The Moon and More (7 page)

If I was honest, though, there was probably more to this than just what happened in April. Like the fact that while, for the first year or so we were together, Luke and I were all about falling in love—the stuff that happens pre-walking into the sunset—we’d now crossed over, right to the little irritations that crop up in relationships after that. Like the other person drives too fast (or slow), watches too much football (or not enough), or wants to fool around all the time (or never). He was such a great guy, I knew that any other girl would be able to overlook any of his not-so-great aspects. But I was me. Unfortunately.

Plus there were the various stresses of the last year, with both of us applying for school. We hadn’t ever talked about it, but I could tell all the college stuff I’d done with my father—applying to Ivy League schools far away from Colby and, by extension, Luke himself—he’d taken a little personally. I mean, why wouldn’t I go to East U, where I’d get a free ride
and
we’d be together? For him, that was perfect. And even though he never said as much, I knew he wondered, more than once, why it wasn’t for me.

“Wait.” I pushed myself up on my elbows. “I swear, I think I just heard a car door.”

“There is nobody here.”

“Just listen for a second.”

This time, he didn’t move, just stopped. As he humored
me, I looked up at his face, familiar and gorgeous. I could not imagine my life without him, and I thought I’d kill any girl who tried to come between us. And yet, I knew he was right: it was the week before last.

He looked at me. “I don’t hear anything.”

“Okay. Sorry.”

For a moment, we stayed right where we were, him above, me below, our eyes locked.
I love you,
I thought, but instead of saying this, I slid my arms around his neck, pulling him closer. He whispered my name and then his lips were on mine, erasing the space between us and everything it encompasses and doesn’t. At least for now.

“You just take a shower?”

I blinked, startled. I didn’t know what it was about Mrs. Ye, my best girlfriend Daisy’s mom, but she had this way of totally disarming me. Even about something so simple as having damp hair at twelve thirty on a weekday.

“Um, yeah,” I said, as she went back to applying hot pink polish to a woman wearing a terry-cloth beach cover-up. “I got hot cleaning up the storeroom at work. Plus it’s filthy in there.”

“Hmmh,” she replied, the meaning of which even without the language barrier—which was sizeable—was impossible to decipher. Then she said something to Daisy in their native Vietnamese, the undecipherable words flowing off her tongue as quickly as the polish off the brush.

“Okay,” Daisy replied. “Do you want mayonnaise?”

Her mom added something else, again so quickly I couldn’t have caught it even if it was in a language I spoke. This time, Daisy said nothing, only giving a quick nod of her head. I followed her out into the parking lot of Coastal Plaza, where her parents’ salon, Wave Nails, was located right between a liquor store and AZ Grocery. Booze, food, and pampering. What else did you need on vacation?

“Hot,” Daisy said, putting on her huge sunglasses as we started down to the other end of the mall to Da Vinci’s Pizza and Subs. “Too hot.”

“Well,” I pointed out, “you’re not exactly dressed for summer.”

She turned, leveling her eyes at me. Daisy had been my closest girlfriend since her family had moved here in seventh grade, but her beauty could still totally disarm me at random moments. My style was slapdash at best, but she was always photo ready, cribbing styles from the fashion magazines she read nonstop. She was small, with delicate features she made even more stunning with the makeup she got up early to apply carefully every morning. Nobody dressed like her, mostly because she produced most of her looks at her mom’s sewing machine, which she’d taught herself how to use when she was twelve. Colby was not exactly New York or Paris when it came to fashion, but you wouldn’t know this by looking at Daisy. She was dressing for the life she wanted, not the one she had.

Which was why, while I was sporting my basic summer uniform of cutoff shorts, tank top, and flip-flops, she had on a black sleeveless dress and platform wedges, her hair pulled
back in a neat chignon. Like Audrey Hepburn, if she passed Tiffany’s and headed south. Very south.

“What you don’t understand,” she said now, smoothing her small hands over her dress, “is that this is the perfect dress.”

“It’s black and long and it’s ninety degrees out.”

