“It’s okay. I was two. I don’t really remember him.”
She nods and we fall silent. I’m sure she’s thinking about her mom. I want to ask more, ask if she’s okay, ask what I can do, but it all sounds so formulaic. Besides, I’ve been trying to help my mom through her grief for years. You don’t get it, Grace. You don’t understand, she’d always say when she was really struggling. And maybe I don’t. Maybe I can’t. There’s a huge chasm of difference between losing someone you never really knew and losing someone who encompassed your entire world.
“Why doesn’t Luca have a chance with you?” I finally ask. Apparently, when silence gets too oppressive, I like to vomit up some awkward-as-ass questions.
Her eyes widen in surprise, but one corner of her mouth ticks up in a little smile. “He told you that?”
“Yep.”
“Damn. Boy is ruining my mystique.”
She laughs and I laugh, but she won’t look at me. Instead, she trains her gaze on the water. A yellow-orange ray from the lighthouse’s beam a few miles away swings over the waves and she follows it.
Up, over, away.
Up, over, away.
I hear her take a few breaths, the inhale before speaking, but the words never come.
Until they do.
“I like girls, Grace.”
Her words seem to flutter on the wind, tossed this way and that until they land between us.
Chapter Eleven
I LIKE GIRLS, GRACE.
Well, sure, who doesn’t? I think at first. Because that’s exactly what my mother said to me once, her oh-so-maternal retort to a very similar confession.
I like girls, Grace.
I look at Eva, the way she chews at her bottom lip and focuses on the swirls she’s drawing in the sand, nervousness cascading off her in waves. Still, her mouth bends into the tiniest of smiles.
My mind slows and retreats to three years ago and Natalie Fitzgerald, the sixteen-year-old lifeguard at the cape’s community pool. All the boys fawned over her, brought her sodas, and offered to slather her back with SPF 40. Girls got to the pool early so they could see her arrive and catch a glimpse of what en vogue outfit she had on over her red one-piece.
Me? I was somewhere in between. Always had been with girls. For a long time, when I was a little younger, I thought that was how every girl saw other girls—?this mix between beauty and awe and curiosity, a thin layer of lust just underneath. Took until I was fourteen to realize that no, the way I thought about other girls was a little different.
Natalie’s long dark hair tumbled down her back. She always wore it loose, even when she was on duty, and her tanned body was smooth and lean from years of swim team. I couldn’t help but watch her every time she got out of her chair to check the pool’s chemical levels, every time she dove into the water during adult swim. If she was moving, I was watching, something stirring low in my stomach. The same kind of feeling I knew was flaring in Luca’s gut as well. His mouth practically hung wide open for that entire summer.
I didn’t tell him the thoughts swirling around my head about Natalie, not even when the three of us struck up a pool-only friendship, but he asked anyway. That’s how Luca was and is and always will be.
“So, you like Natalie, right?” he had asked one hot day. I’d just flopped back on the towel after Natalie had called me over to her chair to make me listen to some new singer she liked on her phone.
“What do you mean?” I’d asked back.
He tilted his head at me. “Natalie. You like her.”
“Um . . .” I thought about denying it, only because I wasn’t sure what I felt exactly. But then his question Ping-Ponged around in my head as I caught a glimpse of Natalie pulling up her perpetually slipping bathing-suit strap. My mouth went dry and my heart felt too heavy in my chest.
“Yeah. I think I do,” I’d said quietly.
Luca nodded and smiled, like it was the most natural thing in the world. And for me, I guess it was.
Later that fall, he was pretty baffled when I started dating and messing around with guys, but I liked them, too. It took several conversations with Luca, both of us sitting cross-legged on his Star Wars bedspread, for him to get it. For me to get it.
“Is Grace only kissing guys because she thinks she should?” he’d asked a Magic 8 Ball, shaking it so vigorously, the whole bed vibrated. We were fifteen and I’d just made out with Nate Landau at a party the previous weekend. Luca made a face at the ball’s answer, then presented it to me.
