Chapter 14
Fourteen
When Nikki was sixteen, I found a half-eaten granola bar wrapped in a paper towel at the bottom of the bathroom trash can. It wasn’t the granola bar that bothered me; it was that it had been chewed and spit out.
Back then, I didn’t recognize it for what it was.
I’d convinced myself it was one of her weird teenage experiments, like when she tried to cut her own hair with kitchen scissors or decided she could “manifest” better skin by drinking celery juice for a week.
But the truth had been right in front of me, and I hadn’t wanted to see it.
“Stop hovering,” she’d snapped one night when I followed her into the kitchen after dinner, pretending to look for a glass of water.
“I’m not hovering,” I’d said, which is exactly what a person who is hovering says.
She’d turned from the sink, face pale under the fluorescent light. “There’s nothing wrong, Nat. I don’t know why you don’t believe me.”
The words landed like a bruise. She didn’t sound angry, just tired. Tired of me watching. Tired of feeling whatever this was that she was feeling.
Sometimes that memory sneaks up on me when I least expect it, like tonight, when we’re all at the dinner table and everything is objectively fine and we’re talking about Nikki dyeing her hair.
“I want a change,” she insisted, pressing her hands into the table. “Some people cut their hair when they go through a breakup. I am, in a way, breaking up with my ED, but I don’t want to cut my hair, because that’s too dramatic. So, I’m thinking red—but not red red, like an orange red.”
“Sure.” Mom nodded. “Why not like a chestnut brown or a black?”
“Black hair would make me look like Matilda,” Nikki stated, as if she’d already foreseen it and decided against it.
I sniggered. “Better Matilda than Leeloo from The Fifth Element.”
“Lee-who?” Nikki groaned.
“Not Leewho, Leeloo,” Mom sputtered between laughs, and eventually the three of us were cackling like hyenas, holding our sides with tears in our eyes.
Moments like these were coming more often, but there was still a part of me that wanted to bottle it up in a jar and store it away, as if I would need it in the future.
For what, I wasn’t sure, but there were times I found myself looking upward without even realizing it, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Those moments still lingered.
“Fine, maybe I’ll just get a trim,” Nikki scoffed.
“You’re born to be a blond,” I reassured her. “Like Elle Woods.”
We finished dinner, and to my relief, no shoe had dropped.
“I have exciting news,” Mom said as we were clearing the table. Nikki had her hands elbows deep in the sink washing the Corningware while I scraped leftover chicken into Gracie’s bowl.
“Oh yeah?” I perked up. “Do tell.”
“There was a last-minute withdrawal from the Furman Gallery showing next Friday, so they want to replace it with my On the Bay series.” She paused and finally let herself beam with excitement while the news set in to us.
“Obviously it goes without saying that I’d love for you two to be at the showing with me. ”
“This means I get to buy a new dress!” Nikki squealed in delight.
“That’s great, Mom.” I returned her smile. “You deserve it.”
“Oh, can we bring dates?” Nikki asked, dancing around in circles while Gracie tried to keep up.
“You mean Alec?” I chided Nikki.
“Who’s Alec?” Mom raised an eyebrow at her.
“No.” Nikki groaned. “I’m not dating Alec. Besides, he won’t even be here, he has to go back to Stanford for some smart-people convention. I meant you could bring Brooklyn, Nat.”
“Pot calling the kettle black. We’re not dating either. We’re hanging out.” I waved a dishrag around.
There was a pause, and I caught sight of Nikki out of the corner of my eye, still grinning.
“Maybe you two can hang out at the gallery, then,” Mom stated plainly, but she and Nikki traded scheming glances. “He seemed nice.”
“Oh yes, he’s very nice.” Nikki jabbed me in the side again, her grin widening by the second.
“All right, all right.” I held my hands up in defense. “If I ask him, will you two conniving creatures leave me alone?”
“Only after we go shopping,” Nikki insisted. “I need a dress, you need a dress, we all need dresses.”
“Okay, Oprah, calm down.” I chuckled. “We’ll get dresses.”
>> <<
In literature, pathetic fallacy is the use of weather to reflect tone or mood.
Typically it was applied in a negative way, such as a storm to imply something detrimental or foreboding.
But sitting out on the beach on a Saturday at the end of June, with the sun warm and high and glinting like diamonds against the water’s surface, I thought maybe for once pathetic fallacy could be good. Genuinely good.
Nikki and I had met Brooklyn, Alec, Stella, and a few of Stella’s college friends out at the beach by Sixth Street mid-morning (after going out of our way to pick up Bad Beans).
Alec had been constructing a massive sandcastle (half child, half engineer), and Nikki eagerly skipped over to him, leaving me to the conveniently open lounge chair beside Brooklyn.
Third Eye Blind played from a speaker clipped to his backpack hanging between the two chairs, and I dropped into it with a sigh.
“Not a bad way to spend a Saturday,” he remarked, sipping his iced latte.
“Unless you forgot your sunglasses,” I responded as I rummaged through my beach bag past a few bags of chips and my notebook. “I’ll have to go back and get them.”
“Oh, wait.” Brooklyn leaned over the side of his chair to dig through his bag, then produced a worn-out Clayton baseball cap in the school’s black and teal colors. He slapped it onto my head with a grin. “All better.”