She sighed. After Daisy spent much of the first year we knew each other trying to get me to be even
slightly
fashionable, we decided for the sake of our friendship to agree to disagree. Which we did pretty much constantly.

“Black and long,” she repeated, her voice flat. “That’s really how you describe this?”

“Am I wrong?”

“It’s a vintage A-line, Emaline. It’s classic. Knows no season.”

“It’s a dress,” I replied. “It doesn’t know anything.”

This she didn’t even dignify with a response. Despite our sartorial differences, the reason we’d bonded, at least initially, was our shared perfectionism when it came to school. Before she arrived, I’d regularly been near the top or the best student in just about every class I took. Then, suddenly, there was this new girl, whip smart, better read,
and
bilingual. If we hadn’t hit it off I was pretty sure we would have hated each other.

Now she adjusted her sunglasses as a guy on a moped passed us, engine whining like a gnat. I hated mopeds, but for whatever reason they were ubiquitous here, like saltwater taffy and hermit crabs being sold as pets.

Daisy wrinkled her nose. “God, I
hate
mopeds.”

I smiled. “You better talk to Morris, then. He’s still making noises about getting one.”

“That boy needs a car, not a toy,” she said, sighing. “But
first he needs a job. Did you hear he got let go from that catering gig?”

“No,” I said, not that I was surprised. Since Daisy and Morris started dating—around the same time hell froze over, pigs flew, and bears began relieving themselves in other places than wooded areas—I’d learned that I couldn’t talk about him the way I once had. Used to be, he was My Friend Morris and I was free to complain about his slackness as much as I wanted. Now he was Her Boyfriend and different rules applied. We were still working out what they were, however.

The truth is, anyone would be lucky to date Daisy. First, she was gorgeous and smart, clearly headed for what she and I referred to as GTBC: Great Things Beyond Colby. This was in comparison to the other category we created, AGN: Ain’t Going Nowhere. Which, if we’re honest, is where Morris would fall instantly if he wasn’t someone we cared about. This shorthand began as a kind of game, a way of passing the time while pouring over our slim yearbook. But in the last year, as college loomed and then overtook us, it got real, and now two categories weren’t even really enough. A lot of people were going Beyond Colby, but not necessarily headed for Great Things. Like myself, actually. Columbia would have gotten me to Great Things, for sure, just like the Savannah College of Art and Design, where Daisy would enroll at the end of the summer, earned her a spot. East U, however, was a more lateral move. But at least I was moving.

Morris, like about thirty percent of our class, would be going to Coastal Tech, the community college twenty minutes past the bridge over to the mainland. There was a good
four-year school just past North Reddemane, Weymar College, but locals rarely went there: it was pricey and private, not to mention geared towards the arts, which our high school didn’t have the funds or faculty to provide beyond the basics. Coastal Tech, however, was affordable and offered both day and night classes in subjects like office administration and dental assisting, things that could get you employed right out of the box. Unlike my slate of fall classes, which would likely include Spanish-American history, a required overview of English literature, and an introduction to psychology. I could only imagine what would have been at Columbia.

Morris wanted to get a degree in automotive systems technology, with an eye towards getting a job at one of the local dealerships or repair shops. Which was very ambitious. It was also not as much his idea as that of our lone guidance counselor, Mr. Markham, who was young and energetic, and took Morris on as a personal project senior year. “Transport is a human need. People always have to get from here to there,” he said over and over again, pushing the Coastal Tech brochure across his desk. So Morris planned to enroll. Then again, he had also planned to work for Robin at Roberts Family Catering. Not that I could really say this to Daisy.

“He says,” she continued now, as the Da Vinci’s Pizza and Subs sign—featuring the Mona Lisa chowing down on a slice—came into view up ahead, “that they let him go because the owner wanted to hire her nephew.”

I had a flash of Morris, leaning up against the fridge in Luke’s kitchen as everyone moved around him. “Her nephew already works for her.”

“He does?”

She was looking at me, but I kept my gaze on the Mona Lisa. “Yeah.”

Daisy exhaled, a low, whistle-like sound. It was the same noise I’d heard her mom make often in response to a chattering customer. Some things were the same in every language. “He’s still working with your dad, though, right?”

