chapter 6

PIPER BLANKENSHIP

 

 

 

There I was, exiled to Nowhere, South Carolina, to spend the summer with my mom and her childhood best friend, Lainey, my godmother. Oh, yes, and as an added bonus I would babysit Lainey’s bratty kids. Well, okay, it might not have been fair to call them bratty. I hadn’t even met them. And “exile” might be too strong a word, but it was exactly how I felt.

Mom had dropped me off the day before and then she’d gone home to finish packing. She’d be back the next day and Lainey would come with her kids the day after. Meanwhile, I needed to get the house perfectly ready: make the beds, wash the sheets in Mom’s Laundress #22 detergent and fill the refrigerator with groceries. I’m surprised she didn’t ask me to drop little chocolates on their pillows.

It’d been only a couple weeks since Mom screwed up at work. It was like a bomb had been lit that day—she blew up everything in our lives. I think she left Dad, which I don’t blame her for, but it sucked because it only made him a bigger jerk than he was before. Then she began spending all her time going back and forth between Charleston and here to fix up her parents’ old house in this crap town. “I’m saving it to sell it,” she kept saying, as if she still had a job in the ER but the ER was for houses. Meanwhile, our real house, the one we lived in in Charleston, the one I grew up in, had just Dad and Gus, our sweet blond terrier, in it like a ghost house. Mom packed so much stuff it was like she never planned on going back.

If asked, I could tell anyone why I’d been sent here to work for my mom and Lainey—failing my freshman year of college and a tiny little arrest (public intoxication, which shouldn’t even be a real thing) would do that. But it sounded worse than it really was. If it mattered, I could explain what happened. But it didn’t seem to matter and this was my punishment: Keep the house clean. Stock the refrigerator, make the beds, do the dishes and cook the meals. And let’s not forget—watch two little kids. But children were like aliens to me. I was Cinderella, but worse, because a prince did not exist. And there would be no ball at the end of this summer, only a “trial semester” at a junior college if I was lucky.

Yes, it would be ideal if I was a better daughter, if I was still a virgin at nineteen, if I hadn’t “marred” my body with a little tattoo of my favorite flower, a sunflower, if I’d gone to class, if I didn’t drink too much. But ideal was never my thing. Even though I wished, at least once, for it to be my thing.

Anyway, there I was and I had to admit to myself (definitely not to Mom if asked) that the house was super cute—white shingled with the brightest blue shutters and doors. Mom had painted our bedroom doors at home this very color. Now I understood why—some frosting-covered kid’s memory of the river house where she spent her childhood summers. I’d heard her and Grandma and Granddad (before they died) talk about it for years. Should we sell it? Keep renting it? Should we go back? But they never did anything with it. Until now.

I’d nosed my way through the entire house already, kind of freaked out that Mom wanted to be here all summer while she waited to see if she could still be a “real” doctor. It was a creaky house, like its joints needed exercise. The floorboards seemed to be held together by sand. The doors didn’t close all the way, warped like they’d been underwater for years. There were four bedrooms spread out in the back of the house.

Outside, behind the house, was the river—a tributary from the sea. It wasn’t the kind of water you swam in, or at least the kind of water I would swim in, what with so many crabs and shrimp and otters and fish and all manner of disgusting, squishy things that I did not want touching my skin. I was more of a beach girl, so thankfully that was exactly what was across the street—sand and ocean. It was a house between river and sea.

Since the house rested on the banks of the tidal river, the view was beautiful. A dock stretched across the water like it was waking, its wooden sun-warmed arms spread apart in a stretch. A boat, only big enough to fit two or three people, bobbed on the water like a little kid wanting attention. One minute I glanced outside and there was nothing but a blue-gray basin parallel with the earth, a flat landscape separated only by the colors of earth and then water. And the next minute the dock’s plankway dropped ten feet, baring the crushed oyster shells, discarded like sea trash, on the banks of the marsh.

But there wasn’t much enjoying any of it until I finished the to-do list from hell. So I walked along the sidewalks of Watersend on my way to the market. The air felt like it was being pumped through a furnace. Not that I didn’t know what hot felt like—Charleston could be a bonfire—but I’d been north at college in Vermont. Now the humidity felt like a thick sweater, as if I’d never felt it before.

