Page 11 of Dead of Summer

ORLA

Orla wakes up late, disoriented from a deep medication-induced sleep. Blinking, she takes in the end of the couch, the open window with the curtain billowing into the living room on the breeze. Her stomach sinks. She is still on Hadley. Still completely lost in life.

She forces herself upright and paws around for her phone, finding it between the cushions.

It’s nearly one in the afternoon already.

She’s overslept. Not that it matters. She has nowhere to be.

She pulls herself up off the couch, her legs wobbling as she stands.

She stretches and stumbles over to her open suitcase.

Its contents are strewn from her bag in a messy radius.

Blearily, she pulls on a pair of frayed jean shorts and an ancient men’s Metallica T-shirt pilfered from a long-ago ex-boyfriend.

Back from the first few years riding high after her first show, back when she actually dated.

She plods into the kitchen and rummages through the cupboards, where she scrounges up some ancient coffee grounds and a cafetiere and makes herself a cup of coffee, taking it out onto the back porch.

She settles into a chair and tries to make herself relax.

But the quiet feels eerie and dreamlike. It disorients her.

In New York there is always noise—the woman shouting on the street outside, the trash pickup, the drone of cars shooting down the BQE a block away from her bedroom window.

But here there is only a faint papery rustle of leaves, the intermittent screech of a seagull.

Orla has often complained about all the noise in the city, but the sounds were kind of comforting she realizes now, signs of other human life.

She stands up and takes her coffee inside, dropping it off by the sink.

Then she grabs her purse and slings it over her shoulder, making a beeline for the front door, letting the screen bang behind her.

Hadley’s one grocery store has changed since Orla was last on the island.

She notices a fresh coat of paint brightens its drab warehouse ceiling.

Danny’s has also gotten bougier since she left.

Walking the aisles with her basket she notes that alongside the classic island staples, the prepared stuffed clams, and Martin’s hot dog buns, Danny’s is now trading in heirloom beans, expensive tinned fish, dark bottles of organic Greek olive oil.

Orla finds that she is starving as she wanders around the store dropping random things into her basket, a box of expensive seeded crackers, a block of sharp cheddar, some Marcona almonds, a bag of grapes that seem to have nothing fancy about them aside from being nearly eight dollars.

She is debating whether she will actually put in the effort to prepare a paper bag of gourmet pancake mix when a woman’s voice interrupts her.

“Orla O’Connor? Is that you?”

Orla’s shoulders hunch in dread. Spotted already.

She slowly spins around, startled to find the wizened face of her fourth-grade teacher.

“Mrs. Kemper,” she says, forcing some cheer into her voice.

It could be worse. Alice and Orla had loved Mrs. Kemper, a quirky woman who was always coming up with art projects; her classroom was a welcome scene of paint cups and spilled glue.

Her hand lands on Orla’s arm, warm and smooth. “Fran, now. You’re welcome to call me Fran. And no longer Mrs.”

“Oh. I’m sorry,” Orla stammers. “Fran.”

“Oh, don’t be. Marriage was the pits. For me at least. What about you? I hear you’re in New York now. A famous artist.” She smiles conspiratorially, and Orla feels her mouth go dry.

“Oh, hardly,” she says, laughing awkwardly.

“Are your parents here?” She looks past Orla, down the cereal aisle.

“No, they’re still in Florida,” she says, and a strange heaviness descends on the conversation.

You don’t leave Hadley Island for seven years like they did and have nothing to answer for.

Ms. Kemper continues staring at Orla intently, her mouth twisted up in a curious smile.

It gives Orla the creeping sensation that the woman can read her thoughts.

Orla looks down into her basket, trying to block her out.

“Well, I’m so glad to see you, Orla. You and Alice were always such a delight to have in class. So creative and full of imagination.”

Orla’s hand grows slippery around the handle of her basket. “Thank you, Ms. Kemper.” She begins to back away toward the dairy section, eager to leave before Ms. Kemper asks for more details.

“You two always had so many plans. I’m glad you at least were able to go. To New York, I mean,” she adds. Ms. Kemper’s bright blue eyes bore into Orla. “I’m sure Alice would have wanted it for you.”

Orla’s foot comes up against something and she stumbles, catching herself on the edge of a cooler.

“Thank you, yes. I was the lucky one,” Orla says, feeling the words change the shape of her mouth.

Ms. Kemper doesn’t realize that Alice was the one with all the plans.

Orla was just her sidekick. Only a shadow of a person compared to Alice.

She angles herself away from the cooler, prepared to dash away.

“Well, have a nice summer, Ms. Kemper—I mean Fran.”

Ms. Kemper wags a finger at her. “Oh, I’m sure I’ll see you again. Can’t hide on an island this small.”

Orla rushes down the rest of the aisles now, grabbing an assortment of random items, and heads toward the checkout. She only starts to breathe normally when she emerges into the bright sunlight and begins back up the road toward home with her shopping bags.

They must have been coming to the end of their freshman year of high school when Alice first told Orla what the future had in store for them.

Orla remembers them lying side by side in their usual position, backs down on her bed, legs up in the air against the wall.

“For circulation,” Alice had explained once, and Orla had never questioned it.

