Page 25

The snarl in my ankle is impossible to ignore.

At the house, Adriana’s mom takes a closer look and decides I need more than an ice pack. I don’t need convincing, and neither does Everett. I tell them to start a movie without us. Holden carries me to the car and Everett drives me to the nearest 24-hour pharmacy for painkillers and a wrap bandage.

He leaves the car on and tells me to stay put. I don’t need convincing.

The first beats of an Adele song bleed from the radio. I turn it up and let out a faint chuckle. It was a lifetime ago that Blair grounded me for going to Kelsie’s party, but this song sounds like my first taste of the open road, pointless errands, and a magnificent dinner with Blair. For that reason, it also sounds like tears, beer, and Holden’s echoey truths.

There are a million ways my life is different now.

I check my phone for a text from my dad, and still, nothing.

Everett walks out of the pharmacy, swinging a yellow bag beside him. He slinks into the driver’s side and shuffles through the bag. He pulls out a pint of Gibson’s cotton candy ice cream, wearing a smile as big as the ocean.

My face lights up like the fluorescent streetlights outside. “They have Gibson’s? It’s been years since I last had this!”

I’ve only had this brand once. I was nine and mom found it at our local grocery store. It was one of the nicer memories with Mom that year, going home and sharing it with her in front of the latest animated movie. After that, Mom and I hunted for it at every grocery store and we never found it again.

Everett and I take a picture with it. I text it to Mom who I know will text me as soon as she wakes up tomorrow. I lock my phone before I impulsively check the unreplied text again.

“They only had the one, so I figured it must be good.”

“Better than medicine. Thank you!”

“But you do still need medicine.” Everett pulls painkillers from the bag and hands me a water bottle.

“Well, of course.” I take two tablets. In the bag, I spot a bottle of aloe and the wrap bandage. Those can wait for after my shower, but my ankle demands medicine now. “Thank you. For everything,” I add so he knows “everything” goes as far back as everythings can go.

“No problem.” Everett pulls out of the pharmacy into the darkness of the North Carolina countryside.

Everett’s headlights illuminate the dark road, robust corn fields on both sides. I roll the window down to hear the tired, steady stream of cicada, katydid, and locust songs. Warm night air spills in. I put one hand out the window and brush through the thick air, distracted until “Escape (The Pi?a Colada Song)” starts teasing on the radio.

“No way!” I crank up the volume with an ear-splitting laugh.

“Sing with me, Dr. Kessler?”

I respond by singing the first line, using my closed fist as a microphone. It’s impossible not to. Everett joins me for a duet. What an oxymoron to belt out such a song on a slow, meandering road. An oxymoron to be this happy after everything I’ve been through. An oxymoron to sing a song about an affair with a boy I could never imagine falling into a dull routine with, a boy I never want to escape.

A moonlight I never want to shut the blinds to again.

Still, we sing of escapes, pi?a coladas, and making love in the dunes. It sounds like crunchy French fries, Boardwalk lights, real cotton candy.

It sounds like our first kiss.

There are a million ways my life is different now.

I don’t want this moment to end. When we approach the sign for Lake Lockwood, I suggest we stop at the lake access to eat the ice cream. Unfortunately lakes don’t have dunes. Unfortunately, I’m still me.

“You know, so everyone doesn’t feel left out,” I add. “Of the ice cream.”

“Yeah, obviously.” Everett plays along, parking in the vacant lot. We overlook the black lake now desolate without sun. Not even the moon is out right now; only houses from across the lake break the darkness.

Absent of motion, summer night heat streams in the car. The lake is eerily quiet, but the cicadas, katydids, and locusts have yet to fall asleep. The ache in my ankle has calmed since the medicine, real and musical.

Everett opens the ice cream. The lid is already overflowing and soggy from sitting in the car’s heat. He puts it on the dashboard and licks the drip from his thumb. I find a plastic spork in his glove box, ripping it out of its wrapper with my teeth.

Orange heat lightning in the distance cracks across the sky, weaving through a thick blanket of clouds.

“You first.” He holds the pint out for me.

I thank the warm air for softening the ice cream. Then I thank my sweet tooth for all the joy I find in crunchy pink and blue sugar sprinkles lodged into sugar-flavored ice cream.

“Just like I remember.” I smile and pass him the pint and spork.

I take this opportunity to check my phone again. It’s second nature now, but I quickly realize my mistake and tuck it between my legs.

He turns his body to me in his seat, his right leg tucked under him and his elbow propped up where his headrest should be. Last week, Holden and Mason buried it in the sand as a prank and forgot to mark the spot, so now it was lost to time.

He takes his own bite, nodding. “It sure is…sweet.”

I turn to him, my back to the door, my hair spilling out of the open window. I laugh. “I love how you always use sweet as an insult.”

