five
First Summer
I couldn’t find a moment to talk to Everett alone that first night, and that quote from Gatsby kept ringing in my head, about large parties and how there isn’t any privacy at small ones. I’d never been more irritated
with the size of our friend group than when I’d meet him in the kitchen and he’d look at me with a grin like we were in on
the same thing, and suddenly Davi would be there, grabbing another beer from the fridge. Or when he was standing out back
and I hurried to stand next to him only to discover Laurel there too, consoling Gabe. The fact of our small party never bothered
me until I needed to talk to someone alone without drawing attention to it.
But if I thought Everett wouldn’t keep our secret, I underestimated him.
He coolly navigated the whole evening like we’d never met before, shaking my hand and asking what my major was at dinner, while I in turn responded like Laurel did to the Bronco as if I’d never seen it before, demanding we all drive along the coast in it at some point on this trip, and pretended I was surprised to learn he wanted to be a director.
To be fair, that was new. I’d learned he was in film school at the party where we met, but he hadn’t told me exactly what he wanted to do.
I was quickly made aware that whatever casual intimacy I’d felt with him during our one night together was more a result of Everett’s general vibes—easy, sunny, charming—than it was about what we’d learned about each other. Which was to say, very little.
He and Gabe had been friends as kids, I learned, until Gabe moved to Colorado their sophomore year of high school and they
lost touch.
“I didn’t even know he went to Devon until the first day of that Writers of the Beat Generation class I took last semester,”
Gabe said as we sat around the living room on our first night there. “Isn’t that crazy?”
“Crazy,” Laurel repeated before she turned to Everett. “Are you a big fan of the Beats?”
Everett shrugged. “I don’t hate them.”
“On a scale of one to ten, though, how much do you want to be like Jack Kerouac?”
Everett scratched at the back of his head. “I’ve never really considered it.”
“That’s a good answer,” Laurel said, picking up her wineglass again. We’d made our way through most of a box and were all
on the far side of tipsy, save for Everett, who staunchly followed his water-between-drinks rule and was only half as slaphappy
as the rest of us. At Laurel’s comment, he glanced at me where I sat across from him, like I might clarify.
“Laurel has certain red flags,” I said, and ticked some of them off on my fingers. “If they’re too into any male-dominated
artistic movements, if they think they could be president, if they’re too into the ocean.”
“Too into the ocean,” Everett repeated.
“Like, do you want to explore areas you probably don’t need to, not do you want to save it.”
“Do you want to save the oceans, Everett?” Laurel asked, pivoting a wobbly finger his way.
“Of course.”
“Good.”
He smiled at me then, and I smiled back, then glanced quickly around, afraid it was too familiar, but no one was paying attention.
It wasn’t until later that Gabe started to freak out. “Zoey and I were going to get married,” he said. He had a bottle of
some expensive rye whiskey his father had given him as a graduation present next to him and kept tipping more into his glass.
He was the drunkest of anyone, but none of us were stopping him that night. He looked up at us: Davi in the armchair behind
me while I sat on the floor like Gabe. Everett was on the couch over Gabe’s shoulder, Laurel on the other end. “We talked
about it. I was going to propose to her after we’d lived in Denver for a year. After we were more settled. Fuck.” He put his
head in his palms, raking his fingers through his hair. “We were moving to Denver so we could be closer to my family when
we had kids.”
“Oh, sweetie,” Laurel said, sinking down onto the floor and wrapping her arms around Gabe’s wide shoulders. “You’ll have kids
with someone else. Someone who won’t cheat on you with a guy from her biology seminar.”
Gabe looked up. “But you and Sutton would have been in the wedding,” he said. “Davi too. I don’t know—” He waved a hand in
the air toward Everett. “If you and I had started hanging out again, maybe you would have been too.”
“I’m honored,” Everett replied.
“It’s okay,” Davi said. “We’ll still be in your wedding, no matter who you marry. We’ll all be in each other’s weddings. Well,
except mine.”
“The point is, you were also supposed to be in Zoey’s wedding, and now she isn’t even here.” Gabe glanced morosely around at all of us. “I fucked up the whole group.”
“You did not,” I protested.
“I did.”
“Zoey did,” I said. “When she cheated on you.”
