Second Chance Summer

“It didn’t look like flipping out,” I said.

“I tend to flip out very quietly,” Henry said, deadpan, and I smiled. “Sorry to tell you all this,” he said with a shrug.

“I’m glad you did,” I said. He met my eye and gave me a small smile.

I realized there was something I had to tell him in return. I took a breath, but somehow, telling him out here in the darkness didn’t seem quite as impossible. “My dad’s sick,” I said. Immediately after I said it, I could feel my eyes prick with tears, and my bottom lip start to shake. “He’s not going to get better,” I said, making myself go on, and sparing Henry having to ask. “That’s the real reason—” My voice caught in my throat and I looked down at my feet in the water, forcing myself to get through it. “The real reason we’re up here. To have a last summer.” As I finished speaking, I felt a tear spill over, and I wiped it away, fast, hoping Henry hadn’t seen, willing myself to keep it together just a little bit longer.

“I’m so sorry, Taylor,” Henry said after a moment. I looked over at him, and saw in his face something I hadn’t seen from any of the people who knew—a recognition, maybe, of what I was going through. Or someone else who, at least, had gone though something that most other people were unable to really understand.

“I probably should have told you that first day,” I said. I ran my hand over the smooth planks of the dock and thought that it was fitting, maybe, that we were here, at the place where we’d first met again—that we had come full circle like this. “But I think I wanted to pretend it wasn’t happening.”

“I can understand that,” he said. We sat in silence for a moment, and the breeze kicked up again, blowing Henry’s hair over his forehead. “What you said earlier,” he said. “About being friends. I think we should do it.”

“Really?” I asked. Henry, his face serious, nodded. “But what about what you said—about all the stuff that’s happened in the last five years?”

Henry shrugged and gave me a smile. “So we’ll catch up,” he said. He pulled his feet out of the water and turned to face me. “Should we start now?”

I just stared at him in the moonlight for a second, not quite able to believe that this was being offered to me so readily. It made me ashamed for thinking so little of Henry—feeling like he wouldn’t be willing to forgive me, just because that’s how I would have acted. But in that moment, it was like I’d suddenly been given a second chance. It was one I knew I didn’t deserve, but it was one I was getting anyway. I pulled my feet out of the water as well, and turned toward him. “Yes,” I said, feeling myself begin to smile, just a little. “Now sounds perfect.”

Chapter twenty-seven

THE DAY AFTER HENRY AND I MADE OUR PEACE ON THE DOCK, HIS brother showed up on our porch with a proposition.

Henry and I had stayed up talking until almost five a.m. We sat on the dock, occasionally dipping our feet in the lake, and swapped stories—but not in a rushed way, trying to cram everything in. Instead, we traded them back and forth easily, the way we’d once traded comic books (I’d been partial to Betty & Veronica, he’d had what even he now admitted was an unhealthy obsession with Batman). Henry didn’t really say any more about his mother leaving, and I didn’t want to talk about what was happening with my dad. And neither of us discussed any other romantic history we might have had in the intervening years. But every other subject, it seemed, was open.

Henry had told me about how he almost got a tattoo—and showed me the one mark from this experience, a dot on his tricep that looked like a freckle, and was going to be a tribal design until he’d felt the first needle go in and had realized he was making a mistake. “And they still charged me for a whole tattoo, can you believe it?” he’d asked me, as I peered at the tiny almost-tattoo in the moonlight.

I told him about my brief desire to be a marine biologist, until I realized that fish really grossed me out and that I tended to get seasick on the open ocean—things that it would have been helpful to know before starting a summer-long oceanography camp.

He told me about how he’d failed the driver’s test twice before barely passing the third time, and I told him about the speeding tickets I’d been able to talk myself out of. He told me about the first vacation he and Davy and his dad took after Mrs. Crosby left, and how he’d wanted it to be perfect. And they’d ended up camping in a snowstorm, everyone freezing and unhappy, until they all called it quits and spent the rest of the vacation watching TV and eating takeout in a motel room. I told him about last Christmas, when we’d gone to St. Maarten and it had rained every single day, and Warren had been so desperate to find out about his admissions letters that he tried to call our mail carrier, and my mother finally confiscated his phone. We talked about music (he got offended when I labeled his penchant for barefoot singer-songwriters “crunchy”; he mocked me for knowing the names of all three Bentley Boys, despite my protests that I only knew about them through Gelsey) and snack bar gossip—it seemed he’d been in on Elliot’s Lucy crush weeks ago, and had given up trying to get him to do something about it when Elliot assured him that he was actually was doing something about it, that he had a plan, complete with flowchart.

And as we talked, I remembered just why we’d been such good friends when we were kids. It was in the way he listened when you were talking, the way he wasn’t just waiting to jump in with his own story. It was the way he always weighed his words, meaning I always knew that when he responded, it had been carefully considered. It was in the way that every time he laughed—which wasn’t often—it seemed earned, and made me want to do everything I could to get him to laugh more. It was his enthusiasm for things, and how when he discussed what he was passionate about—like how much he loved being in the woods, how he felt things made sense there—I found myself getting swept up in it along with him.

As the hours passed, our pauses between stories grew longer, until we were just sitting in comfortable silence together and looking out at the water, and the first ribbon of daylight showed up on the horizon.

That’s when we parted and headed to our separate houses. As I’d crept into the kitchen, I’d been stunned to see that it was five a.m., and was sure, as I headed to my own room, that I’d have no problem getting to sleep now. But once I’d settled myself in, I realized that there was something missing. And I’d gone to my closet, and returned with the stuffed penguin, settling him next to me on the pillow.