The Foreseeable Future Read online

  DIAL BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  Copyright © 2018 by Emily Adrian

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Ebook ISBN: 9780399539015

  Names: Adrian, Emily, author.

  Title: The foreseeable future / Emily Adrian.

  Description: New York, NY : Dial Books, [2018] | Summary: “High school senior Audrey Nelson is ready to move far away from her small coastal California town after graduation, but that all changes when she falls for Seth O’Malley, saves his ex-girlfriend’s life, and becomes a viral sensation in the process”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2017039685 | ISBN 9780399538995 (hardback) Subjects: | CYAC: Celebrities—Fiction. | Dating (Social customs)—Fiction. | Family problems—Fiction. | Nursing homes—Fiction. | Family life—California—Fiction.California—Fiction. Classification: LCC PZ7.1.A27 For 2018 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017039685

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Jacket photo © 2018 by Shutterstock

  Jacket design by Vanessa Han

  Version_1

  For my mom, Ellen Adrian, who taught me independence

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  Acknowledgments

  ONE

  “It’s an adorable town, right on the water. There’s a surf shop, a gas station, a restaurant called the Fish Shack, and that’s basically it.”

  My host, a freshman named Vanessa, paused her spiel to check the time on her phone. She had already warned me about the risks associated with being late to dinner; apparently, the dining hall ran out of veggie burgers fast on Friday nights. “The problem with Crescent Bay is that it’s about a twenty-minute drive from campus, so you have to befriend someone with a car. But I totally recommend going into town as soon as you get a chance. It’s really quaint. I think the population is less than a thousand.”

  Signing up for an overnight preview of life at Whedon College had been my parents’ idea. So far, my preview had entailed following this girl around while she took a lot of pride in scanning her ID card to open doors marked STAFF AND STUDENTS ONLY. Vanessa had a tangle of dirty-blond hair and wore, attached to her belt with a carabiner, a noisy collection of keys and small tools. She was the kind of person whom my best friend, Sara, would describe as mountain grunge. Letting her show me around felt sort of disingenuous—like I was pretending to be some city kid who had picked Whedon for its proximity to the Pacific, or because I’d heard people in northern California were uncommonly chill.

  Really, the campus was as familiar to me as my own backyard.

  “The population is over four thousand,” I said. “Four thousand, three-hundred and fifty-five.” I knew the number from a salt-eroded highway sign bearing my hometown’s slogan: RELAX, YOU’RE IN CRESCENT BAY!

  “Whoa.” Vanessa had a dramatic habit of lowering her sunglasses every time she wanted to look me in the eye. “You really did your research before deciding on a school.”

  “Actually, I’m from here.”

  “For real?” Her surprise was sincere. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who’s from here.”

  I believed her. Most local kids didn’t have the grades or the money to attend the only college within our zip code. Arguably, I didn’t have the grades, either. What I did have were two tenured professors for parents.

  “It must be nice to love where you’re from so much, you don’t ever want to leave,” Vanessa said.

  I was on the verge of correcting her. My decision to stay in Crescent Bay after graduation—still two months away—couldn’t be reduced to anything as easy as love. Forming an official opinion of this place would have been like trying to articulate my feelings for my thirteen-year-old sister. Obviously, I loved Rosie. We shared a room, a history. We had identical splashes of freckles across the bridges of our slightly oily noses. Almost every day of our lives contained a moment when one or both of our parents said something so off-putting that only a shared look of sisterly commiseration could comfort me. And yet, the last thing I’d said to Ro was, “If you don’t stop leaving your dirty balled-up socks on my bed I will literally carry your entire wardrobe into the yard and set it on fire.”

  Toward Crescent Bay, I felt a similar combination of loyalty and irritation—the kind that makes you grind your teeth, exhale through your nose. My tour guide was from a suburb outside of Chicago. I didn’t think she’d really understand, so I just said, “Someday, I’ll leave.”

  “Oh, totally. But why rush it? This is the most beautiful place I’ve ever been.”

  I nearly thanked her, as if the compliment had been for me and not the landscape. The truth was that I agreed; everyone who stepped foot in our town agreed with Vanessa. The refrain you heard all the time, as families arranged their collapsible chairs in the sand—or as your dad, piloting the minivan, rounded a particularly scenic bend of Highway 101 for the third time that week—was, Does it get any better than this?

  TWO

  That night, Vanessa and her mountain-grunge boyfriend were excited to bring me to a party. At the boyfriend’s insistence, Vanessa and I leaned against the brick exterior of an ivy-draped dorm and posed for a picture, which the boyfriend uploaded to Instagram. Before we went inside, he showed me the caption—Baby’s first college party!—and the list of people who didn’t know me but had promptly liked the photo anyway.

