Chapter 25
When Maggie woke up on Saturday morning, her mouth still tasted like margaritas. Friday’s taco night dinner at the Serendipity House had left her with a hangover, but there was a lightness to it, a brightness that hadn’t been there yet this summer.
PJ’s signature guacamole was spicy, Quinn’s signature margaritas were sweet, and Maggie felt balanced knowing she could look around the room and not be afraid to make eye contact with Liz, or worry about accidentally sitting next to her on the couch, hoping Liz wasn’t hating her guts.
It felt like rolling her shoulders down her back, unclenching. Maggie had spent so much time worried about Liz, their silence. Holding a grudge was a chore in and of itself. Yesterday was a much-needed course correction, back on the track they’d laid as kids.
During last night’s pregame, the friends told stories and sipped cocktails, played games and gave dares. Brenna obliged and took a tequila shot out of the refried bean can, the residual legumes tinting the liquor with flair. When their favorite We The Kings song from tenth grade came on, they even remembered their choreographed dance. Well, a few moves from it, at least.
As the sun set and the stars appeared, the friends took their party to the streets. It was their last Fire Island weekend and they wanted to kick it off in quintessential Ocean Beach barhopping fashion. First was Albatross, a dive bar where they ordered a round of Rocket Fuels. Per tradition, Brenna and Liz took turns swinging the squiggly shaped lamps that dangled from the ceiling whenever the staff weren’t looking. The lamps hovered low over the bar counter and would wave like pendulums. A row of dartboards lined the back wall, and when PJ won the round, Maggie signed “Serendipity” in loopy scrawl on the dart blackboard. The Island Mermaid was their second stop; the restaurant right on the water was soundtracked in the evenings by a live band. They ended the night at Housers, which turned into a nightclub, and the friends danced and took shots. Georgie and PJ bought a round for a pair of brunettes at the bar while Maggie, Liz, Brenna, and Quinn formed a dance circle they didn’t break for a sweaty hour.
It was the summer night a friend group dreams about, when nothing matters except the laughter and the memories and the music. When you feel like, together, you could take on anything.
As long as you didn’t harp on what was missing.
Mac and Cam.
Cam had stayed back for the night, in very un-Cam-like fashion. Liz told the friends that he was coming down with a headache and wanted to sleep it off, at the risk of it bleeding into the engagement party day. But on the walk home, as Liz and Maggie drunkenly stumbled past a couple of deer lying in the park by the town hall, an Ocean Beach trademark, Liz told Maggie the truth. She’d overheard Cam earlier on the phone with Mac. He seemed stressed, which made Liz stressed, too.
Before they left for the bars, Liz had tried to talk to Cam about Domus again, but this time he was the one who pulled away. He claimed he needed to figure out a few other things first.
Liz was nervous.
Maggie promised her that it would all be okay, but what else could Maggie do?
She stood by Liz’s side, tried to distract her with a night out. But Maggie was nervous, too. If Liz and Cam broke up, would it be the end of their East Meadow friend group? Would the guys and girls fissure, the group puncture back to the way it had been in middle school? Was this the dawning of the end of an era as they knew it?
Rubbing the sleep out of her eyes, Maggie yawned, donned a bikini and cover-up, and headed down to the kitchen, where she found her roommates. Brenna and Quinn were flipping pancakes, scrambling eggs. Maggie grabbed a yellow Gatorade from the fridge and checked the large farmhouse clock.
There was another Peters boy to fret about first.
Maggie had half an hour until Mac’s ferry arrived. He’d decided to come in Saturday morning with his parents and his grandma, to help load their car with supplies and make sure they were settled in their own rental for the weekend. She needed to talk to Mac as soon as he got to town, to smooth things over before the rest of the house exploded.
“Order up.” Quinn’s voice shook Maggie out of her thoughts as she slid a pancake-covered plate down the counter. “You ready?”
“Define ‘ready,’?” Maggie said. “I think he’ll maybe hate me forever.”
“Maybe,” Brenna said. “But you still have to give him the chance.”
“Chances, shmances,” Maggie said, mouth full of banana-chocolate-chip pancake, but she knew Brenna was right.
“And you and Liz?” Quinn said. “Last night felt like old times.”
“Which we’re happy about,” Brenna added.
“Me, too.” Maggie smiled. “Here’s hoping this is the summer of forgiveness.”
