I quickly set it face down on the table and open my menu again.
“You said I’d need my energy today,” I say, changing the subject. “What are we getting up to?”
The question is enough for George to forget his discomfort. “How do you feel about a new adventure?”
I peer up at him. “You know the answer to that.”
“Might need you to say it.”
“In that case,” I say, grinning, “I feel utterly desperate for one.”
Chapter Twenty-four
“I’ve always wanted to try surfing,” I say to George, kicking my feet.
We’re sitting on a bench, waiting for our instructors in a beach parking lot. The forest is so dense around us that we can’t see the ocean, even though we’re practically right beside it. The lot is full of camper vans and old Volkswagen buses. Nearby, a father and teenage daughter in wet suits are tethering their surfboards to the roof of a station wagon. A sign warns of cold water, unpredictable waves, and slippery rocks, and another about rip currents—how to avoid them and how to “escape the grip of the rip” by swimming parallel to the shore.
“I know,” George says. “I lived through yourBlue Crushobsession.” He’s wearing contacts, and I’m having trouble meeting his eyes. He looks mischievous without his glasses, more of a rascal than a reporter.
“I’m super excited about this.” Maybe it will help me work off this unspent sexual energy. “I have a feeling I’ll be a natural.”
George grins at me—a full, unguarded smile—and the look sends me reeling back in time. To the same smile, under very different circumstances.
I’m almost fourteen years old, standing in the gap of the cedar hedge, waiting for George’s dad to leave.
I hadn’t seen my best friend in seven months, not since he moved back to Montreal with his father. The day he left was one of the most painful of my young life. When I learned it hadn’t worked out with his dad and that George was coming to live at the Big House for good, I cried with relief. I should have felt guilty. Mimi had visited their apartment without warning and found George alone, as he’d been for forty-eight hours.
As soon as his dad’s car pulled out of the driveway, I raced over. Mimi tried to send me home. She said George wasn’t feeling well, but I wouldn’t budge until she let me in. I ran up to his room, threw open the door, and found him face down on his bed, sobbing. He didn’t look like George. His body was all wrong—long and wiry—and his hair had been buzzed almost to his scalp, like when we first met. I knew from his emails that his dad had made him cut it.
I’d never felt hate until that moment, but I hated George’s dad. I hated him for taking George away from me. I hated him for not loving George well enough. And I hated him for cutting George’s gorgeous hair.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to throw something. But I lay down beside George and rubbed his back the way my mom used to do for me when I was little.
“Once upon a time, there was a girl named Francesca and a whale named Francesca,” I whispered, my mom’s bedtime story coming back to me like the lyrics of a favorite song. “Francesca the girl lived by the sea, and the best thing about living by the sea was the whales. Francesca loved the whales that fed in the waters by her home on the Bay of Fundy. She waited all year for them to arrive.”
By the time I’d finished, George had stopped crying.
“Hi, Frankie,” he said into his pillow.
“I’m sorry you’re sad,” I told him. “And I hope this doesn’t make me a bad person, but I’m really happy you’re back.”
George turned his cheek in my direction. He looked so much older without the waves on his head. “Me too.”
“Your hair,” I said, trying not to cry.
“I know. My one beauty.”
We both cracked up at theLittle Womenreference, and even though his face was damp and his eyelids were puffy, the smile he gave me was the nicest I’d ever seen.
My chest aches at how far he’s come from that heartsick boy. I love it when George lets himself really smile, the way he is right now.
“I can’t believe you were going to spend a week in Tofino and not take surfing lessons,” he says. “What were you guys going to do?”
I give him a meaningful look. “It was supposed to be our honeymoon. What did you think we were going to do?”
“Oh,” he says. “Right.”
I clear my throat, resolving to stop thinking about sex, especially around George. “Please explain how surfing fits into ThePlan,” I say, handing him a power bar, even though he ate an omelet, two pieces of toast, and a chia-berry parfait at breakfast.
