The Foreseeable Future Page 6

  I took a deep breath of cold air. “Honestly? It was so, so hard.”

  “More than you signed up for?”

  “I had no idea what I was signing up for. That’s why I did it.”

  “Really?” Seth said. “You were like, ‘what’s the wildest thing I could do this summer?’ and decided it’d be working at the nursing home?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Have you tried sex, drugs? Rock ’n’ roll?”

  Seth O’Malley saying sex did a number on my heart. “Um, sort of,” I said, flustered and annoyed by his proclivity for making me blush.

  He tilted his head. “You’ve sort of tried sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll?”

  It was an awkward but not inaccurate answer, and I stuck with it. Seth grinned, like my honesty gave him a thrill.

  “I thought I was going to be really good at this job,” I confessed. “And I think tonight would have been a lot easier, except I just found out that my mom’s sabbatical in Italy has been doubling as a separation from my dad.”

  Sleep deprivation was like a drug, I realized. The inhibition-lowering kind.

  “What’s a sabbatical?” Seth asked.

  I sometimes forgot that not everyone was fluent in the lingo of academia. “It’s when you’re a professor and you get these insanely long vacations so you can work on, like, improving your intellect.”

  “Or your marriage?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Had your parents been fighting a lot? Before my mom left my dad, she screamed at him over every little thing. Like him tracking mud across the carpet or forgetting to take the empties to the curb.”

  “They literally never fight. Sometimes when my mom has an issue she’ll write my dad a strongly worded letter, and then he’ll write back until they work it out.”

  “A letter? Like, sent via the postal service?”

  “No. She usually leaves it next to the salt and pepper shakers on the kitchen table.”

  Seth blinked. “That’s so strange.”

  “Professors are a strange people.”

  “Are you excited about Whedon? Isn’t that supposed to be a really good school?”

  My stomach flipped. I didn’t want to go to Whedon. My lack of desire to go to Whedon had never been more evident than in this moment, on the beach with Seth.

  “Yeah,” I managed to respond, because I didn’t know Seth’s plans and didn’t want to seem ungrateful. Whedon College was, in fact, a really good school—one that never should have let me in, no matter whose daughter I was.

  “I always thought—” For the first time all morning, Seth stumbled over his words. “I mean, not that I thought about it that much, but if I had, I would have expected you to get the hell out of here.”

  “Out of Crescent Bay?” I was flattered.

  “Don’t you want to?”

  “Definitely, someday. What about you?”

  Seth shrugged. “Maybe. Someday. But I love it here.”

  He declared his love so easily.

  “Are you going to community college?” I asked.

  “Undecided. For now, I need to save some money.”

  “No one offered you a football scholarship?”

  Seth looked at me askance, unsure if I was kidding. “I don’t know how many games you caught this year—”

  “As many as I possibly could,” I joked.

  “—but I’m not actually very good at football. I’m too tall and skinny. To tackle me, all you have to do is go for my knees.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  Seth lifted his chin and let the wind pummel his face. His lips veered into a smile—either at the thought of me tackling him or just because he found the ocean breeze refreshing. Exhaustion messed with my judgment so that it was hard to tell. Everything was starting to sound strangely remote, as if Seth and I were conversing underwater.

  When I remembered Seth O’Malley, the guy from school, I pictured him leaning over a girl—any random girl—his fingers tangled in her hair or hooked through the belt loop on her jeans. Never for a moment had I fantasized about taking that girl’s place, and even now, I didn’t want anything to do with the kind of boy I had always understood Seth to be.

  But I did want to kiss this boy walking next to me. The one who was confident without being cocky, candid without being self-centered. He had made me feel better about my embarrassing first-day-on-the-job performance.

  He had stolen muffins on my behalf.

  One question was whether I was even tall enough to reach his face. To be determined, I told myself—and then, before I could change my mind, I grabbed hold of Seth’s arm.

