“My parents aren’t coming up until Saturday,” Lark said. “So Friday night we’ll have the place all to ourselves.”
“Just us, though, right?” Calla asked, her voice high and a little anxious. “Last year it turned into this huge thing—everybody came up. But this year I just want it to be our closest friends.”
Our. Closest. Friends?
Olivia’s breath caught in the back of her throat, and she imagined her heart freezing, all of the blood flowing backward in her veins and drawing the color from her cheeks. Olivia imagined them all hanging out by a bonfire and staying up late, sleeping on the beach and waking up with sand in their hair…
But she knew it was impossible. First of all, Violet would never go for it. She’d say it was too dangerous, and she’d be right. What if there were more of those fizzy pink drinks—what were they called? Fellinis? What if Olivia had one too many and said something stupid about Soren? And besides, after what had happened with Violet that morning, Olivia was feeling a little bit guilty about all the time she’d been spending away from home. She’d been given the gift of her sister back.
Shouldn’t they spend as much time together as they possibly could?
“What do you think?” Calla asked again, her finger hovering over the play button. “Can you come?”
Olivia took a deep breath, shifting positions on the bed so that her long legs dangled over the carpet. “I don’t know. I think I’m supposed to go away with my parents next weekend. I’ll have to check.”
“Okay.” Calla shrugged, turning back to the stereo and adjusting the volume. A Bollywood remix of “YMCA” blasted through the speakers and everybody recoiled.
“Next!” Calla shouted over the offensive music. The girls laughed, and Olivia exhaled, grateful for the interruption.
“I
think you make a perfect Lily.”
It was Monday afternoon and Olivia was sitting across from Miles at a cramped sushi place a few blocks from school, with square, metallic tables tucked between red-cushioned booths and low-backed chairs. Her yellow composition notebook was open to an empty page, where she was supposed to be jotting down notes for their scene project, due in Whitley’s class the following week.
Instead she was doodling her name, and transforming the perforated holes on the lined pages into little oblong hearts.
“Hello?” Miles laughed. “What are you writing over there?”
Olivia hurried to cover the page with her hand and looked up. Miles was staring at her expectantly, a small bowl of edamame untouched between them.
“Sorry,” she said. “What was that?”
Miles rolled his eyes playfully and reached for a soybean pod. “I was just saying,” he said, sucking the beans between his teeth and discarding the wrinkled shell on a plate. “I snuck
a look at the footage we shot in your yard, and you look—I mean, it looks great.”
“Oh, good,” Olivia said, her voice distant. She hadn’t seen Soren since Friday night at her house, and he hadn’t called all weekend long. She’d been replaying the night over and over in her head, trying to figure out what could have gone wrong.
“So what did you get up to this weekend?” Miles asked, and Olivia felt her pulse throbbing in her ears. What did he mean,
get up to
? Had somebody found out Soren had been at her house? Was that why he hadn’t called?
Miles accidentally knocked the strap of his vinyl messenger bag off the back of his chair. He fumbled around with his feet, wedging the bag back under the table and scooting his chair a few inches in.
Olivia bit down on the bean pod in her mouth and pulled the hard little beans out of the fuzzy skin through her teeth. “I’m cochairing this fashion show fundraiser for the thrift store with Calla,” Olivia said happily. “I was pretty much busy all weekend with that…” She trailed off as she realized that Miles wasn’t really listening. “What about you?” she asked, sitting back in her seat.
Miles shrugged. “Not much. I was hoping we could take a drive down to Santa Cruz and shoot some footage of this lighthouse down there,” he said, pushing a pile of empty soybean shells around on his plate with a fork. “I tried calling your house, but your dad said you were out.”
Olivia looked up, momentarily surprised that her dad hadn’t at least left her a note, before remembering that he’d hardly come up from his shop in the basement all weekend long.
“What about this weekend?” Olivia asked. “Could we do the drive then?”
Miles looked up as a petite waitress in a gold leaf kimono arrived at their table, bearing a bamboo tray of neatly cut hand rolls. Olivia was admiring the tiny carrot shavings arranged in an igloo sculpture at the corner of the plate, when something outside the window caught her eye. She looked up to see Soren crossing the street, waving at her discreetly from behind an expired parking meter.
Olivia glanced back at Miles, who was breaking apart his chopsticks and rubbing them together, sanding down the splintered wood. Soren was standing directly on the other side of the glass behind him, and Olivia tried to sneak a smile over Miles’s shoulder.
“I guess this weekend would work,” Miles said, while Soren took out his phone and pointed at it sideways, mouthing the word
broken
a few times, until Olivia understood and nodded. Miles looked up and she quickly brought a hand to her neck, pretending to be stretching out a kink.