“Starting with my body forgiving my brain for those shots,” Quinn laughed.
“Last weekend out here, gotta end it with a bang.”
“More like a splash,” Georgie suddenly shouted as he barged down the stairs. He had a portable speaker in one hand and timed it so that right as he entered the kitchen, “Surfin’ USA” blasted through the house.
Maggie cocked her head. “Have you been standing there waiting for a good cue?”
“Nope! Just lucky timing.” Georgie did a little dance in his board shorts.
“This is actually doing wonders for my headache,” Maggie said with a laugh.
“Okay, Georgie. What’s going on?” Brenna asked.
“I met a girl.”
“Ah,” Maggie said. “The beginning of every great story.”
“I met a girl last night and she told me that there’s Jet Skis at the marina. For rent. We’re doing it.” Georgie turned the music up even louder, causing PJ to appear in the hallway behind him, pajama-clad and hair askew, but smiling.
“I surprisingly don’t hate a musical wake-up,” PJ said. “Where were these all summer?”
“Two words, people. Jet. Skis. That actually might be one word. I’m not sure about the hyphen status. Let’s go.”
Before long, in a moment of beautiful spontaneity, the group had changed into appropriate water-wear and were walking to the marina. Everyone except Cam and Mac, that is. Mac was on the inbound ferry with his parents, and Cam had gone straight to his family’s rental house to make sure everything was set for their arrival. He’d said it was a one-man job, no reason for Liz to miss out on the fun.
The sun was hot already, and Maggie could hear her friends drafting a text for Georgie to send to the girl from last night. They debated verbiage and punctuation, the strongest starting word.
For Maggie, their voices went in one ear and straight out the other. All she could focus on was attempting to settle the rubber-band ball of nerves in her stomach. The anticipation of seeing Mac again was just as terrifying and as electrifying and as annoying as it had been when she first moved home.
The friends got to the dock as the ferry pulled in, shouting greetings as the deckhands tied the boat to the dock. “The Peters have arrived!” “Hi, Grandma Peach!” “Mr. and Mrs. Peters, you made it!”
Mac’s face was tan, his hair longer. He smiled as he helped his grandma down the ferry’s steps, as he piled their bags into their folding wire cart.
Maggie snuck out her phone as she looked at him, overwhelmed with words.
I love how he helps his family. How he always helps us all. He’s a prince and he’s charming, but I know by now that he’ll never be mine. I’m not in love with Mac, but maybe I did love the story. A fairy tale, friends to lovers. But it was only ever fiction.
She felt her hands shaking as the Peters family approached.
“Maggie, it’s been so long. I was pleased to hear you’d moved back home,” Roseanne said, pushing her sunglasses to the top of her head. She was beach casual chic, cream linen culottes and a simple black tank. Roseanne was nothing if not put together.
“And how lucky for us, to have you record tonight’s party, too,” Mr. Peters chimed in.
“I really can’t wait,” Maggie said. “Thanks for inviting me.”
“Of course, dear. Well, we better get going. We’ll see you tonight—make sure your dancing shoes are ready, kids!”
Before Mac could turn to head off with his family, Maggie made herself speak. “Hey, Mac, could I talk to you for a sec?”
He looked quickly at his mom, who nodded. “I’ll be at the house in a few. This won’t take long,” he said. Daggers to Maggie’s confidence, but she powered through. She had to say this now, before she ruined anything else. The final apology.
“So, what’s up, Maggie? What do you want to talk about?” Mac’s voice was light, but she could tell it was only because he was trying to make it sound that way. They hadn’t spoken since July.
“Can we walk?”
He looked over his shoulder in the direction of his family as they shrank from view.
“It’ll be quick, promise,” Maggie said.
Mac shrugged, relenting, and followed her down Bay Walk. When they passed Rachel’s Bakery, the quaint yet delicious coffee shop and pastry store, Maggie suggested they stop for a quick iced coffee.
“I really don’t have much time, Maggie.”
“Just one coffee.”
“Fine,” Mac agreed, “but only because I slept at my parents’ last night and my grandma wakes up before dawn. The TV has been on since three a.m., I swear.”
Maggie bought them two iced coffees, trying to bolster her nerves. She wanted to call attention to the extra-large piece of crumb cake with MM’s on it right next to the cash register, ease the tension, but she resisted.
