CHAPTER 8
We stayed out in the bay for what felt like hours, some of us taking turns coming to shore to grab a snack and to check on our stuff.
Nellie had packed a water frisbee, so that’d been much of what kept our attention, that and seeing who could hold their breath the longest. I never won—small lungs, and all—but I still swam until my legs got too tired of kicking to hold my head above water.
That, and the whole four hours of sleep thing.
So, after throwing in the towel, I retreated to the blanket and broke out my sketchbook.
Instead of working in my serious style, I allowed my pruned hands to create in a mind-numbing style for me—chibi.
It was a Japanese style I’d learned from Dad, who was sub-par at drawing them, but always loved their oversized heads and little bodies.
He hadn’t drawn them often, but just on scrap pieces of paper or notes to boost our moods.
Maybe that was where I’d gotten my love for drawing on all the random papers I could find.
With my sketchbook propped on my thigh, I outlined two tiny characters attempting to build a sandcastle.
I rarely drew people I knew—and absolutely never in my realism style—but I envisioned the characters to be Theo and Ivy, the former slightly smaller than the latter.
I didn’t have my Prisma pencils to draw Theo’s flame of hair, nor Ivy’s blonde, so I just used my imagination with my graphite pencil, working on my shading skills.
“Are those the kids?”
I looked up and found Dalton at the side of the blanket. I hadn’t heard him creep close enough to peer at my page.
If this were my serious style, I might’ve jerked my sketchbook to my chest. I could count on one hand how many times Dalton had gotten to see my sketchbook, and only brief glances at my realism style. My chibi style, though, I was less protective of. “Yeah.”
“Don’t tell me you’re going to kill them off,” Dalton said with a little downward twist to his lips. “Like, a sand monster is about to eat them or something.”
His tone had my shoulders tightening. “Of course not.”
“Do you not draw people dying anymore?”
“Not the kids.”
Dalton knelt on the quilt, uncaring that he was dripping water everywhere. “But you still do it.” He hummed a little, but decided he didn’t want to talk about it anymore. “Lydia said she packed sandwiches.”
I tried not to watch his movements, nor the way his muscly arms stretched. “We packed cans of soda if you want one.”
“What kind?”
“Sprite and orange pop.”
Dalton broke into our cooler, swiping up an orange pop and cracking the tab. He took a long drink, let out a loud ahhhh, and sat back on his heels. “You all done swimming?”
He was asking probably because I had my cover-up back on. “I think so. You?”
“For now.”
I turned back to my drawing, but the hand that held my pencil had gone numb.
Ivy’s body was only half-finished. She was missing her arms, and I stared at the spaces they should be as if they’d magically appear.
Being alone with Dalton now was kind of similar to how it’d been last night—there was pressure to not slip up.
I succeeded last night. I could succeed today, too.
“So, how long has it been?” He shifted so he sat cross-legged in front of me. “Since you and Jamie have been trying things out, or however you said it.”
With his focus entirely on me, I struggled to remember the agreed-upon backstory. Eight in the morning felt like forever ago, and the sun mixing with Dalton’s probing stare left my mind hazy. “He—he asked me out after prom.”
“After? Not before?”
“He said… how beautiful I looked in my dress gave him the courage to finally ask me out.”
“Let’s go with prom,” Jamie had said this morning in my kitchen. “We’ll say prom was when I realized. When I saw how beautiful Daisy was in her dress.”
Which had been a lie—the part about the dress. I’d ordered it online, and it was supposed to have been a deep emerald strapless gown with rhinestones, but came more like a puke green with glued-on sequins. But a believable enough story to keep people from second-guessing it.
Or, at least, that’d been the plan. “He saw you in a dress and fell in love?” Dalton sounded unimpressed. “That’s his story?”
“You didn’t notice me until I wore a dress to the spring formal my sophomore year,” I muttered, pencil digging too forcefully into my page. It looked like I’d given Ivy a scar down her arm. “Men are simple, I guess.”
“For the record.” A shadow fell over our blankets, and Jamie quickly sat down beside me.
He held two corndog sticks between his fingers, offering the one drenched in mustard to me.
A corndog I was technically supposed to buy, since I’d lost our race, but he’d refused to let me hand him money.
“I’ve been in love with Daisy since Nell and I switched schools freshman year. ”
I froze, thankful Jamie still had a good grip on the corn dog stick, because my fingers went lax. What the heck? That line hadn’t been part of our story this morning. We hadn’t rehearsed that. What was he doing, going off-script?
