Nantucket Red (Nantucket Blue) (2 page)

Three

IT WAS ALMOST HALFTIME
and Peabody school was beating us three to zero. The field hockey season was not off to a good start. We’d won only one game out of four, and that was against Hamlin. Everyone could beat Hamlin. But this game was embarrassing. They were playing their second string in the first half. I think they were even giving some of their JV players a shot. And it was the first cold day of the year. We’d gone from summer to winter in a week with only one crisp, sweater-weather day in between. Out on Peabody’s field, it was overcast and the air had teeth.

The ref blew the whistle in our favor for the first time the whole game. Jules had the ball. She tapped her elbow. That meant she’d hit the ball hard and long up the field, which was my cue to sprint, make it look like I was going to shoot, and then pass it back to Jules, who would hopefully score. But instead of wielding her stick like an ax, thwacking the ball and sending it flying, she tapped it. It rolled ten feet.

I darted for the ball, hooked it, and started dribbling. My eyes were on the goal, but my head was elsewhere. I knew there was a Halloween party that weekend at Jay Logan’s and that a bunch of girls were getting ready at Jules’s house. They’d talked about it right in front of me on the bus while I’d pretended to be fascinated by the highway scenery. I was tired of sitting out social events because of Jules. I’d done my time. I wanted to go out and have fun. But what was I going to do, show up alone? Invite myself over to her house to get ready?

“Cricket,” Jules called, but I charged ahead, weaving through Peabody’s line of defense. I was about to take a shot when a Peabody player, a freshman, I think, stole the ball right out from under me. How did I not see her? The buzzer sounded.

“That’s hal
f
!” the ref called.

“Cricket and Jules, get over here,” Miss Kang said. Her face was red with cold or anger or both. She gestured with a blunt-nailed index finger. “You two need to get it together. You’re the captains. You need to be communicating. You’re on different planets out there. What the hell is going on?”

I looked at Jules. She shrugged and stared at the ground. Her breath formed faint clouds in front of her perfect, heart-shaped lips.

“Um? You know what?” Miss Kang lowered her voice and looked over her shoulder. Our teammates looked on in curiosity. “Whatever drama you two are going through is taking down the team, and it sucks. You need to decide if you’re up to this. If you’re not, we need new captains. It’s not fair to the other girls. You have five minutes to work this out or I’m holding an emergency election.”

Miss Kang marched off. I took in a lungful of frosty air. If we quit it would look terrible on my applications. I was not going to let Jules mar my résumé.

“Well?” I said. Jules wouldn’t look at me. “Ugh!” I threw down my stick. “Enough is enough! I apologized on Nantucket. I apologized the first day of school. I feel like I apologize every time I look at you. I can’t apologize anymore!” The words came out hot and clear. My ears buzzed even as the tips of them froze. Jules’s eyes widened. The cloud in front of her mouth vanished. There was my old friend, alive and looking right at me.

“Hey, I didn’t do anything,” Jules said in a fierce whisper.

“Ignoring me is not
nothing
. Excluding me is not
nothing
. I’m done walking on eggs!”

“You mean eggshells?”

“I mean what I mean,” I said, because even if I’d gotten the expression wrong, eggs, with all their gooey, messy insides, seemed much worse to walk on than shells. “I can’t keep feeling like I owe you something.”

“
I
can’t help how
you
feel,” she said.

“Well, I’m done acting like I’ve committed the crime of the century.” I picked up my stick and kicked off the dirt.

“Okay,” she said.

“Okay?”

Miss Kang jogged over. “What’s the verdict?”

“We’re in,” Jules said, wiping her mouth guard on her kilt.

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“Definitely,” I added before the wind had a chance to shift.

“Get over there and talk to your team.” Miss Kang gestured to the amorphous pack of girls standing dejectedly around the giant watercooler, sucking on orange slices, shivering, stealing cautious glances in our direction. “Seriously, give them a pep talk.”

We didn’t score in the second half, but neither did Peabody, and by the end of the game, their coach had subbed back in at least half of their starting lineup. Miss Kang called it a dignified loss.

From that moment on, we had a truce. We could lead our team, hang out in groups, or even be paired up for the Rosewood Cares Food Drive table at the street fair, but we had to obey three simple rules. One, we didn’t talk about her mom. Two, we didn’t talk about Nantucket, not about her wild, partying ways, not about her mean streak, as bright as a gasoline path aflame, or about her ditching me for Parker Carmichael, the mean-girl senator’s daughter. And three, we never, ever talked about Zack.

Four

ONE SATURDAY IN NOVEMBER
, I was studying for midterms at The Coffee Exchange. Brown and RISD students had commandeered the place, and were huddled over textbooks, laptops, and sketchbooks. I saw Jules come in with the leather backpack Nina had bought her in Italy. She looked around for a spot, but every seat was taken. I waved, pushed my stuff aside, and made room for her.

