Chapter Nine Luke
Chapter Nine
Luke
I try to get out of the barbecue at the Watkinses’ by telling Mom I’ve been called in to cover at the marina, but she isn’t buying it.
“I called Georgie ahead of time and double-checked they hadn’t put you on the schedule,” she says as she wrestles Adam into a button-up.
I don’t know why she’s torturing them with nice shirts.
It’s just the neighbors. I’m pretty sure Mrs. Watkins was there when Oliver was born.
I remember her showing me how to hold him.
“I know you and Sera had a little falling-out, but you’re eighteen, honey. Learn to patch things up.”
My phone buzzes in my pocket for the fifth time in the last ten minutes. Izzy wants to hang out, and I’ve been avoiding her. It’s not that I’m not happy to see her, but with Sera back it’s just…confusing.
“I’d like you to come,” Mom says as she directs Adam toward the front door and pries a Nerf gun out of Oliver’s hands. “Please. They’re like family.”
We let the unsaid thing sit between us. That with Dad out of the house we’ve been trying to rebuild what family means, to varying degrees of success. I nod and stop Oliver from reaching for his Nerf gun again.
“Heyyy,” he says, pouting.
“There’s stuff to do over there,” I promise him. “Let’s go.”
I text Izzy that I have a family thing but that we can hang soon.
Like the shirts have added some weird formal tension to the day, Mom also has us go around to the front door and knock.
I take a couple deep breaths, shake out my hands, and prepare myself to look at Sera like I look at any of my other friends.
I wish I were more ready, though, because she’s the one who opens the door.
She’s wearing a Mass MoCA T-shirt and denim shorts, and she looks beautiful.
My heart lurches in my chest. I notice she seems nervous to see us. Her smile is a little forced.
“You knocked!” she says, surprised, and I give Mom my best I told you so look.
“Come in. Welcome. You remember the way through to the backyard, right? The house hasn’t changed, that’s for sure.
Same creaky floor, and watch your step between the living room and the kitchen.
But you know that. Duh!” Sera clamps her lips together like she’s forcing herself to stop talking.
Mom and I step inside, and Adam and Oliver dart past Sera, heading straight through the house to the backyard. I cringe, hoping they don’t knock something over. Abbi swoops in, dodging the boys, and gives Mom and me quick hugs.
“So good to see you!” she says, beaming.
She takes the eggplant Parmesan Mom has and starts asking her about her garden.
Mom follows her and then Mr. Watkins appears.
He’s taller than even me, and looks most like Abbi, with dark red hair that’s started to gray since I last saw him.
He pats me on the shoulder and pulls me to the living room, where the sports news is going over the Sox game from last night.
“Did you catch the game?” he asks, hitting pause on the remote and scrolling back. “Did you see this play? What a mess.”
I laugh, taking in the living room, which looks the same.
I spot the photos of Sera and me still lining the wall next to the staircase.
“Yeah, they really almost lost it all in the eighth.” I swallow, surprised the photos are still there when Sera did such a spectacular job cutting me off.
I wonder what her family knows about why she ghosted me.
Mr. Watkins launches into a statistics rant, and I remember he’s a math professor. I’m trying to keep up, but I catch Sera out of the corner of my eye. She mouths Good luck as she points at her dad. Then she slips away down the hall toward the kitchen.
I listen back in to Mr. Watkins’s statistics spiel and offer my own two cents, saying that if they hadn’t intentionally walked the player before, we probably wouldn’t have needed the extra inning to close. He nods.
“Smart observation. So, tell me about this state championship game we missed.”
At least that’s an easy ask. I fill him in as we head through the house to the open sliding glass doors that lead from the kitchen to the backyard.
Talking about baseball is easy. When you break the rules of what’s expected, it’s fun, thrilling even, and makes for a good story.
A game was a game, no lasting ramifications.
Outside, Mom and Mrs. Watkins are fussing with the grill.
Adam and Oliver are doing circles in the yard and playing on the old playset while Mom explains that their parkour instructor made her promise to stop them from doing tricks outside class.
I give Oliver a look when he catches me watching him swinging a little too high on the swing.
He makes a face at me, then hops off. Once both his feet are on the ground, I head for the cooler at the end of the picnic table, where Sera is sitting on the edge.
She’s watching my brothers with a smile on her face, and I wonder what she’s thinking about.
I catch myself wanting to ask but I don’t know if we’re there yet.
At our beach it felt like things could go back to normal, but since the drive-in, Sera’s been hard to pin down again.
She’s busy teaching, and I’m busy with my jobs and Izzy.
Sera also might be seeing that Jackson guy.
I don’t know. Maybe this is just what happens when you grow up and take on more responsibility—less time for friends, particularly ones who have let you down.
“Even baseball scares me,” Mom is saying, “after Luke’s knee injury.”
Sera turns and glances at my leg as I lean down to get a soda.
I accidentally brush my arm against her calf as I stand up, and she flinches back, catching herself before falling off the table.
The awkwardness from the drive-in rushes back, the way her face closed up when I forgot to let go of her hand.
“You okay?” I ask as she rights herself. She nods. That’s when I notice she’s still wearing the EBE bracelet I made her when we were ten. My heart clenches. What does that mean? I wonder, but then I remember the way she was cuddling up to Jackson at the drive-in.
I must be hovering too close, because she jumps down and scoots around me as Abbi puts on some music.