  Just as abruptly, he stopped walking. “You ready to turn back?”

  The unsuspecting look in his eyes convinced me he would be nothing but alarmed if I kissed him. Seth had no interest in making out with me; all he wanted was to align our lunch breaks. All he wanted was to avoid loneliness on the night shift.

  I must have been staring at him with open despair, because Seth’s expression went slack, sympathetic. “You look like you need to sleep for a year,” he said.

  It wasn’t a bad idea.

  EIGHT

  Seth had asked me for a ride to our town’s Fourth of July festival, but it wasn’t a date. Apparently, one of Seth’s buddies needed to borrow the Jeep to tow a boat someplace, and Seth could not, under any circumstances, miss the festival. His fondest childhood memory was of the year he and his brothers had won the sand sculpture contest for their rendering of SpongeBob SquarePants. Each summer, the O’Malley boys had donned their Stars and Stripes and marched in the parade, whereas my family had never even gone to watch. After two decades of living in Crescent Bay, Mom and Dad were still hell-bent against considering themselves locals.

  During my first two weeks on the job, Seth had gifted me with countless blueberry muffins, assorted juices, and cups of reheated coffee. For every complaint I shared about my supervisor, he described Chef Tony berating him in front of the rest of the kitchen staff, or forcing him to wear a hairnet just to mop a floor. After our shifts, more often than not, we walked across the sand and watched the sun come up, sharing high school stories as if high school was something that had transpired a long time ago. The night he and his friends busted a tire trying to drive to the In-N-Out Burger in Grant’s Pass. The night Sara, Elliot, and I had a sleepover in the hayloft and were woken up at three a.m. by the murderous threats of Sara’s barn cats confronting a raccoon family.

  We still hadn’t kissed. I was beginning to think that I would never gather the nerve, and that Seth had taken some summer-long vow of celibacy—on a whim, or a dare.

  On July Fourth, I slept through the afternoon and woke up around six, leaving hardly any time to get ready. The bathroom door was locked; my little sister yelled at me to suck it up. Most likely Rosie had taken a box of Popsicles and a stack of novels into the tub. It was her default summer activity.

  I picked the lock with a hairpin. Rosie roared like a lion and pulled the shower curtain shut.

  “You have to at least let me pee,” I said, pushing down my shorts.

  “You’re disgusting,” she observed from behind the curtain.

  “And you’re a tiny tyrant.”

  When I had washed my hands and was beginning to apply eyeliner, Rosie protested again. “Use the full-length,” she said. “Jake has it.”

  The full-length was how we referred to the cheap, oblong mirror Rosie and I had bought to lean against the wall of our room, but which Jake thieved constantly.

  “I can’t go in there,” I told Rosie. “It’s full of Crescent Bay High graduates.” Our brother’s default summer activity was to invite all of his pals and their unenthused girlfriends to play video games in his bedroom.

  “Yeah, so?”

  “So I’d rather deal with you tha
n them.”

  I could sense Rosie rolling her eyes. On my way out of the bathroom, I yanked open the curtain just to make her scream.

  In the kitchen, I found my father hunched over the table, surrounded by loose pages covered in his own chicken scratch. I told him I was going out. Letting him know where I was going had turned into a sort of courtesy. Since his seminars had ended in May, Dad had sunk too deep into his new book to keep track of my erratic schedule. Sometimes I wondered whether Mom had even informed him that they were separated. Maybe the trial breakup was all in her head, a thought experiment she was conducting for her own private reasons. Iris was prone to thought experiments.

  She was not, as far as I knew, prone to keeping secrets from my dad.

  Ignoring me, he scribbled another sentence, ended it with a forceful period, and declared, “Done.”

  “With what?”

  He looked up, finally registering my presence. Some pasta sauce clung to his beard and his Whedon College T-shirt was almost, but not exactly, the same color as his shorts.

  “With a full draft!”

