Chapter Four
I CALL LUCA AS SOON AS I’M OUTSIDE.
“Gray-Gray!” he shouts into the phone. I’m so wound up, I don’t even have the energy to give him crap about his ridiculous nickname for me. It’s a play on cray-cray that arose after my legendary leap from Colin McCormick’s second-story balcony and into the pool at his Memorial Day party last year. Luca thinks the name is freaking hilarious. He also thinks my jump was inspired by a multitude of lime-green Jell-O shots. It wasn’t. It was only fueled by one. I jumped because I goddamn wanted to. I had recently spent the better part of a Saturday on the phone with the electric company trying to figure out our bill—?and by figure out, I mean asking them how long they’d give us to scrounge up some more pennies before leaving us in the dark. I was so pissed off. For weeks. Colin’s party rolled around and I just wanted to feel like a damn teenager, stupid and carefree. So I jumped.
“Are you back?” Luca asks. “Tell me you’re back.”
“If you’d call it that.” I walk over to the garage and peer inside, searching to make sure my beach cruiser is still in one piece. It’s my only mode of transportation around the cape.
“What does that mean?”
“Typically, in order to come back you have to return home.” I wade through more boxes, shove aside golf clubs, and edge around a rusting lawn mower before pulling my bike from a corner by one handlebar.
“What the hell are you talking about?” He yells it, but only because he’s at LuMac’s, his family’s diner, and a blender starts whirring in the background.
“We moved.”
There’s a beat of quasi-silence. I can almost feel Luca wincing through the phone. I push on my bike’s dingy white tires, amazed Mom managed to keep them intact during the move.
“Are you serious?” Luca finally asks.
“Yes. To the lighthouse.”
“Okay, Virginia Woolf. Wait . . . Peter Lanier is the new lighthouse manager—?”
“Yeah, no shit.”
“So . . . you’re living with Jay?”
“Again, no shit.”
“Damn.”
“Do you have anything helpful to offer, or should I try to hit up my mother again for a little comfort?”
“I’ve got pizza fries.”
“That’ll do. But you know I can’t leave Mom here by herself for too long when she’s unpacking. She’ll probably start a fire trying to store pillows in the oven or something. Or she’ll channel-surf until she finds the most depressing UNICEF commercial in existence, and then she’ll really be useless.” I think about my neat little room and swallow a lump in my throat. Mom can be damn focused when she wants to be. Key word want.
“Gray, she’s a big girl. You’re allowed to do something for yourself.”
“I did. I went to Boston for two weeks and look what happened.”
He doesn’t say anything to that. In the background, I hear his mother, Emmy, calling out orders. “Blue Burger up for table ten!”
Luca clears his throat, then laughs a little. “If anything, she’d burn the place down with her hot glue gun. Remember that time she left it on in the bathroom of that crappy duplex you lived in a couple years ago?”
“And melted my toothbrush—?yeah, I remember.”
When things get heavy, Luca likes to whip out a story or two and hardy-har-har over it. From anyone else, I’d rip them a new one, but I know he only does it to keep me from using Mom’s legendary hot glue gun for much more sinister purposes. Either that, or he legit has no idea what to say to all this insanity, which is highly likely. Still, no matter how many times this happens, no matter how many times Luca smiles through it all, it’s still embarrassing as hell that this is my life.
“Hey, seriously,” he says. “Do you want me to talk to my mom? You could move in for a—?”
“No.”
“But—?”
“Luca. No.”
