“Lou, honey.” My dad calls up from downstairs, but I’m buried under three miles of blankets, sobbing into my mattress, and I don’t intend to move. “Elouise.” This time it’s a bit louder, a bit closer to the door. His knock feels inevitable now.
I burrow down, wiping at my eyes and tugging the blankets tighter around me. It’s hot, and I’m sweaty, but this is the closest I can get to disappearing, and oh god I want to disappear. My phone has been buzzing nonstop since I left work, but I’m not about to answer it. I can’t right now, simple as that.
My door clicks open, the sound quickly followed by my dad’s heavy sigh. Pillows and blankets are lifted away, and the air feels cool on my clammy skin when he pulls back the last one. “Lou, you have a visitor.”
My heart pounds in double time, and all the air goes whooshing out of my lungs. I don’t know how to do this. I’m not ready. There is no manual for how to navigate this big of a cluster, no matter how bad I wish there was. Maybe I should write one later, when there’s time, when it doesn’t feel like my heart is leaking straight out of my eyes.
“I can’t see her right now.” I wipe away some of the snot dripping from my nose and pull the blanket back up. “I can’t do this.”
And his face is kind, and his face is sad, and I know the words that are about to come out of his mouth before he even says them. “It’s not Seeley, honey.” He puts his hand on my arm, and I didn’t know anything could hurt this bad, but it does.
“Oh.” I look down at my blankets and will myself to not start crying all over again. “Who is it, then?”
“It’s a boy. A very blond, very tan boy. And—” He hesitates for a moment. “He has a lot of cake mix with him for some reason.”
“Are you serious?” I take a shaky breath.
“Do you want me to send him up?” Dad glances at my mess of a room before leveling his gaze back at me. “Or are you coming down?”
“I’ll come down.” I sniffle. “Just, just give me a minute, okay?”
“Take two,” he says, pulling my ponytail holder from where it’s tangled up on the side of my head. “Should I give him access to the kitchen or keep him corralled in the living room?”
I take the hair tie back and set to work smoothing it down. “Living room.”
My dad smiles and then heads out the door, his footsteps disappearing back downstairs. I take a deep breath and push off my bed, frowning at my puffy red eyes in the mirror. I think about putting on some makeup, some concealer to hide the fact that my heart is broken in a million places, but Nick can probably relate anyway, and besides, who cares? I run my finger over one of the pictures of Seeley and me that’s up on my mirror; we are sunburned, with smiles that take up our whole faces. Her arm is slung around my shoulder, and mine is around her waist, two interlocking pieces, always . . . and I shatter all over again.
“Hey.” I step off the bottom stair, having spent the last ten minutes trying to piece myself back together.
Nick’s eyes widen at the sight of me, and I guess my swollen eyes and raw runny nose have definitely registered. My dad glances between us and excuses himself, telling us he’ll be right upstairs if we need him. I don’t know if that’s a threat or a promise, but the way he squeezes my shoulder when he walks by makes me think it’s the latter.
Nick rubs his hands up and down the legs of his jeans. He is a jumble of tight energy perched on the edge of a couch cushion. “Hi.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Bake sale’s tomorrow.” He nods his head toward the piles of boxes and pans he’s brought with him. “We gotta get baking.”
“There’s not going to be a bake sale.” I drop into the chair across from him, kicking my legs up over the side.
“Why not?”
“Because there’s no point.” I sigh and dangle my head off the other end. “Because Mr. P is selling the place so he can go live with his granddaughter who has cancer, and that’s actually a really good reason. Because our GoFundMe is a joke. And because it was messed up of me to try to scheme my way into keeping the park open. It was messed up to try to scheme anything.”
“That’s a lot of becauses,” he says.
I flick my eyes to his, puzzled. “Why are you really here?”
“I’ve got nowhere else to go.” Oddly, even though the words are sad, his voice isn’t. It’s more like open, resigned, accepting.
“Doubtful.”
“Really,” Nick says. “I can’t go to Jessa’s, obviously, and most of the pirate squad are now desperately scheming to get with Jessa, which also rules them out.” He flops back on the couch and looks at me. “And I didn’t want to be around anybody tonight, you know?”
“So you came here?”
“I figured you didn’t want to be around anybody either.” He shrugs. “I figured we might as well not be around anybody together.”
“I can get that.” I search his face, settling on the blotchy purple welt roaring up from his cheekbone. “How’s your eye?”
“It feels strangely like it got punched. Why do you ask?” he says, dropping his head over the back of the couch. “I should probably be furious with you, you know?”
