The high school had an open house on Wednesday night, one of those things where all the parents and their kids can come to the school and show off their work and talk to the teachers about how great/wonderful/abysmal their little darlings are. It’s a big community to-do, and my parents, of course, haven’t missed one ever. Even when my mom had bronchitis, she managed to make a miraculous recovery and show up to discuss my B-plus grade with my eighth-grade history teacher. (My mother thought it should have been an A-minus. She thought wrong.)
Oliver’s mom, on the other hand, hadn’t been able to attend one for ten years, so she was over the moon. “Come on, we’re going to be late!” I heard her yelling that evening as she herded everyone into their cars. I heard this because I was being herded by my parents into our car.
“Emmy, step on it,” my mom said. “If we don’t get there soon, there’s always a line to talk to your AP Bio teacher.” Mr. Hernandez was thirty years old and very, um, in demand by most of the moms in our school. Not that my mom wanted to hit on Mr. Hernandez. She was probably the only mom who actually wanted to discuss my participation in class with him.
“Aren’t you tired of talking to my teachers?” I asked them as I fastened my seat belt. “I can just reenact the conversation for you.”
“You’re a poor man’s Mr. Hernandez,” my dad told me.
“Oh my God. Dad.”
“Fasten your seat belt,” my mom said.
“It’s fastened.” Like it always was every single time she asked.
Oliver and I both looked at each other as our respective cars backed out of the driveways. I was about to wave when he suddenly crossed his eyes and stuck out his tongue at me.
I had to laugh. That’s what I had done to him back on his first day of school, back when I could barely imagine talking to him, much less sitting on his lap or wrapping my arms around his neck or sprawling on the warm sand, my head resting against his shoulder as he ran his fingers up and down my back. He had been a friend, then a stranger, and now something more.
And going to UCSD meant that this time, I would be leaving him.
School always seemed so weird on open house nights, lit up in the dark and suddenly filled with parents. It was even weirder hearing your parents refer to your teachers as Mr. or Mrs. So-and-So, like they were students, too. My parents were pretty much on a first-name basis with every other parent there, and my mom shouted “Oh, hell-lo!” at five other families even before we got inside.
I managed to hang in there for about thirty minutes, showing my parents where I sat in French class (“Why are you so far back?” my mom wondered), introduced them to my calculus teacher and let her talk about what a great math student I was, and waited with them in line for the famed Mr. Hernandez. “Emmy is an excellent diagrammer,” he told my parents, smiling at them, and I swear I heard half the moms swoon.
I looked at my dad. He looked back at me. Then we both tried not to laugh.
“How long does this go on for?” someone said into my ear as we headed toward my civics classroom and I turned around to see Oliver standing next to me as our parents all greeted one another. (Rick was at the twins’ future elementary school, probably taking copious notes for Maureen.)
“Forever,” I whispered back, then found his hand and squeezed it. “Hope you didn’t make plans for the next three days.”
“Does this seriously happen every year?” he asked.
“Look at my eyes,” I said, then widened them dramatically. “Does this look like the face of someone who would joke about this?”
“You look deranged,” he said, and we both leaned forward a little before we remembered where we were, and more important, who we were with.
“You must be so happy to be here,” my mom said, and Maureen could only nod as her eyes filled with tears.
“Mommm,” Oliver said. “You promised you wouldn’t, not here.”
“I know, I know,” she said, then waved her fingers in front of her eyes as if to fan away the tears. “I just haven’t been to one of these since first grade, you know?” She started to tear up again, then stopped herself. “It just feels good to be back in the swing of things.” Maureen smiled at Oliver, then reached for his hand. “We’re just . . . we’re trying.”
Oliver nodded, but didn’t let her hold his hand. “Mom,” he said again. “We’re at school, okay?”
“Sorry, sorry,” she said again, then rolled her eyes at my mom as if to say, Teenagers. My mom smiled back and luckily for her, didn’t try and hold my hand, either.
“Do you wanna go walk?” I asked Oliver. “Unless you want to see all of your teachers for a second time today, that is.”
“Um, no,” he said.
“Is it okay if we . . . ?” I asked, pointing down the hall. “We’ll stay on campus.”
