I wasn’t expecting him. I wasn’t expecting to have to talk to someone, especially a boy my age. He had a Baycrest High School insignia on his ocean-blue varsity jacket. I was supposed to go there, I knew, but I’d tried not to think about it. The summer had seemed endless, until suddenly it wasn’t, and ads for spiral-bound notebooks and back-to-school fashion had appeared in the local mailers.
“You’re not a dog thief, are you?” he asked pleasantly.
“Only on alternate Tuesdays,” I said, surprising myself with how easily the joke spilled out. But then, I was good at keeping up appearances. I always had been.
“Well, that’s a relief.” He grinned.
“I tell you that I steal dogs twice a month, and you’re relieved?” I asked, frowning.
“Eh, I’m chaotic neutral,” he replied, walking over and sticking out his hand. “Adam. I live here. In this house.”
“Sasha. My grandparents live there, in that house,” I said, waving toward it.
His hand was still out, so I shook it briefly, thrown by the formality. He was more eccentric-looking close up, and the script on his varsity jacket read Academic Decathlon, which I hadn’t known it was possible to letter in.
“Have you been here all summer?” he asked.
“Um, pretty much.”
“We just got back this week,” he said. “School starts on Monday.”
Did it? I hadn’t been paying attention. Today was Thursday. No, Friday. Because therapy.
“Getting a head start on your school spirit?” I asked, gesturing at his letter jacket.
“Psh, my school spirit is perpetual,” he said. “What’s your excuse?”
I was confused for a moment, and then I realized I was wearing one of my old RHS shirts. Randall High Lion Pride, my chest advertised.
“Oh, this?” I shrugged, keeping a straight face. “Yves Saint Laurent is having an exceptionally weird fashion moment.”
“Aren’t they always?” he returned, not missing a beat.
And then a low-slung white Mercedes pulled up. A gorgeous Asian girl in cat-eye sunglasses and bright red lipstick lowered the passenger side window. Françoise Hardy crooned loudly for a few moments before she turned the stereo down.
She stared at us, and I stared back, fascinated. I couldn’t stop staring. She felt like someone I had conjured from the pages of my book. Even though she was around my age, I couldn’t possibly imagine her sitting in a high school cafeteria with a sack lunch and a binder full of math homework. She seemed somehow better than that, and more interesting.
“Hi,” she said, and it took me a moment to realize she meant me.
“Um, hi,” I said, feeling self-conscious in my dog-walking clothes.
“Let’s go!” she called. “Club presidents have to get there early, remember?”
“Trust me, no one’s gonna care!” Adam yelled back, and then swiveled toward me with a sheepish grin. “That’s my ride. See you around?”
“Sure,” I said.
The girl turned the music back up as Adam climbed into the passenger seat. She said something, but I couldn’t hear what. And then the car swung around, white paint gleaming in the sun and music trailing from the windows like smoke as the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen sped away.
Chapter 6
LIFE REALLY WAS STARTING OVER IN the fall, because my grandparents were going out on Saturday night, and they were taking me with them. To dinner. “As a family.”
I let that phrase hang there, not even wanting to merit it with a response.
“Cocktail attire,” my grandmother warned. “No jeans.”
I didn’t own any cocktail attire, seeing as how I wasn’t old enough to drink one. But I knew where I could find some.
I’d gone into my mom’s old closet just once, during my first few days in Bayport, when I was half out of my mind with grief. Tears had bubbled up, hot and fast, as I ran my fingers over the abandoned pieces of my mother’s unfinished life. The soft college sweatshirt. The vintage prom dress. The thrift store finds she’d loved even back when she was my age. I couldn’t help myself: I’d sat down at the bottom of the closet, closed the door with me inside, and bawled.
Now when I pulled open the door, my hands only shook the tiniest bit.
It’s just a closet, I told myself. It’s just a dress.
I almost believed it.
I took out a cream-colored sheath that looked like it might fit. The dress was a little snug, but thankfully it zipped. I stared at myself in the mirror. My hair was a lighter shade of brown than my mother’s, but it had the same wave. My bangs had grown out from neglect, parting like curtains. Without them to hide behind, her face stared back at me. The barely there freckles, the wide brown eyes, the lashes that could never hold a curl.
I was a lesser version: shorter, curvier, with a rounder face and a sharper nose. A knockoff of the original.
Except not even that, because I wasn’t anything like her in the ways that actually mattered. My mom was charming and brave and immediately likable. She made a great first impression, whereas people tended to forget they’d ever met me. She was forever chatting with strangers in checkout lines or singing along to the car radio or wearing enormous vintage earrings.
I was never going to be her. But I also wasn’t going to snap back into being me again. And that was the part I couldn’t quite wrap my head around. The earthquake and its aftermath had changed me, and I wasn’t quite sure who this new person staring back at me from the mirror was, or who she was supposed to be.
“We’re leaving in five,” my grandfather called, his voice floating up the stairs.
“I’ll be ready!” I called back.
I twisted my hair up, put on a quick swipe of winged liner, and stepped into my ballet flats. When I came downstairs, my grandparents were waiting, calm and cool and perfectly pressed as always. My grandfather in his pink Hermès tie with little elephants on it. My grandmother in a beige leather jacket and black silk pants, her hair in a French twist.
They stared at me, and I saw the pain in their eyes. I was the ghost of the daughter they’d lost.
“White?” Eleanor said, pursing her lips, her haunted expression clearing as she surveyed my dress. “It’s almost Labor Day.”
“Should I change?” I asked, unsure.
“It’s fine,” she said.
“You look beautiful,” my grandfather added.
The dress had been a mistake.
I knew that as my grandfather maneuvered his car through the weekend traffic down on Ocean, the three of us sitting in awkward silence. Now, instead of just leaving the house, we’d also left the neighborhood. It was a lot. I thought wistfully of the Korean drama I’d been watching in bed, full of ridiculous fashion and even more ridiculous hair, about a girl masquerading as her twin brother to join a boy band. I’d just gotten to a good part.
The radio was turned too low, and was just that type of jazz that gets piped into waiting rooms, but my grandfather tapped along on the steering wheel anyway as he turned through the gates to the Bayport Country Club.
“This is dinner?” I asked, confused. I’d been expecting a restaurant.
“They have excellent food here,” my grandfather promised. “Best dinner rolls I’ve ever had. Served warm. And don’t even get me started on the salmon.”