I kept thinking I was lost, because in Watersend the curvy roads changed names without warning as if a drunkard had planned the place. I checked the little hand-drawn map and saw I was exactly where I was supposed to be—one more left and then downtown. Along the way, there were cedar shake houses with wide porches and front lawns with wildflower gardens and iron gates hinting at hidden secrets. It made me think of The Secret Garden, but then again, Ryan (my ex) made fun of me because he said everything made me think of a book. I was a weirdo. Which he once thought was cute, but not so much anymore.

The river scooped around the town like a hug (I couldn’t believe I thought something so sentimental and sappy). And everything—the town, the houses, the streets and stores—sat in the curved arch of the bay. If the river overflowed, or decided to swallow the town, it would all be gone in an instant, absorbed into the green and gray and oyster-dimpled basin.

These were the things I thought about as I strolled into town because I was doing my very best not to think about Ryan. And how much I loved him. And how he’d chosen Hannah over me even though I’d offered him everything and how he was backpacking through Europe with her this very second and how he posted things on Instagram like “View from here” and I could tell it was from the bed where he lay with her. He was my “first,” and although I’m not a big enough idiot to believe that the first is the last, I loved him so much that I couldn’t stop believing it. It was horrible knowing something wasn’t true but believing it anyway.

My chest felt bruised even though he’d never hit me. And to add insult to embarrassment, there I was dragging one of those ridiculous wagons with the big beach tires because “everything is walking distance.”

My cell phone dinged. I glanced to see who had texted or e-mailed or Instagrammed or Facebook messaged or Snapchatted or . . . anything at all. But it was just Mom asking how it was going.

It’s going, I texted back. On the way to market. I rounded the corner to downtown and it was charming for sure. My grandma, she would have said, Golly! And sometimes I say it just to say it, which I did right then.

Downtown had the only straight street so far: the town planner had finally sobered up. The shops were decked with brightly colored awnings—yellow, blue, pale pink and garish orange. The rows of attached shops were separated only by paint color and awning designs. Benches, black iron with curved backs, lined the street and I spotted a retro movie theater, its marquee bright red. Gas lanterns burned, trying to outdo the sunlight, which today was impossible. Faded white lines marked the parking spaces and most people obviously ignored them, parking any which way they chose.

I glanced at the grocery list, which was on a pad of paper with a ridiculous dolphin on the upper left-hand corner and the name of the house typed below: Sea La Vie. Dumb name. Even though I failed French (eight a.m., were they serious?), I knew that La Vie meant “Life.”

The Summer Sisters’ shopping list was like a Rorschach test of food.

Mom, the OCD ER doctor: Chicken cutlets. Asparagus. Eggs and cheese. Like she printed her list from the Cookbook for the Boring.

Lainey, the artist: Chardonnay came first. That told me mostly all I needed to know. Then health food after that. Which was frankly quite the contradiction, but who was I to judge? “Vegetarian,” it said at the top of the e-mail. Guess Lainey was oh so California now. Her kids couldn’t have anything processed, packaged or pumped with hormones.

Guess chicken nuggets, macaroni and cheese and Goldfish weren’t good enough for her kids even though I seemed to be alive and well after being fed that usual fare in my childhood.

I tucked the list into the back pocket of the cutoff jean shorts that Mom would most definitely tell me were too short. Then I stopped because I saw one of my favorite things: a bookshop. It was small, tucked between a gift shop called All Things Seashell and a knitting store, Top Knot. It was a slim doorway, almost something I’d pass if I were in my usual state of rushing, which I wasn’t because what was there to rush to do here? Nothing. Nada.

Title Wave, the sign read.

Coastal Theme overload here. The bright blue awning yawned over the window where, in smaller print, was the subtitle Purveyor of Imagination. The window display held an antique desk covered in books. An old Underwood typewriter squatted in the middle of the desk with its little letter-stamped faces looking at me, and I couldn’t help but see a book hidden in the promise of typing.

I left the cart outside and a blast of arctic air washed over me as I opened the door. A small bell jingled my arrival like some fairy announcement. I took a quick glance and saw that it wasn’t a well-organized store, but the disarray felt welcoming. Music played, a whisper in the background: “Fly Me to the Moon.” A long counter made of old shutters ran along the right side of the store and was covered in pamphlets, bookmarks and tiny reading lights—all the things people would buy without thinking as they were checking out.

