Like the shirts have added some weird formal tension to the day, Mom also has us go around to the front door and knock. I take a couple deep breaths, shake out my hands, and prepare myself to look at Sera like I look at any of my other friends. I wish I were more ready, though, because she’s the one who opens the door. She’s wearing a Mass MoCA T-shirt and denim shorts, and she looks beautiful. My heart lurches in my chest. I notice she seems nervous to see us. Her smile is a little forced.
“You knocked!” she says, surprised, and I give Mom my bestI told you solook. “Come in. Welcome. You remember the way through to the backyard, right? The house hasn’t changed, that’s for sure. Same creaky floor, and watch your step between the living room and the kitchen. But you know that. Duh!” Sera clamps her lips together like she’s forcing herself to stop talking.
Mom and I step inside, and Adam and Oliver dart past Sera, heading straight through the house to the backyard. I cringe,hoping they don’t knock something over. Abbi swoops in, dodging the boys, and gives Mom and me quick hugs.
“So good to see you!” she says, beaming. She takes the eggplant Parmesan Mom has and starts asking her about her garden. Mom follows her and then Mr.Watkins appears. He’s taller than even me, and looks most like Abbi, with dark red hair that’s started to gray since I last saw him. He pats me on the shoulder and pulls me to the living room, where the sports news is going over the Sox game from last night.
“Did you catch the game?” he asks, hitting pause on the remote and scrolling back. “Did you see this play? What a mess.”
I laugh, taking in the living room, which looks the same. I spot the photos of Sera and me still lining the wall next to the staircase. “Yeah, they really almost lost it all in the eighth.” I swallow, surprised the photos are still there when Sera did such a spectacular job cutting me off. I wonder what her family knows about why she ghosted me.
Mr.Watkins launches into a statistics rant, and I remember he’s a math professor. I’m trying to keep up, but I catch Sera out of the corner of my eye. She mouthsGood luckas she points at her dad. Then she slips away down the hall toward the kitchen.
I listen back in to Mr.Watkins’s statistics spiel and offer my own two cents, saying that if they hadn’t intentionally walked the player before, we probably wouldn’t have needed the extra inning to close. He nods.
“Smart observation. So, tell me about this state championship game we missed.”
At least that’s an easy ask. I fill him in as we head through the house to the open sliding glass doors that lead from thekitchen to the backyard. Talking about baseball is easy. When you break the rules of what’s expected, it’s fun, thrilling even, and makes for a good story. A game was a game, no lasting ramifications.
Outside, Mom and Mrs.Watkins are fussing with the grill. Adam and Oliver are doing circles in the yard and playing on the old playset while Mom explains that their parkour instructor made her promise to stop them from doing tricks outside class. I give Oliver a look when he catches me watching him swinging a little too high on the swing. He makes a face at me, then hops off. Once both his feet are on the ground, I head for the cooler at the end of the picnic table, where Sera is sitting on the edge. She’s watching my brothers with a smile on her face, and I wonder what she’s thinking about. I catch myself wanting to ask but I don’t know if we’re there yet. At our beach it felt like things could go back to normal, but since the drive-in, Sera’s been hard to pin down again. She’s busy teaching, and I’m busy with my jobs and Izzy. Sera also might be seeing that Jackson guy. I don’t know. Maybe this is just what happens when you grow up and take on more responsibility—less time for friends, particularly ones who have let you down.
“Even baseball scares me,” Mom is saying, “after Luke’s knee injury.”
Sera turns and glances at my leg as I lean down to get a soda. I accidentally brush my arm against her calf as I stand up, and she flinches back, catching herself before falling off the table. The awkwardness from the drive-in rushes back, the way her face closed up when I forgot to let go of her hand.
“You okay?” I ask as she rights herself. She nods. That’swhen I notice she’s still wearing theEBEbracelet I made her when we were ten. My heart clenches.What does that mean?I wonder, but then I remember the way she was cuddling up to Jackson at the drive-in.
I must be hovering too close, because she jumps down and scoots around me as Abbi puts on some music. As she brushes by, I smell citrus shampoo and vanilla perfume and my mind starts to act like I’m sixteen again and can’t take a hint. I swallow and shake my head, opening the soda as Sera takes the phone from her sister and starts adding songs to the queue. Abbi whispers something at her, and she brushes it off, glancing at me quickly, then away again.
Oliver comes sprinting back to the patio, pausing at the cooler to take two sodas before I can tell him not to. I settle in at the table and keep an eye on them. In less than ten minutes they’re turning cartwheels in the grass and Oliver has lost a shoe and Adam his collared shirt, which he has affixed to the top of the tree house as a pirate flag. I spot Sera out of the corner of my eye heading back into the house.
Mrs.Watkins keeps saying it’s fine, but I can tell all the chaos is making Mom upset. I’m about to tell them to calm down or we’re not getting ice cream tomorrow when Sera comes back out and gets their attention with a couple of huge sketch pads.
“Do you guys want to make some pirates?”
The boys stop what they’re doing and rush over, asking a hundred questions. Sera explains her plan: to make some large drawings they can tape up on the back fence or the bushes toact as targets. Oliver is immediately into it, making Adam lie down so he can trace him.
“I’ll make an enemy boat,” Sera says, settling onto the grass. As she tears a piece of paper away for Adam to draw on, and helps Oliver open a brown Magic Marker, I’m pulled back into a memory from two years ago.
We were working on the camp float for the Fourth of July parade in Barnstable. Sera had only been back for a couple weeks, and everything felt different. Had she always looked at me so intensely when she talked? Had her eyes always been a rich, dark brown at the center? Had she done something new to her hair, which kept catching the sun? We were alone on one side of the float, painting the papier-mâché copy of the Blue Honeybee. All of a sudden I felt nervous to be one-on-one with her, like I didn’t know how to talk to her.
“So, um, what happened with that guy you were dating?” I asked as I reached past her to re-dip my brush in the paint. I knew she’d just broken up with Ethan, a boy from her school, about a month ago, but she hadn’t told me why.
“Oh”—she paused, readjusting the bee’s antennae—“I don’t know. I mean, he was nice. He got me that cool book of hyperrealistic paintings of science fiction worlds. The one I showed you.”
“But?” I asked, trying not to sound too interested.
“I guess…it just didn’t feel special.” She shrugged, pushed her hair out of her face, and got a smear of paint on her cheek. I smiled.
“I get that,” I said.
“Yeah?” Her eyes met mine and stayed there. I couldn’t stop looking at her. It was the first time I wondered if she’d ever wantmeto be her boyfriend. Butterflies exploded in my stomach at the thought, but my nerves got the better of me and I glanced away. Before I could say anything, Ryan O’Rourke, the senior in charge, had come back around to help us, and the moment was over.
Still, that day, every little move and look felt like it meant something. When Sera handed me the paint bucket and our hands touched, they lingered—didn’t they? When she came over to give me advice and leaned against my shoulder to point out what she thought I should change, her breath so close to my ear—that was flirty, wasn’t it? When I finally told her about the paint on her face and went to wipe it off and she blushed—was she feeling that tug in her gut too?
I swallow down a sigh and go to help her with my brothers. Sera’s feet are bare, the bottoms a little green. I sit next to her.
“Want some help?”