“I’m so glad you’re here. I’m totally lost with European History,” she said and dropped her bag, with a thud. She found the one empty chair in the whole place and carried it over her head across the room to our table.
“
’Scuse me,” she said to a bearded drama student as she lowered the chair next to me. He gave her a dirty look and tweaked his handlebar mustache. “What?” she asked him; then she turned around, pulled out her European History folder, and sighed.

“Which prompt did you pick?” I asked.

“The one on world markets?”

“That’s the hardest one. Let me see your notes.”

After almost three hours of drinking too much coffee, consuming two giant pieces of cinnamon cake each, and mapping out our essays, we decided to reward ourselves with a movie at the Avon. Since they showed only one movie at a time, we had to see whatever was playing. It was a weird Danish murder mystery set in a 1970s nudist colony, told from several naked perspectives. We were dying of laughter at all the flapping boobs and bobbing penises, even though the ten other people in the movie theater were very serious.

After, we went to CVS, even though neither one of us had anything specific to buy, and tried to figure out who the killer was.

“It had to be the guy with the man boobs,” she said as she sniffed a new brand of shampoo.

“No, it was the lady with all the…” I said, and gestured in front of my crotch.

“That’s it! She hid the weapon in her bush!” We doubled over in laughter. She handed the shampoo to me to sniff. “Is it just me or does this smell like poop?”

“Ew!” I said, pushing it away, “I don’t want to sniff it.” We kept bumping into each other as we meandered toward the magazines. We discussed everything from the latest teacher gossip (Miss Kang was dating Señor Rodriguez again) to the best type of jeans for our butts, to the subtle British accent one of our classmates had picked up on a recent trip to London. We sampled body lotions until our hands were sticky. They smelled like lavender and medicine and roses and grandmas. We pushed up our sleeves and sampled more on our forearms. We decided the apricot one was the best and slathered it up to our elbows. By the time we left, it was dark and we reeked of synthetic sweetness.

“So, who do you have your eye on this year?” she asked as we lingered outside CVS with mascara, some hot pink lip gloss,
Teen Vogue
,
Lucky
magazine, Red Vines, Junior Mints, and Fresca, which we’d long ago deemed the world’s most underrated soda.

“No one,” I said, realizing that she thought Zack and I had broken up. I opened my mouth to speak, but changed my mind. I didn’t want to correct her and explain that we had “paused,” because having my old best friend back, even for a day, felt like returning home, setting down a heavy suitcase, and curling up in a favorite chair. “How about you?”

“Actually,” she said, sticking her hands deep in the pockets of her puffy jacket. “I kind of like Jay.”

“Really?” I’d had a crush on Jay Logan from the eighth grade until last summer. It was weird to think of Jules liking him, only because of the time I’d invested in studying him, memorizing his lacrosse statistics, and daydreaming about our life together as a private school power couple. I still claimed him out of habit.

“Do you care?” she asked. Did I feel a pinch? A pang? A twinge? Nope. Zack had turned my Jay Logan crush into ancient history.

“Not at all. Go for it.” Strands of soft rock blew out of the glass doors as a group of guys carrying Brown University ice hockey equipment bags exited, dropping f-bombs and potato chip crumbs.

“Cool,” she said. After our summer, it surprised me that she would care how I felt about the whole thing, but her shoulders sank with relief. Her eyelids fluttered and she smiled one of her huge, movie star smiles. It felt so good to give her something she wanted. “Good. ’Cause I think he likes me, too.”

“That’s great,” I said.

“I’m going to call him tonight,” she said, rocking on her heels.

“Do it!”

I took the shortcut home through the Brown athletic complex. Warm gusts of chlorinated air wafted from the aquatics center as I tightened the straps on my backpack. I skipped across the playing fields. The motion detector lights illuminated my path in brief, consecutive bursts.

That night I was sitting at my desk memorizing French verbs when my phone vibrated, panicking on the hard surface of my desk. I saw Zack’s name, grabbed the phone, and stared at the screen as the buzzing traveled from the phone up my arm, and to my heart. He was breaking our rule. But I had to pick up. It was Zack.
Zack.

“Hello?”

“Hey, beautiful.” His voice wrapped around me like a summer breeze.

“What are you doing?” I asked, absurdly alert.

“I’m calling you,” he said.

“Oh.” I slid off my chair and expanded like a starfish.

“I’m coming home for Thanksgiving, and I want to see you.”

“Me, too,” I said, curling up, closing my eyes, and imagining him next to me.

