Page 239 of Hell Hath No Fury

It’s not as if I think that somehow graduating from high school has suddenly made me an adult.Poof, a diploma, and I’m awarded wisdom and maturity! I’m not quitethatnaïve.

And it sure as hell didn’t happen for Jonah, either. I just feel…tired. We’ve only been dating a year or so, but he pursued me for so long before then that I’m not sure I can even recall a time when I felt free to explore the possibility of a different relationship, or, more importantly, freedom. I guess I just feel like I know things will always be the same with him, this very same cycle, in whatever degree. It’s a merry-go-round, and it’s time I get off this ride.

Avoiding the unnecessary melodrama, I simply turn on my heel, not bothering to locate my flip flops, which I’m pretty sure I left by Jonah’s surf board, which he’s currently leaning on. I take the sand route back toward Arizona Avenue, where I’ve lived with my mom since my dad was killed in a drunk driving accident when I was in the ninth grade. I’ll find my shoes tomorrow, or not. I’d rather go barefoot the rest of the summer than deal with his petty, childish, possessive bullshit.

“Hi, Rusty Girl,” my mom murmurs from the couch, fighting sleep as I stroll in through the back screen door. She looks up from her paperwork. She never could go to sleep until I’m home from a night out. I’m even more glad I didn’t let Jonah’s mood dictate my decision to go home or not, and at barely eleven, at least my mom will get to bed at a reasonable hour.

“Hi, Mom,” I say, grabbing the band from my strawberry-amber hair and loosening the locks of my long braid.

“Home early?” Mom gives me her unique look that conveys both suspicion and compassion and I blow out a sigh. She likesJonah. She always has. She’s been friends with his parents for as long as I’ve had conscious memory, after all. The problem is, she doesn’t like Jonahfor me. I’m still not sure I do, either.

I’m not sure I ever have.

Which is probably why I resisted his advances for so long. I wish I could say I didn’t know what did me in. But I do. It wasn’t just his long game—his sweet words and gestures—or his lean surfer body, his mid-length dirty blonde hair with highlights that literally shimmers by Labor Day. It was those rare times he showed me the rough draft version of the boy trying to turn himself into a good man. The unguarded Jonah, sans the macho, king of the beach attitude that always made me keep a bit of distance. The boy who came straight to me when he learned that his mother was having an affair, when his dad discovered it months later and he spent a year not knowing what would become of his own family. I didn’t suffer through that limbo. One minute my dad was here, and the next, my mom was sitting me down and telling me that a third of our family—and my best friend—was gone forever, his car totaled by a drunk driver. And there was something heartbreaking about watching Jonah wonder if his family would suffer its own form of destruction. They worked it out in the end, or they seem to have as far as I know, but it was Jonah’s open vulnerability, and the fact that he chose me to grace with it that made me want to give him a chance. And one chance led to the next, and to the next after that.

I run my fingers through my hair, rubbing my scalp to displace any leftover grains of sand, before plopping down next to my mom on the sofa. “I’m tired.” It’s not a lie.

I had my first day of lifeguard training this morning, and while the ice-cold, early season saltwater did its job to jolt me to life earlier, after a day in the sun, not to mention a couple of winecoolers and the aforementioned weed, I’m suddenly even more exhausted than I thought.

My mom gives me that look of empathy and skepticism, but she doesn’t press me. She’s good at communicating without saying anything, getting her point across without putting me on the defense. She knows Jonah didn’t impress me tonight any more than she’s ever been impressed by him. But she’s always been willing to let me come to whatever conclusion I come to about him myself, and tonight is no different.

I kiss my mom goodnight, and she’s upstairs and in bed by the time I’m washing up.

Most of the summer people who didn’t come out for Memorial Day Weekend, the first official start of summer, will start straggling east over the next week or so. I’m not as uneager as Jonah is, though. I have tons of old friends I’m excited to catch up with and a lot of them aren’t any kind of “snobs”.

I smile, ignoring my constantly buzzing phone, which I proceed to turn off. Jonah is more than a little pissed, and though my heart skips once or twice in anxiety over how he will react tomorrow at the beach, for tonight, his problem is, well, his problem.