“Yeah.” I watch him sit there, and I feel—nothing really. A week ago, I would have died to have him sitting on my couch, but now it’s hard to imagine ever feeling like that. I wonder if someday, I’ll think the same thing about Seeley. If she’ll just be a blip on the radar.
Doubtful.
If there’s one thing I learned from watching my dad pine over my mom, it’s that there are some people you don’t get over, ever. Some people get in so deep, they just stay with you, holding part of your heart hostage long after they’re gone. You can move on, sure, I’d love it if my dad did, but they’ll still have that little piece of you, and there’s nothing you can do about it. I think Seeley is that for me.
Nick lifts his head up enough to look me in the eye. “Did you really only date Seeley to get with me?”
“Yeah,” I say, low and resigned because there’s no sense in hiding it anymore. “At first.”
“How was that supposed to work? I don’t get the mechanics of it.”
“I didn’t really either.” I sigh.
“But why me?” He chuckles, and I can tell he thinks it’s totally ridiculous that anyone would go through all the trouble.
“Have you seen you?” I ask, because now that the urgent, desperate need to have him is gone, it’s easier to talk honestly.
“Yeah, I’m a dumb blond who jumps off stuff for a living.”
“Or,” I say, “you’re a hot, sweet, diving pirate–slash–future college boy with a knack for cupcake baking.”
“You give me too much credit.”
“You’re a good guy, Nick. I could tell the moment I met you.”
He tilts his head. “Then how come you spent all last year avoiding me?”
“I did not!”
“Yeah, you did. I practically had to chase you down in the hallway at school just to say hi.”
“Oh, give me a break.” I laugh. “Why would you want to hang out with me when you had Jessa, anyway?”
“I did want to, you know,” he says, and his cheeks get all pink. “I was trying to ask you out or whatever, that time with my car.”
“No way.”
“Yeah, but after that day you pretty much avoided me the whole rest of the summer, so I figured you weren’t interested.”
“You are not serious.”
“I am, sorry. I feel like I’m letting you down over here.” He snorts. “But yeah, I was trying to ask you out with that whole ‘We should hang’ thing. I’m not really as cool as you seem to think I am.”
We both get all quiet for a minute, and I try to wrap my head around the fact that I built up an entire idea of a person in my head based on a pile of misunderstandings.
“I’m sorry.” My words come out slow and heavy, like they’re burning up on the way out. “For whatever it’s worth.”
“What are you sorry for?”
I stare down at the threads of the chair. “For trying to manipulate you and stuff, for trying to make you into something you weren’t.”
“S’okay,” he says. “You weren’t very good at it anyway.”
“That doesn’t make it okay.”
“No, it doesn’t.” He bites his lip a little, like he needs to chew on whatever’s coming next. I watch him, content to wait.
He shoves his hair back off his forehead and sighs. “If we’re coming clean, I guess I should tell you that things with me and Jessa were already falling apart anyway.”
I kick my feet and let them bounce back up from the side of the chair. “You guys seemed pretty happy from the outside.”
Nick shrugs and stares down at his feet. “I’m not how people think.”
“Nobody is, apparently.”
“No, but I’m really not.” Nick scratches the back of his neck and exhales for what seems like an eternity. “I was a massive loser before I moved here.” He looks up at me, and I hope I don’t look as confused as I feel.
He kind of crinkles his forehead and looks down at the floor. “I have this thing that makes it hard to read, so I would get extra time on tests and extra help with my homework. Plus, I used to have a really bad lisp, and I spent pretty much all of elementary school doing intense speech therapy. It still comes up when I get nervous, but I can mostly deal, and when I can’t, I play it off like I’m joking or doing it on purpose. But yeah, I was a nobody at my old school, and I was treated like it every day.”
“That doesn’t make you a loser,” I blurt out before I catch myself. “I, for one, love your lisp!”
“Fuck,” he groans. “I knew it was coming out more, but I’d hoped no one noticed.”
“I don’t think anybody really has; I was just kind of creepily tuned in for a minute there.”
Nick smirks and shakes his head. “Anyway, we came here because the bullying was so bad at my old school that my mom got scared.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah, that’s why I’ve taken judo since I was a kid. My mom wanted me to be able to defend myself.” Nick gives me a sad little smile and tucks his arms behind his head. “But yeah, I spent the whole time before we moved hitting the gym, buying new clothes, and doing everything I could think of to fit in.”
“At least it all kind of worked out,” I say, and instantly regret it.
“Do you know how strange it is to wake up every day and know that the kids I hang out with now are the same kind of kids who made my life hell at my old school?”
“Then why do you?”
“Wouldn’t you? Honestly? It feels good to be liked.”
