“I promise I’m not a stalker,” I said. “I just pay attention to your mom’s work.”
“What else?” he said.
I laughed. It was the first time I’d ever used that laugh, the nervous one, which doesn’t really sound like me. I mentioned the cowlick.
“Do you want to come over to my house sometime?” Leo said then.
“Yes,” I squeaked.
God. I was so pathetic. I was so naive. I was so wrong.
9
I’ve been comforting myself by imagining a scenario in which Leo shows up on my front lawn and shouts I’m sorry up at my window, like a scene in a romantic comedy. He’ll also yell that he’s made a terrible mistake, and if I will just forgive him he’ll make it up to me, and Kayla doesn’t mean anything to him. Then I plan to open my window and scream back, You don’t mean anything to me, either! Go away, loser! and slam the window shut again. No kissing and making up for me. I don’t require a happy ending, only some small form of petty vengeance.
But, sadly, Leo never appears.
“What’s up with you?” Pop asks. “You’re being quieter than usual.”
“I’m a quiet person,” I say, although that’s not entirely true. I’m only quiet around people I don’t know. Around Pop I’m generally talkative. “I’m fine.”
Pop and Abby are in my bedroom, helping me pack for Hawaii. Although helping is not quite what Abby is doing. She keeps bouncing on the bed and suggesting weird stuff for me to bring, like my large wooden art easel that won’t have a prayer of fitting in my suitcase, or the white feather boa that’s draped over one of my bedposts, a leftover from a birthday party years ago. “To remind you of home,” Abby says, flinging it around my neck.
“We’re only going to be gone for like a week,” I remind her.
“How many days is a week?” Abby wants to know.
“Seven. But we’re going to be gone nine, counting the travel days.”
Abby counts it out on her fingers. “Nine days is a lot,” she decides.
Yes, it is. Thank god. It’s just what I need, nine days with an entire ocean between me and Leo. “I won’t get homesick, Abby. Trust me.”
“It’s too bad you burned up Bucky,” Abby adds mournfully. “You could have brought him instead. He was snuggly.”
“Bucky?” Pop looks confused.
“Ada got mad at her horse,” Abby explains. “I don’t think it was his fault, but she burned him up anyway, in the firepit, because Leo’s an asshole.”
Pop’s mouth opens, but no words emerge. He turns to me, eyebrows raised.
I cringe and hold my hands up, like I surrender, arrest me. “I don’t want to talk about it?”
Thankfully that’s when Afton struts into the room—without so much as knocking, of course—and everyone’s attention shifts. Because all Afton has covering her body is a bright red bikini.
“Um, why are you wearing your underwears?” Abby asks.
A legitimate question.
“Oh no, that’s too little to be underwear,” I say. “I’m not sure what that is, actually. I don’t think it’s clothing.”
“What, is this too slutty for you?” Afton says archly.
“Whoa!” Pop exclaims. “You know we don’t use that word.”
“Oh, grow up,” I mutter to Afton.
“I am grown up. Unlike you, who is so very immature.”
“Are you two having a fight?” Abby asks.
“God, that’s hurting my eyes,” Pop says, looking away like Afton’s bikini has become the sun, too bright to stare at directly.
“Aren’t you cold?” asks Abby.
“Well, yes.” Afton runs her hands up and down her arms, where there are, in fact, goose bumps. “But I won’t be cold in Hawaii.”
If she’s trying to prove some sort of point, I’m not sure what it is.
“You’re not wearing that in Hawaii, young lady,” Pop says. “You’ll give your mother a heart attack.”
Afton gives him a cool, assessing look. “I’m legally an adult, sorry. I can wear what I want, when I want. And when did you and Mom become such prudes?”
Pop looks even more shocked than he did when his five-year-old cheerfully uttered the word asshole. Afton has never mouthed off to him before. He stares at her in stunned bewilderment.
Afton pretends not to notice. She turns to me, holding up a hanger that has a different bathing suit on it, a white one-piece with a neckline that plunges nearly to the belly button. “Which one?”
“What are you doing? There’s no need to take things out on Pop.”
“Oh, come on.” Afton turns to gaze at herself in the mirror on my closet door. “I’m feeling the red. It’s less careful, you know? Less boring.”
Oh, so Afton’s calling me boring. I grab my robe and throw it unceremoniously at my sister. “Get out of my room. No one here wants to see that.”
Afton scoffs but retreats to her own bedroom, slamming the door behind her.
“All right, what exactly is going on here?” asks Pop.
“Afton and Ada are having a fight!” exclaims Abby excitedly.
I wave my little sister off. “Not really. Afton’s just digging up drama. We’ll be fine.”
“Did something happen with Leo?” Pop looks worried.
I consider telling him and decide against it. I always assumed I could talk to Pop about anything. But, it turns out, not this. If I think about the look on his face if I confess it all, it feels like too much, for both of us. I swallow down a lump in my throat. “Seriously, Pop, I don’t want to get into it. Let’s just pack, okay?”
I can see in his eyes that he’s deciding whether to push or not, to try to make me tell him or leave it. In the end he goes with leaving it. “Okay. But I’m here if you need me, Ada. I’d be happy to bestow my relationship wisdom upon you. Ask, and you shall receive.”
“Maybe later,” I say lightly.
Pop finally drops it and returns to organizing my luggage. He likes to roll the clothes into neat little tubes, which somehow allows him to cram more into the carry-on suitcase than should be physically possible. My mom always makes our family travel with carry-ons only. She doesn’t like to wait for luggage at the airport.
“Wait,” Pop says after a minute. “Don’t you have a swimsuit?”
I shake my head. “I don’t own one.”
“Ada!” he exclaims like I am personally offending him with my appalling lack of swimwear. “We live in California.”
“I’m aware.”
“You can go to the beach any time you want.”
I shrug. The beach makes me think of Santa Cruz. Which makes me think of Leo.
“We have a pool,” Pop says.
“I know. I swam in it, like twice, when we first moved here.” That was around the time Abby was born. Swimming just isn’t my thing. Especially now. God. I never want to set eyes on a pool again. Because that of course also makes me think of Leo.
It’s a good thing that I’m escaping to Hawaii, which is made up entirely of pools and beaches.