“But just on me,” Gabe said. “Not all of you.”
“She broke our trust, though,” I argued. “That’s the point. We don’t do that. We choose each other. Zoey could have broken
up with you and then slept with someone else. She could have talked to you, or any of us, if she was having doubts about your relationship.”
“But wouldn’t that have been just as bad?” Gabe asked. “It still would have changed things between all of us.”
We looked around at each other then. Davi, behind me, shrugged, while Laurel sat back against the couch, thinking.
“Okay,” she finally said, grabbing the bottle from in front of Gabe and pouring some into each of our glasses before she raised
hers. “From here on out, to maintain the sanctity of our friendship and preserve the family we’ve chosen for ourselves, we
will promise not to date or otherwise fornicate with each other.”
“You didn’t need to use the word fornicate,” Davi said. “You never need to use the word fornicate.”
“Oh my god, you get it, though,” Laurel said. “Gabe is right. Dating each other opens the door for things to get messy, no
matter how sure a thing you think something is. And we’re all too important to each other to risk it.”
“Wouldn’t we have slept together by now if we wanted to?” Davi asked.
“I think you protest too much,” Laurel countered.
“I’m just saying,” Davi said. “Are you suddenly going to start dating Gabe?”
“No,” Laurel said. “That’s the whole point. This—” she waved a finger around at all of us “—is too important to me to risk
even considering sleeping with Gabe.”
“Have you ever considered sleeping with Gabe?” Davi asked.
“Why does that matter?”
“I think we should get any past dalliances out in the open.”
“I was faithful to Zoey the whole time,” Gabe said, holding up his hands.
“We know, sweetie,” Laurel said. “And no, I haven’t. Fine, Davi. Anything anyone wants to get out in the open?”
My eye caught Everett’s for half a second. We were all looking at each other, like we expected someone to confess, so the
moment between us went unnoticed as we communicated something across the circle. We weren’t going to tell anyone.
Davi was the one to break the silence. “I had a dream about Sutton once.”
I turned to him, nose wrinkling.
“What?” he said. “I’ve seen you every day for the past three years. I think it’s natural. It doesn’t mean I’m in love with you.”
I shoved off the hand he rubbed on top of my head, rolling my eyes.
“Aside from Davi’s sex dream about Sutton, have any of us ever, even once, done something that could compromise the friendship?”
Laurel asked. “Speak now, or forever hold your peace.”
Another glance at Everett. I wasn’t sure why, if it was the wine and whiskey or some other reason I couldn’t identify, but
it seemed like the same thought passed between us, the same decision being made. That whatever had happened between us didn’t
matter. That the us anyone would know about started now, this weekend, and it could be as simple as that.
“Fine, then,” Laurel said, lifting her glass toward the middle of the table so we could all cheers.
She slung an arm around Gabe’s shoulders.
“Then on this night, we make a pact that we are all off-limits. Friendship only.” She started to push her glass forward to clink it against everyone’s when she realized we were one short and glanced over her shoulder at Everett.
He was sitting with his glass balanced on one knee, fingers settled lightly against its sides.
“You too, Bridges,” she said. “You’re a part of this now.”
“I don’t—” he said, almost hesitantly. “I’m just here for Gabe.”
“No,” Laurel said. “Sorry. You’re one of us. You’ve now promised your first week of June to us from here until forever, and
you can’t sleep with a one of us.”
“Okay,” Everett said. He leaned forward and pressed his glass into our little cheers.
“To friendship!” Laurel said, squeezing her arm tighter around Gabe’s shoulders. “Fuck the rest.”
“Fuck the rest,” we all echoed, and sipped our whiskey. But Everett’s eyes met mine over the rim of his glass, and I felt
it: We would be in on this secret together, forever.
After we made the pact, the only real goal of the week beyond cheering up Gabe was to enjoy this week like it was our last
together.
We stayed up late and woke up late, drinking the coffee whoever got up first made on the back porch while we stretched off
hangovers. Everett excepted, of course, who, beyond that first night, had a hard three-drink limit that he rarely reached.
We declared everything a tradition to be re-created the next summer, and every summer thereafter, because time was endless
then. There were no responsibilities we could fathom that could possibly keep us from this.
