Entry 22: Maybe It Isn’t Too Late

Date: June 4, 2013

Grandma Betty lived in a beautiful two-story house that stood merely a few miles away from the shoreline of Venice Beach. It was painted pastel blue trimmed with white and had a lovely porch complete with a swinging bench.

My mom told me that it used to be some ordinary old bench—until she and Patrick, eleven and spontaneous, needed some extra wood for the bird house they were making and decided that the four short legs of the bench were exactly the right size.

Grandma had been furious but Grandpa just laughed it off.

“What are you laughing about? It’s completely useless now!” Grandma Betty had claimed.

“Don’t speak too soon, dear,” Grandpa had fired back at her as he winked at his daughter and her best friend. “Nothing is ever completely useless.”

With the right equipment bought and some help from the very kids responsible for the bench’s destruction, it was transformed into the swing where my mom had cried on the first time she had her heart broken by a boy. The second time was by a man’s death—grandpa’s death.

And for the past summer vacations, that swing had been my spot. I would read, leaning back on the pillows I’d taken from the living room, and sink into story after story after story rather than go out to the beach and swim like the other girls.

It had been two days since we arrived and I was once again sitting on my “throne”, as my dad liked to call it. I had a book with me—two, actually—but there was something different about it this time.

I was certain it wasn’t the people. Whatever noise they could make, they wouldn’t be able to pull me out of a book. They never did and I was pretty sure they never would. It wasn’t the weather. It was sunny with a slight wind picking up, brushing past the chimes Grandma had hung just above the front steps, but that had never bothered me before.

For some reason, I just couldn’t read. My mind was too busy drifting back to L.A., back to a particular hallway in my high school where I’d last spoken to the boy I love.

Colin…

I let out an angry groan and shook my head, trying to focus on the words on the page.

This summer was supposed to be the perfect opportunity to get over him, seeing as he would be too busy with college. I looked up the university in Chicago that Colin wanted to go to online and found out that there was going to be an early summer program for incoming freshmen on June six. A little scrolling down Facebook allowed me to learn that Colin was interested in this particular program.

I knew that it was just a summer program and Colin could always come back and hang out with his friends and family here, but there was still a chance that he wouldn’t come back at all. He had relatives there that he could stay with. He could spend the rest of the summer getting used to his surroundings, making friends before school even started and whatnot. That meant I didn’t have to see him around L.A. anymore.

However, if I kept letting my heart wander back to him like this, there was no way I could possibly move on from him.

“This is the first time I’ve ever seen someone this determined to read,” a voice said, and I craned my neck to find Patrick resting all his weight against the doorframe.

Seeing as Patrick and my mom grew up together, it was only logical that he knew Grandma Betty and that she loved him fiercely like a son she never had. Naturally, he was always invited to summer visits like this one.

“And to think I own a bookstore—I mean, I’ve seen my fair share of weird but this is definitely different,” he went on, smirking at me as he sauntered over. Despite his present teasing demeanor, it was impossible for me not to flash back to The Book Station, just a month ago. I could see it all before me, clear as day: Patrick sitting hunched, lifeless, on the floor, tears swelling but never falling.

I blinked and this time, I saw Patrick in a thin button-down and black Bermuda shorts, relaxing against the other side of the bench. He used his leg—the one that wasn’t crossed—to rock the swing back and forth.

His smile had softened just a notch. “What’s up, Seven?”

“Nothing’s up,” I said, swerving my gaze the other way. I absently flipped through the book in my hands. “Why?”

Patrick shrugged and sighed. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Just want to know what’s on your mind. Everyone else is filled with the summer vibe except you.”

“And you?” I asked, but he didn’t answer. I was certain he could hear me; he was just pretending he couldn’t. “Did you try contacting your parents again?” I immediately regretted my words when I noticed his eye twitch in irritation.

His reply was quick and sharp as a sudden sword swipe: “Why should I?” He cleared his throat and tried to cover up the emotion in his voice. “I’ve been making the effort this whole time. It’s their turn now.”

I pursed my lips, and my thoughts, as they never failed to do, circled back to Colin. “But…maybe they don’t know it’s their turn.”

That made Patrick pause. He was already quiet, actually, but I sensed the stop in his train of thoughts, hesitating before it would turn to its next direction. In the end, the train just went ahead on its original track.

“That’s their problem now,” he said, almost like he was trying to convince himself.

I wanted to say more, but Patrick didn’t give me a chance. He hopped off to his feet and ducked back inside the house without even a word of finality. His exit itself implied that this conversation should be put to bed, and never woken up again.

I sighed, feeling guilty for ruining Patrick’s considerably better mood, compared to the previous weeks. There was no way I was going to be able to get back to my book at all now.

I stood up, shaking the swing violently from my sudden movement, and went inside to get my purse. Counting to make sure I had enough money, I called out to my parents that I was going out to the boardwalk and started heading down the road to where the people, the music and the colors were more vibrant.

