Beach read

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 fu

“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 Tu

“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, gri

“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 pla

“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—”

“‘To my parents,’” Gus said. “‘Who are proof of fate’s strong, if animatronic, hand.’”

My mouth fell open. I’d almost forgotten what he had told me at the gas station, that he’d read my books. Or maybe I hadn’t let myself think about it, because I was worried that meant he’d hated them, and somehow I was still competing with him, needing him to recognize me as his rival and equal.

“You remember that?” It came out as a whisper.

His eyes leapt toward me, and my heart rose in my throat. “It’s why I asked about them,” he said. “I thought it was the nicest dedication I’d ever read.”

I made a face. Coming from him, that might not have been a compliment. “‘Nicest.’”

“Fine, January,” he said in a low voice. “I thought it was beautiful. Is that what you want me to admit?”

Again my heart buoyed through my chest. “Yes.”

“I thought it was beautiful,” he said immediately, sincerely.