The Foreseeable Future Read online

  “Uh.” I wondered if he could be joking. “Are you sure?”

  “Positive. She was still in post-op when it aired on the news.”

  “But . . . she’s going to see it eventually.”

  He frowned. “Why?”

  My elation began to drain. Seth wasn’t unconcerned about my accidental YouTube fame; he was just, somehow, unaware of it. “Seth,” I said cautiously, “do you ever go on the Internet?”

  “Yeah, I do e-mail.”

  “You do e-mail?”

  “My house is outside of the cable company’s boundaries, so we have this satellite thing? It’s really slow.”

  Even so, it was impossible that none of Seth’s friends from school had sent him the link. “Have you done your e-mail recently?” I asked.

  “Actually, no. Not in a couple days.” He shrugged. “I’m almost never home. And when I’m there, I’m asleep.”

  “Okay.” No part of me wanted to tell him, but I had no choice. “The video’s on the Internet. A hundred thousand people have seen it.” Every time I’d checked, the view count had risen higher.

  He blinked at me. “Who put it there?”

  “The news station . . . it’s kind of a big deal. A lot of reporters have asked me to do interviews. Cameron, too, probably.”

  Seth screwed up his face, disturbed. “People are the worst. As if you would want to talk publicly about something like that. As if Cameron would want to. Jesus.”

  “I’m sorry,” I offered. The apology felt like a lie.

  “Not your fault.” But Seth’s jaw was clenched. Searching his pocket for his flip phone, he mumbled, “I should call Cam. Make sure she’s okay.”

  “She’s probably asleep.”

  Seth directed a frustrated sigh toward the clouds. “Right.”

  I gave him a second to calm down, to stop seething at the sky. Soon he was smiling at me again. “I’ll call her later. You’re right—she’s probably already seen it. And it’s not like there’s anything I can really do.”

  It was a fact that seemed to disappoint him. I pointed to the steep hill rising up behind us. “You feel like a hike?”

  Seth hesitated, still mired in thoughts of his ex-girlfriend, and then he took my hand.

  The dune was only about fifty yards high, but the incline was almost vertical, the sand so dry that our feet sank deeper with every step. My legs were burning by the time we reached the top, where we panted and surveyed our town. Steam rose from the Fish Shack. A neon sign blinked in the window of North Coast Outfitters, where I’d always followed Jake around as he bought wax for his board and tried to convince me I should learn to surf. At the far end of the beach was the playground with the jungle gym from which Rosie, age seven, had fallen and chipped her tooth.

  I could remember standing in this exact spot while my parents waded into the ocean below. I had screamed at them to stop kissing each other so they could observe my fearless, flailing descent. They had, more often than not, taken their time.

  This view was one of my favorites—sometimes but not always diminished by its achy familiarity. Currently, the landscape seemed as novel as Seth’s fingers laced through mine.

  I led him to the hollow in the rocks. We crawled inside on our hands and knees. With the top of his head pressing against the smooth ceiling of red stone, Seth said, “This feels a little like a coffin,” and I teased him, saying, “Don’t pretend you’ve never been here before.”

  He bit down a smile—not at the memory of his make out history, I hoped, but at the ease with which I’d delivered the joke.

  In the cave, at the top of the dune, at six in the morning, Seth O’Malley and I discovered that our bodies knew how to be together. His lips never moved against mine in a way I didn’t like. His hands never roamed to a place where they weren’t welcome.

  As it turned out, his hands were welcome everywhere.

  I’d never really been with a guy without feeling the need to memorize a play-by-play for Sara and me to analyze afterward—usually, immediately afterward, our legs swinging over the edge of her hayloft. But with Seth, I didn’t want to detach. Didn’t want to invite anyone else into this moment. I was too busy pulling his shirt over his head, running my hands across his chest and his warm, narrow stomach.

  I knew that boys were not known for guarding their bodies, but part of me still couldn’t believe I was allowed to touch him.