My mom raised an eyebrow at me. “Only walking,” she said. “No funny business.”
“Got it,” I said, even as I linked hands with Oliver. “No telling jokes or making humorous observations.”
“Oh, get out of here,” my dad said, swatting at my head as I ducked past, and I giggled as Oliver ran to keep up with me.
I don’t know why my mom thought we’d spend our time kissing on campus. To be honest, high school isn’t the most romantic setting. It smells like dirty linoleum and tempera paint, along with paper and burnt coffee and gym socks, and besides, there were probably a thousand students and their parents wandering around. Still, it was nice to wander with Oliver and not have to listen for a creaky floorboard or keep an eye out for the twins, who were forever curious about why we were always studying together.
“It’s gonna be weird to be here next year without you,” Oliver said. “Who’s going to eat lunch with me?”
“Don’t say that,” I said. “I’ll still come back and visit. And who knows, I might not even go.”
Oliver glanced down at me. “You don’t mean that.”
I shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know. It’s scary, you know? Moving. Leaving my bedroom. Leaving my parents.” I took a deep breath. “Leaving you.”
“Well, I left you,” he pointed out. “Think of it as payback.”
“You didn’t leave,” I started to say, but just then Caro came running up. I had seen her at school, but both of us had been going out of our way to avoid talking to each other, and I actually took a step back when she came closer. “Caro?” I said.
“Yeah. Hi. Look, Drew’s upset.”
“Drew is? About what?”
“You should probably just come with me.”
My heart was starting to pick up pace. Drew never really got upset. He had always been the peacemaker between me and Caro, between Kane and his parents, between his parents and himself. “Okay,” I said, then gestured to Oliver to follow me.
“Wait, no,” Caro said. “Just you, Emmy.” She looked at Oliver, her face a protective shield. I knew what she was thinking: Oliver isn’t one of us anymore.
I was about to protest, but to my surprise, Oliver spoke up first. “Caro, wait,” he said, and she sighed and turned to face him, her arms folded over her chest. The campus lights had come on, bathing us in a watery yellow light. Under them, Caro looked tired and concerned and unsure, so unlike her normal self. “What?” she asked.
Oliver glanced at me before taking a deep breath and turning back to Caro. “Look, Caro, I know that I came back and sort of changed everything, especially for you and Emmy and Drew. I get it, okay? But we were friends once before and it’d be cool if we could try to be friends again. Not, like, re-creating what we had when we were seven, but as who we are now.”
Caro’s eyes filled with tears before she hastily brushed them away, and I realized that Oliver’s return had impacted more than just my family and his family. We weren’t the only people who had known him. Caro and Drew had been there the day Oliver’s dad drove off with him. The police had questioned them, too. And when Oliver came home, they had been standing right next to me.
“Fine,” she said. “Come on, Drew’s waiting.”
We followed her out to the parking lot, where Drew was standing near his parents’ Escalade. It loomed in the near darkness and made Drew look even smaller. “No, I don’t know,” he was saying into his cell when we arrived, his back turned to us. “Okay . . . yeah, okay. Love you, too, Kane. Okay, yeah. Bye.” When he turned and saw us, his cheeks were wet, and Caro immediately went to his side and wrapped her arm around his waist.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, shivering a little as the fog started to roll in. Next to me, Oliver pulled on his hoodie and zipped it up a little more in front.
“It’s stupid,” Drew said, shaking his head. “It’s just . . . so stupid. It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters,” Caro murmured. “It matters a lot.”
“What happened?” I asked again. “Is it Kevin? Did you break up?”
“No, no,” Drew said. “At least, not yet.”
“Dude,” Oliver said. “Just tell us what happened.” His voice was kind, though, and I thought it was a good thing that he was there, because I was about ready to shake the answer right out of Drew.
“I asked my parents if I could bring Kevin to my grandma’s birthday party,” Drew said, his voice trembling a little. “And at first they said they had to think about it, and then tonight before we came here . . . they said they thought it wouldn’t be a good idea.” He was twisting his own hoodie strings around his fingers so that they cut off the circulation. It looked painful but I didn’t move to stop him.
