Sometimes I can’t fall asleep at night, because I’m scared that when I wake up some detail or memory will be fuzzier than it was the day before and eventually I’ll forget them. But it can’t all be woo-woo feelings or morbid reality. When I was in elementary school and Mom died, and then again in high school when Dad died, my everyday life was almost the same. I still went to school and took the bus home. But this adult version of my life? It’s my second act—my sophomore collection—and neither of my parents will ever be in the audience. I have to find a way to move through all these new experiences without forgetting them. And I have to find a way to create again. All the pieces are there inside me. They’ve just been lying dormant for the last year.
“Hello?” a voice calls, interrupting my thoughts.
“Yes!” I say. “You can leave it on the doorstep. Thank you!”
“You don’t want it to melt, do you?” There’s no mistaking that voice.
My heart skips and my limbs splash as I frantically sink down lower into the bath. “Henry? Don’t come in here! I’m naked!”
He chuckles. “Was that supposed to be a deterrent?”
“Yes,” I say with uncertainty. “Did it work?”
“Sadly, yes. Don’t worry,” he says. “I’m staying right where I am…. I just…I guess I just wanted to see you.”
“Well, I guess you’ll have to settle for talking.” It’s been less than twenty-four hours since our steamy make-out session in the early hours of the morning, and somehow it feels like years ago.
“You mind if I eat the cherry out of your drink?” he asks.
I pretend to gag. “Please. I hate those things.”
“Excuse me?” he says, his voice steeped in shock. “You hate cherries? How does anyone hate cherries?”
“In fact,” I tell him from the other side of the partition, “just take the whole drink. It’s been cherry tainted.”
“Wow. Okay, well, now that I know where you stand on cherries, I might as well take myself and my cherry-infested drink back to my room for a quiet night in.”
“Noooo.” I laugh softly. “Don’t go.”
Silence hangs in the air for a moment as I hold my breath.
“Okay,” he finally says.
I can hear the sound of his back sliding down the wall as he sits down in the grass. “Making yourself comfortable?” I ask.
“Well, I’m not open-air-tub-in-a-Mexican-villa comfortable, but this isn’t so bad either.”
“How was your big date?” I ask, even though I know I shouldn’t.
He groans.
“That bad or that off-limits?”
“You know it’s just part of being here, right? This isn’t real.”
“It’s not?” I ask, and I know it’s too big of a question for either of us to answer, so I quickly change course. “Olives too,” I tell him. “Can’t stand ’em.”
“Okay, well, you’ve left me with no choice. I choose Zeke.”
“Oh, I’m pretty sure someone’s already called dibs on Zeke.” I clap my hand over my mouth, then remember that he saw them in the pool that night.
“Yeah, he and Anna make a pretty cute pairing. Neither of them is very good at sneaking around, though.”
If he only knew. I open my mouth to tell him about all the times Erica caught Anna sneaking out but quickly stop myself.
“Anyone who hooks up in a pool behind a house full of women isn’t keeping any secrets,” he says.
I don’t know how to talk to him about Anna without also telling him that she’s my sister, so I return to a proven tactic. “It’s not that I don’t like olives and cherries. But they have to be fresh. Like, with the pits in them. None of that canned or jarred stuff. Though, on my twenty-first birthday, I ate twenty-one moonshine cherries.”
