I just stared where he was pointing for a moment. That was the Morrisons’ house, and I’d just assumed they were still there, Mr. and Mrs. Morrison and their mean poodle. “You live next door to me?”
“We have for a few years now,” he said. “But since there were always renters at your place, I didn’t think you were ever coming back.”
“Me neither,” I admitted, “if you want to know the truth.”
“So what happened?” he asked, looking right at me and startling me with the greenness of his eyes. “Why are you back, all of a sudden?”
I felt my breath catch as the reason—never far from my thoughts—crashed into the front of my mind, seeming to dim the afternoon light a little. “Well,” I said slowly, looking away from him and out to the water, trying to think about how to explain it. It wasn’t even like it was that complicated. All I had to say was something along the lines of My dad’s sick. So we’re spending the summer together up here. That wasn’t the hard part. The hard part came with the follow-up questions. How sick? With what? Is it serious? And then the inevitable reaction when people realized how serious it actually was. And that what I meant, but hadn’t said, was that we were spending our last summer together.
I didn’t have a practiced explanation because I had assiduously avoided having this conversation. Word had spread around school pretty quickly, preventing me from having to explain the situation. And if I was with my mother, and we happened to run into an acquaintance in the grocery store who asked after my father, I left the task of breaking the news to her. I would look pointedly in the other direction, or wander a few steps away, as though yielding to the inexorable pull of the cereal aisle, pretending that the difficult conversation she was having had nothing whatsoever to do with me. I wasn’t entirely sure I could say the words out loud—or handle the follow-up questions—without losing it. I hadn’t really cried yet, and I didn’t want to risk this happening in front of Henry Crosby.
“It’s kind of a long story,” I finally said, keeping my eyes on the calm surface of the lake.
“Yeah,” Henry said, sarcastically. “I’m sure.”
I blinked at his tone. Henry had never talked to me like that before. When we’d fought, it had been the kid version of fighting—arm punches, name calling, pranking—anything to get the fight over with so that we could go back to being friends. Hearing him now—and the way we were sniping at each other—felt like speaking a foreign language with someone you’d only ever spoken English to.
“So why did you move?” I asked, a little more aggressively than I meant to, as I turned to him, folding my arms across my chest. Moves within Lake Phoenix were fairly rare—on the drive up, I’d seen signs I recognized in front of house after house, the same owners still there.
Expecting an immediate answer, I was surprised to see Henry flush slightly and stick his hands in the pockets of his shorts, which had always been his tell when he didn’t know what to say. “It’s a long story,” he echoed, looking down. For a moment, the only sound was the faint thunk thunk of the plastic kayak bumping up against the wooden leg of the dock. “Anyway,” he said after a pause, “we live there now.”
“Right,” I said, feeling like we’d already established this. “I got that.”
“I mean, we live there year-round,” he clarified. He looked back at me and I tried to cover my expression of surprise. Though you could live in Lake Phoenix full-time, very few people did—it was primarily a summer community. And five years ago, Henry had lived in Maryland. His father had done something in finance in D.C., coming up to Lake Phoenix with the rest of the fathers on the weekends, and staying in the city to work the rest of the time.
“Oh,” I said, nodding like I understood. I had no idea what that meant in terms of the rest of his life, but he didn’t seem like he was about to give me a detailed explanation, and I didn’t feel like I had the right to ask for more information. All of a sudden, I realized there was a much bigger distance between Henry and me than just the few feet that separated us.
“Yeah,” Henry said, and I wondered if he was feeling the same thing that I was—like he was standing on the dock with a stranger. “I should go,” he said shortly, as he turned to leave.
It felt wrong to end this on such an unsettled note, so, mostly just wanting to be polite, as he passed me, I said, “Good to see you again.”
He stopped, just a few feet from me, closer than ever, close enough that I could see that there was still a scattering of freckles across his cheeks, but so faint I could almost see each one, and connect them, like constellations. I could feel my pulse beating harder at the base of my throat, and I suddenly had a flashback to one of our early, tentative make-out sessions five years earlier—one that had, in fact, taken place on this very dock. I’ve kissed you flashed through my mind before I could stop it.
I looked at Henry, still so close, wondering if maybe he was remembering the same thing. But he was looking at me with a flat, skeptical expression, and as he started to walk away again, I realized that he had deliberately not returned my “good to see you” sentiment.
Maybe, on a different day, I would have left it at that. But I was cranky and tired and had just spent four hours listening to boy bands and facts about the energy of light, and I could feel my temper start to flare. “Look, it’s not like I wanted to come back,” I said, hearing my voice get louder and a little more shrill.
“Then why are you here?” Henry asked, his voice rising as well.
“I didn’t have any choice in the matter,” I snapped, knowing that I was about to go too far, but also knowing that I wasn’t going to be able to stop myself. “I never wanted to come back here ever again.”
For a second, I thought I saw a flash of hurt pass over his face, but then it was gone, and the same stony expression had returned. “Well,” he said. “Maybe you’re not the only one who wanted that.”
I tried not to flinch, even though I knew I deserved it. We stared at each other, in a momentary standoff, and I realized that one of the main problems with having an argument on a dock is that there’s really nowhere to go if the other person is standing between you and dry land.
“So,” I said finally, breaking our eye contact and folding my arms over my chest, trying to indicate with my tone of voice how little I cared. “See you around.”
Henry slung the kayak paddle over one shoulder like an ax. “I think that’s inevitable, Taylor,” he said ruefully. He looked at me for a moment longer before turning and walking away and, not wanting to watch him go, I strode to the end of the dock.
I looked out at the water, and the sun that was just starting to think about setting, and let out a long breath. So Henry was living next door to me. It would be fine. I could deal with it. I would just spend the entire summer indoors. Suddenly exhausted by the thought of all of it, I sat down and let my feet skim the surface of the water. Just then, I caught sight of something at the very corner of the dock.
HENRY
+
TAYLOR
4EVER
We had carved it together, in the center of a crooked heart, five years ago. I couldn’t believe that it was still here after all this time. I ran my fingers over the plus sign, wondering why, at twelve, I thought I’d had any concept of forever.