  Seth’s lips were close to my ear when he tugged on the waistband of the blue hospital scrubs I was still wearing, and said, “Do you want to . . . ?”

  I pulled away, but only because I had been trying to answer the same question in my head for the last few minutes. “You’ve done it before, right?”

  He smiled, like I’d questioned his ability to swim. “Yes.”

  “Recently?”

  “Um.” I couldn’t tell if he was annoyed, ashamed, or both. “What do you mean, recently?”

  “Like, this summer?”

  “Audrey, no. Of course not.”

  “Sorry,” I said quickly. “I just wasn’t sure if we were, like . . .” Mortification swallowed the rest of my sentence.

  “Exclusive?”

  I hated the word, but said yes anyway.

  “I told you.” He kissed my throat. The combination of embarrassment and pleasure almost killed me. “You have nothing but options.”

  His words filled the small amount of space between us. The rocks above us smelled damp and salty, like the inside of an oyster. Seth asked, “Have you had sex before?”

  I had forgotten the question could be applied to me. I wobbled my hand in the air. “I tried to, once, but it didn’t exactly . . . work.”

  “Oh, really?” he said, faux-casual. “Who couldn’t get it up?” His eyes contained a glimmer of competition—a side of Seth I hadn’t seen, but couldn’t hold against him.

  “It’s not nice to gossip.”

  “Just tell me.” He spoke quickly, sounding exactly like Sara when she implored me to disregard human decency.

  “Cole Hendrix,” I admitted. “It wasn’t that he couldn’t get it up, necessarily. It was more of a mutual failure.”

  “Ah,” Seth said, thumbing my cheek. Cole Hendrix and I had been together for the second half of eleventh grade. Our dates had mainly consisted of driving up and down the highway, listening to songs that, at a certain volume, convinced us we felt much more than we did.

  “I don’t think we’ll have the same problem,” I told Seth.

  “So . . . you do want to?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now?”

  I thought about the underwear I was wearing—green and white stripes with a hole beneath the elastic—and how long it had been since yesterday’s shower. I thought about Sara’s warning that sex in the sand wasn’t as romantic as it seemed; everyone’s body parts became extremely adhesive.

  “Not now,” I told Seth, aching.

  “All right,” he said. And still, there was something triumphant about the way he kissed me on the lips. “Just say when.”

  * * *

  * * *

  By the time I got home, the video had been on the Internet for almost twenty-four hours and my mother, so far, had declined to say a single word to me. She had definitely seen it, after following a link from Jake or Rosie or a nosy colleague, and I was getting anxious for her reaction. Not because I thought she’d be mad—accidentally going viral was not a punishable offense—but because I knew that, deep down, Iris had never wanted me to work as a nurse assistant, let alone get famous for skills I’d learned in night school.

  The video might cause her to panic, the same way she’d panicked when Rosie got caught shoplifting with her weird friend Dana, or the one time Jake cut class because the waves off Point St. George were rumored to be epic. On both occasions, she’d shaken her head and sighed at her mi
nimally rebellious offspring: “I just don’t recognize you right now.”

  I didn’t really expect Mom to blog her feelings about my YouTube stardom—to do so would defeat her halfhearted attempts at anonymity—but I checked the site, anyway. Reading Sprung Free in Italy! had become one of my presleep rituals, along with brushing my teeth and also blowing a torrent of air into my still-slumbering sister’s left ear, just to make her groan and roll over.

  Lately I’ve been somewhat distracted by a development in my family life, but I just can’t wait any longer before telling all of you about my Italian suitor!

  Because my mother couldn’t just say boyfriend or lover, something I could immediately interpret, I had to read this sentence a second time before its meaning sunk in.

  My ears filled with the roar of imaginary engines. My eyes skimmed frantically over the post. I was afraid of missing a crucial detail, but I was equally afraid of encountering the kind of detail that would scar me for life.

