This is a memory I want to keep forever: Grace standing at the stove of her parents’ rental cottage in one of her dad’s oversize T-shirts as she makes us a can of SpaghettiOs. Her mom already cleaned out the fridge and cabinets, throwing away anything with an expiration date.
“Almost ready,” says Grace as she stirs the pasta around with a wooden spoon.
“I should probably leave soon,” I tell her. I hate prolonged good-byes. They’re as bad as tearing a Band-Aid off one arm hair at a time.
“Don’t pretend like you have somewhere to be right now. Besides, you should eat before you go.” Grace is like her mom in that way. Every time we’ve left the house over the last month, her mom has tried to unload some kind of food on us, like we were taking a long journey and would need rations. “Don’t make me eat these SpaghettiOs by myself.”
“Okay,” I say. “The thought of that is actually pretty pitiful.”
She takes the pot from the stove and drops an oven mitt on the kitchen table before setting it down in front of me. Scooting in close, she winds her legs between mine and hands me a wooden spoon. We’re both white, but my legs are permanently tanned from life on the coast (though a little hairy, because shaving is the actual worst), while Grace’s normally ivory skin is splotchy and irritated from all the overexposure to the sun. And then there are her feet.
I grin.
“What?” she asks, tilting her head. Her raven waves brush against her shoulders. She’s obsessed with straightening her hair, but even the mention of humidity makes her ends curl. “Don’t look at my feet.” She kicks me in the shin. “You’re looking at my feet.”
I swallow a spoonful of pasta. “I like your feet.” They’re flat and wide and much too big for her body. And for some reason I find this totally adorable. “They’re like hobbit feet.”
“My feet are not hairy,” she insists.
I almost come back at her with some dumb quip, but the clock behind her melts into focus, and I remember.
Grace is leaving me. I knew she would leave me from the first moment we met on the beach as I handed out happy-hour flyers for Boucher’s. She lay spread out on a beach chair in a black swimsuit with the sides cut out and a towel over her feet. I remember wishing I knew her well enough to know why she was hiding her feet.
This is our last meal together. In less than an hour, her mom, dad, and brother will all wake up and pack whatever else remains from their summer in Eulogy into the back of their station wagon, and they’ll head home to their normal lives, leaving a hole in mine.
“I’m gonna be miserable without you,” says Grace between bites. We’re both too realistic to make promises we can’t keep. Or maybe I’m too scared to ask her to promise me anything. She tugs at my ponytail. “And your stupid blue hair.”
“Not as much as I’m going to miss your hobbit feet.”
She smiles and slurps the pasta off her spoon.
Grace loves this shit. It’s the junk food she craves after growing up in a house where her mother fed her homemade meals like stuffed salmon and sautéed asparagus. SpaghettiOs or any other kind of prepackaged food marketed toward kids—that was the kind of stuff Hattie and I grew up on. With Dad working and Mom gone, we ate anything that could be microwaved.
I think I’m in love with Grace. But sometimes it’s hard to tell if I’m in love with her or her life. Her adorable little brother, Max, who is still sweet, because he has no idea how good-looking he will be someday, and her mom and dad, always checking in and leaving out leftovers for us. And this house. It’s only a vacation rental, but it still feels so permanent.
Grace tucks her black bob behind her ears. “Did you ever look up any of those schools I put on that list for you?”
I shrug. This is our sticking point—the one thing we can’t get past. Grace says the only thing keeping me here after high school is me. And I can concede that, in a way, she is right, but Grace is the kind of girl who never has to look at a price tag or tell the clerk at the grocery store to put a few items back.
We sit here curled into each other as the clock on the microwave melts into morning.
“I should go,” I finally say.
She nudges her forehead against mine.
If we lived in a world where only my rules applied, I would kiss her. Hard. And leave.
Instead we walk hand in hand to the porch, where my bike sits, and then we make our way down the gravel driveway to the mailbox still shrouded in darkness.
I rest my bike against the post.
“Text me when you get a chance,” I tell her.
“Olive juice,” she says. I love you, her lips read. Her mother used to mouth it to her when she was dropping Grace off at school so she didn’t embarrass her in front of all her friends.
“I love you, too,” I whisper back with my lips already pressed into hers. She tastes like SpaghettiOs and the cigar we stole from her dad’s portable humidor. Her lips are chapped and her hair dirty with salt water from our midnight swim just a few short hours ago. I feel her dissolving into a memory already.