Chapter 19
For a moment, Emily and I are suspended, neither of us moving closer or further away and I am giddy with anticipation. In the next moment, something in Emily's expression changes and she pulls away so aggressively, the surfboard tips and she goes splashing into the water. She gets caught in the surf and flails her way back to the shore. She's still for a second before another wave pushes her fully onto the shore.
I watch her through this, trying to settle my disappointment before grabbing her board and then meeting her on the shore. I can still feel my heart pounding in my chest when I'm close enough to talk to her.
"You good?" I ask, trying not to laugh at her laying on the beach like a washed-up ship. She sits up dramatically as she meets my eyes.
"Blake, I swear, if you laugh, I will-" but she stops talking when she realizes it's too late and my shoulders are already shaking with laughter. It's easier to laugh at her wrecked form than perseverate about what almost happened between us. She peels seaweed that has stuck to her face, grabs the surfboard, and heads back to the truck.
"Em, come on! I'm sorry," I yell, chasing after her. I feel bad as we drop off the surfboards and grab our stuff to get changed. After changing as quickly as I possibly can, I decide to go see if I can buy her a treat to make up for it and find just the perfect thing. As she heads out of the stall, I hold out one of the two cotton candies I've bought for her. "Sorry I laughed at you."
She takes it, nudging me lightly. "It's okay."
We walk along the worn wood of the boardwalk, dodging in and out of people, surrounded by voices. Next to us, a man in an old-time pinstripe suit with a matching hat is announcing the winning prize for a ring toss. I pause, imagining winning something like the giant bear the last person got for Emily. "Do you want to-"
But before I can finish, Emily has already paid the vendor. I slide onto one of the wobbly stools, realizing that this is going to be incredibly difficult without glasses. Emily sits down next to me, two kinds and an old man taking up the remaining three spots. The vendor goes over the rules and I can tell Emily is taking this pretty seriously as she lines up her gun.
"Ready to lose, Clarke?" I whisper to her as the vendor starts counting down from three even though I can barely see the target.
"You wish," she says as she smacks my gun before firing her own at the sound of the bell and I can tell I'm shooting in the right direction but I can't see the target at all.
"Damn," I say, when she narrowly beats the grandpa two seats away and the bell above us dings her win. "I took my contacts out to go in the ocean and I literally can't see anything. My eyes were too dry to put them back in."
"Excuses, excuses," she says as she's rewarded with one enormous bear, a yellow bow tied neatly around it's neck. Ugh. I'm going to have to wear my glasses if I want any shot at beating her, but I hate how they make my face look. I find them in my backpack and put them on my face, cringing when I see Emily looking at me. She's never going to kiss me now. I groan.
"They're awful, aren't they?"
"Definitely not." She shakes her head. "They're really cute actually."
Something about the way she says it and the faint color in her cheeks makes me blush. I rise my eyebrows in surprise, unable to believe that this beautiful girl might find me cute even with the world's largest pair of glasses.
"Wait, really?"
"Yeah," she says with a nod. "Very Christmas 2011."
Once my glasses are on, I crush Emily. I win ring toss, balloon darts, and ski-ball, our hands brushing lightly together as we walk from stand-to-stand, a collection of stuffed animals in my backpack. The urge to take her hand is strong, but I don't want to scare her. Every time her fingers touch the back of my hand, I squeeze my hand into a fist until half moons are carved into my palm from my fingernails.
As we head back to the truck, we stop by a snack stand with funnel cakes and lemonade, which claims to be freshly squeezed but obviously isn't. We get hot dogs and lemonade and drive the two blocks to my aunt's house as we eat the snacks along the way. When we get there, Lisa opens the door in a white button-down and directs us to drive to the backyard. I haven't seen her much in the last decade and I suppose this is one of the perks to moving to Huckabee. She's unmarried and doesn't have children and hates Huckabee with a passion, but getting to see her and the beach is a trip that'll definitely be worth it more often. Especially if Emily joins me.
"Aunt Lisa," I say as my door screeches open. I hop out to give her a hug. She looks like the female version of my dad, tanned skin and blond hair that's tied into a ponytail.
"Nine o'clock," she says, checking her watch. "You kept me up past my bedtime. You know daybreak is the best time to surf around here."
