Page 57 of The Break-Up Pact

Dylan tilts his head at me. “We’ve barely had a chance to catch up. You’re sure you don’t want to come with?”

There’s a moment I almost say yes. Cassie is still checking in with me periodically about meeting to talk about expanding, or at least other ways we could tweak Tea Tide. Maybe it’s just the way everything in my life has shaken up lately, but the idea doesn’t put the same pit in my stomach it has for the past two years.

Then my eyes sweep past a framed photo—me and Annie in poofy princess dresses at my sixth birthday party, both of us drinking apple juice out of fancy teacups, our hair tangled in our crowns from running around in the backyard.

I’m angry with her, I realize. For what she said to Levi that day. For what it set into motion. But more than that, for the years afterward when she still had him as a friend, and I didn’t.

I know that part was my fault and not hers. But I’m angry about it anyway, and guilty for being angry, and so tangled in all of it that I can’t even let myself think about doing anything drastic with Tea Tide right now. It would almost feel like it was out of retaliation, if I did it with this anger in my heart.

“I should stick around here today,” I tell Dylan.

He lingers for a moment, long enough to prompt me to look up. But by then, he’s already headed toward the door, leaving me alone in Annie’s room. I settle on the edge of her bed, breathing deep, trying to let the anger go. Trying to fill the space it takes up with the good, because we had more than our fair share, and Tea Tide will always be at the heart of it.

I can’t pinpoint a moment we decided to open a tea shop in town; I just remember that it was a thread that followed us our whole lives. We were all early risers, and my mom would make a massive pot of tea every morning and make it last the whole day, letting us sneak sips when we were little and have our own cups when it was decaf. We had these giant seafoam-green mugs my dad got my mom for her birthday, and I remember clutching mine with hands all sticky from Eggo waffles or coffee cake on weekend mornings, sitting in a too-big chair on the porch, listening to the ocean and watching the neighbors go to and from the beach.

My mom always used to say how nice it would be to have a tea shop by the sea. How it was a shame that the closest place with decent tea service and good scones was in the city. It made those annual Christmas trips to the city special—we always went to the Russian Tea Room for their holiday service while Dylan and my dad went off on their own—but it was one of those ideas we all daydreamed about, turning it back and forth like a lazy wave in our minds until eventually it stopped turning and just sank in: we could do it ourselves.

I had no intention of holding Annie to it—Stanford opened her up to such a massive world of opportunity that I wouldn’t have done anything to limit it. But she persisted in talking about it her whole time there. Planning color schemes, dreaming up menus, keeping an eye on prime Benson Beach locations. She wanted a quiet, pretty place where she could write. She wanted to leave her mark on the place we called home.

“I’m just going to do it,” she said to me over the phone one day. I was somewhere at the top of Norway, staring at fjords in bright daylight at midnight. She was freshly graduated and back in Benson Beach. “It’ll be here waiting for you whenever you get back.”

It was our dream, but it was also my safety net. An assurance that I could go as far as I thought I needed to go and still have a life waiting for me. A job. A sister. A home.

I understand now that it was less Annie assuring me that there was a place for me and more Annie asking me to come back and take it.

The little girls in the photo are still watching me. I turn away from them and toward Annie’s closet, now empty of all the things I borrowed that never found their way back. Without consciously deciding to, I pull the key out from under the nightstand and walk over to the drawers full of her things.

Dylan put them all in here in the days after the funeral, so I’m not sure what to expect. Mostly it’s old toys of hers from when we were kids. Her baby blanket. A few art projects from when she was younger. A finisher’s medal from the local 5K Dylan convinced her to do when she was a senior and he was a sophomore, after which she wheezed at him very pointedly, “Never. Again.”

The next drawer is more of the same, plus the graduation program listing her as the salutatorian, where she gave a two-minute speech about how she wasn’t qualified to dispense any knowledge, just goodwill—a speech that infamously ended with the words, “Good luck out there, everyone. The only real advice I can offer you? Just try not to fuck up.”

I smile at the memory of the absolutely scandalized look on the principal’s face as my parents tried to muffle their laughter from the audience. It was a phrase she uttered often and with relish, but certainly not one anyone ever expected her to blurt with dozens of camera phones trained on her. But that was Annie for you—she said what needed saying, whether you wanted to hear it or not.

I set the program on top of a pile of loose papers, but not before I see Levi’s name on one of them. I know precisely what the papers are before I decide to lift them out of the drawer. It’s the missing pages from when Levi started The Sky Seekers. Annie must have printed them out when we were all still in high school, and she and Levi were constantly swapping their pages back and forth to critique.

What’s funny is I’ve spent the last two weeks trying to plow through Levi’s new manuscript about New York, and I’ve only managed to get about halfway through. But this—I sit on the carpet and gulp it all down in one go. It makes me startle at old memories. Makes me delight in all the little details, at the cheeky dialogue between the characters, at the unique ways Levi has of looking at the world and the way we interact with it.

But it also makes me ache. It isn’t finished. It’s just the potential of something—a story that, with the right care and focus, could be crafted into something iconic. A story that wouldn’t just be a testament to Levi’s writing talent, but his ability to see into people’s hearts.

Maybe it’s a story Levi will never write, but it’s one he deserves to remember. So when I stack the pages back together, I don’t set them back in the drawer. I tuck them under my arm, glancing at the picture as I back my way out of the room, at the two cheesing girls in their princess dresses.

“He needs these,” I tell little Annie, and I have to think older Annie knows that, too.

Chapter Eighteen

By the time I roll into Tea Tide, I have at least seven fires to put out, the main one being that thanks to a late supply delivery, we’re fresh out of Revenge Ex scones. And the customers who came in specifically to get one are not taking it lightly. After a brief panic brainstorm, I send out one of our part-timers to the corner store with the instruction to buy a box of just about any cookie she can find. We break them into chunks in the back, bake them into scones, and dub them “the Levi.”

In other words, a giant cookie pretending to be a scone.

I figure he’ll be in at some point today, and it’ll be a cheeky way to cut through the tension of this morning. And although hours pass without Levi showing up, the Levi sells so dangerously fast that the owner of the corner store moseys in to ask what on earth we’re doing with our multiple raids of her entire stock of Oreos, Chips Ahoys, and Nutter Butters.

“Something unholy,” I inform her, giving her a giant, Frankensteinian scone on the house.

Sana comes in and delights at it—“It looks so ugly and so delicious!”—immediately taking a picture for Tea Tide’s Instagram account. Even that doesn’t summon Levi, but it does bring in an unexpected influx of late afternoon customers. We’re moving so fast that I barely come up for air, and I’m glad for it. With the day whipping by, I don’t have a single second to spare worrying about Levi and Kelly.

That is, until Kelly is directly in front of me, standing at the register with a warm smile on her face.

“You must be June,” she says, holding out her hand.

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