“It was prom that I realized going the rest of my life without saying something would be impossible,” Jamie went on, speaking easily as if he were truly recalling. “But it wasn’t because of some dress. It was because I’d been accepted.”
Dalton stared at Jamie, like he was trying to suss out a lie. “Accepted?”
“To NYU.” Jamie pulled his hand back, and the corndog in my grip wobbled violently before I had the strength to pinch it tighter. “When we checked our portals for our admission, that’s when I thought it.”
Jamie spoke so nonchalantly, as if his words didn’t transport me back to the time everything fell apart.
It’d been the first of April when NYU had posted our admission status in their online portal.
We’d gone straight to my house after school to check together, in private.
Nellie had already applied Early Decision to Mullhound—and had gotten in—so she’d been there as moral support.
Theo had stood beside Jamie’s chair, his little hands curled around the spindles.
“On three,” Nellie had breathed, eyes darting between her brother and me.
I hadn’t been that nervous going into it. My dream had always been NYU. Of course I’d be accepted. “One.”
“Two,” she had said.
And then Jamie had finished. “Three.”
“Go!” Theo called as I slammed the Log In button.
The world had become a blacked-out blur as the webpage loaded, my pulse the only sound I could hear. The webpage loaded slowly, and I’d taken a page from Nellie’s book and spelled out one word I surely had been about to read. A-C-C-E-P-T-E—
I hadn’t even been able to finish the word, because a different one stared back at me. WAITLISTED.
We would like to offer you a place on our waitlist.
My gaze had lifted, locking onto Jamie’s. He’d been staring at me, and I wondered if his portal hadn’t loaded, wondered if he’d been waitlisted too, or even rejected, because there had been something in his gaze that had looked so… crushed.
My pulse had slowed then, almost like it was about to stop completely.
“You got into NYU?” Dalton asked Jamie now, frowning. “You… applied with DD?”
“Daisy didn’t tell you?” Jamie took a bite of his corndog, readjusting so that his knee brushed my bent one. “It’s always been our dream to go to NYU together.”
“What does yours say?” Jamie had asked that day in April, voice low. “Did you get in?”
I hadn’t answered.
“Me either,” he’d tried to say, but Theo was too close to him.
“Nuh-uh,” Theo had said in his high tone, happy he could understand the screen he scanned. “Yours says ac-cep-ted. That means you got in, right?”
Jamie had planned to lie. One look at my face and he’d tried to lie.
And he’d continued to lie. To let me believe he’d accepted NYU’s offer. To believe I could live vicariously through my best friend come fall. To not tell me he’d thrown away our dream for something better.
“You know, now that you say it, I feel like I do remember something like that.” Dalton crunched his soda can a little beneath his curled fingers.
“I remember you acting like you had a bond with my girlfriend. Now it makes sense—you said you’ve been in love with her since freshman year, huh?
” Dalton stared Jamie down. “Were you just pretending to be her friend all this time?”
It wasn’t true, of course. I’d hit it off with Nellie almost instantly when we’d met, but even back then, Jamie had been reserved. Harder to pull his head up from his book and force into conversation. He’d barely met my eyes at first.
“Not pretending,” Jamie answered calmly. Dalton threw the questions at him quickly, but Jamie still remained cool, as if he’d prepared for each one. “When you love someone, you’ll have them in your life any way you can get them. Being her friend was more than enough. In fact, it was an honor.”
Something unfurled in my chest. Even though the words weren’t real, the devotion of them was something out of a novel. I tried to imagine Dalton saying them, but he never would’ve—not without cringing and breaking into a laugh.
But off Jamie’s lips, quiet and thought-through, they were… perfect.
Perfect, but a part of the act.
And they ticked Dalton off. “I knew I should’ve told her to cut you off,” he said, glaring venomously at Jamie. “I knew you were always a loser trying to break us up.”
The insult to Jamie had me flinching. “Hey, stop,” I told Dalton, trying to draw his attention to me. “Jamie wasn’t—”
“And I always knew you were a piece of garbage Daisy needed to throw to the curb.” Jamie tipped his head to the side, offering a bland smile. “Guess we’re both good at reading the room.”
“Stop it,” I told them in a stern tone, slamming my sketchbook down on the blanket in front of me. I hated Dalton thinking Jamie had just been biding his time, and I hated that Jamie was feeding into it. The confrontation made me feel nervous, panicked. “Just… knock it off.”
Jamie finally looked at me, and at once, I watched as his eyes seemed to melt in the sunlight. “You got mustard on your chin,” he murmured, as if he hadn’t been wound tight a second ago. “I didn’t get any napkins.”
