S
INCE OUR RETURN
to Boston from Maine two weeks ago, my parents had been surprisingly good about not hovering. As a literature professor, Dad had always respected the importance of alone time, but he’d been even more respectful. (Though whether that was for his sake or mine, I wasn’t sure.) And Mom, who’d once monitored my comings and goings like they were her clients’ Wall Street stocks, now settled for once-a-day, dinnertime updates. I thought this was their way of making the transition back home, without Justine, as easy as possible, and assumed they’d keep it up until I made it clear they didn’t have to.
I was wrong.
“Six forty-five!” Mom sang on the first day of school.
Underwater, I didn’t move.
“Six fifty!”
I inhaled deeply, the lukewarm liquid sliding down my throat and into my chest.
“Um, Vanessa?” This voice was lower, softer. It seemed to come after a longer stretch of time. “I made breakfast… and I thought if you had a few minutes… that maybe we could all sit down and—”
I sat up. “Be right there.”
There was a pause and then the slow, heavy footsteps moved down the hallway. I stood, lifted the tub’s stopper, and turned on the shower. I washed with extra soap to make sure I didn’t smell like I’d spent the morning at the beach, then sprayed the tub’s sides with the handheld nozzle. When the lingering white film was gone, I turned off the water, dried quickly, and replaced the blue salt container behind stacks of toilet paper rolls in the linen closet.
New bathing routine aside, if last summer had never happened, this was exactly how the morning would’ve gone. I still would’ve gotten up extra early. Mom still would’ve knocked on the bathroom door to hurry me along. Dad still would’ve made breakfast. Justine still would be gone.
That’s what I told myself as I headed down the hall toward my room—or, more accurately, to Paige’s room.
She stood in front of the full-length mirror with her back to me, wearing the Hawthorne Prep uniform: a short, navy blue skirt; fitted white shirt; and crimson sweater vest. On the floor next to her feet was a leather messenger bag, its flap opened to reveal new notebooks and pens.
“Vanessa,” she said, turning around. “Thank goodness! I was two seconds away from wearing this tie as a belt.”
As I walked toward her to help, I saw that she held her cell phone to her ear.
“Here. Grandma B wants to say hi.”
Holding the phone between my ear and shoulder, I looped and knotted Paige’s blue silk tie. “Morning, Betty.”
“Vanessa, my dear, all set for the big day?”
I smiled at the familiar warmth in her voice. “As ready as I’ll ever be. And thanks to your lovely, studious granddaughter, I have more new pens and Post-its than the biggest office supply store in Boston.”
“Always better to be overprepared than the alternative,” Betty and Paige said at the same time.
“Guess that means I should probably get dressed,” I said.
“I won’t keep you,” Betty said. “Have a wonderful day. And thank you again for taking such good care of my girl.”
We said good-bye and I gave the phone back to Paige, who said her own good-bye and hung up.
“You’ll get an official lesson later.” I tightened Paige’s tie and straightened it. “Learn once and you’ll never forget.”
“I hope that’s true about the rest of today.” She turned back to the mirror. “Hawthorne’s, what? Your third school?”
“Fourth. Before that there was John Adams Pre-School, Ralph Waldo Emerson Elementary, and John F. Kennedy Junior High.”
“My last schools were named after towns, not past presidents and famous intellectuals. Impressive, right?”
“It is impressive.” I headed for the middle of the room. “You live where rich Bostonians drop tons of money to vacation. If they were as smart as you, they’d sell their fancy Newbury Street brownstones and move to Maine for good.”
“Lived.”
I stopped and turned around.
“I
lived
where rich Bostonians drop tons of money to vacation.”
My chest tightened. I wasn’t the only one who’d suffered a loss last summer. In fact, if it was possible to put a number on such a thing, Paige had lost four times as much. That was why she was here instead of home in Winter Harbor.
“This isn’t forever,” I said. “It’s not even a week if you don’t want it to be.”
She sniffed once, and I started back, prepared to hold her for as long as she wanted to cry. But then she fanned her watery eyes with both hands and smiled her famous smile. It was the same one that had put me instantly at ease when I first met her at her family’s restaurant three months ago.