As she brushes by, I smell citrus shampoo and vanilla perfume and my mind starts to act like I’m sixteen again and can’t take a hint.
I swallow and shake my head, opening the soda as Sera takes the phone from her sister and starts adding songs to the queue.
Abbi whispers something at her, and she brushes it off, glancing at me quickly, then away again.
Oliver comes sprinting back to the patio, pausing at the cooler to take two sodas before I can tell him not to.
I settle in at the table and keep an eye on them.
In less than ten minutes they’re turning cartwheels in the grass and Oliver has lost a shoe and Adam his collared shirt, which he has affixed to the top of the tree house as a pirate flag.
I spot Sera out of the corner of my eye heading back into the house.
Mrs. Watkins keeps saying it’s fine, but I can tell all the chaos is making Mom upset. I’m about to tell them to calm down or we’re not getting ice cream tomorrow when Sera comes back out and gets their attention with a couple of huge sketch pads.
“Do you guys want to make some pirates?”
The boys stop what they’re doing and rush over, asking a hundred questions. Sera explains her plan: to make some large drawings they can tape up on the back fence or the bushes to act as targets. Oliver is immediately into it, making Adam lie down so he can trace him.
“I’ll make an enemy boat,” Sera says, settling onto the grass. As she tears a piece of paper away for Adam to draw on, and helps Oliver open a brown Magic Marker, I’m pulled back into a memory from two years ago.
We were working on the camp float for the Fourth of July parade in Barnstable.
Sera had only been back for a couple weeks, and everything felt different.
Had she always looked at me so intensely when she talked?
Had her eyes always been a rich, dark brown at the center?
Had she done something new to her hair, which kept catching the sun?
We were alone on one side of the float, painting the papier-maché copy of the Blue Honeybee.
All of a sudden I felt nervous to be one-on-one with her, like I didn’t know how to talk to her.
“So, um, what happened with that guy you were dating?” I asked as I reached past her to re-dip my brush in the paint. I knew she’d just broken up with Ethan, a boy from her school, about a month ago, but she hadn’t told me why.
“Oh”—she paused, readjusting the bee’s antennae—“I don’t know. I mean, he was nice. He got me that cool book of hyperrealistic paintings of science fiction worlds. The one I showed you.”
“But?” I asked, trying not to sound too interested.
“I guess…it just didn’t feel special.” She shrugged, pushed her hair out of her face, and got a smear of paint on her cheek. I smiled.
“I get that,” I said.
“Yeah?” Her eyes met mine and stayed there.
I couldn’t stop looking at her. It was the first time I wondered if she’d ever want me to be her boyfriend.
Butterflies exploded in my stomach at the thought, but my nerves got the better of me and I glanced away.
Before I could say anything, Ryan O’Rourke, the senior in charge, had come back around to help us, and the moment was over.
Still, that day, every little move and look felt like it meant something.
When Sera handed me the paint bucket and our hands touched, they lingered—didn’t they?
When she came over to give me advice and leaned against my shoulder to point out what she thought I should change, her breath so close to my ear—that was flirty, wasn’t it?
When I finally told her about the paint on her face and went to wipe it off and she blushed—was she feeling that tug in her gut too?
I swallow down a sigh and go to help her with my brothers. Sera’s feet are bare, the bottoms a little green. I sit next to her.
“Want some help?”
“Sure.” Sera moves over so there’s space for me to sit and work on the other half of the page.
She hands me some markers, and when I grab them, goose bumps rise on my arm at her touch.
But Sera just turns back to the drawing, reminding me I was a fool for thinking I could turn our friendship into something more.
The quick, painful memory of the night she stood me up comes back to me.
My anxiety when she was late, turning into tearful disbelief, then anger, when she told me she couldn’t do this.
I want to know why, but more than that, I want to be friends again.
We sketch quietly for a few minutes; the boys have finally calmed down.
Through the trees, the sun falls in broken yellow splotches across the yard, warming our cheeks and shoulders.
My phone buzzes again, and I scramble to shut it off, like I’ve been caught.
I wish I could just get wrapped up in Izzy like last summer.
Maybe I should. She’s fun, and it’s comfortable knowing that it’s not going to get serious because there’s a clear end date.
A few minutes later, it’s Sera’s phone that lights up with a text message.
She looks at it and smiles, typing back a quick response.
I wonder if it’s Jackson, but I can’t ask that without sounding jealous.
“You’re good at this,” I say as she gives Adam the okay to run his Pirates Only sign up the tree house.
“Yeah? Thanks. I’m loving teaching.”
“That’s great,” I say, picking up a brown marker and scribbling on the edge of Adam’s other abandoned drawing.
“I miss camp.” Getting lost in my art was always something I looked forward to, and making posters for town events scratches some of that itch.
But art will always be there, waiting for me to have time again.
“You should come by sometime, then,” Sera offers, smiling at me for real as she watches me sketch.
“That would be fun.”
“Just don’t let them see you’re a better artist than I am,” she says, still looking at my stupid drawing. “Or my expertise will be questioned.”
“Yeah, right. As previously mentioned, I’m a hobbyist—you’re the expert.”
“And you gotta keep it zipped about the old days. If they find out it was our idea to start the annual last-day-of-camp paint fight against the theater kids, I’ll have no authority at all,” Sera says.
I laugh. “Fine. Deal.”
“Glad that’s settled,” she says.
“So,” I say, adding a cannon to the front of the boat. “Tell me about this gap year thing.”