“I think so,” I replied, although in truth I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen Morris show up at 6:30 a.m. for a ride to the job site. Just because I hadn’t witnessed it, though, did not mean it wasn’t happening. Technically.

We came up to the door of Da Vinci’s, which was steamed over slightly, and I pulled it open, instantly smelling dough and pepperoni. It was just before twelve, so the place was packed with a mix of tourists in beachwear and locals on lunch break. We got in line, right behind three girls in bikini tops and shorts looking up at the wall menu and talking loudly.

“I can’t believe I still have a headache,” one of them was saying.

“I can’t believe you hooked up with that guy last night,” one of the others replied. “Since when are you into chest hair?”

“He did not have chest hair.”

Her friends burst out laughing, clearly disputing this. “Deidre,” one finally said, “it was like
fur
.”

They started giggling again, while the girl with the headache sighed. “I think you guys are forgetting the vacation code we decided on during the trip down here.”

“Code?” the girl on her right asked.

“We said,” her friend continued, “that what happened here, this week, would not be part of our permanent record. Pizza at last call, chest hair, belly shots—they all apply. They’re to be filed away and forgotten.”

“Belly shots?” the girl on the left said.

The other two looked at her. “You don’t remember the belly shots?”

“Who, me? No
way
. I would never do that.” They kept staring. “Would I?”

“Next in line!” the guy behind the counter called out, and they moved up. I smiled at Daisy, who was shaking her head disapprovingly.

“Oh, come on,” I said. “You have to admit, it would probably be fun.”

“What?” she replied. “Belly shots?”

“No, that whole down-for-a-week, anything-goes, summer-fling thing.”

“Please don’t start up about how the tourists have more fun than us again,” she warned me. “I can’t take it today.”

“I’m not saying they have more fun,” I replied. She gave me a doubtful look. “I’m saying that, you know, we never get to go to the beach and just, you know, let loose. Fall in love and be different, with no permanent record. We
live
in our permanent record.”

“There are other beaches besides here,” she said.

“I know. But we’ve never gone to any of them, have we?”

“Emaline, I look at the ocean all year long,” she told me. “If I travel, I want to do something different.”

“Which is exactly what I’m saying. You go on vacation, you
can be different. We see people do it all the time. But we’re always just supporting players in someone else’s summer, so we stay the same.”

“I like my same, though,” she said. “And don’t forget, things are about to change, in just a month or two, with college. Right?”

I nodded, but really, that was different. College was for four years, not one week. It was permanent, whereas a vacation—like the ones I saw beginning, in progress, and ending all around me, every day—had a set duration, only a finite amount of time before it was gone for good. Just once, I would have liked to find out how it felt to come to a place like Colby, have the time of my life, and then leave, taking nothing but memories with me. Maybe someday.

“Next!” the heavyset guy behind the counter called out. We stepped forward. “Crazy Daisy, my favorite customer.”

“Eddie Spaghetti,” she replied. “How’s it going?”

“Wednesday,” he said with a shrug, like this was an answer.

She put down a twenty-dollar bill. “She wants her usual. No mayo.”

“You got it,” he said, scribbling something on his order pad. “You guys eating?”

“Slice of cheese,” I told him, and Daisy held up two fingers. I reached for my money, but she shook her head, sliding the bill towards him. “Hey. I can pay.”

“I know.”

Eddie comped us two fountain drinks, which we got before claiming a booth to wait for our food. “So,” Daisy said, unwrapping her straw, “why’d you really just take a shower?”

I raised my eyebrows. “Does there have to be a reason?”

“For you, yes.” She flicked her eyes to the TV over my head, then back at me. “I know for a fact you’ve been up since six thirty, at work at eight sharp. Last I checked you didn’t take bathing breaks.”

I poked at my ice. “Luke and I, um, met up for lunch at my house.”

She exhaled, shaking her head. “I thought you said never again.”

“I did. Apparently this is never.”

“Apparently you
want
to get caught.”

“I really don’t,” I told her. She made a face, clearly doubting this. “But it’s not like we have a lot of options.”

“Other people manage.”