  . . . Realized I’d been in Italy three months without forging any real connections . . .

  . . . locked my laptop in my desk and dragged myself to a faculty party . . .

  . . . escaped the party and talked until sunrise, at an osteria by the sea . . .

  . . . can’t remember the last time I felt so fascinated and so fascinating, simultaneously.

  And then my eyes landed on the worst part:

  He’s not, as my kids would say, “my type.” He’s not even an academic, was only at the party as the guest of a friend. He owns a vineyard and prefers old horror movies to books.

  Then, there is the fact that my husband and I never agreed to see other people during our trial separation. Sometimes, I’m not even sure N fully agreed to separate at all. He was only humoring me, allowing me to think that my time in Italy could possibly clarify what each of us wants from the rest of our lives.

  Well, if I’m being honest, this is what I want.

  The post had twelve comments, half of which employed applause emojis.

  I was very aware of the shape and weight of the phone in my hand. For the first time, it struck me as absurd that so much unwanted information had come from something so small and smooth and seemingly harmless.

  I remembered being a kid, messing around with an old CD and asking my mom how the music got inside the disc. She had been unable to answer the question and reluctant to admit she had no idea. “There are grooves in the plastic. The grooves contain data. I’m not explaining it right, but I promise it makes sense.”

  Did it make sense that my mother could cheat on my father in Italy and, from my bottom bunk in northern California, I knew about it almost instantly?

  My heart threatened to escape my chest.

  I had been so careful, promising my parents that the retirement home was only a summer job. Doing my best to seem excited, or at least open-minded, about college in the fall. Not confronting Mom about her Internet activity, or demanding answers from Dad, or forcing my siblings to suffer along with me. As if, by sticking to my parents’ plans for my own life, I could inspire them to stick to their wedding vows.

  Being careful hadn’t worked.

  Buried in my in-box, beneath an ever-growing pile of messages from reporters and writers, was an e-mail from Kristy Summers. She had sent it as a follow-up to yesterday’s call, on the basis that my uncertainty over the phone had been palpable. In her e-mail she’d referred to me as a hero twice.

  I didn’t think I was a hero. But I thought maybe I was a girl who was good at something that mattered—even if my life was straying, dramatically, from what the professors had envisioned.

  Before I could change my mind, before I could dwell on anyone’s disgust or disapproval, I wrote to Kristy Summers and agreed to go on TV.

  If I was being honest, it was what I wanted.

  THIRTEEN

  A good idea would have been to get a full night’s sleep before appearing on the Steeds County News. But in Kristy Summers’s e-mail, she had asked me to arrive at the station at seven a.m. so that their in-house cosmetologist could do my hair and makeup before the live interview at eight. By the time I was sitting in a cracked leather salon chair, letting a pale girl in a baggy sweater fry my hair, I had been awake for seventeen hours.

  At the end of our shift, Seth had given me a juice and a sticky cinnamon bun, kissed me, and said, “Just so you know, the other morning . . . I had a condom. I know you weren’t ready. But I hope you don’t think I wanted to have sex without, you know, having anything on me.”

  My expression must have been discouraging, because he continued. “I mean, without having a condom in my pocket. Which I did. And still do.”

  I didn’t say anything, too busy trying to decide what it meant that a condom lived permanently in Seth’s pocket. He had laughed, mistaking my pensiveness for post–night shift fatigue. “Go home,” he said, patting the striped hood of my dad’s MINI Cooper. “Get some sleep.”

  I drove straight to the station instead.

  When the cosmetologist knelt in front of my chair to do my makeup, she spent a lot of time frowning, dabbing flesh-toned gunk beneath my eyes. Later, having done “everything she could,” she passed me off to an intern, who outfitted me with a microphone and escorted me to a low-budget set featuring a staged living room—two plush chairs, a floor lamp, and a coffee table covered in Good Housekeeping magazines. I waited in my assigned seat, palms sweating, while the surrounding cameramen messed with their equipment. Kristy Summers appeared. Her face was familiar.