  It was true that I’d never attended a party at Whedon; the only parties anyone in Crescent Bay really cared about centered around the weekly bonfires we built on top of Cape Defiance. There, Friday after Friday night, we perched on Igloo coolers and drank beers filched from our own garages. The boys stuck fallen branches into the fire and ran around threatening one another with their makeshift torches, while the girls discussed how long it would take us to wash the smoke smell out of our hair.

  This party was different. And not in a way I found especially refreshing. Everyone was
sitting on the carpeted floor or else squeezed onto one of two narrow beds. Music played faintly through someone’s laptop, and a kid with a knit cap slipping from his head welcomed me to Cali, not even bothering to ask where I came from. I was bored and, for the first time in my life, feeling a little claustrophobic. The whole experience was like being trapped in an elevator with a lot of wasted strangers.

  On our way back to Vanessa’s dorm, she and her boyfriend laughed until their knees stopped functioning. Because I had avoided the shot glasses lined up on the edge of someone’s desk, filled with ominous blue liquid, all my joints were in working order.

  “I just need to rest awhile,” Vanessa announced, collapsing in the grass beneath a statuesque tree. We were right outside the political science building where my mother—Professor Iris Cox Nelson, chair of the department—had her office.

  “Right on,” agreed the boyfriend.

  I joined them on the ground, at first sitting cross-legged and then letting myself fall backward. Above us, leaves shivered in the breeze. I could still locate the exact limb from which my brother had fallen, age ten. After landing in a heap, Jake had at first regarded his left arm—fractured in two places, like a staircase—with detached horror. A beat later, he began to scream.

  As Vanessa and her boyfriend discussed how it was possible that the moon looked “sometimes huge and sometimes tiny,” I texted my brother. Locating his name in my phone made my heart surge with a level of affection I felt for Jake only when he was nowhere near me.

  Hey. Why did it take you a second to start screaming after you broke your arm?

  It was three a.m. in New York City, but my brother wrote back right away.

  It didn’t really hurt until I looked at it up close.

  * * *

  * * *

  In the morning, under the assumption that I’d woken up with a hangover to rival hers, Vanessa tried to persuade me to stay and consume one of the infamous infant-size burritos from the dining hall, but I was done previewing college life. Leaving campus felt essential. Driving back toward town, my stomach growling, I tried to reassure myself. The past twenty-four hours had not actually revealed what my life would be like next year. For one thing, I was going to live with my parents, not sleep on the floor between Vanessa’s bed and the one containing her congested roommate. Furthermore, no one would force me to attend parties in tiny, crowded rooms. Wasn’t the whole point of college that you could spend your time however you wanted?

  Or, in my case, exactly as I’d spent time all my life: wandering the beach, driving north and south down the highway, listening to my parents’ rapid-fire dinner conversations in which they referred to Academia as if it were a distant and sophisticated nation.

  It was Sunday, and still early. I had what was left of my weekend to search for a summer job. At the moment, securing seasonal work felt more crucial than coming to grips with my college plans. Sara would be leading tourists on horseback trail rides beginning and ending at her family’s barn, as she did every summer, and our friend Elliot had already been offered three months of evening shifts at the Qwick Mart. I wanted something semi-interesting—a job where I wouldn’t have to sit still or answer any phones, ever. Something that would make people raise their eyebrows and ask questions, years from now, when I described the first job I ever had. Crescent Bay was not exactly rife with employment opportunities, but there was one place in town where I had yet to try my luck.

  The Crescent Bay Retirement Home was glassy and modern, sprawled out across the top of a bluff, presumably so no one inside had to deal with any stairs. As I pulled into the parking lot, I observed that Seth O’Malley and Chelsea Hamilton were messing around outside the main entrance. She had on pale blue nursing scrubs. Seth was just in regular jeans, his lips elastic with laughter. Every few seconds he would lunge at her, arm outstretched, and she would spin in a frantic circle.

  It appeared he was trying to steal the rubber band from the end of her braid.

  I got out of the car and walked toward them, preparing my face for the moment they noticed me and I would have to pretend to be noticing them for the first time. But because they were engrossed in their game, and also blocking the doors, I was forced to say, “Hey, guys.”

  Seth snapped to attention, like a daydreaming kid called out by his teacher. “Hey, Audrey.” He clasped his hands behind his back. “How can we help you?”

  Still giggling, Chelsea, who had graduated two years ago, stepped closer to Seth. “Yeah, how can we help you?”

  “Please, let us help you.” Seth was grinning. He looked older than he had whenever I’d last given him a second thought; laugh lines edged his eyes and something resembling a beard shadowed his cheeks.