“I don’t need a napkin,” I began, raising my hand.
Before I could rub the condiment away, Jamie, lightning fast, beat me to it. He curled his forefinger and used the side of it to swipe the mustard off my skin, a quick and glancing touch. My breath caught, but he didn’t seem to notice. He just wiped his hands together, completely normal.
“I guess you’ll both be happy at NYU together, then, huh?” Dalton asked, glowering at us. “Living out your starving artist dreams?”
It’s a little silly to hear you talk about NYU like you’ll go. I should’ve tossed my hair and shot something back at Dalton—something sharp and witty—but the words stuck somewhere in my throat. His prediction had been right, after all.
“We’re going to make a graphic novel together,” Jamie said when I said nothing. “It’s always been our dream. I’ll be the author; she’ll be the illustrator.”
My blood ran ice cold.
Jamie didn’t even look at me when he said it, just leaned back and wielded our dream to sell our fake relationship. We’re going to make a graphic novel, present tense.
He talked about it like it was still happening. Like it wasn’t a dream that was in the past tense now, and it was like a knife to my chest.
I plopped my corndog in the sand, swallowing hard. “It’s getting late,” I got out, voice tight. “I need to be home to get the kids off the bus.”
“Aren’t they old enough to be home by themselves?” Dalton asked as he watched me hastily pack up my beach bag. “Penn’s, what? Fourteen?”
“She’s too young to watch them all.”
“You were watching them all at fourteen.”
My bag caught on the corner of the cooler, wrenching the strap out of my grip. I fell still, his words taking the knife sticking out of my chest and twisting it further.
Jamie grabbed my beach bag strap and stood up, offering a hand down. “Nellie can catch a ride home with Beck—”
“No.” I pushed to my feet on my own, pulling my bag away from him and shoving it up my shoulder. It was heavier than I remembered. “I—I’ll get an Uber.”
“All the way to Addison?” Jamie swiped an orange soda from the cooler, offering it to me. “Let me drive you. It’s another boyfriend responsibility.” He looked at me with meaning. You’re slipping.
Dalton watched us, and for a split second, he almost looked hopeful.
I nearly caved, then and there. Because I didn’t want Jamie to drive me, and I didn’t want to convince Dalton that we were a stellar couple. I didn’t want to lie about NYU, and pretend I was okay when I wasn’t. At that moment, I didn’t want to do anything except go home.
Jamie slipped my bag off my shoulder. “Tell everyone we said bye, could you?” Jamie asked Dalton, swiping up my hand.
He squinted up at us with a nod, an unreadable expression on his face now. “I’ll catch you later, DD.”
I clenched my jaw, swallowing a reply as I dragged Jamie away, the two of us walking through the sand and dodging other sunbathers. He only waited until there were a few beach blankets between us. “I’m sorry,” Jamie said under his breath. “I’m sorry, Daze. He—he just—he gets under my skin, and I—”
“Right, and that’s why you went all storyteller mode and deviated from the script.” I gave a harsh nod. “You’ve been in love with me since freshman year? You were trying to make it seem like we’ve had some sordid love affair from the beginning, just to set him off.”
Jamie’s eyes went wide behind his glasses. “No. No, that’s not why I—”
“Then why?” I wanted to grind to a halt in the sand, to drop his hand and turn on him, but I knew Dalton could’ve been watching us walk away. So, instead, I gripped Jamie’s hand so tightly that his bones shifted. “Why would you tell him that?”
Jamie sharply looked away from me, straight ahead, as he pressed his lips together. “I know you’re angry.”
Something about the way he said it lit a fire through me. “Wow, look at you and your fabulous skills on reading the room. You’re a good actor, Jamie, but you know what else you are?” The spot behind my eye pulsed as I faced the full parking lot. “A good liar.”
I told myself I didn’t care that Jamie had flinched. I told myself I didn’t care that his fingers slackened around my palm. And I told myself that my words were nothing but the truth.
“Why does it matter?” Jamie demanded, his scowl set on the cars. “If we hurt Dalton’s feelings, or set him off, or anything else? It shouldn’t matter.”
You shouldn’t care was what he meant. It only made me angrier. “Just forget it.”
And, miraculously, Jamie let it drop.
The rest of the walk to the car was silent, our hands only locked together out of necessity.
I was sure that if I loosened my grip at all, our palms would fall away entirely, because Jamie barely held on.
I’d taken the knife from my chest and plunged it into his, but instead of feeling relief, it only hurt me more.