Always and Forever, Lara Jean (26 page)

He stays on that page for a while. When he doesn’t say anything, I say, helpfully, “It’s something to remember us by.”

He snaps the book shut. “Thanks,” he says, flashing me a quick smile. “This is awesome.”

“You’re not going to look at the rest of it?”

“I will, later.”

Peter says he should get back home so he can pack for Beach Week, and before we go back downstairs, I ask him again if he’s okay, and he assures me that he is.

*  *  *

After Peter leaves, Margot comes up to my room and helps me pack. I’m sitting cross-legged on the floor, arranging my suitcase, and she’s passing me piles. I’m still feeling worried about Peter, so I’m glad to have her company to take my mind off things.

“I can’t believe you’re already graduated,” Margot says, folding a stack of T-shirts for me. “In my head you’re still the same age you were when I left.” Teasingly she says, “Forever sweet sixteen, Lara Jean.”

“Almost as grown-up as you now, Gogo,” I say.

“Well, you’ll always be shorter than me, at least,” she says, and I throw a bikini top at her head. “Pretty soon we’ll be packing you up for college.”

I stuff a curling iron into the pocket of my suitcase. “Margot, when you first went to college, what did you miss most about home?”

“Well, you guys, obviously.”

“But what else? Like, what were the unexpected things you missed?”

“I missed giving Kitty a kiss good night after she’d had a bath and her hair was clean.”

I make a snorty sound. “A rare occasion!”

Margot takes her time, thinking about what else. “I missed a good hamburger. Hamburgers taste different in Scotland. More like . . . meat loaf. Meat loaf on a bun. Hmm, what else? I missed driving you guys around. I felt like the captain of a ship. I missed your baked goods!”

“Which ones?” I ask.

“Hmm?”

“Which ones did you miss the most?”

“Your lemon cake.”

“If you’d told me, I would’ve sent you one.”

Smiling, she says, “I’m pretty sure sending a cake overseas is exorbitantly expensive.”

“Let’s make one now,” I say, and Margot kicks her legs up happily.

*  *  *

So we go downstairs and that’s what we do. Kitty is asleep; Daddy and Trina are in their bedroom with the door closed. As much as I love Trina, that’s a strange thing to get used to as well. Daddy’s door was never closed. But I suppose he needs his time too, time where he’s not a dad. Not even for sex, but just to talk, to take a breath. But also for sex, I guess.

Margot’s measuring flour when I ask, “Did you have on music when you and Josh first did it?”

“You made me lose count!” Margot dumps all the flour back in the canister and starts over again.

“Well, did you?”

“No. Nosy! I swear, you’re worse than Kitty.”

I roll a lemon around on the counter to warm it up before I start squeezing. “So it was just . . . silent?”

“It wasn’t
silent
. There was the sound of someone mowing their lawn. And his mom had the dryer going. Their dryer is really loud. . . .”

“But his mom wasn’t home, right?”

“No way!
I couldn’t do that. My roommate brought someone home once and I pretended to be asleep, but honestly, I was trying not to laugh. The guy was a heavy breather. He was a moaner, too.”

We both giggle.

“I hope my roommate doesn’t do that.”

“Just set up ground rules in the beginning. Like who can use the room when, that kind of thing. And just remember that you should try to be understanding, because Peter will be visiting a lot, and you don’t want to use up her goodwill.” She pauses. “You guys haven’t had sex yet, right?” Quickly she adds, “You don’t have to say if you don’t want to.”

“No,” I say. “I mean, not yet.”

“Are you thinking about it?” Margot asks, trying to sound casual. “Because of Beach Week?”

I don’t answer her right away.

I hadn’t been thinking about it, not Beach Week specifically, anyway. The thought of Peter and me having sex in the future, for it to be as commonplace as us going to the movies or holding hands—it’s a little strange to imagine. I just wouldn’t want it to be less special, after we do it. I want it to always be a sacred thing, not something to take for granted because everybody else does it, or because we’ve done it before. I suppose anything can become ordinary or commonplace if you do it enough times, but my hope is that this never is. Not for us. “I think I definitely want music,” I say, straining lemon juice into a glass measuring cup. “That way if I’m a heavy breather or he’s a heavy breather, we
won’t really know. And it’ll be more romantic. Music makes everything more romantic, doesn’t it? One second you’re walking your dog in the suburbs, and then you put on Adele, and it’s like you’re in a movie and you’ve just had your heart brutally broken.”