I drop my head back and shut my eyes because, yeah, I guess we all do weird things to get what we want sometimes.
“Then Jessa came along last year, and it got even more complicated.” He swallows hard and looks up at me. It’s a little bit surreal to have him confiding in me like this, but a good surreal, like it turns out that Nick-the-friend is better than Nick-the-crush that I’ve been imagining in my head all year.
“I don’t know,” he says, running his hand through his hair. “I’m rambling. I’ll shut up. Your turn: Are you really in love with Seeley? No games?”
His question stabs me straight in the belly. Yes, I want to say. Always have been probably. And now it’s ruined. But I just shrug and tip my head to face him.
“I’m going to go ahead and take that as a yes,” he says, and then we get all quiet again. “All right, enough whining for both of us.”
I eye the various boxes of cake mix peeking out from the plastic bags surrounding him. “What happened to homemade?”
“Time crunch.” He laughs. “Plus, I didn’t know if you were going to go for it, so I opted for something transportable and returnable—which I guess was the right call since there’s no point in making cupcakes now.”
I nod, lost in thought, and then sit upright in my chair. “But what if there was?”
“I think we’ve had enough of your scheming for one summer,” he says, frowning.
“Wait.” I hold up my hands. “What if we still do the bake sale, and give him all the money? Not to keep the park open, but—”
“But to give to his granddaughter,” Nick says.
I smile, a tiny flicker of hope unfurling in my chest. “I think we should do it.”
“Yeah?”
I nod my head, grinning when he jumps up and gives me a high five.
It is 11:54 p.m., and my dad is being unusually cool about the fact that I am still up banging pots and pans all over our kitchen with Nick at my side. He’s come down twice to check on us, but abandoned ship quickly both times after being forced to act as our unofficial taste tester. Nick started combining the store-bought stuff with ingredients we had in our own kitchen a few hours back, and it got a little wild. I think we lost Dad for good sometime after the maple bacon flavor, but I can’t be sure. It could have also been the lemon churro twist.
At any rate, it’s late and we’re covered in dry mix and batter and powdered sugar, and I know that tomorrow the world will go back to falling apart—that tomorrow everything will be wrong again and Seeley will still hate me—but, right now, we’ve managed to carve out a tiny little spot where we’re both somehow okay.
There’s a dab of frosting stuck to the left of Nick’s lip, and without thinking, I reach out and I wipe it with my thumb. He leans into the touch, just enough to let me know that I could kiss him if I wanted, two lonely desperate people wishing they were other places with other people. It would be so easy to scoot up on my tiptoes and press my lips to his, to let my whole life melt away in this haze of confectioner’s sugar and flour and cute boy, to finally know what his skin would taste like under the tip of my tongue.
Salty, I bet—salty with a hint of chlorine.
It sounds fascinating in a super detached sort of way, and that reaffirms everything I already know. This isn’t my person. I look at the floor and take a step back. Nick lets out a shaky sigh, and I wonder if it’s from relief or disappointment, or maybe even somewhere in the middle. We’re the walking wounded all right, from start to finish.
“Yeah.” He drops his chin to his chest and runs his hands through his hair a couple times. “I should—”
“Yeah.” I nod, puffing out my cheeks as I exhale. “I should too.” And I don’t know exactly what I should be doing—cleaning the kitchen, maybe, going to bed, calling Seeley over and over again until she picks up and then declaring my love for her—but I know that whatever it is, it doesn’t involve Nick.
“Do you need help cleaning up?”
I scan the kitchen. There are dishes piled up in the sink, and every available surface is dotted with flour and frosting. It will take hours to clean, but I have plenty of time. “I got this. It’ll give me something to do.”
Nick raises his eyebrows. “It’s already midnight.”
“Exactly,” I say, and he nods again, like he gets it, like he knows that the nights are the worst parts.
Nick asks me again if I’m sure, and I am. God knows I won’t be sleeping tonight anyway. I follow him to the door, fully intending to lock it behind him. It fact, he makes it all the way to the end of the sidewalk, all the way to his car before I grab my bag and go flying out after him, flagging him down and shouting his name.
He looks at me, tilting his head. He’s still got his hand on the car door, ready to make a quick exit. “What’s up?”
“Can you drop me at Seeley’s?” I don’t know if it’s the running or the adrenaline, but I’m out of breath, and I feel like I’m never going to catch it again if I don’t see her tonight.
“It’s the middle of the night,” he says, like that matters.
“I don’t care.”
“Are you sure you won’t regret this in the morning?”
“Please,” I beg, because yes, I will walk there if I have to, but this would be so, so much faster.
“Get in,” he says, and a grin breaks out wide across his cheeks.