I wish I could say that I easily got a seat at a quiet café, but to be honest, wrestling my way through the crowd of tourists loitering by the souvenir shops and waiting for a couple to finish up their drinks and leave so I could take their table wasn’t exactly a walk in the park.

Nonetheless, I got my seat. I was drinking an iced mocha latte and I was satisfied with watching the busy street and the foaming waves in the distance.

It was a little after lunch when I’d journeyed outside my house, so naturally the café was full, but after an hour of playing with my phone and watching some hilarious videos online, the number of customers began decreasing, and I found myself in the company of the boy behind the counter and two girls facing their laptops in the far corner.

Most would’ve found this scenario boring, but I actually enjoyed the time to just relax and space out, my problems momentarily shoved to the farthest alcoves of my brain.

I was still wedged between the fat arms of the couch I’d been sitting on for almost one and a half hours already, running my eyes over the pastries they had, when the door opened with a jingle.

And then: “Oh my gosh, Seven! What a coincidence!”

Unaccustomed to the sound of my name in a place where I didn’t know anyone, I jerked my head toward the door and felt my eyes grew to the size of saucers.

Kiera stood before me in a pink and very exposing one-piece swimsuit. The cleavage cut reached all the way down to her navel and there were slashes at the sides, showing just how narrow her waist was. She’d overlaid it with a loose shirt, but it barely served its purpose. For one, it only reached half of her stomach, and it was almost completely sheer. If her enticing swimsuit wasn’t attracting enough attention, then my name being yelled certainly did the job.

“Um, hi, Kiera,” I murmured weakly, “Nice to see you too.”

I had no idea what to do. Kiera and I never really had any interaction at school, besides talking about the latest psychology assignment or borrowing a pencil. I didn’t have any of her secrets written in the black notebook, and every time she happened to pop in my thoughts, unbidden, all I could think about was Colin and her making out inside a closet.

Kiera ran over to my place in the café and sat herself down on the couch across mine. “I didn’t know you came to this beach,” she said. “I notice some juniors every once in a while but never you.”

“I come here almost every summer, but I just don’t venture out to this part of the beach.”

“No wonder you always look so pale at the beginning of school!” she laughed. I had no choice but to smile awkwardly at her comment.

For conversation’s sake, I asked, “So, do you always come to Venice beach?” but she dismissed my question with a vague, “Sometimes” and went on to ask her own: “So, how are you and Colin doing?”

The grip I had on my latte tightened, causing the ice inside to noisily bump into each other. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, I know you guys got into some love quarrel and stuff,” she said, twirling a strand of her brown hair with a manicured finger, “but everyone in a relationship goes through that. You two are okay now, right?”

I almost forgot that nobody knew that Colin and I weren’t actually ever together. “Uh, we’re…we broke up,” I said.

Kiera’s hand stilled and she stared at me, long and hard, as if I’d grown another head. She then fixed her gaze on the table between us for a minute or so, and I could practically hear the wheels in her head turning. “Colin wasn’t the one who ended things,” she concluded, almost accusingly, “was it?”

Confusion was clear in the way I brought my eyebrows together. “How did you know that?’ I asked slowly, drawing out each word.

Kiera couldn’t seem to meet my eyes. She fiddled with her fingers, tapping them to the beat of the song playing softly in the café. The only answer I got from her was a pair of pursed lips.

“Kiera?” I asked reluctantly. “How do you know?”

She closed her eyes and exhaled deeply. “I just—I don’t feel like it’s my place to tell but,” she said quickly, “maybe…maybe you need to know.”

I hated being stuck in suspension like this. “What is it?”I asked impatiently.

“Okay,” she said, spreading out her hands before her as if she were smoothing out a piece of paper, “so you remember Alana’s party? We played Seven Minutes of Heaven and I ended up with Colin?”

Oh, yes. Quite vividly. “Yeah?”

“Well,” she said tentatively, testing the ground before taking a step forward, “we didn’t actually kiss.”

At first I wasn’t sure if I’d heard right. “Wait, what?”

“Colin and I never made out like you all thought we did,” she repeated. “And you know why?”

“No,” I said softly, my mind rushing back to my disappointment at that time, the pain I’d felt because I thought Colin had actually enjoyed that kiss with Kiera. I gently dug through my heart, unearthing those feelings I’d buried deep inside. “Why?”

Kiera smiled knowingly at me. “Because Colin didn’t want to kiss me,” she said. “It was a good thing I didn’t immediately throw myself at him or that would’ve been embarrassing. I was alright with it, my ego kind of bruised, but I was fine. I had to know why, though. And you know what he said?”

I shook my head no.

