Chapter 74
Tyler
August, Eight Years Ago
Long Island
I turned nineteen the October of my second senior year of high school. I kept my head down, focused on my grades, went to
meetings, and then—every night, around nine thirty or ten—knocked on Katie’s window. We spent autumn at the diner, and then,
when winter whirled in, we gave up on our scarves and sweaters and started crawling into Katie’s bed to watch movies instead.
We began writing again. We drafted new stories—more mature ones. True to our genres, but both about broken teenagers with
bad parents and worse luck.
She’d fall asleep in my arms, and eventually, when I was sure I wouldn’t wake her, I’d slip out of her bedroom and back into
mine. In the mornings, we’d walk the thirty minutes to school, rain or shine. Neither of us drove. I wasn’t sure if her parents
knew we were spending time together, how they felt about me anymore, or whether they even cared.
My mom had spared me the details, and whenever I saw Paul or Carolyn in town, I did the exact opposite of what a real man would do.
I disappeared around the nearest corner.
Mikey moved from one rehab to another, barely home for a day or two before his next stint.
The treatment centers were getting nicer and nicer, and I had no idea how his parents were paying for them.
I wasn’t honest with my sponsor about my relationship with Katie. I was afraid that if I fessed up, he would’ve told me to
stop spending time with her. I was desperate to stay sober. I’d replayed the accident in my head every second of every day
since the afternoon it happened, and the only thing that horrified me more than what I’d done to Mikey was becoming my own
father.
Maybe that was why I got clean and Mikey didn’t. Because I already knew what I was. I already knew because I had driven the
car, because I was Tom McNally’s son, because I had seen it in the irises of Katie’s eyes. Maybe that was what saved me. That,
and how, at eighteen, I was already too tired to fight. It wasn’t like the drugs had worked for longer than a few months,
anyway.
All this to say that when I got clean, things got better. I made straight A’s. I read a book a day. I walked myself into the
police station with my sponsor by my side, admitted I’d been high during the accident, and was promptly told by the chief
of police, who was an old friend of my father’s, to shut up, stay sober, and turn the hell around.
I also stopped sleeping with every girl in town. In recovery, you’ll often hear that newcomers should avoid relationships
for the first year of sobriety. Despite my requisite teenage angst, I’d been quite the teacher’s pet in A.A. and swore off
sex entirely during that time.
But the months rolled by, and I got that one-year chip, and still, nothing changed.
When I’d finally fessed up to my sponsor about all the time I was spending with Katie, he mostly laughed, told me not to be such a liar in the future, and that I’d need to make amends for hurting her in more ways than I could possibly count.
But even with the ban lifted, I couldn’t make a move. I didn’t want to disturb what she and I had. It was pure and easy and
innocent. We were never not together, and I knew her inside and out. And she was okay. Despite everything, she really was
all right. We had our stories, and we had each other, and she was all right.
And then, in August, a few weeks before I left for college, Katie and I were lying on that same stretch of beach, talking
about this publishing externship she wanted to apply for in the city her senior year. We hadn’t discussed what would happen
when I moved. After all, we were just friends. Friends could stay in touch over the phone. And Rhode Island wasn’t that far
away. Only five hours by train.
Katie held out her hand. “Is it drizzling? Or am I crazy?”
I squinted at the sky. “It’s one cloud. Let’s just—”
And that was when it began to pour. Rain slammed down onto the sand, big and fat and sideways, splattering on our faces, our
book bags, our bare legs until we were running, laughing, scrambling for our bikes—the backstreets, flooded; the gutters,
failing; our hands, covering our heads. We flung our bikes onto Katie’s front lawn and flew through her gate, and then we
were flush against the siding, chests heaving, bodies soaked. I twisted a half inch toward her and took her in—lips parted,
eyes crinkled, hair stuck to her skin in sopping-wet strawberry waves—and the world stopped.
We were kissing.
My mouth was on her mouth, and my hands were in her hair, and her legs were locked around my waist, and she was arching into me, kissing me hard.
I was moving us up the lattice, sliding us into her room, and we were peeling off her clothes, and then we were peeling off my clothes, and then she was standing there in her underwear; the pink-gold glow of her room, soft and warm and the brightest place I’d ever known.
She was pulling me onto her bed, whispering what took you so long?
and I was laughing, touching her, letting her tell me how badly she’d wanted me, how long she’d been waiting for me to do
this, for me to act on what we’d always known. I was twisting my tongue into hers, letting her hands drop past my hips, trying
not to think too hard about how she could possibly be so good at this, trying not to think too hard about anything other than
right here and right now and the demanding-but-unselfish pull of her lips.
“We should slow down,” I said.
“We don’t have to,” she said. We were drenched and under the covers, tangled in each other, making the kinds of sounds you
don’t forget. “You don’t have to say that just to say that.”
I kissed her harder. “I don’t have a condom,” I said. “I haven’t been doing this, and—”
“We don’t need one. I’m on the pill. I haven’t been with anyone all year. I’ve been waiting for you.”
I made a strange noise. It came out in a curse. “I definitely cannot have sex with you without a condom.”
Her hips were already moving, and my hands were pulling her deeper into me, helping her do it. “Then get one. Go get one.”
“I—I need to think,” I said. “I really like you, Katie. You’re my best friend.”
“This was always going to happen. We can’t put it off forever. This is just how it is for us. This is what we’re meant to
be.”
I kissed her again. This time, softly. “Can we maybe slow down?” I said. “I want to do this. I really do, I promise. I just need a little more time.”
She brushed her fingers over my lips and said, “Sure.”
And for the next two weeks, I had her. We spent our last days of summer at the beach and the bookstore and in bed, pushing
our story a little further every night. But we never finished what we’d started. Because on the twenty-fifth of August, somewhere
in the Allegheny Mountains, Mikey Caruso checked himself out of rehab and got high on bad dope for the last time.