She smiles at Emily noticing her, although she still has me in an embrace. "You must be Emily. God, you look just like your mom."
I cringe, remembering that Emily doesn't like it when people say that. Emily smiles politely.
"Thanks for letting us stay."
"In my backyard?" she snorts, throwing her hands up. We're planning on camping in the back of my pickup truck to check:
6. Sleep under the stars
Checked off the bucket list too.
"Oh come on aunt Lisa. You're telling me you didn't do worse when you were our age?" and the two of us share a knowing smile.
"You got me there, Blake," she says, leading us through the door to a covered back porch with blue and white striped furniture. "So, how's Huckabee treating you?"
We plunk down in the chairs. Lisa swings her feet up to rest on the small wooden coffee table and appraises me with her eyes. "I'm honestly surprised you didn't bail to come see me sooner."
"Not too bad. Definitely still getting used to…" my voice trails off as I decide what to say. She knows that I'm gay and she lived in Huckabee long enough to know that it might be difficult for me. "Well, everything. I guess."
"Yeah," aunt Lisa nods. "I don't think I ever got used to it and I was born there."
The conversation then turns to our summer activities and we tell her about cliff-jumping and skinny-dipping, and stealing apples. She laughs at the last one. "O-ho! You bet your ass I tried that one. Got tackled about halfway through the gala section. Had a mean black eye for a week." Soon, we all start yawning and aunt Lisa takes us inside to get pillows and a blanket to lay on the bed. Her bungalow is an adorable two-bedroom ranch-style home with a rustic quality to it and I know my grandfather helped design it.
"Bathroom's through there," aunt Lisa says, leading us down a small hallway with two doors, one being the guest bedroom. "Spare bedroom is here."
She pulls the pillows off the two twin beds and hands them to us. "If it gets too cold out there and you guys weenie out, you're welcome to just hop right in here. I'll leave the back door unlocked."
She throws a blanket on me, completely covering me like a ghost. "Looks like you're all set," Lisa says, chuckling to herself as we head back down the hallway to the screen door. She holds it open for us as we stumble outside.
"Let me know if y'all need anything else. Otherwise, I'll see you for breakfast tomorrow morning."
"Thank you!" we chorus, the screen door closing behind her. I take the surfboards out of the back and lay the blanket for us to sit on. Both of us hop up to sit against the cab, the mound of pillows behind us, our lemonades clutched in our hands. I brush my free arm against Emily, moving ever so slightly closer, knowing that I might be pushing my luck. She doesn't pull away and I feel her relax a little into me until our arms are pressed against each other. The night feels alive with the electricity of our touch, the unsaid things between us, the feeling that this is something more. Emily looks over at me as I grab a pillow and I can feel her eyes trailing down my side.
"I like your tattoo," she says and there's something tender in her voice that tugs at my heart. "I didn't know you had one."
I glance down at the writing on my side because I definitely can't make eye contact with her and the thought of my mother makes me smile. "It's my mom's handwriting. She wrote me a letter the day before she went into labor."
I think about the letter telling me how much I'm loved and about what love really means as I prop the pillow behind me. She reminded me in the letter that love isn't always what you expect, that she wasn't expecting to fall in love with my father but that he still brought her so much joy. She told me how she was so glad that she leaped into love the way she did, cheesy as that may sound. I still don't know how she knew to write me a letter that would end up meaning so much to me. How she knew to write something so perfect for her child when she had no experience being a mom. "It's like she knew, you know? Like she knew she wouldn't make it. Maybe she did. Maybe on some level, she knew."
We're both quiet for a minute, listening to the hum of the radio and the waves crashing onto the sand. "What did it say? Her letter?"
I take my glasses off and lean back. "A lot of stuff. That she loved me. That she wanted me to live a full and happy life. That I was her favorite person in the world and she hadn't even really met me yet." I smile, thinking about the stuff about my dad. "But also stuff that means something new to me now, you know? She had a line in there like, take it from me Blake, even the most unexpected people and places can turn into the greatest adventures. And then I moved to Huckabee and met you. And it became real in a whole new way. I feel like everytime I read it, I get something new out of it."
I don't think Emily's breathing anymore. "I definitely get that," she says after a long while and I meet her eyes.
"What's it like?" I say. "Doing the list?"
