me?” Hobby said. “Dude, I’m here by myself. I don’t have my license, and I’m too gimpy to walk anywhere. Last week I ate here with Claire, but today she’s tutoring some freshman in geometry.” He popped a grape into his mouth. “It’s a thing she’s started doing. Looks good on the transcript.”

“Oh,” Jake said. “Well, what about Anders and Colin and those guys?”

“They’ve been going to Nobadeer,” Hobby said. “They swim and throw the football around, and I’m just not that mobile yet.” He took a bite of his sandwich, and Jake tried not to stare, though it looked delicious, with baby lettuce peeking out like lace from between the slices of nutty whole grain bread. “Plus, Claire hates Anders. She thinks he’s common.”

This made Jake laugh. “She’s right.”

“She is right,” Hobby said. He chewed his sandwich, took a sip of iced tea out of his plastic thermos, then said, “So, I guess you’ve heard?”

Jake nodded, happy to have a topic to discuss that had nothing to do with him. “My dad told me. It’s true, then? You’re going to have a baby?”

“A boy,” Hobby said. “Hobson the third.”

A boy, Jake thought. Hobson III. Penny used to say that she wanted five kids—three boys and two girls—and the oldest child was going to be a boy and she wanted to name him Ishmael, after the protagonist of Moby-Dick. Jake had pretended to like the name Ishmael for her sake.

“That’s great, man,” Jake said. But he wondered, was it great? Having a baby in high school?

“Well,” Hobby said. “It was unexpected. She, uh, got pregnant before the accident.”

“Oh,” Jake said. He hadn’t thought about that. “Wow.”

“And we’d pretty much decided to get rid of it,” Hobby said. “We were scared shitless, you know. But then when I was in the coma, Claire changed her mind. And when I came out of it, I was so happy that she’d decided to keep it. Man, it was the only thing that mattered.”

“Yeah,” Jake said. “I guess I can see that.”

“So now we’re having a baby and we’re psyched about it, and we’ve decided we’re still going to college—separately, you know, wherever we get in—and my mom and Claire’s mom are going to split time taking care of the baby.” Hobby swallowed. “It’s not a conventional arrangement, but Claire is bound and determined to get an education, and so am I, and we may end up together or we may not, but the baby will have four people who love him, so hopefully that will be enough.”

Jake bobbed his head. He could barely keep up.

“Sit down, man,” Hobby said. “You look like you’re going to run for the hills. It’s making me nervous.”

Jake hesitated, then sat. This was the same granite bench where he and Penny used to sit and make out after school while they waited for their parents to pick them up. Mentally, Jake threw up his hands. It was impossible to escape places and objects and people that reminded him of Penny. This was their high school; it was saturated with reminders of her.

Hobby said, “You want the other half of my sandwich? My mom packed too much for me, as usual.”

Well, Jake wasn’t about to turn down Zoe food. He picked up the half sandwich and thought, This alone was worth coming home for.

Hobby said, “There’s something I want to tell you, man.”

Jake tried to concentrate on the perfect composition of the chicken salad sandwich: The tartness of the dried cherries, the tang of the mayonnaise, the succulent chicken. He didn’t want to hear what Hobby had to say. He just didn’t want to hear it.

“I talked to Demeter,” Hobby said.

Jake thought he might gag. He swallowed with difficulty, then reached for Hobby’s thermos of iced tea, even though Hobby hadn’t offered it to him. His heart felt like clay that was oozing through the powerful fingers of Hobby’s clenched hand.

“She told me what she told Penny in the dunes,” Hobby said. “And it had nothing to do with you.”

“What?” Jake said.

“It had nothing to do with you or what you told me before you left. Nothing at all.”

Jake took a breath in, then forced it out. He did a neck roll.

He didn’t believe it.

“I don’t believe you,” he said to Hobby.

“Well, I wouldn’t lie. What she said to Penny had nothing to do with you.”

“What was it, then?”

Hobby popped a handful of grapes into his mouth and stared across the street. “Here’s the thing,” Hobby said. “I can’t tell you.”

“Oh, come on.”

“I promised Demeter I wouldn’t,” Hobby said. “And man, you don’t want to know it anyway. It’s… it’s adult stuff, nothing to do with us, none of our fucking business.”

“Well, whatever it was made Penny pretty damn upset,” Jake said. “Whatever it was made her want to pile-drive the car into the sand.”

“Penny was sick,” Hobby said.

“What?” Jake said.

“She was sick,” Hobby said. “She was depressed. Messed up in the head. Emotionally disturbed. Whatever you want to call it.”

“No she wasn’t,” Jake said. But he knew, even as he denied it, that Hobby was right. Ava had confirmed as much. Penny was sad and fragile, she cried a lot, every hard knock floored her, she missed the father she had never known, she felt broken, damaged, confused. Even her voice weighed on her as a burden. No one had been able to make her feel any better—not Zoe, not Jake, not Ava.

“Ultimately it didn’t matter what Demeter told Penny,” Hobby said. “Anything could have set her off—the thing about you and Winnie, or the fact that Claire was pregnant and I hadn’t confided in her. For the longest time, I worried that that was the reason. I thought Penny had found out about my secret with Claire and flipped out. But it was this other thing. Or maybe it wasn’t this other thing, maybe she just did it, maybe she’d been planning to do it for a while, or maybe it just occurred to her in the moment. We’ll never know. Blaming ourselves or each other isn’t going to help. She’s not coming back.”

Jake nodded. Penny wasn’t coming back. That was the simple, awful nut of the truth.

“We have to forgive ourselves, man,” Hobby said. “I’ve thought a lot about it. I even wrote to Demeter and told her not to blame herself because it wasn’t her fault either. It wasn’t anybody’s fault.”

“You did?” Jake said.

“I haven’t heard back from her,” Hobby said. “But I hope she took what I said to heart. We’re the ones who survived. We have to be grateful for that. We have to take care of ourselves.”

Jake finished the half sandwich in silence, and then, wordlessly, Hobby handed him the container of broccoli slaw, and he devoured that as well.

“Do you want a brownie?” Hobby asked. He unwrapped the wax paper. Zoe had packed two.

“I’d be a fool to turn that down,” Jake said.

They ate the brownies side by side, in silence. The convertible red Mini occupied by Winnie Potts and Annabel Wright pulled back into the parking lot, and when the girls got out of the car, they waved to Jake and Hobby, and Jake and Hobby waved back. A few seconds later, as Hobby was consolidating his lunch debris, Claire appeared before them.

She said, “Thanks for saving me some.”

Hobby said, “Sorry, my brother is back.”

Claire smiled at Jake. There was something incandescent about her now. “Ahhhh, yes, he’s back. The school is abuzz.”

Jake smiled despite himself. He said, “You know, I always wanted a brother.”

“You know,” Hobby said, “me too.”

They said this lightly, sidestepping the ghosts of Ernie and Penny, amazed that this could be done. Then the bell rang to announce the start of sixth period. Jake and Hobby stood up, and Hobby took Claire’s arm, and Jake found that he was happy to follow them inside.