  Dad’s novels were, technically, about a lot of things, but reviews always praised him for capturing the essence of the Pennsylvanian middle class. He had grown up in Pittsburgh and hadn’t been back since my grandmother’s death, five years ago.

  “First draft?” I asked my father. Occasionally I tried to read one of his novels, but I always fell asleep before reaching chapter two.

  “Second!”

  He was beaming in my direction.

  “That’s great,” I said, trying hard to mean it. “Congrats.”

  “Do you want to go out to dinner? See a film of some kind? We ought to celebrate.”

  “I’m going to the beach. It’s the Fourth of July.”

  “Right.” Dad nodded. “Independence. I almost forgot.”

  “I think you’re the only person in Crescent Bay who could forget.”

  Dad smiled like I had paid him a compliment, and asked who I was meeting. Something stopped me from saying Seth’s name. I doubted Dad knew anything about the O’Malleys, but in a town so small, it was always possible. “Just Sara and Elliot,” I told him.

  “Have fun,” he said.

  Leaving the room was harder than I wanted it to be. Celebrating the distinct phases of Dad’s manuscripts had always been our ritual. His triumph would inevitably morph into a kind of hyper-focused attention, all for me. We would go to the ice-cream place in town and sit across from each other at a sloped picnic table covered in seagull shit. He liked to ask me specific questions about my friends and my school assignments, until I felt endlessly fascinating, like a celebrity granting an interview to the press.

  “Hey,” I said, “remember when Mom got that article published last year? Like, around Christmas?”

  Dad squinted into the distance. “I think so. Yes.”

  “I was wondering, why didn’t we go out to dinner or anything?”

  Dad searched my eyes. “Probably because it was her fourth publication of the year,” he said. “You know Iris. Ever modest.”

  It was my turn to search his eyes for signs of jealousy, for signs of resentment to rival that which Mom had aired to so many strangers on the Internet. But Nelson’s gaze was impassive. The question wasn’t whether I knew my mother.

  The question was whether I knew either of them.

  * * *

  * * *

  At Seth’s house, a basketball hoop lay overturned in the grass, beside an aboveground pool that had been drained of water. A tangle of blackberry bushes half-covered the only window visible from the driveway. He had asked me to honk instead of sending a text; cell service got spotty as you went higher into the hills.

  It had been a while since I’d seen Seth in anything but the ratty clothes he wore to work. Now, emerging from the house, he had on a clean white T-shirt and stain-less blue jeans. He looked like the prototype of a boy. It had never occurred to me that what I most desired in a boy was maximum boyness, but, as Seth crossed the driveway and squeezed himself into the MINI Cooper, my pulse confirmed that this was the case.

  Seth had buckled his seat belt by the time I noticed the football in his hands.

  “What is that?”

  “It’s a football,” he said, his knees colliding with the glove compartment. “Crucial to a game called . . . football.”

  “But why do you have it?”

  “You said your friends wouldn’t be into sand sculpting.”

  “So you thought we’d all tackle one another instead?”

  Seth pacified me with a look. “I thought we could throw it around.”

  “My friends aren’t going to play football with you,” I told him.

  “Not even Elliot?”

  “Especially not Elliot.”

  “Okay, okay,” Seth said, grinning. “Calm down.”

  Calm was the opposite of how I felt as Seth leaned over the center console and pushed a lock of hair out of my face. The gesture was unprecedented. Occasionally, Seth pressed his shoulder against mine or grazed my hand as he passed me a paper cup. He had never touched me so deliberately.

  “Um,” I said, staring at him.

  He returned his hands to his lap. “Shall we?”

  I fumbled with the key in the ignition. Until I started hanging out with Seth, I’d never fully understood the meaning of the phrase sexual tension. And I still wasn’t sure if it was supposed to apply to two people who had never so much as held hands, but it was the only way to describe the way I felt around him—torn between melting into a puddle of embarrassment and climbing into his lap.

