Chapter 12
Summer, Thirteen Years Ago
“Sam Florek is a fucking lunatic, and don’t you forget it.
” Delilah was sitting on my bed, her pale legs folded underneath her, delivering a pep talk as I packed for the cottage.
“You are a smart, sexy, seventeen-year-old woman with a ridiculously hot boyfriend, and you don’t need some small-town loser who doesn’t appreciate how incredible you are bringing you down! ”
Delilah was on an anti-man kick. She broke up with Patel when he went away to McGill, and threw everything she had at school.
She had gotten it in her head that she was destined to change the world, and she wasn’t going to let any guy stand in her way.
Her grades were better than mine. Though she and Patel were now “on again” for the summer.
“You know it’s weird to call your cousin ridiculously hot, right?” I said, cramming bathing suits into my overstuffed suitcase.
“It’s not weird if I’m just stating a fact,” she replied. “But you’re missing my main point, which is that I don’t want you to get hurt again. You’re too good for Sam.”
“That’s not true.” I may have spent the past ten months convincing myself that I was over him and that he was right to want to keep our relationship purely platonic, but I didn’t believe for a second that I was too good for him. “And he’s not a loser,” I added.
Sometimes I wondered if Sam called things off last summer because he didn’t want to attach himself to me when he had all these big plans to go away to school and become a doctor and never look back.
He didn’t want to get stuck in Barry’s Bay, but at my most anxious I thought that maybe he didn’t want to get stuck with me, either.
I had joined the swim team, to my mother’s delight, and had distracted myself with practice, writing, and Mason’s hockey games, while Sam had spent the year studying or working to save for university.
He barely took a break. I had to convince him to go to parties or spend a night playing video games with Finn and Jordie.
He never mentioned girls, but I knew he wouldn’t waste time dating—not that I cared.
Okay, I cared. He was still my best friend.
But that was it. Best friend. Nothing more.
“I’ll be the judge of that once and for all when we come up to visit,” Delilah said, reaching into the suitcase and pulling out my team suit.
“I get that you actually swim when you’re up there, but please tell me you’re packing something a little more exciting than this,” she said, holding up the navy one-piece.
I smiled: Delilah was nothing if not predictable.
I grabbed a gold string bikini and threw it at her.
“Happy?”
“Thank god. What’s the point of all that time you spend pickling yourself in chlorine if you aren’t going to show off the results?”
“Some people call it exercise,” I laughed. “You know, for health?”
“Pfff . . . as if you and Mason don’t lie around naked talking about how hot your hot athletic bodies are,” she scoffed.
“Again, he’s your cousin.”
Delilah and Patel started having sex a while ago and she assumed the same was true of Mason and me. To correct her would mean having a detailed conversation about exactly what was happening between us, which I preferred to keep to myself.
“I can’t help it if the Mason family gene pool is prone to extreme good looks.
” Delilah tossed her hair over her shoulder.
She wasn’t wrong. Even with her red hair and explosive personality, she looked softer than me, with roller-coaster curves that were irresistible to the boys in our high school, who constantly stopped by our lunch table to flirt.
She dismissed them all with a flick of her wrist.
I gathered up a couple of notebooks and paperbacks and placed them on top of the piles of clothing.
“I’ll never get this zipped up,” I said, trying to shove everything down in my suitcase.
“Good, then you’ll have to stay!”
“I’ll see you in a month, D. It’ll fly by. Give me a hand here?” Delilah pushed down on the bulging case while I zipped it up.
“Is Charlie still as hot as I remember?” She wiggled her eyebrows. Delilah’s version of man hating was admittedly pretty thirsty. Charlie had started school at Western in the fall, and I hadn’t seen him since the Christmas break.
“He’s not ugly,” I told her. “But you can be the judge of that, too.” My parents had agreed to let me have Mason, Delilah, and Patel up for the Civic Holiday, which they would be spending in Prince Edward County for a second year.
Mason had stayed in Toronto for university, and we had made it official in the fall.
I’d been holding out hope that Sam would change his mind about us, but when I saw him over Thanksgiving, it was like the night we spent in his bed had never happened.
The next weekend, I let Mason feel me up under my skirt at the movie theater.
“I hope you start calling me your boyfriend now,” he had whispered in my ear, and I agreed that I would, reveling in the feeling of being wanted.
