Beach Read Page 11

  It was that we met at the same age my parents had, that the snowball fight and impromptu road trip had felt like fate, that my mother adored him. He fit so perfectly into the love story I’d imagined for myself that I mistook him for the love of my life.

  Breaking up still sucked in every conceivable way, but once the initial pain wore off, memories from our relationship started to seem like just another story I’d read. I hated thinking about it. Not because I missed him but because I felt bad for wasting so much of his time—and mine—trying to be his dream girl.

  “We were together,” I repeated. “Until last year.”

  “Wow.” Gus laughed awkwardly. “That’s a long time. I’m . . . really regretting making fun of his shirtless rock climbing now.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, shrugging. “He dumped me in a hot tub.” Outside a cabin in the Catskills, three days before our trip with his family was scheduled to end. Spontaneity wasn’t always as sexy as it was cracked up to be. You’re just not yourself anymore, he’d told me. We don’t work like this, January.

  We left the next morning, and on the drive back to New York, Jacques had told me he’d call his parents when we got back to let them know the news.

  Mom’s going to cry, he said. So is Brigitte.

  Even in that moment, I was possibly more devastated to lose Jacques’s parents and sister—a feisty high schooler with impeccable 1970s style—than Jacques himself.

  “A hot tub?” Gus echoed. “Damn. Honestly, that guy was always so self-impressed I doubt he could even see you through the glare off his own glistening body.”

  I cracked a smile. “I’m sure that was it.”

  “Hey,” Gus said.

  “Hey, what?”

  He tipped his head toward a cotton candy stand. “I think we should eat that.”

  “And here it finally is,” I said.

  “What?” Gus asked.

  “The second thing we agree on.”

  Gus paid for the cotton candy and I didn’t argue. “No, that’s fine,” he teased when I said nothing. “You can just owe me. You can just pay me back whenever.”

  “How much was it?” I asked, tearing off an enormous piece and lowering it dramatically into my mouth.

  “Three dollars, but it’s fine. Just Venmo me the dollar fifty later.”

  “Are you sure that’s not too much trouble?” I said. “I’m happy to go get a cashier’s check.”

  “Do you know where the closest Western Union is?” he said. “You could probably wire it.”

  “What sort of interest were you thinking?” I asked.

  “You can just give me three dollars when I take you home, and then if I ever find out I need an organ, we can circle back.”

  “Sure, sure,” I agreed. “Let’s just put a pin in this.”

  “Yeah, we should probably loop in our lawyers anyway.”

  “Good point,” I said. “Until then, what do you want to ride?”

  “Ride?” Gus said. “Absolutely nothing here.”

  “Fine,” I said. “What are you willing to ride?”

  We’d been walking, talking, and eating at an alarming rate, and Gus stopped suddenly, offering me the final clump of cotton candy. “That,” he said while I was eating, and pointed at a pathetically small carousel. “That looks like it would have a really hard time killing me.”

  “What do you weigh, Gus? Three beer cans, some bones, and a cigarette?” And all the hard lines and lean ridges of muscle I definitely hadn’t gawked at. “Any number of those painted animals could kill you with a sneeze.”

  “Wow,” he said. “First of all, I may only weigh three beer cans, but that’s still three more beer cans than your ex-boyfriend. He looked like he did nothing but chew wheatgrass while running. I weigh easily twice what he did. Secondly, you’re one to talk: you’re what, four feet and six inches?”

  “I’m a very tall five four, actually,” I said.

  He narrowed his eyes and shook his head at me. “You’re as small as you are ridiculous.”

  “So not very?”

  “Carousel, final offer,” Gus said.

  “This is the perfect place for our montage,” I said.

  “Our what now?”

  “Young—extremely beautiful and very tall for her height—woman in sparkly tennis shoes teaches fearful, party-hating curmudgeon how to enjoy life,” I said. “There’d be a lot of head shaking. A lot of me dragging you from ride to ride. You dragging me back out of the line. Me dragging you back into it. It’d be adorable, and more importantly it’ll help with your super romantic suicide-cult book. It’s the promise-of-the-premise portion of the novel, when your readers are grinning ear to ear. We need a montage.”

