Second Chance Summer

“Mom said that the Crosbys are living next door,” Warren said, carefully highlighting a passage and looking up at me. “Henry and Derek.”

“Davy,” I corrected automatically.

“You didn’t mention that,” Warren said, his tone of voice singsong, designed, I knew, to bait me. I was suddenly very envious of Gelsey and her noise-canceling headphones.

“So?” I said, as I crossed and then uncrossed my legs, wondering why we were even talking about this.

“Have you seen him yet?” Warren was continuing to highlight, and if you didn’t know him, you’d think he had no idea that he was torturing me, and enjoying it, which he absolutely was.

“A couple times,” I said, raking my fingers through my wet hair. “I don’t know. It’s been weird,” I said, thinking of all our encounters, not one of them suited for a real conversation or an apology.

“Weird?” Warren repeated. “Because you two dated when you were… twelve?” He smirked, shaking his head.

“Because—” I started. A huge crash of thunder sounded, making both of us jump. Warren dropped his highlighter, and as it rolled across the table, I reached out and grabbed it, twirling it between my fingers.

“Because?” Warren prompted, glancing over at me. He motioned for me to give him his highlighter back, and I pretended not to see.

“I don’t know,” I said, a little irritably. I didn’t want to talk about this. And I certainly didn’t want to talk about it with my brother. “Why do you even care?” I finally asked. “And since when do we talk about stuff like this?”

“We don’t,” Warren said. He shrugged, and in a patronizing voice, he continued, “It’s just obviously an issue for you, so I was giving you an opening. That’s all.”

I knew that there was probably no point to this. I should just walk away and let it go. But there was something in my brother’s expression that seemed to indicate that he knew so much more than me. And about some—if not most—things, this was true. But not everything. Warren had never had much of a social life, preferring to spend weekends studying and working on his various projects. He’d never had a girlfriend, that I had been aware of. He had gone to his senior prom, but with his study partner, who was pretty much the female version of Warren. They’d said they wanted to examine the ritual as a cultural experiment. After the prom, they had had cowritten a paper on it for their A.P. Psychology class that had won a national award.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. My brother’s head swiveled over to me, probably because this was a sentence he was so unused to hearing. I knew I should stop, but even as I recognized this, I heard myself keep going, my voice with a snide edge to it that I hated. “You have to have been in a relationship to have a breakup.”

Even in the dim lighting of the screened-in porch, I could see my brother’s face flush a little, and, like I knew I would, I regretted saying it.

“I’ll have you know,” Warren said stiffly, flipping the pages in his textbook much faster than he could read them, “that I have been putting most of my focus into my academics.”

“I know,” I said quickly, trying to smooth this over, wishing I hadn’t said anything.

“There’s no need to get involved with people who aren’t going to turn out to matter,” he continued in the same tone of voice.

I had been about to agree and head inside, but something that Warren had just said was bothering me. “But how do you know?” I asked.

He looked up at me and frowned. “Know what?”

“You said you didn’t want to waste your time on people who aren’t going to matter,” I said, and he nodded. “But how do you know they’re not going to matter? Unless you give it a shot?”

Warren opened his mouth to reply, but nothing followed. I could practically see his brain working furiously, his future-lawyer logic churning through answers. He took a breath to say something but then let it out. “I don’t know,” he finally said.

I had planned on going in, but I changed my mind as I looked at my brother, sitting in the semidarkness, reading books he wouldn’t even need for months or years. I slid the highlighter back across the table at him and he gave me a brief smile before picking it up. I settled back into my seat as he started slowly going through the book again, highlighting the relevant passages, making sure that he wasn’t missing anything important, as all around us, the rain continued to fall.

Chapter thirteen

five summers earlier

IT WASN’T A DATE. THAT WAS WHAT I’D BEEN TELLING MYSELF EVER since Henry had asked me, the day we’d walked our bikes home from the pool with our wet towels slung around our shoulders. We were just seeing a movie together. It was not a big deal.

Which didn’t explain why I was so nervous now, sitting next to him in the dark of the Outpost theater. I was barely paying attention to the movie at all, because I was fully aware of his presence next to me, every time he shifted in the red velvet seat, every time he took a breath. I was more conscious than I ever had been in my life of the movie theater armrest between us—wondering if I should rest my arm on it, wondering if he would, wishing that he would reach across it and take my hand.

The summer without Lucy was turning out to be less painful than I’d expected, mostly because of Henry. We’d spent the first few weeks hanging out, long afternoons together at the beach or the pool, or in the woods, when Henry needed to show me some rock or insect that he promised would “blow my mind.” Whenever it rained, and nobody was willing to take us to the Stroud Mall, or bowling at Pocono Lanes, we would hang out in his treehouse. Sometimes Elliott would come, and we’d play the three-person poker game he’d invented. I didn’t do as well at this as with other card games, because Henry, for whatever reason, always seemed to know when I was bluffing, and wouldn’t even reveal to me what my tell was. Unlike with Lucy, being friends with Henry meant that there wasn’t any makeup-swapping, watching of cheerleading movies, or candy-sharing going on. (Henry, I’d discovered, was ruthless, and claimed not to be able to taste the difference among any of the Skittle colors.) I also no longer had anyone to endlessly pore over the library’s back issues of Seventeen magazine with, studying each page carefully. Despite that, Henry and I had been having fun.