thirteen
This Summer
Come Tuesday morning, I’m desperate to even the score between me and Everett. At dinner the previous night, he had everyone
else hooked with his wild stories from set, everything from outlandish demands (his lead actor wouldn’t shoot a single thing
before everyone participated in an hour-long group meditation at sunrise every morning) to weather restrictions (they spent
four long days trying to film a desert scene in ten-minute bursts between monsoon-level rainstorms). I sat swirling my wine
in my glass, my brief triumph of re-creating Laurel’s favorite dish from a restaurant in LA quickly diminishing under the
weight of learning just how bizarre the world of filmmaking really is.
I’m in the kitchen at five the next morning so that by the time Laurel comes down the stairs I’m pulling a perfectly timed
tray of biscotti out of the oven and handing her a mug of coffee.
“I don’t know how I feed myself without you,” she says as she accepts it from me, sinking onto a stool at the island.
“Lemon ricotta French toast will be ready in half an hour,” I tell her. She sighs dreamily.
Everyone else is quick to follow once they start to smell breakfast and coffee.
By the time they’re all around the island, loading their plates with French toast and bacon and strawberries from the farmers market, Everett is leaned against the wall opposite me, hair still messy from sleep, the sleeves of his sweatshirt pushed up.
He lifts his mug in my direction, a barely there, devilish grin on his face that tells me he’s not so clueless about how all
of this is going, after all. I return his gesture.
When I turn back to Laurel, she’s watching us.
We all load into the Bronco a while later (point: Everett, always Everett, with his stupid vintage car) and head to the marina
to catch a sailboat with Captain Isaiah, the same man who ran a discounted special that first summer here, when we were twenty-two
and the worst thing Everett and I had ever done was lie about when we met. How we met.
The salt spray sent back by the hull of the boat calms my bruised ego, but only a little. Everett is talking with Gabe, apparently
impervious to my presence, so I settle in between Davi and Laurel on the cushioned seat at the back of the boat. Davi passes
me a glass of the same sparkling wine we’ve been drinking on this boat since we first started coming here, made by the captain’s
cousin. Now he seems to be running an aboveboard wine business, rather than passing out experimental basement hooch.
“Thanks,” I say as I take the glass a little too forcefully from him.
“Looks like you could use it,” he mutters. I ignore his comment and toss back half the wine. “And looks like we’ll need more,”
Davi says before standing up and wandering off to find some.
I turn to Laurel, but she’s stiff, clearly uncomfortable. I settle back next to her and raise my glass to the sky.
“Isn’t this beautiful?” I ask.
“Beautiful,” she says shortly.
“Remember when this wine used to give you the worst hangover?” I ask, probing lightly.
If we’re not allowed to ask Laurel how she’s doing, and we’re not supposed to ask what happened, and if I can’t change the facts of why things are so tense right now, then the only option remaining seems like distraction.
“Hopefully he’s gotten that sugar content
under control.”
“Right,” Laurel says. She hasn’t looked at me.
I stay quiet for a minute, chewing on my lip. Across the deck, Everett laughs at something Gabe said, the sound seeming to
drift directly from his mouth to my ears, pulling my gaze toward him. I stare at his profile, seething. The wind ripples through
his hair, the sun catching on the golden hues in it, the tendons in his neck flexing when he turns his head to look at something
on the water that Gabe points out. I hate that I once buried my face against that neck and found comfort there, or that I
used to marvel at the color of his hair while we all played volleyball on the beach. I hate the way that—
“What are you doing,” Laurel says, brusquely drawing me out of my furious reminiscing.
“What?” I ask, turning quickly to look back at her. Even if she sounds angry, I’m thrilled she’s finally looking at me. “Nothing.”
“You grind your teeth when you look at him, did you know that?” she asks. “You only do that when you’re mad. You sound like
you’re going to break a molar.”
I brush this comment away with a wave of my hand. “Just stressing about the cookbook.”
“No.” Laurel crosses her arms over her chest. “I know you, and I know you’re not stressed about the cookbook. You and Everett
have been fighting since we got here.”