It was getting late in the evening, but it wasn’t quite dark outside. A light breeze and the sounds of early summer floated in through the open window, the whispering rustle of fresh leaves and the hum of insects emerging from the ground.

They’d just eaten dinner downstairs with Orla’s parents. Orla’s dad had made some Indian-inspired curry he was proud of. “So cute,” Alice had quipped about his hobby. Her own parents rarely cooked anything, relying on a string of frozen dinners and takeout from town.

“After we graduate, we’ll go to New York,” she’d said, passing Orla a half-full bag of Twizzlers. “It’s the only place to be a serious artist.”

Orla remembers agreeing quickly with her.

“Oh, yeah. I always see myself there.” But in truth she’d never really thought about leaving the island until Alice said it.

Orla didn’t actually consider herself a serious artist back then.

She was, after all, only fifteen years old.

Not yet truly ready to leave home. It was a childhood delusion maybe, the way you want to grasp on to things that are impossible to hold tight forever.

But who wouldn’t get swept up in Alice’s vision?

She had every detail plotted out for them.

“We’ll apply to NYU and Columbia and the New School as a backup. We can get an apartment near campus.” Alice had turned to Orla, her face flushed across the blanket. “I don’t want to do the dorms if we don’t have to.”

“Me either,” Orla had said, scrunching her nose with what she hoped was enough disdain, wanting to impress her best friend.

“Okay, good. We might need to share a room at first,” she’d continued, barely pausing for breath as she listed off each element.

There were things Orla would never have considered, how they’d get around New York and what they would wear, the events they’d have to attend to get noticed by gallerists.

Alice’s plans were airtight, each point shrewdly explained like she was making a legal case.

While she laid it out, Orla had taken a Twizzler and chewed on it quietly.

The more Alice spoke of it all, the more real moving away became, and the more it secretly scared her.

At that age it was hard for her to think about leaving the safety of the island to go somewhere big and unfamiliar like New York.

Sensing her hesitancy, Alice turned her head toward Orla, looking at her over the comforter.

“You know who else lives in New York,” she’d said, a devilish grin on her lips. Orla’s heart had stretched anxiously under her ribs.

She felt her face flush. “Stop it.”

“A very rich young man named David Clarke,” she’d said, evoking Orla’s massive crush, the one that had lasted all the way from the first time they’d met him at the beach at the end of sixth grade.

That kept Orla waiting to see him summer after summer.

“He’ll be in his second year by then. Maybe at Columbia, isn’t that where he said he was applying if his dad let him? ”

Of course, Orla already knew that David lived in New York; Orla memorized information about David the way other kids did with celebrities or sports teams. She knew that David preferred dogs to cats, that he had watched every Adam Sandler movie ever made multiple times.

She knew his favorite food was rigatoni Bolognese from Arturo’s restaurant.

And of course, she knew that he lived in a limestone Upper East Side town house just a few blocks from the Met.

The idea of being close to David Clarke made Orla’s skin prickle. Alice twirled the licorice suggestively around her ring finger.

“You could go see David Clarke whenever you want to if you lived there,” she said in a singsongy voice.

Though they both knew it wasn’t exactly true.

What Alice really meant was that if Orla lived in New York, she could see David whenever he wanted her to.

But the proximity was enough of an incentive to warm her up to Alice’s grand plan for them.

Alice, on the other hand, wasn’t concerned with local boy crushes; she wanted an adventure. She’d been extra full of restless energy in what would end up being the last year of her life. Sometimes Orla had trouble knowing which of Alice’s plans were realistic and what was a fantasy.

But either way, when it came down to it, what other better things did Orla have to do but to go along with them?

And Orla had to admit that Alice’s vision of the two of them was tantalizing, like something out of a movie or a TV show.

Real main character energy. Part of Orla always thought that they would ultimately return to Hadley.

That somehow, the island was their destiny.

How odd that she is here again, but stranger still is how Alice never left at all.

The air inside the house is cold as Orla drops the grocery bags on the kitchen counter.

She leans over, putting her head into her hands.

When she raises her head, she sees the Xanax bottle sitting tantalizingly on the counter.

She picks it up and stares at it before knocking one of them out into her palm.

Orla knows that spending the summer here means she is going to have to face the pitying looks.

And the familiar questions from those who are brave enough to ask, a sympathetic tone in their voice that doesn’t do much to cover their titillation.

How are you holding up? Poor thing. What do you think made him do it?

What do you think he did with the body? Didn’t they say she’d been spending time with him, alone?

That one made Orla seethe most of all. As though Alice had somehow seduced Henry Wright. As if Alice herself were to blame.

Orla had imagined the night Alice disappeared a million times over, playing out scenarios where her friend had survived.

Where in another parallel life they were still able to go together to New York and everything had gone exactly as Alice had planned it for them.

But how would a fifteen-year-old have survived on her own?

How would she have managed to swim across a huge open sound with no one knowing?

Whatever happened to her out in the water with Henry, there was no chance that Alice had come away from it.

Orla’s fantasies of Alice having somehow made it through were only that, mixed with more than a little survivor’s guilt.

She opens the bottle and takes out another pill, swallowing it down with a swig of cold coffee. Soon there will be nothing more to tie any of her family to this place. They have all suffered enough. The very least Orla can do now is to free them from it.