“Mom, I’m not physically tired, I’m emotionally tired. We’ve been at this for months. I’ve done everything Dr. Spaldingsuggested, everything you and Dad requested. I’m tired of pushing for something that has clearly disappeared. I need you to let it go.”
I flung myself backward, my strawberry blonde bob fanning across my lumpy pillow. I mapped the textured ceiling, searching for any direction other than the eyes of the woman I couldn’t meet. They housed nothing but pain and disappointment.
It was impossible to miss the tears that pooled in them as she pleaded, “Can we just try one last thing? PLEASE. And then I promise I’ll stop.”
I groaned, stretching out my five-foot-two frame like a starfish. I already knew my parents would look at my choice as giving up rather than moving on, but I also knew we were heading into uncharted territory. I had to give her this. “You promise?”
“I do.”
She sprang up and scurried for the old wooden vanity tucked against my bedroom wall. The drawer gave way on a tug, and she extracted a book with spiraled bindings from its confines. She cradled it between her hands like a newborn baby. I sat up cross-legged as she laid it in my lap.
“What’s this?” I scrubbed my hand over the dusty worn cover before meeting her mossy green eyes that matched my own.
“You used to sketch.” A far-off look and a hint of a smile haunted her face with the memory. “By the time you were out of diapers and starting preschool, it was your thing. You never left home without some kind of bound paper. Everything you’ve ever loved, you’ve drawn in those pages. I just thought…”
She didn’t finish her sentence. She didn’t have to. We both knew that anytime we tried something new like this, it planted a seed of hope.
I flipped open the cover to the first page. A pencil-drawn sketch of our cabin on Bear Lake rested in the center. Charcoal strokes mapped the water on the next one, but the view was from above, like I hung from a tree branch when I drew it. I brushed my palm over the flat surface, expecting to feel the ripples beneath my fingertips.
The next twenty minutes were consumed with page-turning. Each drawing growing more vivid in detail than the last. When I got to the final sketch, my mom propped herself up a little taller. An outline of a heart-shaped locket rested open in the center, a silhouette of a different boy on either side. A deep dimple carved the cheek of the one on the right, while the other boy’s smile tipped up on one side.
I studied their hair next. Memorized the way one curled up over his eyes, and the other’s hid beneath a baseball cap. Even in black and white, they were both nice to look at. Both striking and strong. Both… figments of my imagination.
“Well?” my mom started.
How was I supposed to tell her that her last resort failed? As much as she wanted me to remember, I couldn’t give that to her. I didn’t know how to break her heart.
“It’s… beautiful,” I chose to say instead.
Tears tumbled down her cheeks. I’d seen them a hundred times before, but this time they were a firm and brutal reminder that I was disappointing the people I loved.
The frown of my reflection, no longer distorted in undulations, shifts my focus back to the present moment, back to what I determined this morning. I can’t stay in Bear Lake.
I may not know who I am anymore, but I know I won’t figure it out here. No matter how bad I feel about it, I meant what I said to my mom last night.
I just need to survive the summer, I convince myself. Three months of saving money at my new job and, somewhere along the way, I’ll confess my plan to my parents. I can do that.
As I stare out over the water, a soft glow nudges against the horizon. It’s too low in the sky to feel its warmth yet, and the shiver that snakes its way up my spine is getting harder to ignore. Goose bumps prick against my skin at the thought of dunking my whole body in this glacier, but no one is here to stop me. No one is here to tell me it’s unsafe, or that I’m not ready.
Taking a deep breath, I rock my hips in one final arc.
Snap.
The sound of a stick splitting in two jolts my body rigid. My grip falters and my feet slip below the knot that anchored me in the air. I yelp and scramble for purchase, my right hand sliding in a nasty wake of razor burn until my feet crash against the earth.
“Woah, are you okay?”
I startle and whip around at the sound of a deep timbre voice. My gaze catches on a pair of hazel eyes, on an outstretched hand, as if this guy planned to catch me from several feet away.
I squint, drawing details from beneath the brim of his ball cap. There’s something familiar about the way his jaw angles in a sharp slope toward his chin.
When he tips his head to the side, jerking a pair of headphones out of his ears, I see it. The dark shading of his hairline. The rounded fullness of his lips. There’s no denying that he looks an awful lot like a sketch from my past. One that I shoved away in the depths of a drawer for a reason. And he’s standing right in front of me.
CHAPTER TWO
SUMMER, NINE YEARS AGO
“Ican’t wait to see this place!” My dad drums his hands against the wooden steering wheel to the beat of “The Boys are Back in Town” streaming through the radio speakers.
