Page 74 of The Summers of Us

My body shatters the surface.

The anchors return.

Water hugs me tightest of all.

For the first time since my late-night swim with Everett last year, I’m in the water. I forget how to resurface, but my life jacket does its job, pulls me back into the world Hadley wasn’t. I feel like I might die, my breath confused and quick. I wipe my eyes open and try to move forward, but my legs are stuck in Jell-O.

Adriana swims to me, grabs my life jacket. “Quinn, are you okay?”

I nod.

She pulls me back to the jet ski, now idling in the water. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to break my promise. I thought you were holding on tight enough and you gave me the okay and I’m just so sorry…”

I listen to her babble the whole way back to the jet ski. I’m not mad at her. I’m not mad at the water. Or the jet ski. I’m mad at myself. How could I ever think I’d be able to walk the Earth not shackled to anchors?

Adriana doesn’t exceed 15 miles per hour on the way back. I pant into her back, squeezing my eyes so tightly they wrinkle, trying to ignore the lake water streaking down my legs and how sore my ankle feels when I put pressure on it.

I can’t ignore it; it’s what I deserve.

When we get back to the dock, Adriana cuts the engine, jumps in, and pulls the jet ski flush with the dock.

Haven jumps up from her towel, helps me onto the dock. “Did you fall in? Are you okay?”

I must look as distraught as I feel. Adriana hands me a towel. I wrap up in it and wring my hair out onto the dock. “It’s no big deal.” If I keep telling myself that, maybe it will become true.

Adriana mouths another “I’m sorry.” I shrug it off like the nothing that falling into a lake should be. She walks back to the backyard where everyone but Haven plays cornhole.

“I promise it was fun,” I say to Haven.

“I believe you.”

“My ankle is a little sore, butreally, I’m fine.”

“I know.” She smiles and lies back down to return to the sun and the book slumped over her towel.

I fan my towel next to hers and lie on my stomach, resting my forehead on my arms.

“Let me read you a story.” Haven pages to where she left off.

I don’t know what happened earlier in the book, but there’s something about the curl in her voice that makes me feel like I’ve been with it all along. The story is just like Haven: all summer, no worry, the tiniest bit of romance. It’s about a girl who works at a sleepaway camp trying to get the super-cute-but-grumpy counselor to fall in love with her. It’s obviously something that would only happen in a syrupy beach read, but there’s a reason syrup sticks to everything it touches.

I let the words stick to me as the story and the sun lull me into a half sleep that might put me into a permanent one in this midday weather, my body failing as the heat takes me. If I do wake up, I’d have towel prints on my arms, a headache burned into my brain, skin that’s only white when you poke it.

So I don’t fall asleep. The Mom side of me actually believes I’ll die. Instead, I focus on the lake swaying under us. The joy I find in a little thing like that must be the Dad side of me.

Then I realize it’s been hours since the last time I thought about checking my phone.

For that, I can at least thank the lake.

Later, while the boystake to the jet skis, Haven, Adriana, and Mia balance themselves on the watermelon float. I lie on my stomach at the edge of the dock, dangling my hand into the water as a half-assed truce. After a whole plate of seafood boil and a large slice oftres leches, all I want to do is laze.

Mia tells us about the night she and Tanner kissed at a gas station and then decided it was just the heat of the moment.

“You know what I think?” Haven stretches a wet hand to the sky and watches the water drip off her fingertips.

“What?” Mia asks.

“I kind of get the impression that he likes you,” Haven says. “I bet that gas station kiss meant something more to him.”

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