“Welcome,” a voice said, and I glanced around to spy an old woman behind the counter, her white hair fluffed into a cotton ball slightly dented on the right side. She wore red cat-eye reading glasses secured by a purple string that looped down by her chin and disappeared behind her neck. “Make yourself at home,” she said, but she squinted at me like she didn’t really see me as much as know I was there.

“Thanks,” I said and wandered farther in, the door swishing shut behind me. I wanted to make myself at home. The store was bigger than it appeared from outside, with cozy white oversized chairs that just begged to be curled in and green metal café tables with matching chairs scattered around as if a party had just ended. There wasn’t a coffee bar or sweets shop. Just books stacked to the ceiling and wall to wall and piled on the floor.

Suddenly I knew where I would spend the time hiding from Mom, Lainey and the kids: here. Right here.

Books. They were the only place in the world where I could be Piper and not Piper at the same time. I didn’t have to leave myself, but I could be someone else entirely, without the hangover.

I know. I know. I took Psych 101. It sounds like escape is my go-to thing in the world—to be drunk or to disappear into a story. And maybe it’s true, but I didn’t see it that way. I just didn’t, right then, exactly like being Piper Blankenship. I believed I would like myself again. Or I hoped I would. But I didn’t today.

I wanted to unzip myself and let the real Piper out to go find another life. And I could do that in a story—a good one, anyway.

I slipped into the fiction section and ran my hands along the book spines but didn’t choose one. Instead I went to the poetry section and picked out a Marjory Wentworth book. I checked my cell for Ryan again, which was ridiculous and slightly embarrassing, like I had a tic. I approached the checkout counter and the old lady with the white hair glanced up from her reading.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” She stared at me funny, like there was food on my face or toilet paper stuck on the bottom of my shoe and she didn’t know how to tell me.

“I did find exactly what I was looking for. This is a great bookshop.”

A little chitchat about this and that, and about how she knew my mom and Lainey when they were little girls, and I was back outside in the sweltering heat. I rolled the wagon for only a half block and then stopped under the yellow striped awning of the grocery store. The Market, it was called. At least something here wasn’t trying to be too-too cute.

Hand-painted signs announced: Organic! Fresh! On the sidewalk, zinc buckets spilled over with fresh wildflowers—zinnia and thimbleweed, doll’s eyes and bellflower. I knew my wildflowers; Mom was obsessed (when Mom loved something she didn’t just love it, she obsessed). Then there was the fruit, plump and seductive, resting in large wooden crates. I lifted a peach and my fingers dented the skin. Juice trickled along the side of my hand and quickly, without thinking, I licked the side of my wrist. The sweetness of the fruit filled my mouth.

“You planning on paying for that?” a deep voice asked.

I peered up, embarrassed, at the face of the best-looking boy I’d seen in months—a rugged guy who looked like he’d just played a soccer game on the beach, all smiles. He was African American, and as beautiful as if he’d been carved from the air he misplaced. His dreadlocks were long enough to almost touch his shoulders, but not quite yet.

“Honestly?” I said. “I was hoping to eat it before anyone noticed.”

He laughed and then tried to appear serious. “Maybe I should call the very bored Watersend police on you, give them something to do.”

“That’d be great,” I said. “Perfect way to start the summer.”

He stuck out his hand. “Hey, I’m Fletch. And this is my parents’ place. You new here?”

I noticed everything about him in one flash: His left front tooth was slightly crooked, slanted toward the middle. His T-shirt was a faded green and advertised a long-gone county fair. His face was clean shaven, and then, stunningly, there were his eyes, blue and so bright they seemed to be made of the sky.

I looked away because I realized I was staring too hard and too long. “Yep. I’m new around here.” I faked a thick southern drawl. “Just for the summer.” I took a bite as if to prove my point. “Thank you for not arresting me. And your folks, too, I guess. I’ll pay for it with the groceries. God, this is a good peach.”

“We know how to make ’em around here,” he said, imitating my fake accent but with a much better drawl. He jostled the bag to his other arm. “Let me know if you need any help.” He disappeared inside and I took another bite, allowed the juice to roll down my chin before I wiped it off with the back of my hand.

I took inventory of my morning—the river coursing behind the house, the beach only steps away through a wildflower-strewn pathway, a bookshop and a market with fruit so fresh it burst from the skin. So far, not quite as crappy as I’d imagined. But there was still plenty of summer left.