On our fifth and second-to-last night there, we all piled into Everett’s car and drove through Topanga Canyon to the nearest In-N-Out, Davi’s vacation playlist pumping through the speakers.
He sat huddled on one side of Gabe in the back, Laurel on the other, and I had to pretend I’d never been in this passenger seat before.
Everett glanced at me as the three in the back sang along to “Sweet Disposition,” alarmingly off-key. “Are you having a good
week?” he asked.
I looked over at him, offering up a smile. I’d been a little standoffish with him since the first day, when talking to him
alone had been all I’d wanted. Whatever silent agreement we’d made stood: No one would know what had happened between us two
months ago. Still, I was having a hard time pretending having him here was normal.
I was the only one, though. I could tell Gabe was thrilled to have his old friend back. It was obvious the two of them had
been close when they were kids, sharing that kind of mutual language you only know when you’ve been young with someone. Davi,
usually stingy with his affection but never one to be left out, quickly got over any lingering doubts he had about this new
person. That, and he was obsessed with Everett’s car. Everett handed him the keys on our second morning there and Davi had
a friend for life.
Laurel was, of course, Laurel about it. Her doubts were erased as soon as she saw Everett. Not that Laurel was altogether
vain, not that Laurel wanted Everett, but a beautiful face could sway her.
And Everett, I was discovering, was beautiful.
I’d known it that first night, that morning I woke up in his room.
But it was something else altogether to see him laughing as he hopped into his car with Gabe to go surfing, or as he paused on a hike high above the ocean to take a long drink from a water bottle, the ocean stretching blue behind him, or as he lay on the sand next to me, chest bare, eyes closed.
Or as he glanced over at me again with one hand casually on the steering wheel, the other arm resting on his window, hair rustling in the breeze as the twilight cast everything in blue.
“I’m having a good week,” I told him. I motioned at the world around us. “Are you having a good time?”
“You didn’t tell me you had such great friends,” he said, voice low.
The top was on the Bronco, but the windows were down, and Laurel, Davi, and Gabe were singing loudly enough that they wouldn’t
have heard Everett even if he’d shouted. Still, it had me seizing up, shifting in my seat.
“They’re the most important thing in the world to me,” I said. I met Everett’s eyes when he glanced at me, almost in a challenge.
“It seems like you all take care of each other.”
“We do,” I said. “We’re family.”
He navigated us around a sharp curve before he spoke again. “Do you want to tell me about Zoey?” he asked.
The sting the question sent through me surprised me. “She betrayed Gabe,” I said. “She’s not one of us anymore.”
Everett glanced sideways at me, back at the road. “She’s got to be missing this,” he said.
“She caused the breakup,” I said, defensiveness edging my voice. “She broke Gabe’s heart.”
“I’m not saying she’s in the right,” Everett said. “Just that it would be hard to lose this.”
“Then don’t screw people over,” I said.
Everett did that huff of a laugh again: just an exhale, really, through his nose, accompanied by a barely there smile, like
he knew something I didn’t. I would have found it annoying if it didn’t have me leaning in, curious, every goddamn time.
“You’re not big on chances, are you?” he asked.
I crossed my arms over my chest as we continued to climb out of the canyon. “I don’t think what Zoey did really deserves a second chance.”
“I agree with you,” Everett said, in that easy way of his. I prickled at it, his levelheadedness. His ability to just carry
on a conversation even when I was irritated. “I just wouldn’t ever want to do something you deemed unforgivable.”
“You don’t even know me,” I said then. “How do you know what I find unforgivable?”
“I don’t,” he said. “But it strikes me that you set a pretty high standard.”
“What, and you just let people get away with anything?”
“Oh, no,” he said, surprising me. We came up on a stop sign at the top of the road, and he glanced over at me, a crooked grin
on his face. “I think I might be as unforgiving as you are.”
I laughed a little, out of shock or relief, I couldn’t tell, but as he looked back at the road again, I realized that I didn’t
believe him. Not at all.
We got our food and Everett drove us to an overlook he knew about, where we could see all the way to the water. We grabbed
a blanket from his trunk and spread it directly on the gravel in the parking lot and passed around French fries and milkshakes,
and it was another one of those nights that had made me fall in love with my friends in the first place: In the middle of
all the mad rush of the world, we were always a safe place where I could be still.