four
This Summer
Davi ends up falling into one of what, in college, we called his daily comas on the couch, his phone clasped to his chest
even in that dead-to-the-world, snoring sleep that made him miss class on more than one occasion. Something about it makes
this week feel a little more normal, until Laurel’s emails turn into a hushed phone call with her manager, one she shoos me
out of her room for. I return to my room where I answer my Uncle Hank’s text asking if we’ve arrived safely, unpack my things
into the dresser and closet, stare at the ceiling for a while. Usually, by this time, Laurel and I would be drinking wine
on the back deck, laughing about something. Or at least talking. By six thirty, I send Gabe out to pick up the pizza order
I placed, leaving me with a newly revived Davi at the counter and a pit of dread in my stomach at Everett’s impending arrival.
“I see Laurel did the shopping,” Davi says as I search through the pantry where Laurel shoved the two paper bags of groceries she’d carried in this afternoon.
I grabbed fixings for a salad at the store earlier while Laurel stuffed Cheez-It crackers and popcorn, protein bars and Fritos into the cart.
Back home, she’s a devout subscriber to every meal delivery service on the planet—at least those that aren’t currently sponsoring her.
Her fridge is stocked with things like ready-made kelp salads and smoothie cups she only has to add coconut water to, but when left to her own devices, she is exclusively a grazer of packaged goods.
I toss him a bag of honey-mustard pretzels. “She got you your favorite.”
“I knew I loved her for a reason,” Davi says, ripping the bag open.
I rake my dark blond hair into a ponytail before grabbing plates out of the cupboard and setting them on the counter, collect
a handful of forks out of the drawer and arrange them in a perfect fan, line up five water glasses and five wineglasses next
to that. When I turn around Davi is watching me, eyebrow raised.
“What.”
Davi holds up the hand he just used to pull a pretzel out of the bag, the fingers covered in the yellowy powder that coats
his favorite snack splayed. “Nothing,” he says. “You just seem a little on edge, that’s all.”
“Well, I’m not,” I say. I can tell by Davi’s expression that the strained edge in my voice is fully evident. “I’m fine.”
“Yeah,” Davi says. “I know that I’m always at my peak when I’m about to see an ex.”
“Everett Bridges is not my ex,” I snap quickly.
Davi grins, crunching on a pretzel. “If Laurel hears you using his last name this week you’re going to be in troooouble.”
I draw in a steadying breath, rest my palms on the counter behind me for support before I say anything else. When I do, Davi
still looks amused. “I’m fine. I feel fine about spending this week with . . . him.”
“You’re going to have to land on Everett at some point, sweetie,” Davi says. “Or we’re all in for another disaster.”
I hear Laurel’s footsteps start to descend the stairs at that moment, her timing impeccable.
I can’t be sure if Davi is referring only to what happened five years ago, or to one of the several incidents that have occurred since, but either way it doesn’t surprise me that he’s the one bringing up the obvious tension in the room.
Davi tends to be the bluntest among us. But even so, it rattles me, this reminder that, probably, I’m not the only one who has what happened at the forefront of my mind.
“Everything okay?” I ask Laurel when she appears and stops next to Davi with a slight crease between her eyebrows.
“Fine,” she says almost absentmindedly, eyes scanning the kitchen. “Do we have wine?”
“Gabe’s grabbing some,” I say. Laurel nods, clearly distracted. “Did you and your manager get everything figured out?”
“Oh, sure,” she says. She sits down next to Davi and digs her hand into the bag he offers her. “Just finalizing the details
for the post announcing the divorce on Friday.”
Davi and I exchange a quick glance before we look back at her.
I’d anticipated Laurel’s mood might be less than her usual bubbliness this week, had thought it would be a trip spent taking
long walks on the beach, talking, drinking too much, maybe burning a picture or two of Stephen. But instead, she’d asked me
to organize it as if we were re-creating every one of our old traditions in this place.