  Seth and I were the same age and had gone to school together since kindergarten. He had a ponytail and had been known to wear cowboy boots to places other than the rodeo. In school, he was always giving people hugs. These long, meaningful hugs that blocked the hallway and inspired both parties to close their eyes. It wasn’t uncommon to overhear one Crescent Bay girl ask another, “Have you seen Seth? I could really use a hug,” as if pressing your face against the guy’s Levi’s shirt was some holistic cure for heartache and insecurity and period cramps.

  “I was just going to see if they’re hiring servers.” I nodded toward the entrance. I knew of kids who, over previous summers, had waited tables in the dining room. Allegedly, the uniform included a necktie patterned with tiny bottles of red wine, and the residents tended to be picky about the number of prunes adorning their morning oatmeal. But the retirement home was supposed to be fancy. A billboard erected beside the exit for Crescent Bay featured three silver-haired women walking on the beach, their arms linked. The ad promised, Friendship never grows old.

  I figured the job might pay.

  “Oh, damn,” Chelsea said. “There aren’t any openings right now.”

  “But they’re always looking for CNAs, aren’t they?” Seth asked her.

  Chelsea made eye contact with him as she said, “But Audrey’s not a CNA.”

  “What’s a CNA?” I asked.

  “Certified Nurse Assistant. Key word being certified, I’m afraid.” Her smile was convincingly apologetic.

  “How do you get certified?”

  “You have to take a course. Night school. It’s pretty grueling.”

  I pictured myself wearing blue scrubs, like Chelsea’s. I pictured myself rushing down a long sterile hallway, responding to an urgent call for nurse assistance in Room 12. The job, in my imagination, would be superior to manning the front desk at the hair salon, or getting personal with the deep fryer at the Fish Shack.

  Seth’s eyes were fixed on my profile. I wondered if my cheek still bore the imprint of a standard-issue dorm room carpet.

  “Well. . . .” Chelsea sighed, as if we were nearing the end of a phone call.

  “Maybe you could join the janitorial staff,” said Seth, inadvertently providing an explanation for the bleach stains on his black jeans. “I’ll show you how to mop a mean floor.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I lied. To Chelsea I said, “I’m sorry I interrupted your, uh, conversation.”

  She relaxed her arms. “No problem.”

  Clearly, she expected me to turn back toward my car.

  It’s not inaccurate to assume, as everyone does, that people in small towns are friendly. We never cross paths in the supermarket without smiling broadly and saying hello. We know the names and birth orders of one another’s siblings and pets. But we can also be territorial, determined to separate what’s ours from what’s communal. Pissing off Chelsea wasn’t my goal; she could have Seth O’Malley all to herself, for all I cared. But she couldn’t prevent me from going inside the retirement home and asking about a job.

  “Good luck,” Seth called as I moved past Chelsea and pushed through the glass doors.

  Turning to t
hank him, I was caught off guard by the expression on his face. Both his grin and his slightly raised eyebrows suggested we had history—some enduring past we were hiding from Chelsea, and also from the world.

  I swear, I barely knew the guy.

  * * *

  * * *

  It was April. I would graduate from high school in two months—the exact amount of time my mother had already been gone.

  When she first told us that she’d won a grant and would be spending the duration of her sabbatical in Italy, I wasn’t entirely upset. I loved my mother, but when the five of us Nelsons were together, I sometimes felt like I was trapped on a television show that had been renewed for too many seasons. All of the plotlines were stale, all of the once-charming characters reduced to caricatures of themselves. We would recycle the same arguments and one-liners and family legends until the writers finally had one of us murdered in an effort to boost ratings.

  But when Jake was away at college, the four remaining Nelsons relaxed. We went off-script, gave one another more space. Rosie stopped scrawling FOR RO’S LIPS ONLY across bags of Goldfish crackers. Dad stopped making us bet on who would be the first to get married, have kids, commit accidental tax fraud. And I was less prone to flinging insults, as if drawing attention to everyone’s weaknesses—Jake’s pride, my sister’s paranoia that she was the butt of every joke, Mom’s desperation to be perfect, and Dad’s sensitivity, which he masked with a perpetual scholarly gloom—would force them all to conclude that I, Audrey, must be flawless.

  That my brother’s summer at home would coincide with Mom’s trip seemed, potentially, ideal. Like maybe what our family needed to achieve domestic equilibrium was to exile one member at a time. But Mom had been gone since the first week of March, and already it was clear that she had, all along, been the most crucial member of our clan. Evidently, she had kept the mess of our lives below a certain threshold. In her absence, the mess had crossed that threshold. Laundry had swallowed the bathroom. Sand had seeped between every cushion, every crack in the floorboards. Some kind of black mold was spreading across the shower wall—granted, Google had declared the growth “common and harmless” and we weren’t too concerned.