CHAPTER TWO

Jonah is more pissed than usual at last night’s defiance, but I have a way of calming his ire with the right combination of words and tones, a task I find much easier when he’s relatively sober. His large, stocky body still carries the stress of the previous night in the tension of his broad shoulders, though, and it makes me anxious.

He and his friends lounge lazily on their boards in the warm morning sun, not-so-surreptitiously vaping what is definitely not nicotine as they watch me and my fellow lifeguards-in-training go through our exercises in the shock of the freezing ocean. It takes until at least mid-summer before the water off Long Island’s southern shore becomes anything less than painfully frigid without the protection of a wetsuit, and as our lifeguard “uniform” includes nothing more than a less than flattering red one-piece swimsuit, I’m forced to spend the vast majority of the morning shivering and clenching my teeth to keep them from chattering.

Fortunately, I’m a strong swimmer, and despite the heavy undertow, I get through the training easily enough, learning how to safely flip an unconscious victim from front to back without compromising a potential neck injury, and how to correctly strap them onto a standard backboard.

Jonah hoots when I’m first to finish our laps, shouting “that’s my girl!” for all to hear, and I can’t help but roll my eyes. As if he hasn’t already made that clear to everyone in Atlantic West.

He meets me in the shallow surf and flings an arm around me, his body heat doing little to stop my shivering despite theworkout, and I keep my own arms crossed tightly across my chest. I need a towel, so I duck from his embrace, and head over to his board where I left mine, and grab it.

“My bad,” Jonah murmurs as an afterthought, not that I expected him to consider I might want my towel after ninety minutes in what felt like a pool of ice.

Jonah is better at considering his own needs than those of others, despite having spent the better part of our senior year trying to convince me otherwise. I realize now, of course, that his sweet gestures were more about his needs than mine, then, too—in that case, his need to claim me ashis girl.

He tosses me his water bottle, and I thank him, knowing how much I need to hydrate despite barely feeling like I broke a sweat. Cold water is tricky like that, which is part of the reason I love to swim rather than run or go to a gym. I just prefer the ocean later in the season, or a heated pool. Which the Aqualina Beach Club, where, in spite of Jonah’s whining, I’ll be working this summer as soon as I finish my certification next Friday.

Jonah would prefer I work for the town, or at least at the Gold Coast Beach Club. But not only does Aqualina pay significantly better, but I have just as many friends who belong there as I do at Gold Coast, and while years ago the former was known to be patronized more by the summer people, and the latter, us locals, that’s no longer the case, and it hasn’t been for a decade.

But Jonah holds strange, old grudges I never could understand, and he seems to take my choice to work at Aqualina as some kind of mild betrayal. After a good two months of arguing over it, however, Jonah has more or less accepted it. The clubs are literally side by side, anyway, and there aren’t more than thirty yards of beach between them. No one stays exclusively at their own clubs, anyway, and who cares where people happen to enter, or keep their cabana? My mom and I still have our cabana at Gold Coast regardless, right around thecorner from the one Jonah’s family has kept for as long as I’ve known him.

“Ah, shit. And so it begins,” Jonah gripes, his gaze launching over my shoulder and to the junior cabana boys scrambling to set up umbrellas for a family of five. “Fucking summer people.”

I shake my head and brush him off with a laugh. He’s been friends with enough of the seasonal visitors for years, and has even dated a few of the girls, so his hypocritical attitude about them in general makes little sense to me. Any day now I will find him partying with kids he’s known since childhood in from Manhattan, saving his derisive “summer people” comments for specific company, myself included. He can be so predictable.

“Come on, J, I’m hungry,” I tell him.

“Boardwalk Bagels?” he offers, and I smile. Whatever his shortcomings, he knows me as well as anyone, and there’s something comforting about that.

Just like that, we fall into our summer routine, no less predesigned than a school class schedule, and his boys and I flock away from the water and toward our favorite breakfast spot, where my best friend Jillian will hook us up with free coffee, and Jonah will down a disgustingly large and greasy egg and bacon sandwich.