  Gus folded his arms and studied me with narrowed eyes.

  “Come on, Gus.” I bumped his arm. “You can do it. Be adorable.”

  His eyes darted to where I’d bumped him, then back to my face, and he scowled.

  “I think you misunderstood me. I said adorable.”

  His surly expression cracked. “Fine, January. But it’s not going to be a montage. Choose one death trap. If I survive that, you can sleep well tonight knowing you brought me one step closer to believing in happy endings.”

  “Oh my God,” I said. “If you wrote this scene, would we die?”

  “If I wrote this scene, it wouldn’t be about us.”

  “Wow. One, I’m offended. Two, who would it be about?”

  He scanned the crowd and I followed his gaze. “Her,” he said finally.

  “Who?”

  He stepped in close behind me, his head hovering over my right shoulder. “There. At the bottom of the Ferris wheel.”

  “The girl in the Screw Me, I’m Irish shirt?” I said.

  His laugh was warm and rough in my ear. Standing this close to him was bringing back flashes of the night at the frat house I’d rather not revisit.

  “The woman working the machine,” he said in my ear. “Maybe she’d make a mistake and watch someone get hurt because of it. This job was probably her last chance, the only place that would hire her after she made an even bigger mistake. In a factory maybe. Or she broke the law to protect someone she cared about. Some kind of almost-innocent mistake that could lead to less innocent ones.”

  I spun to face him. “Or maybe she’d get a chance to be a hero. This job was her last chance, but she loves it and she’s good at it. She gets to travel, and even if she mostly only sees parking lots, she gets to meet people. And she’s a people person. The mistake isn’t hers—the machinery malfunctions, but she makes a snap decision and saves a girl’s life. That girl grows up to be a congresswoman, or a heart surgeon. The two of them cross paths again down the road. The Ferris wheel operator’s too old to travel with the carnival anymore. She’s been living alone, feeling like she wasted her life. Then one day, she’s alone. She has a heart attack. She almost dies but she manages to call nine-one-one. The ambulance rushes her in, and who is her doctor but that same little girl.

  “Of course, Ferris doesn’t recognize her—she’s all grown up. But the doctor never could’ve forgotten Ferris’s face. The two women strike up a friendship. Ferris still doesn’t get to travel, but twice a month the doctor comes over to Ferris’s double-wide and they watch movies. Movies set in different countries. They watch Casablanca and eat Moroccan takeout. They watch The King and I and eat Siamese food, whatever that may be. They even watch—gasp!—Bridget Jones’s Diary while bingeing on fish and chips. They make it through twenty countries before Ferris passes away, and when she does, Doctor realizes her life was a gift she almost didn’t get. She takes some of Ferris’s ashes—her ungrateful asshole son didn’t come to collect them—and sets out on a trip around the world. She’s grateful to be alive. The end.”

  Gus stared at me, only one corner of his very crooked mouth at all
engaged. I was fairly sure he was smiling, although the deep grooves between his eyebrows seemed to disagree. “Then write it,” he said finally.

  “Maybe so,” I said.

  He glanced back at the gray-haired woman working the machinery. “That one,” he said. “I’m willing to ride that one. But only because I trust Ferris so damn much.”

  12

  The Olive Garden

  There was no montage. It was a slow night on the warm asphalt, under the neon glow and screeching metal of cheap rides. Hours of eating deep-fried food and drinking lime-infused beer from sticky cans between visits to each of the seven rides. There was no dragging in and out of lines. There was just wandering. Telling stories.

  Gus pointed at a pregnant girl with a barbed wire tattoo. “She joins the cult.”

  “She does not,” I disagreed.

  “She does. She loses the baby. It’s awful. The only thing that starts to bring her back to life is this rising YouTube star she follows. She finds out about New Eden from him, then goes for a weekend-long seminar and never leaves.”

