ten
First Summer
The rain finally cleared after an afternoon of watching Food Network reruns on the couch, so we left the house in search of dinner.
We pulled up to a quiet pier, the sky a brilliant pink in the post-rain glow, lights diffused in the mist that still hung
in the air. We grabbed food at a burger stand and stood at their counter, dipping fries into milkshakes and wondering if anyone
on the Food Network had ever acknowledged what we both thought was the general superiority of the combination.
After a while, we started walking toward the end of the pier, where there was a wide view of the last streaks of light across
the sky.
“So, what about you?” Everett asked as we walked.
I cast him a sideways glance. “What about me?”
“You’ve heard my whole sad story,” he said. “What about you?”
“You haven’t told me your whole sad story,” I pointed out. “You’ve told me one tiny part of your whole sad story. And what
makes you think I have one?”
“Don’t we all?”
I smirked. “Spoken like someone who wants to make movies.”
Everett laughed and clapped a hand to his chest, like I’d wounded him. “Come on,” he said. “You’ve got to have something.”
“What if I don’t?” I said. “What if I was raised in a household full of marvelously well-adjusted people and never encountered
a setback in my entire life? What then?”
“Did you?” Everett asked me. “Grow up in a household full of well-adjusted people and never encounter a setback in your entire
life?”
I looked at him, sucking at my lower lip to try to hide the smile that always seemed to pop up around him. Even then, when
he was asking a question like that, I couldn’t seem to help it. He stared at me, waiting me out. Finally, I shook my head.
“No.”
He nodded as if in confirmation. “See,” he said. “Even if your answer had been yes, I still think there would have been something.”
“How’s that?”
“Everyone has some kind of setback,” he said. “Or thing or issue or whatever it is. I think even that thinking you don’t have
a thing would probably constitute having a thing.”
“And your thing is your famous father,” I clarified.
Everett gave me a look like he might wink at me, like he was just taking all of this so lightly. “He’s part of it.”
We were walking toward the end of the pier, where the water stretched out underneath the sunset, residual stormy waves cresting
gray under the final fades of the brilliantly colored sky.
I could always not tell him, I knew. Leave our relationship as it was: somewhere between something and nothing, a sort of safe place to be whatever version of myself I wanted to be.
But I was finding it hard to be anything but myself with Everett in a way that startled me.
Outside of Laurel, I’d never been so immediately comfortable with someone.
She told me once it felt like Gabe and Davi, Zoey too, had had to earn knowing me, that there was some wall almost visible to her when we were all together at first. That it wasn’t until six months in that she noticed it missing.
You can talk to anyone, she’d said. But it’s like there’s some point system.
Only once they’ve proved themselves do you actually relax.
It hadn’t bothered me. I knew what she meant, and it seemed bizarre to me that all relationships weren’t formed this way.
Show me you’ll stay, and I might let you. But she’d proved me wrong. As soon as I met her, waiting outside our freshman math class wearing a shirt that read Kirsten and Sandy Cohen Adopted Me, I knew we’d be friends. There was no probationary period with her.
I looked over at Everett, a breeze rifling through the soft wave of his hair. Maybe it was something about that night, being
without my friends, that made this happen. Maybe it was the secret we shared. Maybe it was the fact that there was something
in his sadness that matched mine, even if I didn’t know all of it. Maybe it was that we just had that tiny slip of time together.
“I was mostly raised by my uncle,” I said.
“Hank,” Everett said, and I nodded confirmation. “I’ve heard that name a few times this week.”
“He knows everybody,” I said. “He feeds everyone when he’s in town.”
“Ah,” Everett said. “So the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
“If we’re calling Hank my tree.”
“I think we are,” Everett said. I grinned sideways at him. “How is that your thing?”
I’d said it before; to Laurel, to Gabe and Davi, to Zoey.
It always came up somehow. People tended to be curious why I grew up with my uncle instead of my parents.
I’d added the mostly a while ago—I was mostly raised by my uncle, because there were the years I still lived with my parents while school was in session and with Hank only
in the summers, but even then, the summers seemed like the time most of the raising was actually being done.
“My parents love their jobs more than much else,” I said finally, Everett’s eyes finding mine in the quickly fading light.
