thirty
This Summer
I don’t see Everett again for the rest of the party. I wait for him to come back in through the door, keep a watchful eye
on the crowd for him, but he never comes back. The worst part is that no one else seems to notice.
When it’s nearly midnight, I ask Gabe if he’s heard from him. “He isn’t here?” he asks, and when I shake my head, he shrugs.
“He’s got to be around here somewhere.”
Davi hasn’t seen him either, so I finally track Laurel down at a table in the corner, holding court with a group of beautiful
people I don’t know and have never heard her mention.
“Hey,” I say, sliding into the spot next to her as she bids the group goodbye. They slink off into the party like they’re
her personal NPCs. “Have you seen Everett?”
“I’m sure he’s somewhere around here,” she says, waving a dismissive hand. “Now, did I see you talking to Cooper earlier?”
“Laurel,” I say, something like impatience flickering through me. I tamp it down, remind myself this is her night, her party, her week. “I can’t find Everett.”
One of Laurel’s eyebrows ticks upward. “Is there a reason you’re suddenly so concerned about him?”
I bristle at the comment, even though I know I’m keeping a secret from her, yet again.
In that moment, though, I’m exhausted. Tired of Laurel being mad at me, of trying to atone for what happened for years now.
Of making something up to someone who can’t seem to decide if she actually forgives me or not.
I watch for a minute as she waves at people milling past, nothing but her public self. I think back to every time I’ve watched
her shift, a social chameleon I used to envy. Now it has me questioning if the version I’ve always had of her is even real.
Look at me, I want to shout at her. But instead, the question bubbles up in my throat and bursts out of me, sharp and sudden. “Why did
you text me first?”
She moves her face like she might glance at me, but her eyes don’t leave the crowd. “When?”
I know Laurel is going through something. I know she might be heartbroken. I know that my only job is to be here for her right
now, but suddenly, I can’t do it anymore. I can’t keep pretending things are fine, that this week is in any way normal. When
she’d texted me that she needed me I’d felt some kind of pride wash over me, like it was proof she still needed me, but I
don’t feel needed, or even wanted, right now.
“When you and Stephen split up,” I say. “Why did you text me first?”
At this, she does finally look at me. “I knew you could make this week happen,” she says.
“That’s it?” I ask. “You wanted to start up this tradition again, and you knew I’d be the one to plan it for you?”
She’s taken another sip of her drink and almost laughs as she sets her glass down on the table again. “Sutton,” Laurel says.
“This trip was never about tradition. We all know what this week really is.”
I shake my head. “What is it?”
Laurel’s head tilts, almost like she pities me. I still don’t know what I’m missing until she says it. Until she’s speaking
to me like I need to be helped along. “Look at all of this,” she says, gesturing to the party at large. “Honey, this week
was never about going backward. It was a goodbye.”
I’m still not caught up. Or, maybe I am, but I don’t want to be. Don’t want to hear what she’s saying. “To what?” I ask. “To
this place? Because we can go somewhere else. We can plan other trips, we—”
“Sutton.” The tone in which she says it is grating in its condescension, like I’m a child she’s carefully delivering news
to. “Be realistic. This week was a way to say goodbye to us.”
My throat seizes. “To you and me?” I ask.
If Laurel catches my reaction, she dismisses it. “To everyone,” she says. “To the family we used to be. To my old life.”
“Used to be,” I repeat. Laurel nods, and for some reason, it sparks an angry ember in my chest. “What, do Davi and Gabe feel
the same way?” I don’t include Everett. I can’t bring myself to.
“We haven’t been talking about it,” Laurel says. “But everyone knows.”
“I didn’t know,” I say, almost shrilly. A man in a gold suit startles a little, looking at me, then Laurel, raising an eyebrow
as if asking if she needs help. I’m her best friend! I want to yell at him, but instead she waves him off, nodding that she’s okay. Her expression flattens when she looks at me
again.
“Everett and I—” I start, swallowing over the burgeoning lump in my throat.
“I know we messed things up when we broke our promise to everyone. I know we shouldn’t have lied to you for so long, but, but we’re fine now, we—” I break off, unsure of how much to say.
Knowing it can’t be much without Everett here with me.
Then I remember that there might not even be anything to tell anymore, given how he seemed at the party tonight, his disappearing act.
But Laurel is looking at me like I just said something crazy. She shakes her head, brows drawn together. “Sutton, no one cares
about you and Everett hooking up what, five, ten years ago? God,” she says, looking almost baffled. “We aren’t in college
anymore. We made that pact ages ago.”
“But it’s why we stopped coming on this trip,” I insist, sure this has to be the reason. Because it has been the reason—I’ve
believed it’s the reason—that everything fell apart. I’ve blamed myself for it since it happened, thought that my poor decisions caused
the fracturing of my family. I’ve put so much energy into fixing things, railing against people who didn’t seem to want to fix things, that it’s impossible that Everett and I breaking the pact isn’t what caused this. “It’s when everything fell
apart.”
Laurel shakes her head again, slowly, like I’m once again that child she has to help arrive at the right conclusion. “I was
mad about you lying, sure. But things had been changing for a while before that, Sutton,” she says. “No one could even come
on this trip anymore. We were spread out all over the place.” She shrugs a shoulder. “We grew up.”