  “She’s there for two years,” I countered. “But then her little brother comes to get her. She doesn’t want to see him, and security’s trying to get him out of there, but then he pulls out a sonogram. His girlfriend, May, is pregnant. A little boy. Due in a month. She doesn’t leave with him, but that night—”

  “She tries to leave,” Gus took over. “They won’t let her. They lock her in a white room to decontaminate her. Her exposure to her brother’s energy, they say, has temporarily altered her brain chemistry. She has to complete the five purification steps. If she still wants to leave after that, they’ll let her.”

  “She completes them,” I said. “The reader thinks they’ve lost her. That she’s stuck. But the last line of the book is some clue. Something she and her brother used to say. Some sign that she kept a secret part of herself safe, and the only reason she’s not leaving yet is because there are people trapped there she wants to help.”

  We went back and forth like that all night, and when we finally stopped, it was only because riding the scrambler left me so nauseated I ran from it to the nearest trash can and vomited heartily.

  Even as the recently eaten chili dog was rushing back up, I had to think the night had been some kind of success. After all, Gus grabbed my hair and pulled it away from my face as I retched.

  At least until he grumbled, “Shit, I hate vomit,” and ran off gagging.

  Hate, I found out on the ride home, was a less embarrassing way to say fear.

  National Book Award nominee Augustus Everett was vomit-phobic, and had been ever since a girl named Ashley in his fourth grade class puked on the back of his head.

  “I haven’t puked in easily fifteen years,” he told me. “And I’ve had the stomach flu twice in that time.”

  I was fighting giggles as I drove. In general, I didn’t find phobias funny, but Gus was a former gravedigger turned suicide-cult investigator. Nothing Grace said in our interview had made him bat an eye, and yet cheap rides and puke had nearly bested him.

  “God, I’m sorry,” I said, regaining control of myself. I glanced over to him, slumped back in my passenger seat with one arm folded behind his head. “I can’t believe my first lesson in love stories actually just unearthed multiple traumas for you. At least you didn’t end up also . . . you-know-what-ing . . .” I didn’t say the word, just in case.

  His eyes flashed over to me and the corner of his mouth curled. “Trust me, I got out in the nick of time. One more second and you would’ve gotten Ashley Phillips’ed.”

  “Wow,” I said. “And yet you held my hair. So noble. So brave. So selfless.” I was teasing, but it actually was pretty sweet.

  “Yeah, well, if you didn’t have such nice hair, I wouldn’t have bothered.” Gus’s eyes went back to the road. “But I learned my lesson. Never again will I try to be a hero.”

  “My parents met at a carnival.” I hadn’t meant to say it; it had just slipped out.

  Gus looked at me, his expression inscrutable. “Yeah?”

  I nodded. I fully intended to drop the subject, but the last few days had loosened something in me, and the words came pouring out. “Their freshman year, at Ohio State.”

  “Oh, not The Ohio State University,” he teased. Michiganders and Ohioans had a major rivalry I often forgot about due to my total ignorance of sports. Dad’s brothers had lovingly referred to him as the Great Defector, and he’d teased me with the same nickname when I chose U of M.

  “Yes, the very one,” I played along.

  We fell into silence for a few seconds. “So,” Gus prompted, “tell me about it.”

  “No,” I said, giving him a suspicious smile. “You don’t want to hear that.”

  “I’m legally obligated to,” he said. “How else am I going to learn about love?”

  An ache speared through my chest. “Maybe not from them. He cheated on her. A lot. While she had cancer.”

  “Damn,” Gus said. “That’s shitty.”

  “Says the man who doesn’t believe in dating.”

  He ran a hand through his already messy hair, leaving it ravaged. His eyes flickered to me, then back to the road. “Fidelity was never my issue.”

  “Fidelity across a two-week span isn’t exactly impressive,” I pointed out.

  “I’ll have you know I dated Tessa Armstrong for a month,” he said.

  “Monogamously? Because I seem to remember a sordid night in a frat house that would suggest otherwise.”