“Why don’t you head down to breakfast?” I gave her a quick hug. “I’ll be there as soon as I’m dressed.”
Paige agreed and we headed down the hall together. At the last door on the left, I turned and she continued toward the stairs.
Inside my new bedroom, I faced my red suitcase. It still sat where I’d left it on our first night back in Boston, when I’d moved into Justine’s room so Paige could have mine. I’d removed my shorts and T-shirts, refilled the suitcase with fall clothes, and been living out of it since. Jeans, sweaters, and bras littered the surrounding carpet like trash around an overflowing garbage can. Normally, the mess would’ve been picked up on Tuesday, when the cleaning lady came… but the cleaning lady didn’t touch this room anymore.
I found all the pieces of my uniform, dressed quickly, and threw my wet hair in a ponytail. I was searching for socks when my cell phone buzzed.
It was on the nightstand next to a half-filled gallon of water. I drank from the bottle as I opened the phone and read the text message.
Interesting Admissions Factoid #48: The average GPA of incoming Bates freshmen is
3.6.
I smiled as I texted back.
Interesting Prospective Factoid #62: I have a 4.0 GPA. Maybe I should quit while ahead & head north now? Can’t wait for later
.
I reread the message and then hesitated. What I needed to quit was this… this flirting, this relationship that would only end worse the longer it lasted. But wouldn’t he worry something was wrong if I didn’t write back? Deciding that, yes, he definitely would, I hit Send and went downstairs.
“There she is!” Mom declared without looking at me as I entered the kitchen. She was slicing strawberries at the table. “Can you believe our baby is about to start her last year of high school?”
She aimed this question at Dad, who was at the counter pouring chocolate chips into a bowl of batter. Before he could answer, she glanced—and then stood—up.
“Vanessa, sweetie… what happened?”
She reached for my arm, but I ducked out of the way and veered around her. I swung by the counter for a handful of chocolate chips and then dropped into a chair. Dad looked up as I passed; I knew he noticed what had gotten Mom’s attention, but he didn’t comment.
“You’ve got to try these.” Paige slid a plate of cinnamon croissants toward me. “Louis would freak.”
Louis was the chef at Betty’s Chowder House, the Winter Harbor restaurant Paige’s family owned. She said his name easily, like we were being served this breakfast at a restaurant down the road instead of three hundred miles away.
“Vanessa.” Mom stood before me. “You look like you’ve been sleeping in those clothes for weeks.”
“No one irons senior year. It’s like a rite of passage.”
“No, it’s not. Justine always—”
She looked down. Said aloud, Justine’s name could end a conversation so fast it was like it never started at all.
“Are you excited for work today?” I asked, reaching for a platter of scrambled eggs. “It’s been a while.”
“Paige, honey, what else can I get you?” Mom asked. “Coffee? Cereal?”
Paige looked at me. I watched Mom dart around the room. She poured a cup of coffee and left it on the counter. Washed a plate and dropped it back in the dirty sink water. Took a box of Corn Flakes from the cabinet and traded it for a carton of orange juice in the refrigerator.
“Your mother’s taking a little more time off,” Dad said. He stood next to me, holding a tray of pancakes.
“It’s already been two months.”
“She said she wanted to be here when you got home from school.”
“But that hasn’t happened since—”
I cut myself off. I was going to say that that hadn’t happened since Justine and I were in elementary school… but we never said her name more than once per meal. If Mom was this worked up now, I had no idea what she’d do after a second mention.
“But back to the original question.” Dad’s voice was brighter, louder, as he speared two pancakes with a fork and dropped them onto my plate. “No, I can’t believe our baby’s about to start her very last year of high school.”
I stared at my food, feeling heat spread across my face.
Our baby
. How could he say that? And even more perplexing, how could she? After seventeen years of practice, did lying just come that naturally?
“May I have the salt, please?” I asked.
Paige handed me the shaker. I waited for Dad to return to the stove and Mom’s head to disappear into the open refrigerator before seasoning my food—including the pancakes, which were so sweet they could double as dessert.