“We’re not fighting,” I say, though I can’t totally deny the accusation. “Bickering is probably more accurate.”
“No,” Laurel says again, the word sending a wash of shame through me, like a child scolded.
“You two used to bicker, but that was sweet, like you were an old married couple or something. That was when you two still liked each other. When you used to flirt with each other and think that none of the rest of us noticed.”
My chest goes hot. I don’t know what to say to her. There’s so much unsaid in her short speech, so many things I thought we
just wouldn’t acknowledge this week. But there’s also a kernel of truth to it, I know, and my gaze is drawn briefly back to
Everett. For a minute, I try to picture what it would be like to just be friendly with him again. I swear I do.
I look back at Laurel. “You’re right,” I say.
Her expression, which has been cloudy up to this point, darkens further. “Are you two seriously still mad at each other?”
she asks. “It was, like, a thousand years ago.”
The words slice a little deeper than I want them to, but I’m not sure I can explain the reason for that to myself, let alone
Laurel. If I could own up to the reason why, after five years, I can’t seem to fully move on, maybe this trip would feel different.
Instead, I force a smile. “We’ll stop arguing,” I say. “I promise.”
Laurel looks unconvinced. She shrugs, dropping her sunglasses from the top of her head over her eyes, and sits back against
the cushions.
Davi flops down on Laurel’s other side, back with more wine. He pulls his phone out of his pocket and lifts it high above
his head, searching for a signal as mine chimes in my own pocket. I pull it out to a text from Hank—Happy Tuesday! Sailboat this afternoon? My heart sinks, guilt twisting through me at the same time Davi’s attention jerks toward me. “You have a signal?” he asks.
“I think it’s already gone,” I say even as he leans over Laurel toward me, phone extended.
“Oh my god,” she says, shoving his arm away. “Can you stop responding to emails for two seconds.”
“I’m waiting to hear—”
“About the promotion, I know,” Laurel grumbles. “They won’t be able to tell you it’s yours if your phone is at the bottom
of the ocean.”
“And why is my phone at the bottom of the ocean, Laur?” Davi says, pocketing his phone and slinging an arm around her shoulders.
I see her suppress a slip of a smile as he squeezes her arm, jostling her jokingly. “Is someone grumpy enough to put it there?”
She shoves him off as I stand, wandering in what I hope is an unassuming manner over to the railing, biding my time. When
they seem fittingly immersed in conversation, Laurel’s mood vastly brightened when it’s just Davi, and not me, sitting next to her, I turn and march over to where Everett and Gabe are still talking.
“I need to talk to you,” I say. I grab Everett’s hand and yank him, stumbling along behind me without looking at either of
them.
“What the—” Everett says as he finds his footing. “Sutton, Gabe was just on picture forty-five of Riley and Chloe’s first
ballet class.”
“You can look at pictures another time,” I say, pulling him to one side of the deck where the rigging blocks us from view.
“Do you know what a Gabe slideshow is like?” he asks.
“Yes, I’ve been through more of them than you have,” I point out.
Technically, though, I realize, there’s a chance this isn’t true.
I know Gabe was already a big fan of the photo montage in college, sitting us all down and running through the literal hundreds of pictures he took over summer or winter vacation, on weekend trips he and Zoey would take, at least 40 percent of them always blurry or duplicates.
But while I had assumed the habit originated back then, there’s a chance he’s always been like that.
That even in middle school, he was showing his friends—read, Everett—slideshows of his science projects or his three cats. I wouldn’t put it past him.
Everett, I can tell, is thinking the same thing, but to his credit, he doesn’t say anything.
“We have a problem,” I say.
Everett raises an eyebrow. “Do we.”
“Laurel caught on to our—” I wave a hand between us, because while she would define what we’re doing differently than I would,
I don’t want Everett to know that “—bickering.”
“Sutton,” Everett says. “The captain picked up on our bickering. Everyone at the marina picked up on it. Hell, the other boats on the water right now can probably—”
“I get the point,” I cut in, holding up a hand to silence him. “It’s a problem.”