It seems she intends this week to be a celebration, which would be fine, great, even, except for the fact that none of us
has any idea what happened between her and Stephen. So while there’s been plenty of the usual Laurel—bubbly, bright, happy—there
have also been pockets of this in the last several months. Some air of distractedness around her, a glimpse of a sadness she
staunchly denies feeling at all.
“Do you have to announce the divorce?” Davi asks as Laurel takes the bag of pretzels from him. “I mean, isn’t not announcing kind of the cool new announcement?”
“I think that’s for baby announcements,” Laurel says, tone gone light. That’s the thing about these moments: They slip away
quickly, and usually after someone else asks a follow-up question, makes it clear they’ve noticed the shift in her mood.
There’s a beep at the door, the mechanical whir of the dead bolt unlocking. For a half second, I hope it might just be Gabe.
Fifty-fifty odds aren’t the worst I’ve ever had. But if this were a horse race I’d lose, because it isn’t the shoulders of
a former high school football star and a stack of pizza boxes coming through the door. It is instead a head of thick, golden-brown
hair pushed back by a pair of sunglasses, cold-weather gray eyes underneath, a long-sleeved black T-shirt with the sleeves
pushed up, the last suitcase to arrive set by the table in the entryway. It’s a Bronco-driving, surfing, amusingly charming,
infuriating film director. It is, despite Davi’s warnings, him.
“Everett!” Laurel crows, hopping off her stool to greet him.
“Hey,” Everett says, setting his sunglasses and keys on the table before he wraps an arm around her shoulders, envy shooting
through me. Not that Laurel is hugging him, but that he is hugging Laurel, that their own friendship that has nothing to do with me or the rest of us is on full display.
I know that they see each other more often than the rest of us, simply because they both live in Los Angeles and frequently overlap
when they’re traveling, because they’re friends. We all are, I remind myself.
“How are you doing?” Everett asks when they release each other. The fact that Everett gets to ask this at all grates on me.
After probably the twentieth time I asked her, Laurel told me in a fit of uncharacteristic exasperation that she’d delete
my number if I didn’t stop asking her how she was doing.
“I’m okay,” Laurel says. “Glad we’re all here.”
“Me too,” Everett says, eyes drifting over her shoulder to mine. “Hi.”
“Hi,” I say, tucking my hands into the back pockets of my jeans and shifting between my feet. I don’t wave. We don’t hug.
Just, hi, hi, before it goes silent between us.
“Okay, we’re all adults,” Laurel says. She waves us together. “Hug and make up.”
It takes a beat for either of us to step forward, but when we do, it’s to practically collide in the middle, all elbows and
shoulders and nothing fitting like it used to. I pat his back once, in what I think is a friendly move, but skepticism is
painted all over Laurel’s face when we pull apart. She is unconvinced.
“Are you good?” Everett asks, head ducked a little toward me. This, at least, is familiar. And he is too, I suppose, of course
he is, but I don’t want him to be. I don’t want to feel anything at the steel gray of his eyes, the pine and salt and cinnamon scent that’s now impossible to escape given his proximity. But
I do feel something. Irritation. A bristle up my spine, heat coiling in my stomach, a reminder that, try as I have for five
whole years, I haven’t let that last summer go.
“I’m good,” I say—or snap, I can’t tell. There’s a sound like waves crashing in the distance rushing around in my ears, a
painful tick in my throat. “Are you good?”
“Great,” he says, voice matching mine. A little annoyed, but trying to hide it.
“Fine,” I say.
“Fine,” he repeats, and this is why you don’t hook up with, date, or become otherwise romantically intwined with your friends. Because you’ll end up standing
across from each other repeating things like fine at thirty-two years old.
Luckily, the front door opens at that moment and Gabe comes walking back in, pizza boxes in hand, another box from the wine shop next to it balanced precariously on top. Everett and I step markedly away from each other.
“Just in the nick of time,” Laurel says on a barely stifled sigh. I step forward to help with the boxes, but Everett does
at the same time, and we’re knocking into each other again.
“I’ve got it,” I say as I grab the pizza out of Gabe’s hands a little roughly. The box on top starts to shift and Everett,
being disappointingly closest to me, grabs it before it falls, bottles clinking together inside. I pivot on my heel and march
back toward the kitchen.