“Cool,” she said, waving the tips of her fingers to Soren, who was now doing a mimed performance of dialing on an old-school rotary phone, explaining that he’d call her later from his house. Olivia imagined how absurd he must look to people on the street, and had to cover her mouth with her hand to keep from laughing.
Miles looked up, catching her before her smile had completely disappeared. He followed her gaze back over his shoulder, just as Soren was tucking his phone into the pocket of his coat and stepping out into traffic. Unfortunately, the light had just changed, and Soren had to hop back up on
the curb, nearly avoiding a scary collision with an oncoming trolley.
“Are you…?” Miles started, looking back to Olivia across the table. “I mean, are you and Soren…?”
Olivia tucked a spicy tuna roll in between the open ends of her chopsticks, hoping the wasabi would help explain away any redness in her cheeks.
“No,” she said quietly. “We’re just friends.”
But as she looked up for the soy sauce, she saw that something in Miles’s posture had changed. He had stopped chewing, and his eyes were big and blank, like he was busy processing something he couldn’t quite believe.
Olivia cleared her throat. “Could you pass the ginger?”
Miles swallowed his bite and pushed the tiny glass bowl of pink ginger across the table. “Sure,” he said, taking the red cloth napkin from his lap and wiping it across his mouth.
“Thanks,” Olivia said, the pounding of her pulse in her ears fading to a distant patter. “So. Let’s talk lighthouses.”
“W
hat about that one?” Violet asked, pointing up at the dense night sky.
It was after sunset, and the girls were stretched out against the sloping bow of Grandpa Joe’s yacht, naming constellations as they flickered into view behind sweeps of clouds and thick hanging fog. Olivia had decided that the likelihood of ever spotting a shooting star in this city was slim to none, and Violet was gamely attempting to prove her wrong.
“No,” Olivia said, tucking the old fleece blanket they’d found under one of the built-in benches around the tops of her bare feet. “That’s a plane. It’s red.”
Violet peered closer at the sky, her arms crossed around her knees, the straps of her green camisole down around her elbows.
“Really?” she asked. “Maybe it’s a planet. Isn’t Mars red?”
The blinking light in question broke through a patch of clouds and began its descent toward the airport on the other side of the jagged city skyline.
“Unless Mars is coming in for a landing,” Olivia said with a laugh, “I’m pretty sure it’s a plane.”
Violet shrugged and stretched her long legs out over the blanket, leaning back onto her elbows. “What time is it?” she asked with a yawn.
Olivia reached into the back pocket of her jeans for her phone. Nine twenty-two. It was a little late to be out on a school night, but her parents weren’t exactly keeping tabs on her every move these days. In fact, they were the reason Olivia had suggested a late-night escape to the boat in the first place.
Olivia had been in her room, quietly working on a paper for her Eastern religion class and listening to the CD Soren had burned for her of his favorite bands (which ranged, incidentally, from the Kinks to the Pixies, making a number of stops at other plural nouns along the way), when the evening’s yell-a-thon had begun. This time, it seemed to revolve around Mac’s lack of motivation, and whether or not any actual progress had been made on the house. The “plan” had been for Mac to do some quick, necessary improvements on the house, enough to make it livable, and then find steady work as a contractor, like he’d had in Willis.
Mac played the “failing economy” card, and Violet, listening at an open crack in Olivia’s bedroom door, rolled her eyes. Olivia’s heart hurt at the idea of her dad struggling to find work, even if there was work to be found. She knew what it was like to feel stuck.
It wasn’t until Bridget brought up the boat that Olivia decided she couldn’t take any more. The broker Bridget had hired had found buyers, filthy rich newlyweds from Marin,
and they would be taking the boat for a test trip down the California coast. If all went well, the boat would be theirs. When Mac protested, Bridget had even more ammunition: “Maybe if you were working, we wouldn’t need to sell it!”
Olivia and Violet couldn’t imagine not having their refuge in the Sausalito harbor, and decided to take advantage of every minute they had left.
“Do you think it’s safe to go back?” Olivia asked, dreading the thought of returning home to more slamming doors. She’d been so caught up with everything going on in her own life, ping-ponging between Soren and Calla, and having Violet back, she’d hardly even noticed that her parents had become practically unrecognizable from the people they’d been before. They’d always been different, but they used to complement each other. Bridget kept everything in order, while Mac gave her something to tidy up. Now their communication styles oscillated between two polar extremes: red-faced screaming fits and harsh, pointed silence.
“I don’t know,” Violet said softly. “I’m worried about them.”
Olivia kept her eyes on the blurry night sky but felt the sides of her neck getting hot. “Me, too,” she whispered.
Her eyes stung as she turned her face toward the salty ocean breeze. She listened to the lull of the waves, her chest rising and falling with each steady breath. All of a sudden, happy, playful voices approached from the end of the dock. Olivia turned to see two shadows walking toward the boat.