“Isn’t it?” He smirks.

I smirk back and take the sweet ice cream from him. Some people just don’t understand sugar. We finish the ice cream with large scrapes against the pint, the beginning of a brain freeze riding its tails. Really, I ate most of it and Everett finished the rest before I exploded.

“What’s been so important on your phone?” Everett asks.

I want to lie and tell him I’m waiting on a text from Haven or Blair or my mom, but when I notice the streetlights spilling artificial moonlight on my thigh, I remember last summer and what I once thought.

Everett is what I need.

He would never leave me checking my phone for days. He’d be there no matter what, just like the moon even when the clouds hide it away.

“I texted my dad the other day.” I feel layers of my skin peel open.

“What’d you say?” His voice is soft, sorry, not at all painful on freshly exposed skin.

“I told him I loved him.” Tears threaten to form as a peppery feeling builds in my nose, a thickness in my throat.

“And he hasn’t responded?”

“No.” I open my phone again to an empty lockscreen, a picture of me and Hadley on the beach. “I haven’t texted him in years. I don’t know why I even tried. It was stupid.”

I shut the phone off. This is the last time I’ll hope for nothing.

“It wasn’t stupid, Quinn. It was what you felt you needed to do.”

“I don’t know why I even love him anymore.”

The words pop like a balloon too full of air. It jolts me, like my brain didn’t even know my mouth could say such a thing.

He’s your dad, of course it’s okay to still love him, part of my brain thinks, but the other half responds, He lost the privilege of your love the day he stopped wanting it.

“He didn’t deserve to be your dad anyway.”

Everett’s truth is so cold it could clip the thick leaves of summer. Even though summer knows it’s coming, it still hurts when the first dead leaves hit the ground.

An ocean lies between knowing something and pretending it’s not true. But I know those dead leaves. I know the truth. Rock bottom tells me her name, shakes my hand, and pulls me into the depths with her.

Accepting the truth is hard, but hard is the first step toward easy. In order to come back from rock bottom, you have to fall to it first.

I let my pesky brain chew on each of Everett’s words like orange wedges that fill your molars for hours.

The more I chew, the more it makes sense.

If a man leaves his wife and nine-year-old daughter to spiral without him, did he ever deserve them?

If not, why do I still love him?

To stop loving my own father would be to stop loving my blonde hair, the joy I find in little things, the sweet tooth I know I got from him.

Hating my dad is to hate half of myself.

Not just the parts of me that I already hate, but the parts of me that make me worth the effort to clean dirty grout, sneak lollipops, find shapes in anything as a distraction, sway in a hammock, trek at 5am to comfort on a pier, slow dance under the stars, drive on a late night pharmacy run.

Hating my dad is to hate the part of me worth falling in love with.

He didn’t deserve to be your dad anyway.

“I know.” A tear finally falls down my cheek.

I let it fall, then wipe the rest away with the back of my hand.

I fight the tremble in my chin until my jaw hurts. The pressure finally fades. In the silence after, there is relief in finally having found the words to describe what haunts me.

I feel the weight of Everett’s hand on my shoulder.

A raindrop falls on the windshield with a muted thud.

We both follow the sound, then look at each other as more raindrops follow.

They splatter on the roof like giant needle pricks, tap tap tapping on the car. Rain streaks down the windshield, distorting the distant porch lights.

I once told Everett how much I liked this sight. That hasn’t changed. The rain comes fast. Like me, the sky couldn’t hold back its tears anymore either. We rush to roll the windows up before it’s too late.

Then an idea strikes like heat lightning across my face, like lyrics of my and Everett’s song running across a karaoke machine.

“Let’s get caught in the rain,” I say and push open my door.

Everett circles around to me, pulls me into the rain that feels nothing like needle pricks.

I gasp at the rush of cold, look up at the sky.

Millions of raindrops fall, visible in the streetlights around the vacant lot. My eyes blink as quickly as my heart pounds.

I buckle from the pain in my ankle, forced to lean on Everett for help.

He hoists me up onto the hood of the car.

It’s sopping wet, but all I can do is laugh quick, breathless laughs that can’t catch themselves in the cold. Everett sits next to me, glowing under the streetlights made brighter as they reflect off the rain-soaked air.

“I like getting caught in the rain,” Everett says.

“I was hoping you would.” I wipe raindrops off his beauty mark with my thumb. What an oxymoron, to wipe rain off a boy’s cheeks when the sky isn’t done crying. Happy tears, this time.

He grabs my wrist, smiles at me through the sky’s happiness. “Of course I do.”

That’s what moonlights do.

They illuminate you.

Even the parts of you not worth anything.

What an oxymoron, to live in the same world as Everett Bishop and believe all men are like my dad.