Nantucket Red (Nantucket Blue)

Copyright © 2014 by Leila Howland

Cover design by Marci Senders

Cover photograph © 2014 by Michael Flores

All rights reserved. Published by Hyperion, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Hyperion, 125 West End Avenue, New York, New York 10023-6387.

ISBN 978-1-4847-0639-8

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www.hyperionteens.com

For Jonathan

One

I NEVER LIKED THE LAST FEW DAYS
of summer vacation. Hot without the promise of beach days, heavy with the knowledge that a whole school year is ahead, and stuck in a muggy haze between summer and fall, they’re the slowest days of the year. Today felt like the most in-between day of all. It was almost eleven o’clock and I was still in bed. The sun streaked through the blinds and made patterns on the walls. I stared at the ceiling, watching the fan go around and around. Zack was starting boarding school tomorrow and we still hadn’t discussed whether we were going to stay together or break up. How was it that only a week ago we were at Steps Beach, kissing under the stars, with what felt like an ocean of time sparkling ahead of us?

A few days after we’d returned to Providence, Zack told me he was going to Hanover Academy, an elite boarding school in northern New Hampshire. I understood why he was leaving. His mom, Nina, had died in June and his dad and sister, Jules, had completely shut down. Who could blame them?

Nina was the most alive person I’d ever met. I loved her, too. She taught me how to ice skate backward. She taught me how to make a perfect vinaigrette. She introduced me to Frida Kahlo and William Carlos Williams. She made the best paella. There was no one like her, and now she was gone. Mr. Clayton and Jules were shadows of their previous selves. Zack was living with ghosts.

Hanover would give him a chance to start fresh and be among the living. When he told me that a space had opened up at the last minute and he was taking it, I was happy for him. It didn’t feel real. I still had Nantucket sand in my shoes. I was so dizzy-happy in love with him that nothing felt real, but it was starting to sink in: the boy I’d risked everything for this summer was going away. He was coming over in a few hours to spend the afternoon with me, and we had to decide what to do. Break up? I wondered as I kicked off the sheets. Stay together, I thought, and sat up.

I lifted my hair off my sweaty neck, twisted it into a bun, and turned on my laptop. When I logged onto Facebook, Zack’s new profile picture was at the top of my feed. He’d taken down the photo of himself on the beach in Nantucket and replaced it with one of himself in a Hanover Academy sweatshirt. No,
I thought.

Jules commented: “Don’t forget your jockstrap!”

A flurry of “good lucks” and “have funs” and more specific comments followed, references to Hanover that I didn’t understand. No, stay with me, I thought and felt myself contract and stiffen. My jaw tightened. My stomach clenched. I wanted to hold on to him and keep him in my world, our world. This feeling, this panicky collapse, was opposite of the sweet effervescence I felt when I was with him; it was foreign and unwelcome, and it didn’t feel like love.

“Cricket, it’s for you,” Mom said with a girlie smile when Zack knocked on the door a few hours later. Mom had never been good with boundaries; my being in love gave her a contact blush.

Zack’s eyes lit up as I walked toward him in the new white tank top Mom had bought me from the Gap after she saw the state of my clothes when I’d returned from Nantucket, and my old, worn-out cutoffs she couldn’t have separated me from if she’d tried. My hair was still damp from a shower and I knew I smelled like the vanilla soap he liked. A slow grin spread across his face as he leaned in the door frame.

“Let’s get lost,” Zack said like someone from an old movie. He handed me an iced coffee just the way I liked it: extra ice, lots of cream, no sugar.

Mom lingered in the front hall and placed a hand over her heart, slayed by Zack’s charm. “Don’t forget to take an umbrella,” she said. “It’s supposed to rain.”

“That’s okay. Thanks, Mom,” I said as we walked to his car. I slid my fingers through his belt loop. “I know where we can get some privacy.” I’d discovered this place on an away game in Newport. It was about a half hour outside Providence, off Route 24, past Dotty’s Donuts, down a shady country road. You had to drive by the farm with the self-service strawberry stand and the Catholic school with its low, humble buildings, all the way to where the road ended at the Narragansett Bay.

The air-conditioning was broken in Zack’s old station wagon, so we drove with the windows down. We listened to the college station, stopped for donuts, and even spotted one of the monks from the Catholic school talking on an iPhone. We held hands and kissed at stoplights, but we didn’t talk about us.

