?MARSHMALLOW MADNESS—House-made marshmallows in our chocolate ice cream.
?MINT CHOCOLATE CHIP—A favorite for decades, with the perfect ratio of mint and chocolate.
?MOCHA—Coffee and cream the way you like it.
?MUDSLIDE—We load it in! Chocolate ice cream, espresso flavoring, peanuts, marshmallows, and pretzels.
?OREO—Cookies-and-cream perfection.
PEACHES AND CREAM (IN SEASON)—Fresh peaches, never frozen, from local farms.
RASPBERRY (IN SEASON)—Pucker up! Our raspberries are sourced from Taylor Farms.
STRAWBERRY (IN SEASON)—You’ll feel like you’re at the farmers’ market on a Saturday morning.
VERITY VANILLA—It’s a classic for a reason! Creamy perfection, our original recipe.
44.
now
I should have come here right after I went to Alex’s. I’ve been avoiding it, which is stupid.
Sydney’s parents have more money than mine, and their house shows it. It’s shingled in gray and painted with white trim, and the shutters are red. Tastefully clipped boxwoods line the drive, and the trees out front are old, substantial. It’s the kind of rich and discreet home you could never build nowadays, full of the charm and taste that a place earns over the course of years. There’s a perfectly rendered addition at the rear of the home that Syd’s dad built when they moved to Lithia the summer before our sophomore year. It probably cost as much as my entire house. I worry I’m going to have to shatter one of their windows to get inside.
But when I round the corner, it turns out that when the Rapture or the Vanishing or Whatever happened, Sydney’s family had left a kitchen window wide open.
Weird. If there’s one thing Mr. Thompson doesn’t like, it’s wasting money on having the air-conditioning running when there’s a window open.
Or. Maybe Syd opened it when she came back. This morning, when it was cool. Maybe she’s out for a run, right now. If I left, went on one of our old routes, would I find her? Could I catch her?
Better to stay here, for when she comes back. I shoulder my way through the window, clambering across the kitchen counter and dropping ungracefully to the floor. Behind me, Yolo jumps easily inside and trots along the counter.
“Show-off,” I say, as he springs from the counter to the kitchen table, as if he’s playing that game we used to play when we were kids when we tried to not touch the ground and crawled across the furniture.Hot lava. When someone made a mistake and touched the hardwood or the carpet, there was a tiny thrill that ran through me, wondering if they’d really get burned, even though I knew none of it was real.
Alex would have understood my going into his house.
But I’m one thousand percent sure Sydney would be pissed about my being here.
“You want to know what we’re looking for?” I ask Yolo.
He does not. He wants to wander off in the direction of the living room, which has several very plump and cushy couches available for his use.
I climb the stairs to the second story, walking along the vintage runners on the hardwood floors, passing their family pictures on the wall. Here they are one Christmas, wearing thick cable-knit sweaters. And at the beach, a tween-aged Syd standing between Mr. and Mrs. Thompson while a perfect summer day—sand, blue sky, puffy white clouds—rolls out behind them. Syd was so pretty, so blond and beautiful, even as a kid, and her parents were tall and slender and golden. I know this is a curated gallery, but still. Not many families could aspire to a set of photos like this.
When I get to Syd’s room, I stop in my tracks in the doorway,not anticipating how much of a gut-punch I’d feel being here again. Tears start to my eyes, but I brush them away. No time for that.
I don’t know what I’m wishing for, what I’m expecting. A journal withWHY I DON’T LIKE JULY ANYMOREwritten across the cover? OrWHAT REALLY HAPPENED?
Her bed’s made, which is weird. It’s like the way Jack’s chair was tucked in after he vanished. Sydnevermade her bed. It was always a tangle, her comforter and sheets twisted up from the way she threw them aside dramatically when she got out of bed every morning. It made me laugh when she did that, and she always looked at me, bewildered, because she did it unconsciously, as if she were mad at the world for catching her lying down and she was hoping to throw it off the scent by hurtling out of bed.
I take a step into her room. For a moment, I pull up short in a panic, thinking there’s someone here, but it’s only me, in the mirror. The one with the bulletin-board frame. I walk closer, avoiding my own eyes.
There’s no pictures of me on the board. There used to be one, right here. It was of the two of us after the state meet our sophomore year, arms slung around each other’s shoulders, matching blue-and-gold uniforms. We’d braided our hair the same, a complicated kind of crown braid that neither of us could do on ourselves but could manage just fine on the other. Strands of both our braids had escaped and were blowing across our faces. We were squinting into the sun; I was laughing, she was smiling. One of my hands had come up to my cheek to push away the strands. We each had a temporarytattoo of a butterfly high on our right cheekbones, put on for good luck before the race.
When Syd moved here, she was so golden and beautiful and interesting and athletic that everyone who met her wanted her. The cheerleaders tried to talk her into trying out for cheer that winter. The soccer coach wanted her for his team.
But we already had her. “I can’t believe our luck,” Coach said, because she was exactly what our team needed, with so many seniors graduating. She was fast and unafraid and stubborn.
