Chapter Thirty
There’s no answer when I knock on the door to Rika and Yasmin’s beach shack, so I walk around it to the deck in the back,
and sure enough, there’s Rika, draped in an Adirondack chair. She looks right at home, eyes closed, wearing shorts and a tank
top, hair up in a messy bun and her legs hanging over the arm of the chair.
“Hey,” I say.
She starts, opening her eyes, and quickly sits up. “Oh, hey.”
“Is Yasmin around?”
“They went out for a run. They’ll probably be back any minute.”
She’s watching me with a familiar expression—the one that says Harlowe is fragile. But this time, I don’t feel annoyed. I deserve it. “Reeks, I’m so sorry. I was a dick yesterday.”
For a moment, she just looks at me, frozen.
And then she lets her breath out, shoulders slumping.
“Yeah, well . . . me too. I shouldn’t have told you about Jackson.
I don’t know what I was thinking. We didn’t come here for some kind of pity trip.
I honestly wasn’t even sure I was going to tell you he was dating somebody, but then you’d made friends, and you had Nathan, and .
. .” She shrugs, shooting me a desperate look.
“You’re doing well, Harlowe. You seemed to be doing so well.
So I thought you could handle it and . .
. I didn’t want things to be weird between us. ”
“What are you talking about? Why would things be weird?”
“Because we’re all friends.” She waves a hand at the space between us. “It felt weird for you not to know. I don’t know.”
I run a hand through my hair. “I don’t know either. I mean, we were friends—all four of us. But, Rika . . . we’re not anymore. You and Yasmin are friends with Jackson, and you’re friends with
me. You’re in the middle.”
“Yeah.” Rika rubs absently at her forehead. “Which sucks, by the way.”
I shift, hands in my back pockets. “Sorry.”
“No, that’s not what I . . .” She shakes her head. “I didn’t mean you had to apologize. It just is what it is.” She sighs
and scoots forward in her chair until her feet hit the ground. “It just . . . it felt strange to realize that you didn’t know
this big thing about Jackson, you know? Like what if you ran into him in Cambridge or something? So I told you. I guess I
didn’t want you to come back and be caught off guard.”
“I get it.” And I do. I can follow her logic. Maybe I even would have done the same thing in her shoes. “I’m sorry I wasn’t
as emotionally mature as you were expecting.”
She smiles a little. “Well, I’m sorry I told you at a party full of other people.”
“Oh, are we apologizing?” Yasmin appears around the side of the shack, still in their running gear, still breathing quickly.
“Hey, Harlowe.”
“Hey.” I give Yasmin a rueful smile. “And yes. I am currently apologizing for losing my shit at you guys.”
“Cool.” Yasmin tips their baseball cap back on their head. “I’m listening.”
I blow my breath out until I can feel my lungs turning concave. “I think I got in my head about the fact that you’d been hanging out with Jackson all summer while I was . . . here.”
Yasmin raises an eyebrow. “Well, yeah, but that’s why we came out here. To visit you. Because we miss you.”
“I know.” I run a hand over my face. “I miss you too. I do. I just . . . I guess maybe I don’t know how to do any of this
either. Us without Jackson. Without sticking you in the middle.”
Yasmin pulls off their hat, running a hand through their hair. “Yeah, well. If there was a guidebook for navigating your best
friends’ breakup, I’d buy it.” They squint out at the ocean, and then at me. “In the meantime, I think we just fumble.”
Relief settles on me like aloe on a burn. “I can fumble.”
“I think we’ve all proved we can fumble,” Rika says. She pushes herself out of the Adirondack chair. “But right now, I need
to eat. We haven’t had breakfast yet.”
“Yeah, I just gotta shower.” Yasmin tugs on their T-shirt, fanning themself with it. “And then we could go look for a place.”
“Well, actually . . .” I pull out my phone to check the time. “I was going to ask if you guys wanted to get brunch. There’s
a place in P-town I think you might like.”
“Is it gay?” Rika asks.
“The entertainment is.”
“In that case,” she says, heading for the shack, “I am very much in.”
I take Rika and Yasmin to drag brunch at Queen of the Bay, where we drink mimosas and eat pretentious egg dishes and make
ourselves hoarse cheering for performers decked out in sequins and feathers and platform heels, lip-syncing to Cyndi Lauper,
ABBA, and Tina Turner.
And then, finally, I drive them up Spyglass Beach Way to the clearing at the top.
We walk to the little cottage, and I unlock the door and take them inside and we spend the rest of the afternoon sitting in the small living room—me and Rika on the couch, Yasmin lying on the floor.
We talk about Yasmin’s hospital shifts, the trials Rika is working on at the lab, and I make them both laugh by recounting the kickball matches.
We don’t talk about Jackson, but it’s different now. It’s no longer something awkward we’re talking around, something we’re
too scared to look at directly. It’s more like a box we’ve moved to the attic. A box we might remember someday and reopen,
but for now, we can let it collect dust.
Finally, Rika asks the thing I’ve been dreading: “When are you coming back?”
I look down at the glass of water I’m holding in my hands. “I haven’t found a place yet.”
“But isn’t your lease here almost up?”
“Yeah. It is.”
“You can always crash with us if you need to,” Yasmin says.
I knew that I could, but it makes me feel better to hear it. “Thanks.”
“Have you tried looking in Roslindale?” Rika asks, pulling out her phone. “A couple folks in the lab just moved there. It
seems cool. Cheaper. And you have a car so not being that close to the T wouldn’t be a huge deal . . .”
I nod along, but I feel strangely like I almost can’t follow. As though I’ve forgotten pieces of the language we all used
to speak—the language of subways and Ubers and night skies that never turn truly dark. As though when I wasn’t looking, I
became someone who lives by the ocean, who drives down empty, winding roads, who pauses to watch sunsets and notices the level
of the tide.
“We can always go look at a place for you, if you find one you like,” Rika says.
“Thanks,” I say again, and try very hard to smile.
Yasmin sighs and sits up. “We should go.” They poke Rika’s leg. “I hate to say it, babe, but we still gotta pack.”
“Yeah, I know.” Rika stands up, tucking her phone back in her pocket. “I still can’t believe you got to spend a whole summer
next to a freaking beach, Harlowe.”
“I know,” I say, pushing myself up. There’s a weight on my lungs, heavy and dragging. “Neither can I.”