“Wait, why?” I asked as Caro rubbed his back. “I thought they were cool with this. I mean, not cool, but . . .”
“Yeah, well.” Drew laughed a little. “They say they’re cool with it, but my grandma’s a different story.”
“So tell your grandma to fuck off,” Caro spat, and Drew gave her a one-armed hug.
“It’s a little hard to do that when she controls the money,” he said, then took another deep breath. “I guess my dad’s business isn’t doing so well?” He said it like a question, like he wasn’t even sure if it was the truth or not. “And she’s been helping my parents out with, like, mortgage payments and stuff like that.”
“And they think she’ll cut them off if she finds out you’re gay?” I cried.
“Apparently, Grandma’s old school,” Drew sighed.
“Apparently, Grandma’s a homophobe,” Caro corrected him. (I hoped for Drew’s grandma’s sake that she and Caro never met in a dark alley.)
“Whatever she is, it means that I can’t bring Kevin to the party.”
Oliver, who had been very still, suddenly spoke up. “It’s not about the party,” he said quietly. “You want your parents to stick up for you.”
“I just want to know I’m worth more to them than some fucking mortgage payment!” Drew said, then quickly wiped his eyes on his wrist cuff. “Like, this was all just fine in theory. But now that they actually have to tell people and deal with that, they’re just bailing. And I don’t get to bail because this is my life, you know? And I don’t want to bail, I don’t mean it like that, but I just wish they weren’t standing so far behind me.”
He glanced over at Oliver. “Can I tell you something?”
“Yeah, man, sure.” I could feel Oliver’s posture stiffen, though, his spine suddenly straight.
“Sometimes I get so jealous of you.” Drew stabbed at the ground with the toe of his shoe. “Your parents both wanted you so much. I know that’s not fair and I’m sorry it sounds bad, but that’s how I feel.”
Oliver nodded slowly, taking it in. “I feel like I should apologize or something,” he said, and we all giggled nervously. I looped my arm around his, holding him close. “Wanting someone isn’t the same as loving them, though,” he said. “You know? It doesn’t mean the same thing.”
“No, I know, I know,” Drew said, wiping at his face again. “Sorry, that sounds so awful. I hate that I think that.”
“It’s okay,” Oliver said. “I get it. I do.” He put his hand on Drew’s shoulder, anchoring him.
“I just don’t want Kevin to think that, like, I’m ashamed to be seen with him or something,” Drew sighed. “Or that I don’t want him around my family. Well, actually, now I kind of don’t want him around them, but—”
“Drew?”
A dark figure was walking toward us in the parking lot, a little unsure. It was Kevin.
“I texted him,” Caro said. “I thought you might want to see him.”
Kevin looked at the four of us. I guess we were a little formidable, gathered around Drew like a small army. “Hi,” he said. “Um, Caro texted me? She said you were out here.”
“Hi,” Drew said. “God, I’m a disaster right now. Sorry.”
“Hey.” Kevin’s face grew concerned and he seemed to close the distance between them into two steps. “What’s wrong?”
Drew took a long, shaky breath, then hugged Kevin. They were talking, their voices muffled against each other’s shoulders, and I was about to gesture to Caro and Oliver that we should probably leave when I heard my mother’s voice cut across the parking lot.
“Emily!”
My head jerked up. My parents rarely, if ever, used my actual first name. No one else ever used it. The only time I really heard the name Emily was on the first day of school when teachers took roll for the first time. Then I’d say, “I actually prefer being called Emmy,” and that’d be it until the following year.
My parents were standing near the school entrance, across the parking lot from us. Even from that distance, I could see that they were furious. My mom looked like she could send herself into the air and fly over to us like she was Iron Man, that’s how angry she was.
Even Caro noticed. “Whoa,” she said softly.
“Yeah,” I said. “Whoa.” My knees started to feel wobbly and I glanced over at Drew and Kevin, who were still hugging but both looking in my parents’ direction.
“I think I have to go,” I said.
“Emmy, now!” I heard my mom yell again.
“Uh, yeah, you do,” Drew said. “Are they going to lock you in a tower or something? What’d you do?”