The rest of breakfast passed without incident. Dad stopped cooking and Mom stopped running around long enough to sit and eat. Paige asked Dad about the classes he was teaching this semester, setting him off on a twenty-minute monologue. And I ate without speaking, thinking of the thousands of meals I’d had at this very table, eating the same pancakes, having the same sorts of conversations… never guessing how much I didn’t know about my own family.
I was glad when it was time to leave. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to school, but I welcomed the excuse to be out of the house for a few hours.
“Do you have everything?” Mom hurried behind us as Paige and I headed through the living room. “Notebooks? T-Passes? Lunch money?”
“Yes, yes, and yes.” I opened the front door and started down the steps. Fall wouldn’t cool the smoldering city for several weeks, and the air was still warm and thick with humidity. I could almost feel my pores pop open and my face moisten with perspiration, and I hoped that I’d packed enough salt water to stay hydrated throughout the day.
“Are you sure you don’t want a ride?” Mom continued from the open doorway.
Dad stood next to her and put one arm around her waist. “They’re fine.”
Mom didn’t say anything else, but her eyebrows lowered and the tip of her nose shone pink, the way it always did when she was worried or stressed. She looked like she had last June, on the morning I’d left to return to Winter Harbor—all alone, and about to drive ten times farther than I’d ever driven before.
I’d felt bad for her then, but I felt even worse now. So much so that I jogged back up the steps and kissed her cheek. “See you soon.”
I turned to head down again just as Dad leaned forward, his free arm extended. There was an odd pause as he waited for some sort of affectionate good-bye, and I debated whether to give him one. Finally, I squeezed his hand and hurried down the steps.
“Let’s cut through the Common,” I said to Paige. “It’s faster.”
Walking through the city’s main park actually added fifteen minutes to the trip, but the most direct route was the one Justine and I had always taken together, and I wasn’t ready to go down that road—literally or figuratively. Plus, now that we were out of the house, the dread that had been simmering low in my belly for days was starting to boil.
Fortunately, Paige was good for distraction. She had questions about every landmark we passed, from the Duck Tours to the Public Garden to the Boylston Street Station, and some-how, I had answers. We hadn’t been friends very long, but we’d been through enough together for each to know when the other wasn’t in the mood to talk about whatever was bothering her. Which meant that in the past few weeks I’d learned more than I ever wanted to know about lobster chowder and restaurant management, and she’d learned more than any guidebook could tell her about Boston. The only problem with our little game was that every now and then I thought about how proud it would have made Justine… which kind of defeated the purpose.
“Vanessa?” a soft voice called out.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Paige slow slightly and glance behind her.
“Vanessa!”
I kept walking, away from the voice and the footsteps that were growing closer, faster, but soon there was the light pressure of a hand on my back.
“Natalie,” I said, turning around to find one of Justine’s best friends. Her head dropped to one side the second our eyes met. “Hi. I thought you’d be at Stanford by now.”
“I’m going to MIT instead. My dad made some calls to get me in after I’d turned them down. After Justine… After what happened…”
I looked down as she tried to find the words. I hadn’t even made it to school yet, and it was already starting.
“Life’s just so short, you know? And I couldn’t move three thousand miles away from my parents.” She sniffed and stepped toward me, her eyes traveling curiously across my wrinkled uniform. “How are you, you poor thing? You must be a wreck.”
“Who’s that guy?” Paige asked.
My stomach turned as I followed her finger, but it was only pointing to a tall gray statue. “Robert Gould Shaw. Born in Boston to a prominent abolitionist family and served as colonel of the Civil War’s Fifty-fourth Regiment.”
“Fascinating,” Paige said as Natalie frowned.
“We should get going,” I said. “It’s my friend’s first day at Hawthorne, and we don’t want to be late. But it was great to see you. Really.”
I turned—and walked right into Maureen Flannigan. She was in my class, though I didn’t know her very well. That, however, didn’t stop her from hugging me.
“Vanessa,” she said, her arms like a straitjacket around my torso. “I’m so sorry about your sister. I can’t imagine what I’d do if my brother got himself killed doing something stupid—and I don’t even like him that much.”
“Thanks.” I shot Paige a look, but she was already on it.
“So sorry to rush,” she said, taking my elbow, “but I have that new-student orientation before homeroom.”