Sing (11 page)

Noel jumps from the boat to the dock to stand beside me. I want to hug Tess, I want her to know how grateful I am, that she's opening up, not just to the idea that Noel truly makes me happy, but to the possibility of being happy with somebody, herself.

While the three of them are chatting, I notice the white tangle of Noel's earbuds dangling from his pocket, slipping toward the ocean.

“Careful,” I say, quickly reaching for them. His phone tumbles out into my hands and I hear the soft, distant beat of music still playing through the tiny speakers. I glance at the screen of his phone and see the cover of my last album staring back at me.

Perfect red circles bloom on his cheeks and he stuffs the phone back into his pocket.

“Clown rap, huh?” I whisper.

He shrugs and takes my hand, and suddenly, everything feels right again.

51 Days Until Tour

July 23rd

THE NEXT DAY,
Noel offers to take us all out on his boat to a nearby island, a local surf spot that's apparently so secret it doesn't have a name. “We just call it ‘off-shore,'” explains J.T., zipping into his wet suit on the dark and pebbly sand once we've docked. I should be working on the last few songs for the album, but somehow it's starting to feel less important. Now that I'm back with Noel, summer is winding down too fast. Maybe Terry is right—maybe I won't push it. Maybe I'll just release the tour EP, a special gift for my fans.

“Off-shore” turns out to be an uninhabited island, thickly settled with looming evergreens and acres of brambly shrubs. Rolling waves break in a steady line
parallel with the short, secluded beach. As soon as Latham has slathered on some sunscreen, he and J.T. belly-flop onto their boards and start paddling out away from land, their arms digging into the water in long, determined strokes.

“Ready?” Noel asks Tess, who has agreed to be his first student. Sammy and I bring beach chairs and towels to a sandy spot near the dunes, and I rummage through my tote for sunglasses.

“Ready for my daily near-drowning?” Tess shoots back, with an overly enthusiastic thumbs-up. “You bet!”

We offer calls of encouragement as Tess wobbles onto her board, and Noel follows her out toward where the waves are breaking. Murphy paddles alongside them for a few feet before losing interest and turning back to join us, panting heavily as he cools off in the sand beside us.

In the distance, Noel has stopped Tess in a calm section of the cove and they practice getting into position. Noel stands waist-deep beside her, keeping the board steady, and Tess lies flat on her belly with her toes pointing back. When Noel shouts “Go!” she assumes push-up stance, hops her feet to the middle of the board, and twists to the side, one foot forward and the other straddled back.

Sammy and I cheer wildly and Tess turns to us, losing focus and tumbling backward into the shallow sea. Noel
shakes his head and gestures for Tess to follow him out deeper, where they can work undisturbed.

“She seems so happy.” Sammy smiles at the closed book in her lap. From the dog-eared page in the middle, it looks like she still hasn't made much progress.

“I know,” I say, rubbing sunscreen on my arms. “It's weird.”

Sammy laughs and fidgets in her chair, adjusting the seam of her black-and-white polka-dotted bandeau top. “You do, too. Noel is really sweet.”

There's a fluttering near my heart, the slightly embarrassing, gushy feeling I get whenever I see Noel or so much as hear his name. I reach down to pat the coarse wet fur beneath Murphy's collar. “He is,” I say, hearing the dreamy quality in my voice. I clear my throat, weirdly self-conscious, and study the chipped red polish on my fingernails. I feel Sammy's eyes on me and worry that there's something new and almost uncomfortable between us.

For most of our lives, Sam has been the one person I've always been able to be myself around. Even when everyone else thought I was too intense, always writing or singing or talking about writing and singing, she made me feel like I was special. She promised that one day, everyone else would see it, too. I figured that when I came clean about Noel, things would go back to the
way they'd always been, that whatever tension I'd been feeling between us would lift because there were no secrets anymore. But it's still there, this awkward delay between the things we want to say and the things we're actually saying, and I don't know what to do about it.

“I hate that I lied to you,” I blurt, a pressure in my jaw, too-late tears stinging the corners of my eyes.