“Nothing that they should know about,” I said, and then I realized with a sobering rush that I had done a lot of things my parents shouldn’t know about, and maybe that wasn’t the case anymore.
“I’ll go with you,” Oliver said, untangling my arm from his so he could hold my hand instead. “You might need a witness.”
“Are you going to be okay?” I asked Drew, who just nodded and then buried his face back into Kevin’s shoulder. Kevin, for his part, just closed his eyes and hugged him back, and I knew that they’d be fine. Kevin wasn’t going to break up with Drew. They’d be okay.
It was suddenly me that I was worried about.
Oliver and I hustled across the parking lot toward my parents. My mom’s arms were crossed now and my dad had the deep wrinkle between his eyes that he always gets whenever he frowns a lot. “What’s wrong?” I asked as soon as we were close enough. I thought it was a good idea to sound like we were all on the same side, like I wasn’t the person who may or may not be responsible for all of the fury that seemed to be coming off them in waves.
“Oliver, your mom’s inside,” my dad said. “Go inside and find her, okay? We need to talk to Emmy.”
“Oh. Um, okay. Yeah, I just—” Oliver let go of my hand reluctantly and I felt our fingertips slip apart. “You’re okay?”
“She’s fine,” my mom said, and the way she said it didn’t leave me feeling exactly reassured. It sounded like I was about to be the opposite of fine, like I would be one of those bodies that always seem to turn up in the first five minutes of those Law & Order episodes that Caro always watched. They’re never fine.
“Oliver,” my dad said, and Oliver shot one quick glance back at me before hurrying off. I was glad he didn’t try to kiss me.
“In the car,” my mom said, and I followed them, trying to think of something that would set them off. No one would tell them about my surfing. I hadn’t mentioned UCSD to anyone except Caro and Drew and Oliver and none of them would spill my secret. All of my teachers liked me and I was doing fine in school. I had used my phone in calculus last week to text Caro—was that what this was about? I didn’t think the teacher had even seen me do that.
As soon as we got in the car and my dad started the engine, I finally leaned forward between the seats. “Um, can you please tell me what’s going on?”
“Isn’t that an interesting question,” my mom said. “That’s my question, too, Emily. Just what is going on?”
“I—I have no idea,” I said. “Dad?”
He just drove, though. My dad always did the silent “we are so disappointed” routine, while my mom was the one who did the shouting and the “what were you thinking?” histrionics. They worked well as a team, except when they were teamed up against me. Then it was a problem.
We drove home in a quiet cloud of anger (them) and confusion (me) and fear (me again). By the time we pulled into the driveway, I couldn’t get out of the car fast enough. I even took a few deep breaths of the cool night air, suddenly aware of how suffocating the car had been.
“Inside,” my mom said, pointing toward the garage door, and I followed her through the door, the laundry room, and into the kitchen, where she threw her purse down onto the table and then turned to look at me.
“We saw your guidance counselor today,” she finally said once my dad was in the room. “And do you know what she said?”
“I don’t even know the guidance counselor’s name,” I said.
“Don’t try to be funny,” my dad told me. “That’s not going to help you.”
“I’m not!” I cried. “I genuinely don’t know who she is! I’ve never met with her in my life.”
“Well, she knows who you are,” my mom said. She was banging around the kitchen now, pulling a wineglass out of the cabinet and a half-full bottle of Chardonnay out of the refrigerator. “Apparently, Oliver pointed you out to her one day.”
I paused. “I’m in trouble because Oliver told the guidance counselor about me?” I asked.
“No, Emily!” my mom yelled.
“Then what?” I yelled back. “Will someone just tell me what I did already?”
“Don’t use that tone,” my dad said.
My mom, though, had enough “tone” for both of us. “Your guidance counselor,” she said as she poured the wine, “congratulated us on your acceptance to the University of California, San Diego.” She took a sip of wine and looked at me over the rim of the glass.
I suddenly felt nervous all over. “I—I was going to tell you.”
“Oh, were you?” my mom said. My dad was standing next to her now, not saying a word. He didn’t have to. The frustration was evident on his face. “When, exactly?”
“Wait,” I said. “How did the counselor even know?”