"Well, it's kind of like what you said that day at my house. It's made me feel closer to her." She is quiet for a moment, thinking. "It's more than that, though. Doing this list has made me feel more like myself again, more like I did before…" her voice trails off and she shrugs, shaking her head. "I don't know. It's made me feel like I don't have to worry about losing everything all the time. Or getting hurt. Or having everything come crumbling down around me. Like I can take a risk and everything won't be the worst case scenario just because it once was. Like I'm…I don't know."
"Lucky?" I ask and her eyes glow with magic. I love that she's opening up to me like this.
"Yeah," she says, nodding. "Lucky."
"That makes it more than a bucket list, then. It's a lucky list," I say.
"God, that's so my mom," Emily says. "She was lucky right until she got cancer, let me tell you that."
I don't know how to respond. And I don't want to. I want to give her the space to tell me about the difficult things too, if she wants to.
"She was like a walking rabbit's foot, always jumping into things like the odds were already in her favor. Like they had to be. I remember going to the Huckabee Fall Festival and she put one raffle ticket in. People buy thousands of tickets for that and she won it with one." She shakes her head. "She was always so sure. Even when she started having these bad headaches and dizzy spells, I think she thought she was fine. I think I thought she was fine." Emily isn't looking at me when she's talking, but I'm staring at her intently, like if I move or breathe, I'll miss a word. "That summer I went to Misty Oasis where my best friend is right now. I knew she was finally going to the doctor while I was away, but I just wasn't even worried about it. I didn't think anything of it."
She has tears in her eyes now and I can feel my heart breaking inside of me as her voice shakes. "I should have been. Stage 4 glioblastoma. I should have pushed her to go to the doctor sooner. I should have been by her side every minute. Even after her diagnosis, I thought she would beat the odds because she always had. I thought she would beat the odds because she thought she would. Up until the last week." I can picture her and her mother, carbon copies, with smiles on their faces, not knowing what would come next. She takes in a deep breath, steadying herself, and I fight the urge to wrap my arms around her and hold her close. "It was like all the bad luck she never had hit at once. It wasn't like one of those small miracles where they say you have weeks to live and you get months or years or a decade. They gave her six months and she didn't make it two."
Emily finally looks over at me and I wonder if she can see the tears in my eyes as she bares her heart. "Her luck ran out, Blake. My luck ran out."
"Hey," I say and before I realize what I'm doing, I've grasped her forearm. "Emily, you can't think like that." I close the space between us, our knees gently knocking. "You can't measure a person's life like that." She meets my eyes. "I mean, if that were the case, then I would have to live my life thinking I was the reason my mom died, you know? That I was the worst and most unlucky thing to ever happen to my parents."
It feels a little like a concession because I have felt like that sometimes, during my worst times. Like when I was twelve and crept down the stairs, excited for my birthday and saw my dad at the table, crying as he held her favorite mug. My birthday is one of the hardest days of our lives, but my dad doesn't let me forget that I'm worth it. Living thinking I'm the reason my mom died is just no way to live.
"Even though our moms lived such short lives, think about how much good they had in them. The people they meant something to. The lives they touched. The adventures they had. The lists they finished. They were lucky, Em. We're all lucky, not because everything works out, but because we get to wake up in the morning and take chances and make mistakes and keep trying not to."
Silence fills the air. I want her to believe me so badly, to know that I know these things because I've had to be her before. I want her to see the summer as something new, something real, something lucky. I know Emily's scared without her mom, but she has also been so brave this summer. I want her to keep moving forward. At last, she takes in a deep breath and I gently sigh in relief. I can be here for her, guide her through this difficult time. But it's not just losing our moms that bind us, it's the bravery we can both show. I'm suddenly aware of just how close we're sitting next to each other.
The night feels charged with electricity, filled with possibility. Like maybe I might get everything I ever wanted. It feels downright magical.
The warm touch of Emily's hand surprises me and I inhale sharply. I feel her fingers snaking around mine and now we are here, under the stars, holding hands. And it's everything that I wanted with her and I know now that I'm not crazy to think that maybe she likes me. The way I like her. I rub small circles with my thumb and I feel the way she shivers next to me and I want to pull her close, to envelop myself in the smell of honey and lavender, but I force myself to take it slow. We have time and right now this is enough.