After we parked, Zack headed down to the beach. I balanced on the abandoned train tracks that hugged the shore and watched him pick up a stone, examine it, and send it skipping into the bay. He was having dinner with Jules and his dad in an hour and a half, and then they were heading to New Hampshire, where they would spend the night at an inn so they could move him into his dorm the next morning. It was time.

I hopped off the tracks, walked down the rocky hill to the beach, and wrapped my arms around his waist. There was a pale band on his neck where his hair had been cut for school.

“What are we going to do?” I asked, breathing into his back.

“I don’t want to break up,” he said, turning to face me. The clouds collected weight and darkness above us. He pulled me close. “What do you think?”

“I think long distance sucks.” Zack pressed his fingers into my spine, confusing my chemicals. Part of me was trying to shut down so that I could deal with this, but my blood spun under his touch.

“It’s only a few hours away. We can switch off weekends.”

“I don’t have a car.”

“You can take the bus. And there are so many vacations. For as expensive as this school is, I’ll hardly ever be there.”

“But I don’t want to be someone you text or a face on the screen,” I said as his hands left swirls of heat on my back. “We’ll forget each other. Or fade away. Long distance will distort everything.”

“I could never forget you,” Zack said as a wave washed over our ankles. My shoes got soaked. I tossed them back on the beach where they landed in ballet third position.

“When I saw you’d changed your profile picture, I felt like this.” I clenched my fists and gritted my teeth. He smiled. “Zack, I’m serious.” I looped my arms around his neck and leaned in. “I don’t want to feel that way about you. All tight and anxious.”

“Let’s not do long distance, then.”

“So we’re breaking up?” The words were so far from what I wanted that they didn’t feel real—like I couldn’t have possibly just said them. “No, no, no. I don’t want that.”

“I don’t either.”

“Maybe we can just…pause,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, we’ll just stop here, right now, like this, and then pick up where we left off next summer.” A few fat raindrops fell. “No Facebook, no Instagram, no texts, no phone.”

“Okay,” Zack said. “I can do that.”

“But we have to stick to the rules, otherwise the pause won’t work.”

“I’m unfriending you right now.” Zack slid one hand in my left back pocket while the other took out his phone. “Well, there’s no reception out here, but I’m going to do it as soon as I get home.” Then, before I knew it, Zack snapped a picture of us: me looking up as the rain started, eyebrows raised, him with his arm around my neck, smiling at me.

The rain started for real. We ran for the car and dove into the backseat. Rain splattered against the windows as if flung from a million paintbrushes.

“Paused,” I said.

“Paused,” Zack said. He pulled off my tank top and I slid his T-shirt over his head.

“Wait—the monk!” I said, covering myself with my hands.

“He’s on his iPhone,” Zack said, and we laughed, trying to guess who it was he was talking to: His mom? A nun? God?

“I love you,” he said as we slid back on the seat.

“I love you, too.” It was the first time we’d said those three words in that order. I shivered. I knew in my bones that the words were as true and real as the vinyl seats in that wood-paneled station wagon, the rusted rails of the train tracks, the drumroll of thunder in the distance. My foot made a print on the cool, fogged-up window.

Forty-five minutes later, flushed and unable to stop smiling, we drove off. I’d forgotten all about my shoes, which had been left on the beach, waiting, in third position, for our return.

Two

FOR THE FIRST TIME
in my thirteen years of attending the Rosewood School for Girls, I was scared to walk through the front doors. I should’ve been happy. As a senior, I was going to be allowed off campus for lunch. I was going to write the name of whatever colleges I was accepted into on the big piece of butcher paper hanging in the senior lounge. I was going to be captain of the field hockey and lacrosse teams, and for years I’d planned on being one of the seniors who was super nice to the freshman. As I watched girls spill out of cars in spanking-new uniforms, and gather in quartets and trios, I didn’t feel nice.

“I can’t go in,” I said to Mom. “Jules hates me.”

“She doesn’t hate you. She’s been through hell, but you did nothing wrong.”

“What about Nina’s memorial service?” I leaned against the headrest to offset the nausea.

“You thought you were doing the right thing. It was an innocent mistake.”

“Zack?”
Innocent
was not the word to describe us.