  Surprise splashed across his face. “I’d broken up with her when that happened.”

  “I saw you with her that morning,” I said. It probably should have been embarrassing to admit I remembered all this, but Gus didn’t seem to notice that. In fact, he just seemed a little insulted by the observation.

  He mussed his hair again and said irritably, “I broke up with her at the party.”

  “She wasn’t at the party,” I said.

  “No. But since it wasn’t the seventeenth century, I had a phone.”

  “You called from a party and dumped your girlfriend?” I cried. “Why would you do that?”

  He looked my way, eyes narrowed. “Why do you think, January?”

  I was grateful for the dark. My face was suddenly on fire. My stomach felt like molten lava was pouring down it. Was I misunderstanding? Should I ask? Did it matter? That was almost a decade ago, and even if things had gone differently that night, it wouldn’t have amounted to anything in the long run.

  Still, I was burning up.

  “Well, shit,” I said. I couldn’t get anything else out.

  He laughed. “Anyway, your parents,” he said. “It couldn’t have been all bad.”

  I cleared my throat. It could not have sounded any less natural. I might as well have just screamed I DON’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT MY SAD PARENTS WHILE I’M THINKING FIERY THOUGHTS ABOUT YOU and gotten it over with.

  “It wasn’t,” I said, focusing on the road. “I don’t think.”

  “And the night they met?” he pressed.

  Again, the words came gushing out of me, like I’d needed to say them all year—or maybe they were just a welcome diversion from the other conversation we’d been having. “They went to this carnival at a local Catholic church,” I said. “Not together. Like, they went separately to the same carnival. And then they ended up standing in line next to each other for that Esmeralda thing. You know, the animatronic psychic-in-a-box?”

  “Oh, I know her well,” Gus said. “She was one of my first crushes.”

  There was no reason that should’ve sent new fireworks of heat across my cheeks, and yet, here we were. “So anyway,” I went on. “My mom was the fifth wheel on this, like, blatant double date trying to disguise itself as a Casual Hang. So when the others went off to go through the Tunnel-o-Love, she
went to get her fortune. My dad said he left his group when he spotted this beautiful red-haired girl in a blue polka-dot dress.”

  “Betty Crocker?” Gus guessed.

  “She’s a brunette. Get your eyes checked,” I said.

  A smile quirked Gus’s lips. “Sorry for interrupting. Go on. Your dad’s just spotted your mom.”

  I nodded. “Anyway, he spent the whole time he was in line trying to figure out how to strike up a conversation with her, and finally, when she paid for her prediction, she started cussing like a sailor.”

  Gus laughed. “I love seeing where you get your admirable qualities from.”

  I flipped him off and went on. “Her prediction had gotten stuck halfway out of the machine. So Dad steps up to save the day. He manages to rip the top half of the ticket out, but the rest is still stuck in the machine, so Mom can’t make sense of the words. So then he told her she’d better stick around and see if her fortune came out with his.”

  “Oh, that old line,” Gus said, grinning.

  “Works every time,” I agreed. “Anyway, he put in his nickel and the two tickets came out. Hers said, You will meet a handsome stranger, and his said, Your story’s about to begin.” They still had them framed in the living room. Or at least, when I was home for Christmas, they were still up.

  That deep ache passed through me. It felt like a metal cheese slicer, pulled right through my center, left there midway through my body. I’d thought missing my dad would be the hardest thing I’d ever do. But the worst thing, the hardest thing, had turned out to be being angry with someone you couldn’t fight it out with.

  Someone you loved enough that you desperately wanted to push through the shit and find a way to make a new normal. I would never get a real explanation from Dad. Mom would never get an apology. We’d never be able to see things “from his point of view” or actively choose not to. He was gone, and everything of him we’d planned to hold on to was obliterated.

  “They were married three months later,” I told Gus. “Some twenty-five years after that, their only daughter’s first book, Kiss Kiss, Wish Wish came out with Sandy Lowe Books, with a dedication that read—”