Page 86 of The Summers of Us

“Just like I remember.” I smile and pass him the pint and spork.

I take this opportunity to check my phone again. It’s second nature now, but I quickly realize my mistake and tuck it between my legs.

He turns his body to me in his seat, his right leg tucked under him and his elbow propped up where his headrest should be. Last week, Holden and Mason buried it in the sand as a prank and forgot to mark the spot, so now it was lost to time.

He takes his own bite, nodding. “It sure is…sweet.”

I turn to him, my back to the door, my hair spilling out of the open window. I laugh. “I love how you always use sweet as an insult.”

“Isn’t it?” He smirks.

I smirk back and take the sweet ice cream from him. Some people just don’t understand sugar. We finish the ice cream with large scrapes against the pint, the beginning of a brain freeze riding its tails. Really, I ate most of it and Everett finished the rest before I exploded.

“What’s been so important on your phone?” Everett asks.

I want to lie and tell him I’m waiting on a text from Haven or Blair or my mom, but when I notice the streetlights spilling artificial moonlight on my thigh, I remember last summer and what I once thought.

Everett is what I need.

He would never leave me checking my phone for days. He’d be there no matter what, just like the moon even when the clouds hide it away.

“I texted my dad the other day.” I feel layers of my skin peel open.

“What’d you say?” His voice is soft, sorry, not at all painful on freshly exposed skin.

“I told him I loved him.” Tears threaten to form as a peppery feeling builds in my nose, a thickness in my throat.

“And he hasn’t responded?”

“No.” I open my phone again to an empty lockscreen, a picture of me and Hadley on the beach. “I haven’t texted him in years. I don’t know why I even tried. It was stupid.”

I shut the phone off. This is the last time I’ll hope for nothing.

“It wasn’t stupid, Quinn. It was what you felt you needed to do.”

“I don’t know why I even love him anymore.”

The words pop like a balloon too full of air. It jolts me, like my brain didn’t even know my mouth could say such a thing.

He’s your dad, of course it’s okay to still love him, part of my brain thinks, but the other half responds,He lost the privilege of your love the day he stopped wanting it.

“He didn’t deserve to be your dad anyway.”

Everett’s truth is so cold it could clip the thick leaves of summer. Even though summer knows it’s coming, it still hurts when the first dead leaves hit the ground.

An ocean lies between knowing something and pretending it’s not true. But I know those dead leaves. I know the truth. Rock bottom tells me her name, shakes my hand, and pulls me into the depths with her.

Accepting the truth is hard, but hard is the first step toward easy. In order to come back from rock bottom, you have to fall to it first.

I let my pesky brain chew on each of Everett’s words like orange wedges that fill your molars for hours.

The more I chew, the more it makes sense.

If a man leaves his wife and nine-year-old daughter to spiral without him, did he ever deserve them?

If not, why do I still love him?

To stop loving my own father would be to stop loving my blonde hair, the joy I find in little things, the sweet tooth I know I got from him.

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