“I know,” Sammy says. “It's okay.”

“It's not okay,” I insist. “It was stupid. I was just . . . I was scared. I didn't want you guys to tell me I was making another mistake.”

“I wouldn't have said it was a mistake . . .” Sam digs at the sand with her bare heels.

I study her disbelievingly until she relents.

“Fine.” She holds up her hands. “I may have
gently reminded
you that the whole point of this summer was to spend time on your own. But that doesn't excuse the fact that you lied.”

“I know it doesn't,” I say softly. “I hate when you're mad at me. It makes my stomach hurt.”

“I'm not mad at you,” she insists. “I can never stay mad at you.”

I laugh abruptly. “Remember when I had that audition and missed your Halloween party?” I ask. “You made me wear a different costume every time I came over until Christmas!”

“That's true,” Sam admits, her eyes taking on a faraway look as she thinks back to a simpler time, a time when all we had to worry about were rides to the mall and multiple-choice tests. “But I wasn't mad.”

We turn our attention back to the ocean, where Tess and Noel are sitting up on their boards, their legs dangling in the water. Every so often, Noel turns his head to check for incoming waves. Latham and J.T. are floating blobs of color on the horizon, bobbing in the growing swell.

Sammy fidgets again with her book and clears her throat. It looks like there's more she wants to ask, or say. I realize with a guilty shock that maybe she has something else on her mind. Maybe whatever it is that's bothering her has nothing at all to do with me.

“What about you?” I ask, hoping for a convincing mix of casual and concerned. “Are you having an okay time? I know things have been a little . . . slow here.”

Sammy shrugs and bites her lower lip, a dead giveaway that something is up. “No, it's great,” she tries. “I mean, yeah, I'm a little . . . I don't know . . . I guess I'm just feeling antsy with all of this downtime. But I think it's good for me, you know? The quiet. It really makes you figure things out.”

“Tell me about it,” I say, and we laugh, the easy sparkle back in her emerald eyes.

Just then, Noel shouts something in the water and we
turn to see a perfect wave taking shape in the distance. Noel is miming furiously at Tess, who stares wide-eyed in our direction, her strong arms slicing into the ocean again and again. The wave grows behind her, a lip of white breaking on one side and slowly spreading, like whipped cream on a warm pie just before it melts.

“Now!” Noel yells, and in one expert motion Tess pops up to her feet. The wave chases her from behind, pushing her down the line for a breathtaking few seconds. Her back is hunched and her knees are bent, but just before she topples over, she pumps one fist in the air, whooping proudly at the sky.

In the afternoon, after we've all had our turns in the water, our arms sore from paddling, our hair damp and threaded with sand, Noel sneaks me off to a tucked-away swimming hole connected to the beach by an overgrown trail.

It's much smaller than the one he showed me on the main island but twice as deep. Noel dives in first and I follow, swimming out to meet him. The sunlight is broken by branches into dappled patches and the air is cool and crisp, but Noel's arms are warm as he pulls me in close.

“Think they're having fun?” he asks, nodding his head back to the beach. His blue eyes are genuine and
concerned. It's the first time we've all been together since I told Sammy and Tess about us, and I realize he's feeling a new sense of pressure, a need to prove himself as worthy, even though he's known Tess longer than I have.

“It's the perfect day,” I assure him. “Thank you.”

Noel kisses my nose and tenderly pushes my wet hair out of my face, before picking me up by the waist and tossing me brusquely into the water. I shriek and splash up to the surface, determined to get him back. We laugh and wrestle, attempting to climb whatever body parts we can get ahold of, pushing each other down and calling false truces again and again.

Eventually, we flop back onto the sun-warmed ledge and lie on our backs, my head resting on Noel's chest. I trace lines on his tanned forearm with my finger.

“Why ‘Bird'?” he asks suddenly, tucking my damp hair behind one ear.

“What do you mean?” I prop myself up on one elbow. “My nickname?”

Noel nods, stretching his arms overhead and resting his head on his open palms. “Who gets to use it?” he asks. “Is there some kind of initiation? A secret handshake?”