“The school is notified of admissions,” my dad said quietly. Oh, he was really disappointed in me. This was worse than my mom yelling. “Your name was on that list. Did you really apply?”
I nodded hesitantly, like there was still some confusion in the matter and the acceptance letter that I had printed out wasn’t shoved between the pages of my old copy of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm on my bookshelf. “I did?” I said. “I mean, I did. And I got in. And I was going to tell you, I swear, but I didn’t know if I—”
“We had a plan, Emmy!” my mom cried. “You were going to go to community college for two years and work and live here and save some money and then go to school somewhere—”
Hearing “live here” made me snap. “No, you decided that!” I yelled, and both of my parents looked temporarily shocked. “You decided that, not me! That was your plan for me and you never asked me what I wanted to do or what I wanted! That’s what you want, it’s not what I want! I want to go to San Diego!”
There it was. The decision. I had been on the fence up until that moment, but having college dangled in front of me and then taken away was more than I could handle. Suddenly, I wanted to go more than anything in the world, even if it meant leaving Oliver behind. “Oh, why, Emmy?” my mom cried, her sarcasm heavy. “Why? Is your life so horrible here? You don’t pay for a thing except gas for your car—which, by the way, we bought for you and is no longer yours—”
“What?!” I was furious. “That’s not fair! You’re taking away my car because I applied to college? Who does that?”
“You lied to us,” my mom shot back. “Lying is not allowed in this household. Not to mention that we were humiliated tonight. Absolutely humiliated!”
The fury that was building inside my chest was starting to scare me a little. No car meant no surfing. I could handle being grounded, whatever, but after nearly a year of having the freedom to go to the beach whenever I could, I couldn’t stand not having it anymore.
“You want to know why I applied to UCSD?” I asked, and now my voice was low and cold.
“Enlighten me,” my mom said, taking another sip of her wine.
I turned, grabbed my car keys out of my backpack before anyone could stop me, then ran out to my car. I came back a minute later, my sandy wet suit in my hand.
“Here!” I said, throwing it on the floor. “This is why! Guess what, there’s something else you don’t know! I’ve been surfing for the past three years!”
The shock from both my parents rendered them temporarily mute. Even my mom didn’t say anything at first. Luckily, I had a lot of words to fill the silence. “Drew’s brother, Kane, taught me when we were fourteen! We were at the beach and I was good and I loved it. I loved it more than any of those stupid ballet or gym or karate classes, all those things you made me do! So I kept going and I got better and now I’m really, really good! They think I can try out for the surf team at UCSD, that’s how good.”
My dad was the first to recover.
“Where did you get that?” he asked.
“Craigslist,” I told him. “And it doesn’t fit well at all and it lets in a ton of water and it’s freezing every time I wear it but I don’t care because I still love it. It’s mine!” Somewhere in between my words, I had started crying. My heart felt so broken, so shattered. I had gotten so close to so many things and now they were being pulled away so, so fast.
“You could have drowned!” my mom cried. “You could have hit your head! You could have gotten caught in a riptide, oh my God!”
“But I didn’t!” I yelled back. “Just stop, okay, Mom? Just stop! Stop pretending like all of this is for me, because really? It’s all for you.”
It was like I had pulled the pin out of a grenade. No one in the room moved for a few seconds. “Right?” I said, because once the pin is pulled, you can’t exactly put it back in. “That’s what it is, isn’t it? You don’t want me to leave because you saw the bad thing happen ten years ago to Maureen and you freaked out.”
“Don’t you dare—” my mom started to say, but her eyes were filling with tears.
“It’s like when Oliver came home!” I yelled. “Maureen was expecting him to somehow be the same seven-year-old kid that he was when he left, but actually, you’ve been expecting me to be that way the whole time! And that’s not fair!” I wiped at my eyes fast, too upset to stop talking, and I remembered Oliver’s words so clearly from the week before. “I’m tired of paying the price for something I didn’t even do!”
Both of my parents stood, shell-shocked, and I stared right back at them, my chest heaving with sobs. “So you can take away surfing,” I said. “Or college. Or my car. Whatever you want, but you cannot stop me from growing up and moving out and finally moving on!”
“She’s right,” my dad murmured.