  Normally, I wasn’t so afraid of kissing the people I wanted to kiss. With my last boyfriend—Cole Hendrix, junior year—I had initiated everything from our first conversation to our awkward breakup hug. With Seth, I was convinced the stakes were higher. If we did start something, I wasn’t sure how fast he would expect us to proceed. The last time the word virgin had applied to Seth O’Malley was probably the year Sara finally persuaded me to start shaving my legs. And I wasn’t dying to explain to Seth that my own virginity was about half gone, that Cole Hendrix and I had experienced technical difficulties the night of our junior prom.

  It wasn’t a conversation I could imagine us having. Not yet.

  * * *

  * * *

  For once, it was eighty degrees in Crescent Bay. The beach had been divided into sections, with a place for sand sculpting and a place to plant chairs and blankets for tonight’s fireworks show. The required firefighters were gathered beneath a tent, where everyone’s dad but mine stood around grilling hot dogs, passing out drinks. Beneath a neighboring tent, Crescent Bay High cheerleaders painted little kids’ faces with flags and cartoon eagles.

  Through the haze of barbecue smoke and patriotism, I saw my friends and waved.

  From a distance, Cameron Suzuki’s proximity to Elliot appeared incidental—the beach was crowded—but as they approached, I could see how hard she was clutching his elbow. Cameron, with her plaited black hair and easy smile, was beautiful, animated, and not someone I had ever expected to find attached to my perpetually poker-faced friend. My confusion must have been evident; the second Seth and I were within earshot, Cameron launched into an explanation.

  “So I went into the Qwick Mart the other night, and I saw Elliot working the cash register, and I thought, that boy is cute! And I thought, how have I never noticed before? Must have been because he was so quiet in school. But then Elliot asked if he could help me find anything, and I was suddenly so nervous, I forgot I’d come in for gum and I bought a box of Duraflame logs.”

  Cameron tossed her braid over her shoulder and giggled.

  “So the next night, I went back and bought a second box, thinking it would be self-deprecating and adorable, like, how embarrassing, I’m so into you I keep buying Duraflame l
ogs. But this one”— she nudged Elliot—“didn’t get it. He just asked me if I wanted a receipt.”

  Elliot shrugged. “It’s store policy.”

  “This morning I came clean. I texted Elliot and asked if he wanted to meet me at the festival. He said yes! I mean, obviously.”

  Cameron began looking all around, like maybe one of her real friends would appear and recuse her.

  “Great story,” Sara said. “Even better the second time.”

  Shuffling his feet in the sand, Seth said, “I enjoyed it.”

  Elliot turned to him. “You brought a football.”

  “Yeah, man.” Seth tossed the ball at my friend, who caught it against his chest, cringing—like when you slap a mosquito and have to deal with the bloody aftermath.

  Cameron relieved Elliot of the football. “Go long!” she hollered at Seth.

  Obediently, Seth bounded through the crowd and toward the waves. Cameron followed, leaving Elliot solo.

  “Well, that was fast,” he said, watching them retreat.

  “Popular kids,” Sara said. “They always find each other.”

  I knew she hadn’t meant to be insulting—but it stung, thinking that Seth automatically shared something with Cameron that he didn’t share with me.

  Sara draped a skinny arm around each of our necks. The three of us walked like that, out of the fray and over to a log where we could sit and observe Elliot’s date playing with mine. The sun had started its descent toward the horizon. Soon the sky would catch fire and we would all take out our phones, like we’d never seen a sunset before.

  Seth and Cameron were throwing the football as high as possible and competing to see who could catch it. Twice they crashed into each other and tumbled into the shallow waves, meaning, I guess, that nobody won. I would have been increasingly jealous if there had been anything romantic about this routine—but they were playing pretty rough, like dogs or brothers.

  As usual, Sara knew what I was thinking. “If they were animals they’d both be Labradors,” she said. “Too much energy, and too eager to please.”