What would I do if I saw him? I would sneak him into my room and hide him under my quilt. No, I would run away with him to Newport and we would get a room at a motel. No, at an inn with a fireplace and one of those big bathtubs. We would take wintery walks on the beach and eat clam chowder, sitting on the same side of the booth at the Black Pearl. I touched my face at the thought. My hands still smelled like the lotion Jules and I had sampled. I sat up and saw the CVS bag with the mascara and the magazines and the Junior Mints. “But Zack, I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“Are you kidding? It’s the best idea. And I need to see you,” Zack said. “I want to get back together. I want to do the whole long distance thing with texts and phone calls and Skype and bus rides.”

“Um, I don’t know.”

“Please,” he said. “This isn’t working for me.”

“It’s not working for me either, but…” I held my breath. I couldn’t finish the sentence. I wanted so badly to see him. I wanted to spend the next few days tingling in anticipation.

“But what?” Zack asked.

“But, Jules,” I said, on the verge of tears. If Jules and I could get through high school, we would be okay; everything changes in college anyway. But if Zack and I got back together now, Jules and I would be right back where we started. I’d be alone again.

“And what if I can’t handle saying good-bye to you again?” I asked, realizing that Jules was only half of it. It’d been so hard to say good-bye once. It hurt again already, and we were still on the phone. How could I go through that over and over again for the rest of the year, wondering all the time if he was thinking of me, too; waiting for him to call; analyzing his Facebook posts? No, I didn’t want that. I just wanted to be with him in person, the whole summer in front of us like that dream where the house keeps going, each step revealing better rooms, bigger windows, balconies, pools, gardens. “Just wait for the summer. The summer is our time.”

“So you don’t want to see me?” he asked.

“We’ll be back together in June,” I said, hoping it would soothe the panic in his voice.

“I can’t wait,” Zack said. “I can’t put my life on pause.”

“It’s only temporary.” It was easy to think that long distance would work on a cold November night a week before he was coming home, but one of us had to stay strong. “I love you, Zack. My feelings aren’t going to change. I know it.”

“I love you, too,” he said.

I felt a “but” dangling at the end of the sentence, like a loose tooth, but I told myself I was imagining it.

Five

I WOKE UP ON CHRISTMAS MORNING
and realized I’d forgotten to buy my stepmother’s parents a gift. Dad had given me a speech about how Polly’s parents, Rosemary and Jim, had made a big effort to include me as their granddaughter. They’d given me a set of monogrammed towels for no apparent reason the last time I visited them. We were going to their house for Christmas dinner and he was depending on me to be a
thoughtful, responsible
person, the kind of person who didn’t buy Christmas presents at CVS on the actual day, as I had done last year for Polly and Alexi. This year, I’d remembered to get Polly a special kind of pan for angel food cake and Alexi a package of glow-in-the-dark stars for his ceiling (with a book about constellations) last weekend, but I had totally spaced on Rosemary and Jim.

I had an excuse. I’d just turned in my college applications. They were so refined and sparkling they were like compressed, digital jewels. I even had a letter of reference from George Gust, the journalist I’d interned for last summer on Nantucket, that was so awesome my mom wanted to frame it. I submitted all my applications two weeks early. But I still had to get a present for Polly’s parents.

Starbucks was open on Christmas and it was a step up from CVS, and two whole blocks closer, which, considering it had snowed three feet the night before, was a big plus. No one had shoveled, so I was in it up to my knees, making deep, fresh footprints, and climbing snowbanks at the curbs. Everything was cold and glinting, but with all the heaviness at home, I wasn’t feeling the magic.

Mom had exclaimed at least three times that “we girls” were a “perfect team” and “fine just the two of us.” No pill and no amount of chardonnay was strong enough to dull Mom’s pain at being single at Christmas, and yet she was pretending that I hadn’t noticed how disappointed she’d been that, without Dad, there had been so little for her under the tree. Now I was dreading my performance in the second act of the Happy Divorced Christmas play. I couldn’t wait for the day to be over. This wasn’t how Christmas was supposed to feel.

It had actually started snowing again when I reached Starbucks, where a neat, straight path had been shoveled from the sidewalk to the entrance, and I reached out with a mittened hand to catch a fat, glimmering flake. Bing Crosby was being piped through the outdoor speakers. A little boy made a snowman in what was usually an ugly parking lot, but now looked like the top of a frosted cake. A couple passed by on cross-country skis. I smelled chimney smoke.

I was looking at the stuff on the back wall, trying to pick out the thing that would seem the least like I had bought it that morning. A French press? A set of travel mugs? Was there
anything
without the store logo on it? Did Rosemary and Jim even drink coffee? Then I spotted a monkey mug. The handle was the monkey’s arm scratching his head. The monkey had a dopey expression, but it made me laugh. I was contemplating if they would like it too when the door swung open and I felt a rush of cold air. It was Zack. He wore a black wool peacoat and a red cashmere scarf. His cheeks were pink and there was fresh snow in his hair.