“I didn’t come here to argue with you,” Everett says.
“Neither did I,” I say. But I didn’t go to Gabe’s baby shower to argue with him either, or Davi’s birthday party, or Laurel and Stephen’s
anniversary. And yet. I realize that my back molars are, in fact, gritting painfully together. I try to unclench my jaw. “But
we are, and it’s what’s putting Laurel in a weird mood this week.”
Everett’s mouth ticks, like he might find what I just said funny. “You don’t think she might be a little more focused on,
I don’t know, her divorce? Herself? I don’t think our issues are front of mind for her this week, Sutton.”
“Are you joking?” I scoff, disbelieving. “Everett, we are the whole reason this trip hasn’t happened for the last four years.”
A dubious expression flits across Everett’s eyebrows before he’s shaking his head. “I think you think we matter too much.”
“I don’t think we matter,” I say, gesturing between the two of us. “I think the fact that we broke a very important pact with absolutely no
consideration for our friends and what it would do to them matters.”
“Oh my god,” Everett says, almost groans, tugging a hand roughly through his hair. “When are you going to let go of the stupid
pact? It sounds so childish.”
I balk. “Excuse me, it is not childish. It’s the thing that made this work for so many years.”
Everett runs a hand down his face. “It was a joke,” he says. “The pact was a joke to begin with.”
“What does that mean?” I ask. Everett opens his mouth to respond, shuts it again, and it’s enough to drop a new hot thread
of anger through me. “Right,” I say, throwing up a defeated hand. “You can’t believe any of this. You’re just so above it
all.”
Everett’s brow creases. “That’s not—” He breaks off, eyes drifting over my shoulder and mouth pressing into a thin line. I
glance behind me, heart jumping into my throat and excuses flooding my mouth at Laurel standing there, cheeks flushed.
“Are you kidding?” she says, and the look on her face could shrink me down ten sizes.
“Laurel,” I say. “We were just talking—”
“Clearly,” she says. Then, shoulders hunching up to her ears, “No, you know what? I don’t want to hear it. I’m sick of this.”
“Laurel, we really were trying to talk things through,” Everett says, and it feels odd, uncomfortable even, to suddenly be
on the same side.
“Great,” Laurel says. She pushes us in the direction of where the captain is sitting by the wheel, looking bored. “Then you
won’t mind continuing your conversation.” Her words drip with sarcasm, disdain, and I don’t blame her.
“What—” I say, feet slipping against the boards as she marches us along. “Laurel—”
“In you go,” she says, stopping us in front of the door to the little cabin.
Everett and I exchange a glance. “We’ll behave,” he says to her. “Seriously.”
“I don’t want you to behave,” Laurel says through her own gritted teeth. “I want you to move past this shit between you.”
The sound that escapes me is half scoff, half snort. I regret it as soon as it’s out, Laurel turning to me with fire in her
eyes.
“You want to know why I’ve been acting so off?” she asks. “It’s not because of my divorce, or the media circus around it,
or the fact that half of my money is going to someone I’m not going to share my life with anymore.” I fight the urge to argue with her on all these points,
because the way she delivers them certainly makes it sound like she’s upset about them.
“I’m upset because this trip was supposed to be fun,” she says. “It was supposed to be a distraction from all the garbage going on. It wasn’t supposed to be about the two of
you hating each other. So I’m pissed that the two of you can’t get over yourselves long enough to just act civil for one stupid
week!” Her voice gets louder as she says it, the last words ending in a high-pitched crescendo that sends Everett hurrying
down the narrow set of stairs into the cabin and me following quickly behind him.
“Figure it out,” Laurel says, Davi’s and Gabe’s faces appearing on either side of her, looking curiously down at us. “You
have thirty minutes until we let you out.”
Everett and I exchange the same panicked glance we did earlier before looking back up at her. “Let us out?” I say.
But Laurel is already slamming the door, the lock sliding into place.