Page 100 of The Summers of Us

August 12

Two flashlights cut across the park.Darkness has long since swept over the island, but there’s never truly darkness under the constellations.

Long after our late-night diner banana split turned to soup, I told him I had a surprise for him. I wanted to keep it a secret, but none of the forces of Piper Island could keep it down. It didn’t matter that I blindfolded him with two takeout bags tied together. It didn’t matter that the car filled with noisy static when he rolled his window down and stuck his hand out to ride the choppy air. It didn’t matter that the water was its own dark secret all around, hidden in plain sight inside the distant lights of Piper Island. With our free hands linked over the gear shift, the secret still managed to spill from my lips.

“We’re going to the park. There’s something I need to show you. Something I want you to do, if you want.”

In our flashlight beams, the wooden castle comes into view. Muscle memory takes me to the spot where the walls swap love stories in secret.

When I was eleven, I knew love was something you could play hide and seek with and never win.

At eighteen, in the watchful eye of a summer night Sagittarius, I know love hides in plain sight.

Love lives in black and white kisses.

In Everett’s palm, I press a pocket knife I swiped from Holden’s tackle box. He nods in silent understanding. The cicadas, katydids, and locusts have rehearsed their whole life to sing the soundtrack of this moment. They nail the bridge, pirouette into an encore.

Everett stands, brushes sand off his knees, kisses love into my temple.

We will move on—this moment a mere sentence in the book of the park—rolling like beach thunder to the next adventure.

We will move on, but somewhere on an island named Piper, at a park with a wooden castle playground, forever lives two names etched into wood:

Quinn + Everett.

August 16

The heist starts whenBlair leaves for sunrise yoga. I wish I could say that we creep out from the shadows the moment her taillights turn off our street, a SWAT team wielding paint sprayers like weapons, but it happens in waves.

Everett and his parents are first. ItwasEverett’s idea, after all, and Hank’s construction company. We were wrapped up on his couch talking well after a movie’s credits rolled when he suggested it. He knew I’d object, so he told me his dad already cleared his schedule for it. At dinner, Hank did the rest of the convincing, bribery via crab cakes. My only job was to pick a color and get Blair out of the house before the sky blushed.

The Bishop family climb out of the company truck. Liezel lays out tarps on the grass. Everett hooks up power tools and Hank starts sanding the dead blue paint from the siding. I pluck unnamed weeds from the edge of the house and trim the hedges sprouted at the windows.

Haven and Holden come next with donuts.

Mason arrives with popsicles after he overslept his alarm.

Jorge rolls in with takeout boxes of hushpuppies and chicken tenders from last night’s rush.

Between snacking and water breaks inside, we take to electric sanders, painter’s tape, and paint sprayers. In the oppressive summer heat, we coat the house in fresh paint, all of us singing along to dad rock. Haven and I picked out the color yesterday, both of us swayed by kitschy names until the perfect shade presented itself.

Sweat holds me like a promise. Hair spills from my messy bun. My thighs stick together.

I stop during the rush to change into a tank top and stay inside to clean the inside of the house. Since Everett and I did most of the heavy lifting earlier this summer, this mostly entails surface mess: dusty bookshelves, cluttered counters, piles of laundry. I throw away years-old unread magazines and expired food in the pantry, put away the new groceries piled on the counter. Jorge helps me fold blankets and stage the house into a home. I sweep the hard floors into a pile of stubborn sand and dirt, and Jorge follows with a mop. The smell of bleach and the coconut candle lit on the kitchen island make it smell like my first day here eight summers ago.

How the universe has spun since then.

The hardest thing about todayis the matter on the front porch. I stand there chewing on my thumb nail, staring at the one-year-old roses, daisies, lilies, and carnations rotten in their pots. We can’t keep walking past dead flowers, but I can’t bring myself to throw them out. It feels too much like forgetting.

“Let me do it,” Everett says, reaching for a flowerpot.

“No.” I grab his arm, still staring at them. “I have to do it.”

We stand there for a bit. He watches me stare at the pot, tears forming in my eyes. I blink and let them fall, then bite my lower lip to keep from crying too much. Everett’s still quiet, slinking his arm around me, pulling me into him. Even when he wipes the tears from my chin and rocks me in place, I still can’t stop staring. I’m stuck in a trance whisking me back to the day I found out, to the day of the funeral when we loaded the flowers in the car, to the days of staring at them through the window—bright and alive—when I felt anything but.

I need to do it.

I breathe in and out, wipe final tears from my eyes, and grab a pot of carnations.This is for Blair, this is for Hadley, this is for me, I repeat on the way to the trash can.

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