“I feel traitorous.” I chuckled, adjusting the brim to shield my eyes.
“No, stylish.”
His grin widened as he sat back in his lounge chair. Sweat glistened on his bare chest, and the way his sternum rose and fell with each breath, so calm and steady, was entrancing. Before I realized I had been gawking at him, he gave me a knowing glance over the tops of his sunglasses.
“You like what you see?”
I stiffened a bit, but let the faintest smirk grace my face. “It’s . . . you’re getting burned.”
“Oh. I’ll live.” He gave me a knowing smirk before settling back in his chair again.
He had me under a goddamn spell, and maybe he knew it.
Time slowed when we were together, and nothing more than his presence made me feel so safe and so secure.
I didn’t have to try so hard to prevent bad things from happening, and I could simply be me.
Nobody had ever given me that feeling before. I wondered if it would ever go away.
I reached back into my bag for my notebook, hoping the weather and the vibes would inspire me somehow.
I took in my surroundings—Stella and two of her friends lying on towels, with hats and shirts over their heads; Nikki trying to follow along as Alec built up more sections of his sandcastle; a teenage couple beside us on a towel, giggling as they ran their hands all over each other.
I clicked and clacked my pen about a thousand times, scribbling little hearts in the margins of my notebook instead of actual words.
“What are you writing over there?” Brooklyn asked.
“Literally not a damn thing.” I sighed and snapped my notebook shut. “The words aren’t coming today. Or this month, for that matter. But I’ve learned you can’t force it, otherwise you’re probably going to hate what you write.”
“Very wise.” Brooklyn nodded, pursing his lips. “Not that I can really relate, since I was technically supposed to be a corporate accountant, right?”
“I cannot see you as an accountant, all stuffy suits and business meetings and asking your secretary to get your coffee five times a day. You’re too—”
“Devil may care?” He slid his sunglasses down the bridge of his nose. I shook my head, but he continued. “It’s okay, you can say it. It’s not like that’s really what I wanted to do, but I was good at math, so it made sense.”
I sat up straight in the lounge chair and put my finger beside a ladybug that had crawled up the side of the chair. “What would you have done, then? Like if you had an honest to god calling, what would it be?”
“I used to think it was baseball. I’m sure at some point someone somewhere told me I was good at it and I should stick with it, but I really did like it. I didn’t feel obligated or pressured to do it, and I was good. Like, really good. Now, I have no idea.”
Uncharacteristic sadness lingered in his voice, and it clenched my heart.
“You don’t have to know,” I said softly, watching the ladybug crawl onto my finger and then flutter away. “I wanted to be a marine biologist when I was younger. Then I realized I was totally afraid of the ocean, and that went out the window.”
That got Brooklyn to laugh, and hearing it made a sense of ease wash over me like a wave. It was an ease that I had almost gotten used to. An ease I felt only when I was around him.
“But you know now.” He gestured to the notebook still in my lap.
“I guess so.” I pulled my knees into my chest. “I like telling stories, but actual success can feel so intangible. I’ve been reaching out to agents for weeks and not even had one person interested in more of my anthology.
That’s why I’m trying to write something new, but—” I waved my notebook around. “No words.”
I paused when I felt his eyes still on me. My heart pounded against my chest like it wanted to escape and leap right into his hands.
“What?”
Brooklyn slumped back into his chair and ran his hands down his face. “I feel like I’ve wasted so much time already with all my bullshit.”
“I understand that. Sometimes I get nervous that I’ll blink and suddenly I’ll be my mom’s age but I’ve done nothing.”
“We’re so young. We’re not even old enough for quarter-life crises.” Brooklyn sighed. “But I definitely don’t feel young.”
The air was heavy with heat and humidity, but the silence that followed was heavier.
I knew I had to ask him to come to the gallery showing, and I knew he’d say yes.
That wasn’t what made my stomach turn over.
Despite agreeing how fine everything was between us, something lingered in the air every time we were together.
We continuously circled each other like wayward asteroids, and I wondered if it was only a matter of time before we collided.
I took a long sip of my iced latte to cool myself off. “Speaking of, my mom actually has this art gallery thing next week. I don’t know if the art gallery scene is really your thing, but if you want—”
“I’d love to come.” Brooklyn cut me off, and a toothy grin stretched across his face. “I’ve got a really great judgy art face.”
He dramatically stroked his chin with his fingers and scrunched his eyebrows before letting out a long sigh. “I find this piece to be very lacking in purpose.”
“You’re missing There’s too much white space or some other pretentious comment like that.
” I laughed. “My mom isn’t like that, though.
She’s different. All my life she’s been the happiest, most positive person I know.
But you can’t be like that all the time, right?
Like, all the negativity has to go somewhere, and when you see her paintings, you can really feel them.
They’re raw and vulnerable, and I guess that’s better than the right amount of white space or color tone or anything else. ”
Brooklyn nudged me. “Now you really sound like an artist.”
“Oh no!”
Ahead of us, Alec’s sandcastle had collapsed, and he and Nikki scrambled to save whatever was left of the turrets and . . . was that a moat with a bridge?
“Guess we better go help them.” Brooklyn stood up and offered me his hand, like he already had so many times before.
I smiled and didn’t hesitate, but I let our palms linger for a moment when he pulled me up. Maybe we’d already collided, and we didn’t even know it.