It’s that, such a general statement accompanied by such a casual gesture, that does it for me. It settles what she’s saying
over me somehow, presses down.
“We’ve been trying these past few years,” I say, almost to myself. “We text. You and I still—”
“Talk on the phone every few months?” she says. “Collab on socials?”
I nod. Stupidly, I guess, because Laurel rolls her eyes, like it’s nothing. I thought I’d been giving her the space she said she needed after my relentless apologies following that last argument between me and Everett. The one that ruined everything, that left us all shattered.
“The most we’ve really talked has been to plan this week, though,” Laurel says, like the rest of our relationship doesn’t mean anything. “Doesn’t
that say something?”
“But this week has been great, hasn’t it?” I say. I need my effort to mean something. “I mean, it’s been like it was.”
“Nothing is like it was,” Laurel says softly.
I stare at her for a long, quiet minute. Her tone is so final, so assured. It dawns on me, finally, that she’s been thinking
about this for a while. That what the rest of us thought was support was actually a last hurrah for her.
“No,” I say suddenly, something almost manic pushing at my chest. “What we have is rare, it’s important, it’s—”
“What?” Laurel says when I stop short, aware that my next words will sound melodramatic to her.
“It’s worth saving,” I say.
Laurel, to my horror, scoffs.
In that moment, I know it’s not my former best friend sitting in front of me. It’s someone I can’t reach. I’ve been fighting
for a friendship she might not even want anymore.
I stand up, rifling in my purse for Everett’s keys.
“Where are you going?” Laurel says behind me.
“I still have to find Everett,” I say.
“Why do you care so much?” she asks. She waves a hand toward the party. “What about Cooper? You have this perfectly great
guy following you around all night, a chef with a kid and a house who wants to be with you, and you’re still chasing after someone you’ve been mad at for years now.
It’s like you want to be disappointed sometimes, I swear. Why can’t you just be happy?”
It’s almost as if I don’t have room in my brain for anything more, can feel her words circling, but taking a while to settle.
She’s not wrong. Cooper is great. Maybe I should be trying to find him, should have paid him more attention this week.
But if being happy is the point, it seems like the most obvious thing in the world: It isn’t Cooper that would make me happy, wonderful as he may be.
“I can be happy,” I say to her, a vivid image, or maybe a memory, crystalizing in front of me. A cold pier, and warm hands,
and hopes shared out loud. My life, but better. What I already have shared with someone who I can’t find right now. “Everett’s
still missing,” I tell Laurel.
“He’s a grown man,” she says, lounging back in her seat. “He’ll come back when he wants to.”
“Everett never disappears,” I say.
“Who cares,” she mutters, sending a new flare of disbelief through me.
“Laurel,” I say. “Everett is our friend, whether you want him to be or not.”
“Yeah, for now.”
I should go, I know, give her space, let her enjoy her party, but I take a step closer. I don’t know this person, this Laurel,
at all. “What does that mean?”
“What do you think it means?” she asks. “Everyone disappoints you. You used to agree with me about that.”
“No, you used to agree with me about that.”
“Same thing,” Laurel says.
“No, it isn’t,” I say. “Because I don’t believe that anymore.
” It seems odd, to have this be the moment that fully clicks into place for me, when Laurel has just told me our friendship means nothing to her, that the funeral or whatever it is she’s thrown for herself tonight was also a funeral for our friendship.
But I mean it. I’m tired of thinking that way, in such black-and-white terms, tired of not leaving any room for not only everyone else to be human, but also for myself.
There are a million ways I know I’ve worked myself into the corners I have. I’ve been stingy with second chances and I’ve
expected the people I love to be superhuman, to never make mistakes, but for some reason, all of that feels foggy now. I don’t
want Cooper, who hasn’t disappointed me once this week, who would probably do so many things perfectly until I got close enough
to him to discover the crack in his immaculate veneer. I want Everett, who I’ve hurt, who has hurt me, whose flawed, human
pieces I know, and have only made me love him more.
I wait for Laurel to say something, anything, to be the friend I used to know so well, but I can’t find any of it there. “Well,
then, you’re the one who taught me,” Laurel says. “Everyone disappoints you.”
I feel it like she reached out and slapped me, heat radiating from the spot. I stare at her until she stands with a fed-up
expression, swiping her hands on the skirt of her dress and starting to march past me.
“Well, I’m going,” I say before she’s out of earshot. She stops in her tracks, turns back to look at me. “And I give a shit
about saving us, the people you called when you needed support. Not any of your internet friends, or all the people you hang
out with in LA and Paris and Tokyo. Not your actual fucking sister. Us. And no matter how badly any of us have acted this
week or in the past five years, we’re worth saving.”
I brush past her, headed in the direction of the door, Everett’s keys jangling in my hand.
“Don’t be so naive,” Laurel calls after me. I pause, not looking back at her. “We’ll never talk to each other again after
this week.”
I frown to keep my chin from shaking. When I look back at her she’s watching me, artfully disheveled in her white dress, framed on all sides by her party, like even when she’s saying things like this, she can somehow still maintain perfection.
She’s never felt more like a stranger to me than she does right now.
“If I find Everett, we’re leaving in the morning,” I say.
I walk away without another glance backward.