I laugh and snuggle back in, my forehead pressed against the stubbly side of his jaw. “Tess started it,” I explain. “It's mostly just for family and close friends.
But I could make an exception . . .” I tilt my head to smile up at him.

“Nah.” He shrugs. “I like Lily. Lily Ross,” he says, landing on each syllable with warm precision. There's something about the way he says my name, my real name, that makes it sound new again, somehow unattached to the
Lily Ross
I've been trying to separate myself from all summer. It doesn't sound like a business. It sounds like a real person.

Like me.

“Do you ever think about what happens after?” he asks, shifting slightly against the hard rocks. His voice is light but his heart pounds behind his ribs, drumming against my outstretched fingers.

“After what?” I ask, looking over the feathery tops of the trees, at a wispy trail of clouds that snakes across the sky.

“When you're done with all of this,” Noel says, locking his fingers into mine. “Touring. Traveling. You can't do it forever, can you?”

I look at the web of our fingers, mine long and slender, his thick and calloused. “I don't know,” I say softly. “To be honest, I've always thought I would.”

He laughs, nervously. “But now?”

I smile. “Now I'm not so sure,” I say. “It's hard to see when you're in the middle of it, and most of the time I
just feel so lucky, you know? But it does seem like there's a lot you miss out on, living that way.”

“Oh yeah?” He sits up slowly, and I lift my head. A slight smile is spreading hesitantly across his face. “Like what?”

“Oh, I don't know,” I tease, shifting to sit beside him. “Lots of things.”

Noel scrambles to his feet and starts to climb back up the trail, disappearing around a tree. “Where are you going?” I call after him. He doesn't answer, and I follow the rustling sound of his feet in the bushes until he reappears high on another clearing.

At the top of the cliff, he peers through a cluster of trees, struggling to untangle something. When he returns, he's dragging a long, sturdy rope, tied to a thick branch overhead.

“What are you doing?” I yell, laughing. “That thing looks like it's been there since the Middle Ages.”

Noel gives it a good tug. “Yup,” he agrees. “Entertaining bored island youth for centuries.”

He beckons me to join him but I shake my head. “No way.”

Noel shrugs dramatically. “Suit yourself!” He steps out to the ledge, and jumps up and down a few times while holding the rope, as if to prove that it's up to the task. Finally he backs up, then careens in a careful arc
over the water, dropping the rope from his grasp. He pulls his knees tidily into his chest and spins backward in an impressive double flip, before slicing into the water in a flawless dive.

I wait until he splashes through the surface and cheer loudly from the lower ledge. Noel runs a hand through his hair, pressing short, choppy blond strands back from his face, and gives me a mischievous smile. “Come on,” he goads. “You're not scared, are you?”

I glance up at the steep rock face and the fraying length of rope. It's the kind of thing I'd normally shy away from, not because I don't want to do it, but for fear of being photographed in an awkward position, or ending up with some kind of stupid injury that would be a nightmare to explain. But there are no cameras here. For once, I don't have to think beyond this moment. I don't have to worry that whatever happens will get twisted, revised, rewritten, until it no longer belongs to me.

I push myself onto the lower ledge and climb up. At the top, I unravel the rope and give it a steady tug.

My stomach drops as I peer over the edge, considering the distance. Noel cups his hands around his mouth and yells something up to me, but it's swallowed in echoes and I can't quite make it out.

“What?” I yell back.

“Jump and I'll tell you!”

I roll my eyes and take a deep breath, the rough fibers of the rope digging into my palms. Before I can change my mind, I back up, then run to the ledge and swing out over the water. Just as I let the rope slip from my fingers, falling weightless and free, the trees a blanket of green around me, I hear Noel's voice:

“I'm falling for you, Lily Ross!”

The water races to meet me, a breath-snatching barrier of cold, but I'm smiling as I sink down beneath the surface. I squint my eyes open, kicking toward the milky light. When I break the surface, Noel is a few feet away, beaming. I paddle closer and wrap my arms around his neck.

“You're crazy,” I whisper into the warm side of his rough cheek. “And I'm falling for you, too.”