Sitting down outside the bakery, she braced herself for the potential end of MM.
“I don’t know if you remember this, but when I first floated the idea of transferring to UCLA, you immediately told me to go for it. No questions asked. I remember being so stunned that you’d be so easily supportive of me moving that far. To a whole new time zone and everything. But you never made me feel guilty. Never made me feel less sure.”
“Sometimes you have to go far to get close to your dreams,” Mac said, and Maggie ignored the familiar instinct to tease him for saying something so cutely clichéd. Maybe once they were friends again, they could return to their rhythm.
She kept going: “I can’t apologize for leaving you guys, for breaking up, for moving to LA. But I never should have led you on when I came back.”
Mac stared at his knees. “I always liked you, Maggie. You didn’t lead me anywhere.”
“I liked you, too. It was scary back then. I didn’t want to mess it up. You were Mac Peters, for Christ’s sake. The Mac Peters. The freaking king of Long Island,” she teased, a dare now just to see if he would smile.
He did.
“And it could have been perfect,” Maggie went on. “Me and you and Liz and Cam. But then it fizzled, remember? And yet after I had gone, I always missed you. Missed what you represented here. What might have happened if I stayed. So, when everything turned sideways in LA, when I felt like I was at my lowest, I wanted the closest thing I’d ever had to perfection. I wanted you.”
Mac took a sip of his coffee, the ice cubes rattling. Maggie couldn’t stop now.
“I’m sorry that I confused things. I used my own quarter-life crisis against you, to twist things up that could have just been simple. It was selfish. I never wanted to get in the way of things with you and Robyn.”
“Robyn and I weren’t meant to be.”
“I sadly don’t think we are either. Not anymore. I’m so sorry, Mac. I just miss you. Our friendship. I hated life without you in LA. I hate life even more without you here. I think I wanted to see what would have happened to us, for us, if I stayed. But now I wish I could take it all back and just start over. I’m so afraid that if I lose you, I’ll lose all of this, too.”
Maggie realized that was why her bones shook when she saw Mac. Why her stomach tossed and turned.
She’d thought it was because she still had feelings for him.
In reality? Maggie shook because she was afraid of him. Afraid of what life would look like if he vanished from it again.
If all of her East Meadow friends did.
Mac had been her most recent rock, her home base, her way back into the group after things went sour with Liz. Maggie had taken him for granted. No wonder Liz had held it against her for so long. When Mac had given Maggie nothing but kindness and love and friendship, how had she repaid him? All of them?
By falling out of touch. By throwing it away.
Now Maggie was throwing it all back to Mac at last, and she just hoped he’d catch her. It wasn’t a typical profession of love; growing up in the same town as someone didn’t mean you had to be soul mates. She knew that now. It was okay if that sort of love didn’t last forever. There was room to change and grow, to morph into something new.
Maggie just hoped that Mac would want that, too.
He sat silently, and she braced herself.
But then he did the unthinkable. He turned toward her, and he kissed her on the cheek. “I love you, M. You’re the best. But you have to know by now, after this summer especially. You don’t need me as your boyfriend to have a home in New York.” Her breath caught but he continued. “I’m sorry, too. I wasn’t welcoming either when you first came back. I needed space from you when I was with Robyn. Then she left and, well, I guess I’d been deluding myself a bit, too. It felt easy to think you were the answer, plopped back in my life when I needed it most.” Mac shook his head.
“What do you mean?”
He inhaled. “I was mad at you for not being honest with me, but I haven’t been all that honest with myself either. I’ve been feeling off these days, too. Like, nothing I do is right. With Robyn, my knee, my job. When you came home, it reminded me of how things used to be. Of the person I used to be. The person I used to love being.”
“I know the feeling.”
“It’s not so easy, this growing up thing, is it?” Mac gave her a smile, smaller than his signature one but just as kind, just as caring. He looked straight into her eyes.
“It’s definitely not. But we’ll figure it out together,” Maggie said, trying not to let her voice crack.
He laughed, wiped his own eyes. “All right, enough dramatics. Sheesh, Maggie, welcome home. You haven’t changed a bit.” He teased, she laughed, like old times again. “How about you buy me that MM crumb cake and we call this whole thing even?”
She grinned. “You’ve got a deal.”