“Falling in love with someone’s brother is not a hanging offense,” Mom said and checked herself out in the visor mirror. She applied a new shade of lipstick. Coral. It was actually kind of hip. She’d been taking antidepressants for three weeks now and I could tell they were starting to work. She readjusted the mirror. “Now, out you go, I can’t be late. It’s my first day, too, you know.”

I shook my head. God only knows how Jules had spun the story of this summer to our friends. She could tell a story like no one else: pauses so well timed, impressions so accurate, gestures so precise that everyone in her orbit was enchanted. My stomach churned at the thought of being on the wrong side of her talent.

Mom leaned over and opened the door herself. “Cricket, go.”

I was biding my time in a bathroom stall before assembly, admiring the paint job they’d done over the summer, when Jules came in. I watched her walk into the next stall. I would know those boat shoes anywhere, as well as the little white scar on the top of her left foot from when she’d dropped an ice skate in the seventh grade. The sound of her peeing seemed horribly amplified. She was humming the school song. I was going to make a run for it, but then I realized that catching her alone was exactly what I needed. I had to face her and apologize again. Better that we weren’t surrounded. I opened the latch, stood by the sinks, and braced myself.

“I’m sorry,” I said, when she emerged from the stall.

“Ah!” She flung a hand to her chest. “You scared me.”

“I’m sorry. About the memorial service, and Zack, and everything.”

“Cricket.” Jules sighed my name. She looked tired, a little too tan, a little too skinny. I wanted to hug her and ask if she was okay. “I just— I can’t right now.” She’d said it with such naked honesty there was nothing to do but accept it.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay.” We washed our hands in silence. We couldn’t walk out together. In a strange move, I gestured like some kind of old-fashioned gentleman for her to leave first. She gave me a confused look and left. I counted to twenty and opened the door. I saw our group of friends seamlessly envelop her as they walked toward assembly, moving in one fluid motion, like a river.

They’d repainted the auditorium, too, and even though the windows were open, the fumes were giving me a headache. I sat up front, away from Jules, and tried to focus as the principal, Edwina MacIntosh, welcomed everyone back to school. Teachers made announcements about school activities: student council, the literary magazine, yearbook, choir, community service outreach. Sign me up for everything, I thought. I may be without a best friend or a boyfriend, but this is my school.

I cast a quick glance at Jules, who was whispering to Arti Rai. My college application is going to fucking glow, I thought as I whipped out my plan book and started making notes.

I spent the midmorning break alone in the senior lounge with my school supplies. I could see Jules in the cafeteria, telling summer stories to a table of enraptured girls. They were all eating bagels the way I had invented, peeling off the hard outer shell and eating that first and saving the squishy middle in its original shape for last. That’s called Cricket-style,
I thought bitterly. I was eating an endlessly chewy protein bar that tasted like wood chips, labeling tabs, and trying to look busy. Miss Kang, the field hockey and lacrosse coach, noticed me as she walked by.

I smiled and held up my plan book. “Getting organized!”

“You are too much, Cricket,” she said and sat down next to me on the old couch. “You know I’m in touch with Stacy, head coach over at Brown, right? She’s got her eye on you. What do you say we put together some clips to send her?” She elbowed me. “What do you say we get you into Brown?”

“Really? Do you think?” I’d always imagined I’d go away for college and not stay in Providence. Where, I didn’t know, but I had this picture in my head of stuffing the Honda to the gills and hitting the road. But Brown was
Ivy Leagu
e
—hallowed words, a synonym for the best. I imagined what it would feel like to write
Brown
on that big piece of butcher paper. It would feel like redemption. I’d seen it happen. The senior girls accepted to Ivy Leagues basked in a haze of adoration, cleansed of all previous misdeeds. “Do you really think I could make the team?”

“They’d be lucky to have you,” Miss Kang said. “And they’re going to graduate their starting lineup this year.” She rubbed her hands together as if devising a plan. Then, glimpsing the clock in the cafeteria, she said, “I have to prep for Algebra II. We’ll talk more at practice. You should be ready to lead warm-ups with Jules.”

“Yeah, sure.” Cocaptains. It had been decided last year, back when we could bust into our synchronized dance moves within three seconds of hearing that Bruno Mars song, but now my stomach elevator-dropped at her name. “No problem.”