“He said, ‘I’m saving these lips for someone special’,” she quoted Colin’s exact words from that night. “Now, how often do you hear a guy—and not just any guy, but a guy like Colin Stillman, who obviously is not a virgin—say that?”

“He’s not a virgin?” I asked.

“Oh my goodness, you were his girlfriend, how could you have not—” her words fell off their course, sending her to silence. And then she goggled at me; realization had finally struck. “You guys never did it—”

“Of course we didn’t!” I exclaimed, feeling my cheeks burn.

Kiera raised a hand to her forehead, like she was suddenly coming down with a fever. “Wow, this is—wow. He’s more serious about you than I thought…but you guys did make out, right?”

“We…” I shook my head. “Can we get back to the point?”

“Oh. Right. Back to what I was saying,” she said, “what he said left me really curious. And then it was your turn to have a try at the make out closet with Ray, and Colin casually interrupts, as if he was just doing you a favor, but I knew. I know. That special someone he was talking about—it was you.”

“H-How can you be so sure?” I stuttered, still unready to accept whatever hopeful contemplations the world had to give me. My heart had been broken too many times to truly believe in anything just yet. “Maybe he’s just some flirt who wants to kiss as many girls he wants or—or maybe that special someone he was talking about was Maria. I mean, he did give her a ride home that night.”

Kiera scrunched up her nose. “Maria? That girl just doesn’t know what the meaning of self-control is. I know I’m not one to talk, but at least I know when a guy isn’t interested in me and I accept it. She can’t,” she stated. “And besides, I know for sure because I know what Colin did for you.”

“What Colin…what did he do?” I asked. The rest of my latte was left forgotten on the table.

“I overheard him a couple times, nonchalantly telling the friends he knew were confessing their secrets to you to give you a break,” she informed me, “He told them you must be tired, carrying the burden by yourself and that you shouldn’t be pushed to your limit.”

“He…he did that?” my voice was barely above a whisper. “For me?” I looked down at my drink, watching it sweat, a tiny drop sliding down the length of the cup, and wondered how it was possible that I could know so much about other people but I didn’t know enough about the things that concerned myself.

I remembered noticing that the phone calls and messages I used to receive had gradually died down. There were barely any new secrets to bother about while I hunted after the black notebook. I never gave it that much of a thought. I’d always put it to luck.

But as it turns out, someone was working behind the scenes for my benefit.

“Yeah,” Kiera sighed dreamily, “it’s so sweet.”

“It is,” I said, feeling numb. If only I’d seen all of these clues before, if only I hadn’t freaked out and severed our ties, burned our bridge, maybe things would be different now. Too late, I kept thinking. Too late.

“That’s how I know he didn’t break up with you,” Kiera said with absolute certainty, “because he’s in love with you.”

I pressed my face into the palm of my hands. The back of my eyes stung with new tears, but thankfully, they remained right where they were. “Why are you only telling me this now?”

Through the slits between my fingers, I could see Kiera bowing her head. “I don’t know…” she started, playing with the frayed hem of her shirt. “I guess I didn’t want to get involved in anyone’s love story at first. I thought you’d eventually work things out, but knowing now that you guys broke up, I thought maybe…maybe you didn’t know the whole story.”

I sat up straight, removing my hands from my face. “You’re right,” I said quietly. “I didn’t know the whole story.”

Kiera sputtered with guilt. “Seven, I’m sorry I didn’t say anything—”

“It’s fine,” I interrupted her, “you didn’t really know what was going on; you were just a witness.” I pushed myself off the couch and fixed my shirt. “I, um, I’ll go ahead. It was nice talking to you.”

Kiera could only nod, her mouth slightly agape, as I guided my feet to the door. Once I was there, though, I looked back. “Thank you for telling me this now, Kiera,” I said. “I needed the truth.”

She tried for a smile and replied, “Anytime.” We exchanged a wave of goodbye before I finally left the café.

On the way back, I couldn’t stop thinking about what Kiera just told me. After first discovering Colin’s message in my diary, I’d been hopeful and I’d gotten this elated feeling that maybe this was it. This was my happy ending. Now I wasn’t so sure.

I’d been so clueless this whole time. I felt so foolish—acting impulsively when I hadn’t even seen the entire picture yet. I didn’t know about my diary being in Colin’s possession for the past months I’d been looking for the black notebook, I didn’t know that Colin actually harbored the same feelings I had for him, and I didn’t know that he’d done all those things for me.

What else did I not know about?

I distanced myself from a couple passing by, the boy carrying the girl on his back while she pointed to the places she wanted to go. I watched them with hungry eyes and craned my neck to watch them even when they were getting farther away.

After a while, I shook my head, realizing that I’d been standing there just staring out for who knew how long.

When I finally reached my grandmother’s house, I was surprised to find the front door ajar and cheerful voices overlapped each other inside. I warily slipped inside and was even more surprised to see two visitors in the living room.