“What?” I asked.
“What?” my mom said. “We—”
“We panicked,” my dad said. He sounded tired all of a sudden, and the crease between his eyebrows now seemed borne out of exhaustion, rather than anger. “We’ve been panicking for ten years.”
“We were protecting you!” my mom protested, looking at my dad like he had just crossed into enemy territory.
“But you can’t do that all the time!” I said.
“When we saw Maureen . . .” my mom started to say, but her tears spilled over, one falling down past her jaw before she could catch it. “When we saw her after,” she started again once she got control of her voice, “that pain, how she was so . . .” The words failed her again.
“We love you more than you can imagine,” my dad said, and even he sounded a little croaky now. “And watching Maureen spend ten years wondering what had happened to her son terrified us.”
“I get it,” I said. “I do. You were scared. Scary things happened. But I’m tired of lying to you, okay? It sucks. It’s not fun. But I have to because you won’t let me do anything! Do you know how many times I could have joined the surf team at school? But I couldn’t, actually, because I needed a parent’s permission.”
“You never even asked!” my mom cried.
“Would you have said yes?” I shot back, and her silence was all I needed. “Look,” I said. “You can keep being scared. Both of you, that’s fine. But I’m done.”
“You’re done, all right,” my mom said. “You’re grounded. No car, no Oliver, absolutely no surfing, obviously, no phone, computer only for schoolwork.”
“I’m seriously the only kid who gets grounded for applying to college,” I muttered.
“You’re grounded for lying,” my mom said.
“We’ll talk about college later,” my dad added, and he sounded as tired as I felt. “Just go upstairs, get ready for bed.”
“It’s eight thirty!”
“Emily.”
“Fine. But who’s picking me up from school tomorrow?”
My parents looked blank.
“No car,” I reminded them, knowing that I was seriously pushing my luck. “If I can’t drive myself to school, I can’t bring myself home, either. Plus, Oliver needs a ride now, too, since I’ve been driving him every morning.”
“You take the car only to school.” My mom quickly amended her earlier rule. “And you come straight home afterward.”
“Fine,” I said. “So nothing I said made any impact on you, I take it.”
My mom pointed at the stairs. “Go.”
“We’ll discuss it,” my dad said.
My mom threw him a look that very clearly said she was done discussing things, but I didn’t see or hear his response as I stormed up the stairs. I was tempted to slam my bedroom door behind me, but if I did, I was pretty sure my mom would start a bonfire in the backyard and use my surfboard as kindling, so I just shut it and then threw my history textbook onto my bed instead. It helped a little, but nothing is as satisfying as slamming a door.
I lay there in the dark for a long time, alternating between seething and panicking. Spending the next however many weeks being landlocked felt like a death sentence, and then I imagined spending two more years that way, my parents still huddled over my every move, and my chest felt tight. I’d be eighteen in a few months, though. I could move out on my own, maybe get an apartment with Caro after all, but I knew that wasn’t a real solution. It’d be like putting a Band-Aid on an arterial wound. It wouldn’t solve the bigger problem.
Around nine thirty, right when I was starting to fall asleep in my clothes, a light suddenly flashed on and flashed off. I sat up, wiping the hair out of my face, and went over to the window. I could see Oliver’s silhouette outlined against the light in his bedroom, his hair hanging in his face as he leaned against the sill.
I did the same, crossing my arms over my waist and wishing they were his arms instead, that he was there instead of a house away. It felt odd to be missing him even though I was looking right at him, when I had spent the past ten years missing him and never knowing where he was. I guess the more you start to love someone, the more you ache when they’re gone, and maybe it’s that middle ground that hurts the most, when you can see them and still not feel like you’re near enough. So close and yet so far.
He turned his light on and off again, our signal. I didn’t dare call out to him lest my parents hear me yelling out the second-floor window (wouldn’t that just be a stellar way to end the day?) so I flicked my own lamp on, then off again. It blinded me for a minute, but when I blinked again, he was still there. My phone was downstairs so I couldn’t send him one last text before it got confiscated, so we just sat in the darkness, all the sadness and loss and fresh starts binding us together until I got confused about where Oliver’s life stopped and where mine started.