“My mom is in finance, my dad is in tech, they’re always busy. I think having at least one kid was kind of something to check
off a list?” I tried to tell the simplest version of it, none of the ins and outs, none of the stretches of silence or darker
moments. Just facts.
“Anyway, every summer, they would send me to stay with Hank in San Francisco. And there was this one summer, right before
seventh grade, when my mom called me the night before I was supposed to get on a plane to fly back to New York, and she told
me I was going to stay with Hank awhile longer. That I might even start the school year there.”
“Did you?” Everett asked when I went quiet for a minute, the conversation replaying itself in my head.
We’re coming out at Thanksgiving anyway, my mom had said, like all my things weren’t back home, like I didn’t know what was happening.
We’ll revisit things again. Revisit was a word I’d heard her use a lot growing up, on the phone with clients during things like dinnertime or our walk to school
in the morning. Revisit, circle back. Pick your brain. I hadn’t thought those things applied to her kid, until they suddenly had.
“I did,” I told Everett. “And I never moved back home.”
Everett shook his head at this, the motion barely there.
I knew I’d skipped over about a hundred steps in the process—the first school year I spent in San Francisco without seeing my parents at all, when the trips for Thanksgiving and spring break and my birthday were all canceled, when another year went by and my mom tried to pick me up and I had to tell her I wanted to stay.
I’d been ready for a fight, but it didn’t come. She’d almost seemed relieved.
“What about now?” Everett asked. I raised an eyebrow at him. “What’s your relationship with them like?”
“We talk on the phone once a month,” I said, without adding if they can make it work. “They helped pay for college.”
“Did they come to graduation?” Everett asked.
I shook my head. “Hank was there,” I said. At Everett’s expression, I insisted, “They’re not bad people,” the same strange
defensiveness I felt for them cropping up whenever I told this story. Most of me really believed it, maybe because I’d loved
living with Hank so much, had been instantly happier than I ever was with them. And it was so routine to not talk with them
much that I didn’t question it. Didn’t want to. “They just . . . they love their work. And honestly, sending me to live with
Hank is the best thing they could have done. They didn’t have the time for a kid. So—” I tilted my head toward him, said around
my straw as I brought it to my mouth “—that’s my thing.”
Everett’s brow pulled together momentarily, relaxed again. It was a look I’d seen before, a rote response. It wasn’t pity,
exactly. Somewhere more in the realm of concern, of disbelief. On Everett, it looked almost like recognition.
Everett huffed. “Hell of a thing.” Something in my expression must have shifted, because he asked me, “What?”
I opened my mouth, closed it. This was the hard part, the part I hadn’t ever really been able to put into words. Hadn’t tried
to, even with my friends, because I didn’t want to seem insensitive or insincere. “It is,” I started. “I know that. But I
almost think it might seem worse to other people?”
We’d reached the end of the pier by then, and Everett settled against the railing next to me, our elbows just brushing.
“Like, if I spent my whole life sitting around thinking about how my parents just decided they didn’t really want to parent
anymore, I’d go crazy,” I continued. “If you spent all your time contemplating all the ways your dad fucked you up, you wouldn’t
get anything done. So just—you’re right. We all have our thing, but it’s our thing, and I think it always sounds worse to someone who hasn’t been through it.” I laughed. “I’m Laurel’s worst nightmare,”
I said. “She still thinks I’m not dealing with my trauma.”
“Are you?” Everett asked.
“I think I already did,” I said. “Hank had me talk to someone when I was younger. They helped a little.”
“So you don’t think there’s anything in your life now or in the future that could be a result of what happened,” Everett said.
“You’ve worked through it? You’re done?”
“I just don’t see the point in revisiting it,” I said. “Rehashing what’s already been—” I waved a hand, searching for the
right word “—hashed.”
Everett smiled, and I knew he got it. All of his sunny-eyed smiles, casual jokes, easy confidence. He didn’t want to revisit
his shit either. I was sure of it.
“Whatever you say, Sutton Hale,” he said. “Let’s not rehash the already hashed.”
“Hear! Hear!” I said, extending my cup his way so he could tap his against mine. “To leaving the past where it should stay.”
And so we didn’t rehash it. We started back toward the car once the sun had set, walking past the restaurants and shops, and
didn’t bring up my parents or his dad. Some measure of space between us was gone, taken up by what we now knew. But it didn’t
have to matter. It didn’t have to change things.