I stood frozen, aglow, a monkey mug in each hand. I must’ve been emitting some signal, because at that moment he turned to see me among the cappuccino machines, my mouth open like I was about to burst into “O Holy Night.” When his eyes met mine, he blinked twice and smiled the warmest, biggest smile. I felt a drop of happiness enter my bloodstream so potent that a second one might have sent me to the emergency room for an overdose. I was wrong not to have seen him over Thanksgiving. I was so stupid not to do long distance. How could I have denied myself
this
? I wanted to feel
this
forever.

“Come here,” he said. I ran to him, wrapped my arms around his neck. He hugged me so tight my feet lifted off the ground. His cold ear pressed against my hot face. I inhaled his scent—wet wool and pine—and he spread his hand over my back and held it there. It was Christmas in three heartbeats.

“Hey, you,” he said.

“Hey, you, too,” I said. My cheeks burned.

“What are you doing?”

“Christmas shopping,” I said, shrugging.

“Pretty lame,” he said with a smile, nodding at the mugs.

“I think they’re cute.” I imitated the ridiculous grin of the monkeys.

Then his phone rang. “I bet this is Jules, changing her mind again. Our plane leaves in two hours and the girl is acting like we have all day.” His phone persisted, but he ignored it. “She’s not even packed.”

“Where are you going?”

The Claytons were not a travel-on-Christmas family.
They
were a stockings-filled-with-clementines-chocolates-and-new
socks, homemade-actual-figgy-pudding, get-dressed-up-to-go-to-midnight-mass-but-just-for-the-music family. I loved
how when I used to go over on Christmas my clothes would smell like the fire that had been burning in their house all day. The one we chucked our orange peels into.

“Mexico,” he said. “Cancún. Dad surprised us at the last minute.”

“Cancún?”

His phone rang again. He silenced it without looking.

“Time for a change,” he said. His phone rang again. The caller’s third attempt. He checked it. His features subtly shifted. He turned away and picked it up.

“Hey,” he said quietly, too quietly, into the phone. “You, too. Of course I miss you.”

I didn’t have to ask if it was a girl. I just knew in my bones. As I felt air vacuumed from my lungs, I made a promise to myself not to cry. Zack stepped out of line to take the phone call. I bought the mugs, handing the cashier a twenty-dollar bill with a shaking hand. She was asking me something about a receipt—did I want it e-mailed? I couldn’t even hear her. I muttered, “No, thank you,” and didn’t wait for my change. I ran out of the store, leaping over the snowbank, immune to the chunks of ice in my socks and the wind chafing my cheeks.

It wasn’t until Jim and Rosemary opened their presents at their house that I saw that the mugs were both emblazoned with the Starbucks logo on the back. I’d even left the prices on them, showing the Christmas discount. They told me how much they loved monkeys, how much they loved Starbucks. My dad shook his head. A minute later, while Alexi was stomping around with his new toy airplane, I excused myself and fled to what Rosemary called the powder room.

Zack had moved on. I’d let Dad down, again. Mom was alone. I was in a near stranger’s house on Christmas.

“You okay in there?” Rosemary said, knocking gently at the door.

“I’m fine, thanks,” I said, as politely as I could. I held a Christmas-themed hand towel to my face as I silently released the tears I’d been holding in since Starbucks.

January, February, and March dragged on like one of Edwina
MacIntosh’s lectures about cliques. That winter there had been one blizzard, two nor’easters, and three months of dirty slush. The bitter cold had somehow helped me perfect the art of not thinking about Zack. One bright spot had been when George Gust’s book came out, the one he’d been writing last summer on Nantucket. He’d put my name in the acknowledgments just like he’d promised. He’d even given me my own sentence:
A big thank-you goes to Cricket Elizabeth Thompson, my faithful intern, for providing good sense, keen insight, and a steady supply of Coke Zero.
I couldn’t believe my name was in a real book for the whole world to see. It got me through waiting to hear if I was going to Brown next year.

My acceptance to Brown was a golden ticket to the future. It arrived on a Saturday. Mom and I went out for dinner and she let me sip her champagne. On Sunday, Dad took me to Nordstrom and told me to pick out anything I wanted. I didn’t tell anyone else I’d been admitted until the next Monday, when I marched right into the senior lounge and wrote
Brown
on that giant piece of butcher paper, smack in the middle. My classmates congratulated me, even as, in some cases, their eyelids beat double time with jealousy. Ed invited me to her office for lunch. We ate with real silver forks and knives. Miss Kang did a victory dance in the middle of the cafeteria. Jules even picked me a bouquet of daffodils from the school’s garden. But of course, the person I wanted to tell more than anyone was Zack.