“Oh, no,” she whispered as a couple appeared in the flood-lights, tottering down the wobbly plank in fancy shoes and pointing directly at…her. “Should we hide?”
Violet turned and then gestured to a small crack between a built-in bench and the shiny white wall of the upper cabin. “Squeeze in there,” Violet directed.
“What about you?” Olivia asked, crawling beneath the edge of the hull and folding herself into the cramped, narrow space.
Violet, wedged on the bench on top of her, flopped her head down to stare Olivia in the eyes. “I think I’ll manage,” she said dryly, and Olivia smiled.
Right. The ghost thing. How convenient.
Olivia held her breath as the voices grew louder and closer. The man sounded vaguely British, or maybe Australian, and the woman was definitely after-dinner tipsy.
“I just wanted to look at it again,” the woman slurred. “I can’t wait for this weekend. I’ve always dreamed of sailing down the coast.” She giggled as the man pulled her closer to him.
“And I’ve always dreamed of making your dreams come true,” he said.
Olivia had to swallow hard to keep from gagging.
“Come on,” the man said, as the dock creaked beneath them. “Let’s get you to bed.”
The sounds of footsteps faded back down the dock toward the parking lot, and Violet’s upside-down head appeared in front of Olivia.
“All clear,” she whispered, as Olivia stretched her legs and shimmied out of the space.
“Disgusting,” Olivia muttered, swatting at her jeans and leaning over the dock to see the couple climbing into a stocky black convertible. “I can’t believe we’re losing our boat to people like that.”
Violet was standing at the railing, looking down at the gentle waves lapping against the swaying dock. “They’re just excited. I would be, too, if I was about to go on my dream trip.”
Olivia stood next to Violet, sneaking glances at her sister’s profile, washed in the pale reflection of the moon-drenched bay. Sometimes Olivia forgot that her sister was always seeing things from the outside, as somebody who used to be a part of things and was now just an observer. It must be terrible to know you’d never do all of the things you’d dreamed of doing.
Violet took a deep, thoughtful breath before turning to her sister. “Anyway,” she said, waving the wistful moment out of the air with a swipe of her hand. “What’s up this weekend? Anything fun?”
Olivia leaned back on her heels, balancing against the cool metal railing. “Not really,” she said. “Calla’s going away, so I won’t have any cochairing to do.”
“She’s going away the week before the fashion show?” Violet asked, her voice deep and drenched in mock horror.
Olivia smiled and shrugged. “Yup,” she said. “I guess it’s an annual thing. Everybody goes up to Lark’s beach house to open it up for the season. There’s a party on Friday night. Calla invited me, but I don’t really feel like going.” Olivia swallowed hard, expecting a
What did I tell you?
speech about getting too close to Calla. But Violet said nothing, just nibbled gently at the corner of her lip and considered Olivia through half-squinting eyes. “Besides,” Olivia went on, “it’s supposed to be nice out this weekend. I was thinking we could check out Angel Island. I heard there are some really pretty hikes.”
Violet nodded slowly, her eyes wandering off to one side of Olivia’s head.
“Violet? What’s wrong?” Olivia asked, turning around to follow her sister’s vacant stare.
“I think you should go this weekend.” Violet stared into the distance a moment longer before looking back at Olivia with a soft, sad smile. “You’re going to need friends, after—”
Olivia’s heart jammed up against her ribs. “After what?” she asked. “What are you talking about?”
Violet shook her head. “Nothing,” she said, swinging her hips to nudge Olivia’s side. “But as long as you have something to do, maybe I could stow away with the lovebirds…”
Olivia considered her sister out of the corner of her eye. “You’re going to go with them?” Her hair was flapping wildly in the wind and she struggled to keep it out of her face.
Violet shrugged, lowering herself to a rounded blue bench built in against the bow. “Why not?” she asked, tucking her bare knees up to her chest and leaning her head back against the railing. “It’s not like they’re going to notice an invisible third wheel…”
Olivia sat next to her on the bench, picking at the fraying hem of her sister’s long denim shorts. “I wish I could go, too.” Olivia sighed.
Violet laughed and straightened out her long legs, crossing her ankles on the yacht’s shiny white floor. “Too bad you don’t have one of your dresses,” she joked. “I’m pretty sure they’d notice you, no matter how drunk or blinded by love they are.”
Olivia laughed and lowered her head onto Violet’s shoulder, looking up at the stars.
“What about that one?” Violet asked, pointing up at the city skyline. A light was flashing at the top of a tower, and if you squinted, it almost looked like a flickering star.
“Nope,” Olivia said quietly, as a strand of Violet’s loose curls fell into her face, tickling the top of her forehead. “Not quite.”