Tyler took me to the diner off Atlantic Avenue—the one where his mom didn’t work, and only a ten-minute walk from our houses. We sat in a booth by the window, and the split vinyl pinched my thighs, and the too-bright overheads bleached my eyes, and I did not care. Because my older brother’s best friend was sitting across from me with his chin resting on his half-closed fist, his phone face down, and his gaze fixed on mine.
“So, this book you’re writing,” he said. “What’s it about, really?”
My legs were kicking, and I had to remind myself to stop them. To push back my shoulders. To be... I don’t know. To be more like the older girls? To be cool—to be effortless. To act like I’d been here before.
“It’s, well...” I decided to pull my legs onto the booth. To sit crisscross. That’d keep them still. That’d keep them normal. “It’s a love story, I guess. Like I told you.”
He reached for a fry. “That’s all you’re going to give me?”
“Well, every time you ask me about it, you’re just kidding. You’re just drunk and stoned and bored. So why would I tell you more?”
Now his head—still cradled in his hand—tilted a little. “That’s not true.”
I fingered the cool, scalloped base of my milkshake glass. It was scratched up and bordering on opaque. When I finally spoke, my jaw ached, and I almost needed to bite down on my tongue to keep a frown from spreading across my face. “That you’re not always fucked-up? Pretty sure that’s true.”
“No,” he said. “That I’m always kidding. That you think I don’t care.”
I lifted my eyes. They were—and this was so dumb, and I knew it, I knew it, I knew it—welling with tears. How stupid that a single sentence could erase all other proof. How stupid that a boy I knew, for a fact, was doing this with every other girl in town could say something like that and change the way I saw the whole world.
“Katie?” he said. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I, um...” I pressed my palms to my eyes until the tears had been sufficiently suppressed. “Nothing.”
Tyler tapped his fingers on the table. I wondered, in that moment, if he knew. Not the obvious stuff because, of course. But the rest of it. That I’d wanted to go to camp, too—a theater program in the city. That I’d asked a thousand times, offered to help my mom with her open houses, offered to babysit for the neighbors every night, offered to take the train all by myself every morning and evening. That I’d wanted all sorts of things, that I had all sorts of dreams, and how second-place and frivolous to Mikey’s they always seemed.
“We should write together,” he said.
“Huh?”
“This summer.” He pulled out a folded scrap of paper from his pocket and slid it my way. “We should write together.”
Even the note’s texture—its wear, its creases—felt like a secret. Like proof of a moment that’d only ever be his and mine. I unfolded it, and something warm and bright and featherlight banged around my bursting rib cage.
I traced a few words—inky, black, and barely legible. I squinted, and the scratch came into focus.Long Island. Summer. Dad stuff? Should he look for him? Would it matter? Would it erase the ache?
“You’re writing too?”
He nodded. His eyes, hazel and twinkling and all the things they usually were, but different. A little more honest. A little more true. I wanted to pry him open. To ask him every question under the sun. To ask if it was his father who’d broken him, and whether he was just pretending it didn’t hurt, and why he was so mean to me in front of Mikey, and why he acted so different when we were all alone, and why, after all the nights we’d seen each other through our windows, it was finally my turn to sit here and learn this new side of him. But I didn’t want to push my luck. I didn’t want to give him a reason to turn me over or change his mind.
“I’m tutoring this moron in the mornings,” he said. “Like, nine to noon. His parents have a house on the water. You should meet me on the beach after. Maybe we can sort of keep each other company? Talk things through? I’m having trouble figuring out where to start, and...” He glanced up and smiled. Not with his crookedsmile either. A new one—soft and good. “Mikey isn’t exactly the best with this stuff, if you know what I mean.”
My feet, somehow, were kicking again. “Wow. Okay! Yeah!” I said. “That’d be... Yes! I’ll pack us lunch! I’ll be there!”
He grinned, then reached for another fry as I traced again the words on his little scrap of paper. As I traced again this brand-new side of him. As I traced again the evidence that the most magical summer of my life had finally begun.
32
Tyler
Present Day
The Hamptons
That evening, Katie’s and my walkie-talkie session lingered long past midnight. The conversation, hardly about Henry and Willa at all. Instead, Katie asked me about the short stories I’d published and what was going on with my unsold manuscripts, then told me how, sometimes, she felt like Pinot was watching her sleep. And so, because her window was so bright and her laugh was so full, and because I truly could not think of another place on this planet I wanted to spend the next few nights, I decided to stay.
And it was also why, when we hit thirty-four thousand words around four o’clock Friday afternoon, I clicked my laptop shut and asked her if she wanted to come print pages with me... and then maybe grab a quick dinner on Main Street.
But Katie, all of a sudden, stiffened. And then, without quite looking at me, she bit down on her bottom lip. “I, um... I have plans. Sorry, I thought you knew? That Danny’s got a share house out here for the month?”