Margot says, “In movies they never put on a condom, so make sure you’re in real life for that part.”

That’s enough to shake me out of my reverie. “Daddy gave me a whole kit. He left it in the upstairs bathroom for me. Condoms, cream, dental dams.” I burst out laughing. “Isn’t ‘dental dam’ the unsexiest word you ever heard?”

“No, I think ‘gonorrhea’ is!”

Abruptly I stop laughing. “Peter doesn’t have gonorrhea!” Now Margot’s the one cracking up. “He doesn’t!”

“I know, I’m just teasing. But I think you should pack your kit just in case things go in that direction.”

“Gogo, I’m not planning on having sex at Beach Week.”

“I said just in case! You never know.” She pushes her hair out of her face and in a serious tone, she says, “I’m really glad my first time was with Josh, though. It should be with someone who really knows you. Someone who loves you.”

*  *  *

Before I go to bed, I open up that kit and take out the condoms and pack them deep in the bottom of my suitcase. Then I pick out my prettiest bra and underwear set, pale pink edged in electric blue lace, never been worn, and I pack that too. Just in case.

PETER’S AT MY HOUSE BRIGHT
and early to pick me up. Everyone else is caravanning down together, but Peter wanted it to be just him and me in his two-seater. He’s in a good mood; he’s brought donuts for us like old times. He says they’re all for me, though. Ever since he came back from that training weekend with his lacrosse team, he’s been in fitness mode.

We’re moving stuff around in his car to make room for my suitcase when Kitty comes running out to say hi. She spots the bag of donuts resting on top of my bag and she snags one. Her mouth full, she says, “Peter, did Lara Jean tell you the news about Korea?”

“What news?” he says.

My head snaps up and I throw Kitty a look. “I was just about to. Peter, I didn’t get a chance to tell you yesterday. . . . My dad’s sending us to Korea for my graduation present.”

“Wow, that’s cool,” Peter says.

“Yeah, we’re going to see our relatives and do a tour around the country, too.”

“When?”

I glance over at him. “Next month.”

“For how long?” he asks.

“A month.”

He looks at me in dismay. “A
month
? That long?”

“I know.” We’re already in mid-June. Only two months of summer left from here and then he’ll still be here and I’ll be in Chapel Hill.

“A month,” he repeats. Before Peter, I wouldn’t have thought twice about going to Korea for a month. I would have rejoiced. And now . . . I’d never say so to Daddy or Margot or Kitty, but I don’t want to go. I just don’t. I do. But I don’t.

When we’re in the car, on our way, I say, “We’ll FaceTime every day. It’s a thirteen-hour time difference, so if I call you at night, it’ll be your morning.”

Peter looks gloomy. “We were gonna go to Bledell’s for his Fourth of July weekend, remember? His dad got a new boat. I was going to teach you how to wakeboard.”

“I know.”

“What am I going to do when you’re all the way over there? The summer’s going to suck. I wanted to take you to Pony Pasture.” Pony Pasture is a little park on the James River in Richmond; there are big stones you can lie out on, and you can float down the river on inner tubes. Peter’s gone before, with friends from school, but I never have.

“We can go when I come back,” I say, and he nods halfheartedly. “And I’ll bring back lots of presents. Face masks. Korean candy. A present a day!”

“Bring me back some tiger socks.”

“If they make them big enough,” I say, just to make a joke, just to make him smile. This week will have to be the
most perfect, the best ever, to make up for the fact that I’ll be gone all summer.

Peter’s phone buzzes, and he ignores the call without looking to see who it is. A minute later it buzzes again, and Peter’s face goes tight.

“Who is it?” I ask.

“My dad,” he says shortly.

“I hope he’s calling to apologize and explain how he could miss his own son’s graduation.”

“I already know why. He told my mom Everett had an allergic reaction so they took him to urgent care.”

“Oh,” I say. “I guess that’s a pretty good excuse. Is Everett okay?”

“He’s fine. I don’t think he’s really even that allergic. When I eat strawberries, my tongue itches. Big deal.” With that, Peter turns on the music, and we don’t talk for a while.