  I understood, then, that I had actually known her all my life—had seen Kristy’s blond hair and red lipstick on a hundred different television sets without ever committing her name to memory.

  “You ready?” she asked, offering me a tight, sterile smile and settling into the second chair.

  “Uh.” I leaned forward, thinking she might impart some advice, or brief me on the questions she intended to ask. Before I could say more, Kristy Summers nodded at a flashing light affixed to the far wall. A guy was using his fingers to count down from five. Kristy arranged her face into a creepy mask of charm and goodwill, and then, evidently, we were on TV.

  “Hi,” she said, crinkling her eyes toward the camera, as if acknowledging an old friend. “I’m here this morning with Audrey Nelson, the eighteen-year-old who saved her best friend’s life. Audrey, can you tell us a little bit about what was running through your mind when you saw Cameron collapse on the beach?”

  My tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth. Who had ever said that Cameron was my best friend? Kristy’s patient smile made it impossible to correct her. I would sound like such a jerk.

  I cleared my throat. “Uh, well, I was hanging out on this log with my friends, and we were watching Cameron play catch down by the water with . . . one of our other friends. And the way she fell, it wasn’t like she had tripped. It was pretty clear that something internal had happened. I had just taken a CPR class, so we’d watched all these videos where people experienced cardiac arrest.”

  “So you recognized the signs of a heart attack from those videos?”

  “Yeah.” I couldn’t stop scratching at my thighs. I was wearing jeans, and nothing itched, but holding still was impossible.

  “And would you say that instinct just took over? The next thing you knew you were at Cameron’s side, performing CPR?”

  “Well, no. I cleared her airways and made sure her spine was straight. That’s what you’re supposed to do. And, I mean, she wasn’t breathing. Her lips were blue. I knew what had happened.”

  “Wow,” Kristy said, with an almost imperceptible shake of her blond bob. “I think I speak for a lot of our viewers when I say, it’s so rare to meet a young person with so much composure. Tell us a little about your job. You’re a—” Her eyes darted to the wall behind me. “—a Certified Nurse Assistant at the Crescent Bay Retirement Home. What sorts
of responsibilities do you have at work?”

  “Uh.” For the most part, Kristy Summers seemed to be ignoring the actual words leaving my mouth. Her loyalty was to her script. “I, like, change bedpans and sheets. Sometimes residents need help, like, showering. And I record everything they eat and drink.”

  Kristy arched a well-groomed eyebrow.

  “I mean, that sounds weird, I know. But it’s part of my job.”

  With a chuckle, Kristy moved on. “So, as I’m sure you’re aware, other girls your age are out partying, joyriding, chasing boys. . . . How do you think you got so mature, by comparison?”

  What was the connection between bedpans and maturity?

  What did any of this have to do with saving Cameron’s life?

  “I’m not?” I guessed. “I mean, I think I’m pretty normal. I like . . . joyriding.”

  Kristy Summers was unfazed. “And you’re planning to live at home, instead of running off to college? Is that correct? Because, and some people might disagree, but I think it’s refreshing to meet a teenage girl who looks at the rising cost of a college education, and the national debt crisis, and says, ‘No thanks, I’m going to come up with a more practical plan for my life.’”

  My dad, brother, and sister were watching at home. I had told them about the interview, hoping I would come across as calm and competent—a girl who knew what she was doing with her life. Now I had to hope that my family members had slept through their alarms, or that the house had caught fire and they’d been forced to evacuate.

  “I’m planning to live at home,” I said, leaving Kristy’s other assumptions unconfirmed. My mom would have wanted me to assure my audience that I was a freshman at Whedon; the nursing gig was temporary. But I couldn’t. Not if I wanted to keep my job.

  Kristy cringed playfully at the cameras, like, isn’t she adorable? “Your parents must be so proud of you. Is your mother a nurse?”