Chapter Twenty-Eight #3
Hey, remember your family beach trip, the crazy week with all the kids? I drove past the house we stayed in. We were trying to get all the StuCo retreat stuff done. Will and Piper were always trying to get us to walk to the pier, arguing it wasn’t so far and would be worth it.
Bing! A picture of a wide beach, dotted with umbrellas.
I made it. It did take a while, though. Felt great until I realized I have to walk it all again to get back to my car. Below this was a shot taken from beneath the pier. Water rushed through the pilings, the sun low in the sky in the distance.
Bing! This time it was Hannah. The first time I’d heard from her, I realized, since the day Colin had broken up with me. And yet again, he was the reason.
Finley, hey. Hope you are doing okay. I know this is weird to ask, considering everything. But has Colin gotten in touch with you? I heard he blew off his counseling job. And he’s been acting really not like himself. Call me?
I heard the door sound. When I looked over, Ben was in the hall, carrying his guitar. It seemed impossible this was the first time we’d been alone since the dock, when my phone had intruded. And now here I was, on it again.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey.”
I slid it into my pocket. Too late, but still. From the porch, Liz was basically pleading for chairs. “So look,” I began. “I’m sorry about what happened. It’s just…”
He waited, did not fill in the blank. Not that he would.
“Colin,” I finished.
There’s being surprised, and then there’s being disappointed. The mix of the two is awful. Especially when it’s on the face of someone you care about.
“Colin?” he repeated. “Wow. That was not what I thought you were going to say.”
“He’s… struggling,” I added, quickly. “He quit his job. Is talking about deferring from school. I don’t know what’s going on.”
“Seems like you wouldn’t need to,” he observed. “Considering he dumped you and all.”
Okay, maybe I deserved that. “It’s not so easy,” I said. “Just stopping caring about someone.”
He looked at me. “Yeah. I know.”
So that’s where we were. Already. In some ways, it made sense. It’s easy to unravel anything if it was never tight to begin with.
And what was this, between us anyway? Some late nights, words said in the dark. He’d wanted more, had even risked saying so. I was the reason we were here. Or at least not where we could be.
“Look, I get it,” he said now. “You just broke up.”
“I know. But it wasn’t that simple even before that. There was a part of me, even then, curious who I’d be if we weren’t together. I even applied to my dream school, Pacchiana, in secret. Didn’t even tell him when I got in.”
“Wow,” he said. “That’s a pretty big thing to keep to yourself.”
This, too, felt like a blow. Cringeworthy honesty was basically what had brought us together, from that first day he’d given me a ride to the Egg. I never thought I would at any point long, wildly, to be awkward.
Bzzzz. I glanced up: A hummingbird was sailing over, heading to the cabin. So light, nimble. I felt an envy I couldn’t explain.
Anne’s car came into sight, heading up the driveway toward us. She parked, then hopped out, carrying a notepad and a stack of folders. “Oh, Ben,” she said, “thank you for meeting me on such short notice! This is all so nuts, I know.”
“It’s fine,” he replied, not looking at me. He nodded at Anne. “You want to talk inside?”
“Whatever’s good for you.”
He bent down, grabbing the guitar, then went up the stairs. Turns out, there is a clear distinction between pretending to ignore someone and actually doing it. I was very aware, right then, of the difference.
That was not what I thought you were going to say, he’d told me. Now I wondered what he had been expecting.
A few minutes later, when I went to the porch, Liz was still on her feet, circling the table as if doing measured laps.
“… meet with the Tides at three.” I recognized Jonathan’s voice, now on speaker. “They’re trying to round up enough boats for the shuttle.”
“Are we sure the vans can’t make it up the driveway?” Anne, who was now in the living room, called out.
“Positive.”
Anne thought for a second. “So we get people to the dock and they walk up.”
“You’re forgetting it’s steep,” Liz warned her. “And will be hot.”
“So we need a shuttle from the shuttle.”
“Maybe golf carts?” Jonathan asked.
Liz snapped her fingers. “Yes!”
“I’ll talk to the Tides people.”
I looked back into the living room. Anne and Ben were seated on the floor, by the big window facing the lake. “Okay,” she said, pulling a pen from her messy bun and centering the pad in her lap. “Music for the ceremony. Go.”
He unbuckled the case, taking out his guitar. “What do you have in mind?”
Before he could answer, my phone rang. Hannah. “Hello?”
“Hey, it’s me,” she said. Like it hadn’t been ages. Like she was my friend, not Colin’s. “Do you have a minute to talk? I have Nalini here too.”
“Hi, Finley,” Nalini chimed in.
“Um,” I said. “Actually—”
“I mean, everyone has a freak-out in college at some point,” Nalini said now. “Leave it to Colin to do it ahead of everyone else.”
“The boy is advanced,” Hannah agreed, and they both laughed. “And we get that he handled things really badly with your breakup.”
“Totally,” Nalini said. “But you still care about him, obviously. So what do you think we should do?”
On the porch, Jonathan was still on speaker, now saying something about ministers. Meanwhile, in the living room, no voices. Just the sound of Ben playing, chords and a melody. I wished it was night and I was walking around the Egg toward him.
“Finley?” Hannah asked. “You there?”
I was. At the same time, it felt as if there was a landline cord wrapped around me like one of Kasey’s bouquets. Tightening, slowly, as it pulled me back, back, back.