Page 20 of The Summers of Us

“The same.” My voice was quiet, joining the lulling hum around us.

Blair knew what I meant. To say my mom was the same was to say she still cared too much about pointless things. She went on dates knowing nothing would come of them. She buried herself in her work so the silence didn’t wipe her out.

She walked life afraid.

Untrusting.

Worried.

To say my mom was the same was to say she was exactly like me.

Technically,Iwas exactly likeher. I knew it was apples that fell from trees. I just spent a perfect pool day worried about wet sunscreen and parental supervision and swimming cramps.

Blair nodded and finally looked at me. Her tongue pushed through her cheek. “You know, it’s okay to live a little.” If she wasn’t looking at me, I would have thought she was reading some kid-friendly part of her book out loud.

“Yeah.” I inhaled, exhaled, waited a million years, then said, “I do. With the twins. And Mason and Jorge. I mean it, it’s been a busy summer so far, doing all this living with them.”

“Talk to me. What adventures do you get up to after I drop you off?”

“You know.” I shrugged. “The usual itinerary things.”

Mom always let me get away with “fine” when she asked how school was, but Blair looked at me with one dark eyebrow raised until I gave her a proper answer.

My lips drew pink lines in the sky and made bullet points from hearts as I filled the air with all the summer’s events so far.

“We go to Sunset Scoop and ride our bikes to the beach. We sit at the dock while Holden and Mason fish. Sometimes I join in but I haven’t caught anything since my first time fishing. We eat a lot of Hammerhead’s leftovers. Haven even caught a fish with the hushpuppies as bait. Oh, and Holden and Jorge have been trying to teach Mason how to skateboard. I’ve tried a little more too, but I’m still not very good. Haven and I would rather collect shells on the beach. We’re in a competition to see who can find an unbroken sand dollar first.”

I smiled, thinking about Mason almost face planting in the road until Holden caught him. Thankfully I’d loaned him my knee pads. I thought about how dry my throat got after too many hushpuppies and the unbeatable way orange soda made it all better. I thought about the jar of sand dollar shards that made a home of my bedroom windowsill, and how amazing it would feel to replace them with a perfect one. I thought about how my skin hardened when I licked melted ice cream dripping down my arm.

Sometimes I managed to do things like that without a care.

“Also, we actually goinsidethe twins’ house some afternoons to play cards and watch movies. We try not to fall asleep on the couch but we end up doing it anyway since the A/C feels too good after a long day in the sun. Haven calls it ‘sun tired’ and, boy, does it feel like that.”

After blabbering every thought as soon as it came to me, I finally came up for air. Blair looked at me with an expression that mirrored mine, like she was living the itinerary through me.

“That sounds like living to me. Completely-unaffected-by-all-that-shit-you-went-through kind of living.” She slapped her hand over her mouth like she couldn’t believe it had just betrayed her. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to curse or say anything like that. I didn’t mean that.”

Whether she meant to or not, I knew what she was talking about. For me to have gone through “all that shit I went through” was to say that I couldn’t do any living without running from the shadow trailing right behind it. Good times were only a sign of bad ones to come. The world needed that kind of balance.

Blair meant to say thatIwalked life afraid.

Untrusting.

Worried.

“It’s okay. I hear bad words all the time at school.” I ignored all the other things inviting the shadows to encroach.

“You’re a good kid, Q.” Blair smiled, different this time. It matched the sorrow in her brown eyes. “You know, sometimes I worry about how growing up with divorced parents will affect Hadley, but then I think about how great you’ve turned out. I can only hope Hadley turns out half as great.”

I didn’t say anything, just smiled with my mouth closed and tried not to let the shadow find me under this umbrella. It wasn’t Blair’s fault I felt this way. Plus, she thought I was great, so maybe I was just a little bit great.

“I hope you keep doing all that living. It sounds pretty fun.”

“Pinky promise,” I said, then I decided I’d better force a nap to ward the shadows off.

We swam until the sky changed colors.We swam until those changes spilled into darkness. We were still swimming, cold water clinging to our skin, when the fireworks were about to emerge from the night sky.

It was almost time for the Piper Island Fishing Pier firework show. Although we weren’t on the shore, Pirate’s Bounty was a popular place to watch them without fighting the evening traffic. The last two years, my friends and I never made it in time and ended up watching them through some trees at a gas station pump, then we lit sparklers in the twins’ driveway as consolation.

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