Sam had spotted the silver bracelet around my wrist as soon as he walked through the door to the cottage on Christmas Eve. My parents had invited the Floreks for holiday cocktails, and he pulled me aside and held up my wrist that wore the friendship bracelet as well as the one Mason had given me.
“Have any updates for me, Percy?” he asked, his eyes narrowed. It wasn’t exactly how I planned to tell him about our relationship, with our parents standing nearby and Charlie within earshot, but I didn’t want to lie to him, either.
“The silver doesn’t really go with ours,” was his only response.
THAT SUMMER, THE tension between Sam and Charlie was obvious almost as soon as I got out of the car. The Florek brothers stood towering by the back door of the cottage a full meter apart.
“You’re looking more gorgeous than ever, Pers,” Charlie told me, his eyes on Sam, before pulling me into a long hug.
“Subtle,” Sam mumbled.
Charlie helped unload but had to leave early to get ready for his shift, giving me another lingering embrace before he departed.
“For the record,” he whispered in my ear so no one else could hear, “my brother is a fucking idiot.”
“What’s going on with Charlie?” I asked Sam when we were lying on the raft later that afternoon.
“We’re not exactly seeing eye to eye on a couple of things,” he said vaguely. I rolled onto my stomach and rested my face on my hands.
“Care to elaborate, Dr. Florek?”
“Nah,” said Sam. “It’s nothing.”
That night, Sam invited me to come over after dinner. I showed up in my sweats with a copy of my latest story for him.
“I brought homework,” I said when he opened the door, holding up the pages.
“I’ve got something for you, too.” He smiled. I followed him to his room, trying not to think about what happened the last time we were in there.
He pulled out a stack of three somewhat worn books, tied up with white ribbon, from the top shelf of his closet: Rosemary’s Baby, Misery, and The Handmaid’s Tale.
“I spent months tracking these down at yard sales and the secondhand store,” he said, sounding a bit nervous.
“The Atwood isn’t really horror, it’s dystopian, but we read it in English and I think you’ll love it.
And I got the other two because I thought you might want to see the words that created some of your favorite movies. ”
“Wow,” I said. “Sam, these are so amazing.”
“Yeah?” He seemed unsure. “Not as fancy as a silver bracelet, though.”
I wasn’t even wearing the bracelet. Was it jealousy? I hadn’t known Sam to be insecure about money before, but maybe that was it.
“Not as fancy, but way better,” I said, and he looked relieved. I passed him the revised version of the ghost story I’d long been tinkering with.
“Reading time?” he asked, flopping onto the end of his bed. He patted the spot beside him.
“You’re going to read it in front of me?”
“Uh-huh,” he said, not looking up from the page and holding his index finger over his mouth to shush me.
I settled onto the bed beside him and dug into The Handmaid’s Tale.
About half an hour later, Sam put the pages down and ran his hand through his hair.
He’d cut it a little shorter since I’d seen him last. He looked older.
“This is really great, Percy,” he said.
“Swear on it?” I asked, putting my book down.
“Of course.” He sounded surprised I’d asked and pulled on my bracelet absentmindedly. “I’m not sure if I’m terrified of the dead sister or if I feel sorry for her—or both.”
“Really? That’s exactly what I was going for!”
“Really. I’m going to read it again and make notes, okay?” It was more than okay. Sam was my best reader. He always had ideas to make the characters stronger or questions that pointed out a hole in the story’s logic.
“Yes, please. Delilah’s critique was very Delilah and totally useless, as always.”
“More sex?”
“Exactly,” I laughed. An awkward silence fell upon us, and I racked my brain for something not sex related to say, but Sam spoke up.
“So when did you and Buckley get serious?” he asked, squinting at me.
“Are you ever going to call him Mason?”
“Probably not,” Sam deadpanned.
“Well, I’m not sure if I’d say we’re serious,” I said.
“But he’s your boyfriend now.”
“Yeah, he is.” I played with the frayed hole in the knee of my jeans.
“So I think I know the basics: He’s Delilah’s cousin, plays hockey, went to a—shudder—private school for boys and is now at U of T, buys his girlfriend expensive-looking jewelry, has a terrible name.
” I was surprised by how much he’d remembered from our emails.
“But you haven’t really told me what he’s like. ”
“He’s nice.” I shrugged, and studied the woman in a red robe on the cover of the book. What was she hiding?
“You’ve mentioned that.” Sam bopped my knee with his. “What does he think about your writing?” He tapped the sheets of paper on the bed.