*  *  *

The girls’ house is second row, with a view of the beach. It’s on stilts, like all the other houses in the second row. There are three levels, with the kitchen and living room on the bottom level, and the bedrooms on the top levels. Chris and I share a room with two beds on the top level. It’s like we are at the top of a lighthouse. The bedspreads are turquoise with seashells on them. Everything smells a little mildewy, but it’s not a bad house.

All of the girls in the house have taken up different roles, except for Chris, whose main role has been to sleep on the beach all day with a water bottle of beer. The first day she
came back with her chest and face lobster red; the only unburned part of her was where her sunglasses were. She was embarrassed but she played it off, saying it’s her base tan for Costa Rica. Pammy is the den mom. She promised her parents she wouldn’t drink, so she’s taken it upon herself to check on the other girls and bring water and Advil to their beds in the morning. Kaila’s really good with a flatiron. She can even curl with it, something I’ve never managed to quite get the hang of. Harley’s good at coordinating and making plans with the other houses.

I’m the cook. When we first got to the house, we went out and did a big shopping trip and bought cold cuts, granola, dried pasta and jars of sauce, salsa, cereal. The one thing we didn’t buy was toilet paper, which we ran out of on the second day. Every time we leave the house to eat lunch or dinner out, one of us steals a wad of toilet paper from the restaurant bathroom. Why we don’t just go buy more, I don’t know, but it’s turned into kind of a game. Chris is the clear winner, because she managed to get an economy-size roll out of the dispenser, and she smuggled it out under her shirt.

The boys come over every day to freeload and also because their house is already filled with sand. We’ve nicknamed it the Sandcastle. Just sitting on their couch, it’s like getting a body scrub, and you stand up feeling exfoliated and not in a good way.

I wonder if this is what it would feel like to live in a sorority house. At first it’s kind of charming, like those boarding
houses in the 1940s, borrowing nail polish and playing music while we get ready, eating ice cream in bed. But then on Wednesday, Kaila and Harley get into a screaming fight at one in the morning over who left the flatiron on and our neighbors call the police. That same night Pammy gets drunk, and I sit next to her on the beach for hours while she cries, because she feels guilty about breaking her word to her parents. The next night, some of the girls go out to a club and bring back three guys from Montana. One has shifty eyes and I make sure to lock my bedroom door that night. In my and Chris’s room, I text Peter, who’s already gone back to his house. He comes right back and camps out downstairs “to keep my eye on them.”

Peter and I spend our days at the beach, where I sit and read and he goes for long runs. Since we’ve been here, he goes running all the time, because he can’t work out like he does at home, in the gym. He goes for a long run in the morning before it gets hot, a short one midday, and another long one at dusk. Except for the day I make him go with me to the Wright Brothers museum in Kill Devil Hills. I went there as a kid with my family, before Kitty was born, but I was too little to climb up to the monument. We go all the way to the top and take in the view.

All week, Peter has been as winsome and winning as ever, especially in front of other people—always with an easygoing smile on his face, always the first to suggest an activity, a game. But with me he’s been distant. Like even though he’s right here next to me, he feels far away.
Unreachable. I’ve tried to broach the topic of his dad again, but he just laughs it off. He hasn’t brought up my trip to Korea again either.

Every night there’s a party at one of the houses—except ours. We never host, because Pammy is worried about losing our security deposit. The nice thing about it is, all the different groups are hanging out in a way that people didn’t in high school. There is something freeing about knowing it’s all over. We won’t all be together like this again, so why not? In that spirit, Chris hooks up with Patrick Shaw, a guy from Josh’s anime club.

Tonight the party is at Peter’s house. I have no idea how they’re getting their security deposit back, because the place is in sandy shambles: One of the wicker chairs on the deck is broken, there are beer cans everywhere, and someone sat down on the beige living room couch in a wet orange towel and now there’s a big orange spot in the middle. I’m making my way through the kitchen when I see John Ambrose McClaren, going through the refrigerator.

I freeze. Peter’s been in such an unpredictable mood; I don’t know what he’ll do when he sees John at his house.

I’m trying to decide if I should go find Peter and tell him John’s here, when John’s head pops up behind the refrigerator door. He’s holding a carrot and munching on it. “Hey! I thought I might see you here.”