They looked to be around Grandma Betty’s age, but you could obviously tell they were still working their backs off. One of them, the man, was wearing a neat blue button-down, and from how his silver watch gleamed in the light, I could tell it didn’t come cheap. He had very few grays in his hair, almost like an indication that he wasn’t willing to give his life up just yet.

The woman sitting beside him wore a casual yet still elegant dress with a large beach hat on her lap. Unlike the man, her head was a crown of silver, cut into a complimenting pixie style.

There wasn’t anything unusual with the scene; Grandma Betty almost always had guests—friends, distant relatives, or just friendly neighbors coming to say hi—but there was something different about these two.

One of the reasons could be because Patrick was hugging them like crazy, with a grin so gigantic it seemed to fill the entire room. Another was that when Patrick thought nobody noticed, he would take off his glasses and surreptitiously wipe his eyes.

They must’ve sensed my lingering shadow by the doorway because one by one they turned to me—my dad, my mom, Patrick, Grandma Betty, and then the two strangers. I shifted awkwardly from one foot to another, returning their stares.

“And who’s this?” the woman asked curiously. She smiled welcomingly at me.

“This is my granddaughter,” Grandma said and then beckoned at me. “Come over here, Seven. Let me introduce you to two of my oldest friends.”

As I walked closer toward the little circle they’d created in the living room, the man chuckled and said, “I’m assuming you don’t mean our age when you say ‘oldest’.” The elder folks shared a small laugh.

The woman’s eyes lit up. “So this is your daughter, Julie?” she asked, turning to my mom, who nodded with a proud smile. “My, she looks just like you when you were her age.”

“Seven,” Grandma said, once I was standing beside her rocking chair, and took my hand. “This is Sophia and Philip—Patrick’s parents.”

Patrick’s…parents? I directed a questioning look at Patrick, but his face wasn’t turned to me. He was too busy beaming at his parents, looking much like an excited boy who’d just got the expensive bike he’d always been waiting for.

Everyone else was expecting a response from me, so I had to turn back to Patrick’s parents and say, “Nice to meet you both,” with a polite smile.

“So,” my grandmother said, clapping her bony hands together, “why don’t we have some snacks? I’ve got some refreshing drinks ready as well.”

“Let’s have them,” Philip said, pushing himself off the couch. “I’ll help you prepare.”

As Grandma Betty and Philip headed to the small kitchen at the back of the house, Sophie called my mom’s attention. “So, I heard from Betty that your husband’s a successful lawyer…” From there, they began to talk about all of sorts of things—where my mom had gone to college, had she and Patrick been keeping contact all this time, and if Patrick already had a special someone in mind.

While they immersed themselves in their conversation, I carefully made my way to Patrick, who was simply watching his mother with a wistful look. I had never seen him look so…at peace.

“I thought you said you wouldn’t contact them anymore?” I whispered to him when I was close enough.

“I didn’t,” Patrick replied, still smiling. “They came on their own accord.”

“Really?” I was genuinely surprised. I figured, after I’d blurted the topic of his parents to him a while ago, he’d suddenly been overcome with the desire to forgive his parents and talk to them again.

“Really,” he confirmed. “Apparently, they’ve been calling my apartment but no one was answering, and then Francesca told them that I was on leave. So they called Betty, she told them I was here, and they came as soon as they could.”

“Oh,” I said, hesitating with my next words. “But…are you even ready to forgive them yet?”

Patrick took a moment to collect his thoughts. “At first I wasn’t,” he admitted, “but Betty explained that they did try to get out of their hectic schedule. Of course, they wouldn’t risk important meetings that would benefit the future of their company, but then they changed their mind.”

“Why?” I asked. “What did they do?”

“They let go of the company,” he said simply. “They already had enough money, they had a house, so they just entered a small business with an old friend to sustain themselves from now on and that’s why they weren’t able to get in touch. They’d been so busy making time for me—for me, Seven.” He spoke as if it was a miracle.

A miracle, I thought, distractedly reflecting on the time I’d convinced myself that only a miracle could possibly give me a second chance with Colin.

“It’s…not that hard to believe, when you think about it,” I said, completely contradictory to my initial thoughts about Patrick’s parents. “You just needed to let it go, and have a little faith that things would get better.”

Sometimes when you’ve been pushed too far by life, it gets harder and harder to believe that anything good will happen to you. You think that it’s foolish to hope and you’re stuck in suspension, stranded between the lines of waiting for things to get worse and desperately wishing that your circumstances were different. But in actuality, it’s not at all foolish to hope; it’s just ridiculous to expect.

Grandma Betty and Philip came back with the refreshments and everyone else settled down on the couch. My mom waved at Patrick and me to join them and I smiled, feeling a surge of optimism and energy run through me.

Maybe…maybe it isn’t too late for Colin and me, either, I thought to myself.