“Looks like things are going well here,” I hear Gabe say in a low voice to Laurel at the same moment I realize Everett is
following me, wine box in hand.
He sets it on the island, clearly trying to communicate something with me through the intense, pointed expression he’s wearing.
I ignore him and slide the pizza into the oven and set it to its lowest temperature, turning back toward the fridge, but there’s
a chest in my way.
“Excuse me,” I say, not looking at him, but he doesn’t move. I tilt my head back to stare up at him, frowning. “I told Laurel
I’d make a salad.”
“We have to play nice this week,” he says, tone warning. His voice is only loud enough for me to hear, but I look around him
to the foyer to check and see if anyone else might have heard. Davi joined Laurel and Gabe, and they’re laughing about something.
“This week isn’t about us,” I say.
“Exactly,” Everett replies. “So we can’t make it about us by bickering all the time.”
“I don’t think we’re bickering,” I say.
One of Everett’s brows tugs upward, doubtful. “How’d you do with those pizza boxes?”
“Great, thank you.”
I can see one corner of his mouth twitch bitterly, and I’m surprised at the thrill that runs through me, like I’ve won. I
don’t like it.
“We’ll play nice,” I say. I wave a hand around him, shooing. “Now may I please get to the fridge?”
“Of course,” Everett says in far too cheery a voice, pivoting on one foot to let me past. “Do you need help?”
Yes. No. Not from you. I smile tightly. “Sure.”
Laurel plops onto one of the island stools as Everett washes his hands before I hand him an apple and a knife. Gabe claps
a hand on his shoulder as he walks into the kitchen, and Everett momentarily sets down what I’ve given to him to hug him hello,
exchange greetings with Davi.
“Seems like everyone’s getting along?” Laurel says, catching my eye as I yank a bunch of kale out of its bag with a little
too much force.
“Mmm-hmm,” I say, ripping the leaves from their stems. “Everything’s great.”
“Can we get to talking now?” Davi asks as Everett returns to the cutting board, picking up the knife.
“Have you been sitting here in silence?” he asks.
“That’s exactly what I said,” Davi exclaims, throwing Laurel a wide-eyed stare.
“We were waiting for you to arrive,” I say, and it’s not the words exactly, but the tone in which they slide out of my mouth
that turns it into a barbed comment. Which, depressingly, makes it all the easier to keep going. “No earlier flights?”
“You know, I tried to convince Delta to make Dubrovnik to Los Angeles their headline flight, but it wasn’t really the boon they were hoping for,” Everett says.
Again, a sarcastic comment that might have gotten a laugh from me before, but now is delivered with enough vitriol laced into it that I rip into the next piece of kale like I’m trying to tear a flag down.
“You were in Croatia?” I ask when I see Laurel eyeing me.
“Filming the next movie,” Gabe says. He’s rounded the counter and is pulling wine bottles out of the box, stashing whites
in the fridge and uncorking a red.
“Have things been as rough as they were a month ago?” Davi asks Everett, and I am suddenly on the outside. It’s clear the
four of them have their own group separate from the five of us, just like I do with Gabe, Laurel, and Davi. Just like I never
wanted to happen.
“You didn’t have to come straight here,” Laurel says, skipping over Davi’s question. “You’ve got to be so jet-lagged.”
“Are you kidding?” Everett says, slicing into the apple. “Wouldn’t miss this. And things wrapped up fine,” he says to Davi.
“But I’m glad to be off a film set for a while.”
Gabe pours everyone wine while I finish the salad, Everett grabbing the goat cheese from the fridge while I make the dressing
in a move that feels competitively helpful.
Everett sets a salad bowl in front of me. I yank it a little too harshly and have to catch it before it careens to the floor
and we have to explain broken porcelain to Ralph. When I straighten, Laurel is watching me, assessing. I clear my throat and
set the bowl on the island, forcing a smile onto my face. Everett is right. We have to play nice this week, even if that’s
all it is. Pretend.