“Also, sick days in quotes,” I announced as Wil’s dad returned with a paper plate full of celery and apple wedges smeared with peanut butter. A sick day in quotes was something special Mom did for my brother, Micah, and me once or twice each school year. We’d get up at the regular time, get dressed for school and eat breakfast, and just as Mom was rushing us out the door, she’d yell, “Sick day in quotes!” and pull us back inside. She’d call the school and tell them we were “sick” and make a big show of the air quotes while she was on the phone. Then we’d pile in her bed together and eat sugar cereal straight out of the box and watch cartoons until we all fell asleep.
“What about sick days?” Wilson crouched on the floor and placed a single napkin in front of each of us. One celery stick for me; one celery stick for Wil. One apple chunk for me; one apple chunk for Wil.
Wil rolled his eyes at me. “Don’t get him started about sick days.”
“No such thing.” Wil’s dad shook his head. “No matter what, every day—”
Wil finished the sentence for him: “You show up to play.”
When Wilson dropped me off at home that night, he told me I was welcome anytime. So I showed up the next afternoon. And the next. I spent nearly every day in that workshop, until Wil and I morphed into friends. Best friends. More. We were solid: made of layers of afternoon snacks and middle-school dances and first kisses. We took years to get that way. And I undid it all in a blink.
Somehow, I’ve survived our senior year without Wil. But now it’s April, and with Miami only a couple of months away, Wil’s absence seems sharper, just like every other detail of my Florida life. If I had to get all Intro to Psych about it, I guess I’d say that before I make the biggest change I’ve ever made in my very small life, I need something familiar. I want to find Wil in his dad’s workshop. I would talk through the cloudy life questions that have been hovering over me since August: What if I don’t get a good work-study job? and Mom can’t set Micah straight all by herself and But I don’t want to stay here, I most definitely do not want to stay in Atlantic Beach for the rest of my life. Not anymore.
The bell rings, and I watch Wil slide out of his seat and rest his hand on the small of Ana’s back. He steers her toward the door, leaving the smell of varnish in his wake.
He must be working on a new boat. He always smells like sawdust and varnish when he’s finishing a skiff. Varnish is his favorite smell—he used to sniff the can as a kid. I bet I’m the only person in the universe who knows that. I know all his real secrets, like how he can’t sleep without the National Geographic channel on low in the background. How he knows his dad loves him and his mom tries but doesn’t know him. How he can only cry underwater.
It’s such a waste, knowing those kinds of things about a stranger.
BRIDGE
Spring, Senior Year
“LAST chance,” Leigh singsongs in the parking lot, searching for Iz, the spray-painted VW bus she named after a famous dead graffiti artist from New York. “You can always come and not drink, you know.”
“There he is.” I point to the far end of the lot where Iz sags, fat-bellied, in the sun. “And it’s not that.”
It is that, and Leigh knows it. I can’t risk getting busted. After Wil broke up with me, there was no one there to pull the red Solo cup from my hand, no one to whisper that I’d had enough, that maybe I should go home. Junior year spring and summer spun by in a haze of beer and bonfires and house parties until reality slammed into me hard and fast, in the form of a minor-in-possession citation from the Atlantic Beach PD.
My MIP has earned me mandatory community service and a letter from Florida International University, informing me that one more run-in with the cops will jeopardize my acceptance and my shot at a future.
I don’t mind the community service. I finished my hours months ago, but I still spend a couple of afternoons every week hanging out with Minna Asher, the elderly woman I was paired with as my court-ordered atonement.
“I couldn’t go if I wanted to. Mom’s working late, and I need to make a Publix run and check on Micah,” I tell Leigh.
She laughs. “This is, like, the third time you’ve lost in a row.”
“Fourth.” My mother and I have this game called Culinary Chicken. We take turns cooking dinner and try to make the most of whatever we have in the refrigerator and pantry. Whoever chickens out and goes to the grocery store first loses. Last night’s meal (mine) was oatmeal-crusted pork chops with a strawberry jam sauce. I called chicken on my own dinner, threw it out, and ordered Chinese. I lose most weeks, because Mom cheats and brings leftovers home from blu, the gourmet restaurant at the resort where she works. The place is so pretentious they can get away with leaving off the e.
“The bonfire won’t get started till eight,” Leigh tells me. “If you change your mind—”
“I’ll call you,” I promise.
“You’d better.” She bumps her hip into mine. She smells like coconut oil, which she uses now for everything from shampoo to surf wax. She has a free ride to Savannah College of Art and Design, and she’s preparing for the life and budget of a legit artist, she says. She can say things like that, because her dad is an orthodontist and her mom stays home and I’ve never heard either one of them use the word money, which is how I know they have enough of it.
I hook my thumbs under my backpack straps and cut across the parking lot, maneuvering around old pickups and hatchbacks and a dented rack of beach cruisers. I find my pickup truck at the edge of the lot and toss my backpack through the half-open window. Soon I’m cruising north and the ocean is a jeweled navy band glinting to my right. Tile roofs and kidney-shaped swimming pools and a couple of dive bars painted dingy pastels swim past my window. The poorest post-card of itself, I think, which is a line from this poem about Florida that we read in English last year.
The grocery store is only a few miles down Atlantic. I wind my cart through the aisles, stocking up on pasta, frozen veggies, and Micah’s favorite bread from the bakery, the kind with cheese baked into the middle, even though he doesn’t deserve it at the moment. Not after the school counselor called my mother to inform her that my brother is showing—and this is a direct quote—pre-delinquent behaviors, skipping class and mouthing off to teachers.
The salmon looks good, so I splurge. I cross everything off my mental list and make one more stop: the refrigerator next to the balloon station. It’s crammed with sagging bouquets of gladiolas and glass vases of tulips and roses. I reach for the last handful of sunflowers.
“Well, if it isn’t Golden Gate.”
I drag the sunflowers out of the bucket and turn around slowly.
“Hey, Wilson,” I say. Wil’s dad is a hulking guy, with shoulders broad enough to rescue a girl from the ocean, like he did when I was nine and Wil dared me to swim past the breakers. For as long as I’ve known him, he’s worn the same uniform every day: jeans, work boots, and a HINES BOAT BUILDING AND REPAIR T-shirt, threadbare and stained. I have one just like it, shoved at the back of my dresser drawer. His hair is pulled into a half bun.