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“Should I ask if you want to talk about it?”
The jib flaps a little and he tightens the line, almost unconsciously, without even having to look, then clenches and unclenches his hand, looking down for a second before quickly returning his attention to the crowded waters around us. “That conversation with my brother you, uh—”
“Eavesdropped on?”
He flashes me a smile. “Yeah, just like I did with ol’ Alex at the rehearsal di
“I got that impression. You going to tell me what your Big Sin was now?”
He moves the tiller to the left, getting us out of the line of fire of a Boston Whaler with a bunch of girls in bikinis in it. “I got a million of them.”
“Mostly alongside Spence?” I say, then regret it, expecting him to snap something about us having that in common, those Spence sins, or just shut down completely.
But he says, “Yeah. We started together at Hodges in kindergarten. It wasn’t so bad then, but the older you get, the more it su—the worse it is. I mean—the rules, and what they think is important and just all this—shi—garbage. He hates that as much as I do and cares less about pretending he doesn’t. So we started messing around—” He hesitates.
“Define messing around.”
Cass shoots me a smile. “Not like that, obviously. Just stuff—like—there’s this big statue of the guy who founded Hodges—marble, in a toga, with a wreath—”
“Hodges was founded in Ancient Rome?”
“Asinine, right? So, sophomore year, Spence and I would, you know, put a bra on it or a beer in its hand or whatever. We did that for a few weeks, and then they caught us.”
“Don’t tell me they kicked you out for that. You’d have to do way worse to get booted from SBH. The last kid who was expelled set all the choir robes on fire while sneaking a cigarette in the chorus closet.”
“Yeah, and from what I hear about that one, he was smashed and it wasn’t exactly a Marlboro he was smoking. That guy managed to pull off all three strikes and you’re out in one day. Chan and me . . . not that efficient. So, yeah, disrespecting our illustrious founder”—he makes air quotes around those two words—“strike one. Then we borrowed the groundskeeper’s golf cart and almost drove it into this little pond they had.”
“Small-time, Somers.” I lean back, folding my arms across my chest. Until I realize how stupid that probably looks with a life jacket on. And that I’m totally borrowing his gesture. Isn’t mirroring a mating signal in the animal kingdom? Soon I’ll be rolling over and exposing my soft underbelly.
“Now I’m supposed to impress you with How Bad I Am, Gwen? Is that what it takes? Okay, so the dining hall looks like . . .” He drags on his earlobe, searching for words. “Hogwarts. No, worse, like where Henry VIII would go to eat a whole deer leg or whatever. Or Nottingham Castle. So, Spence and I figured we ought to up the authenticity of the whole medieval thing. We borrowed a key from the custodian—snuck in at night with a couple bales of hay and these big wolfhounds that Spence’s dad had. And a chicken or two. This pot-bellied pig. Long story short, the headmaster was not as much of a fan of historical accuracy as you’d think. That was that. Strike three.”
I’m laughing. “I hate to tell you this, but you’re going to have to work a lot harder to go to hell. Or even jail.”
But he’s unsmiling, clenching that fist again.
“Oh God. I’m sorry. I just don’t think that’s so bad. Honestly, if they had a sense of humor. I mean, I’m sure your family is very fu
“I get what you mean. And they do have senses of humor. But, uh, not about getting expelled. From a school that your dad and your brothers and your mother and grandmother all went to. Not to mention that my brother Jake is on staff there, a coach. None too cool to have your loser little brother booted.”
Loser? Cass?
“Ouch. I’m sorry.” I rest my hand on his, the one on the tiller, leave it there for a second, feel this shiver—each nerve ending, one after another, vibrating with awareness—spread up my arm. I yank my fingers away, busy them in twisting my hair back into a knot again.
“But I’m not. I’m not sorry.” His voice rises, like he’s drowning out someone else’s voice, not just the waves. “That’s the thing. Getting out of there was . . . right. It was not the place for me. SBH is—I like Coach better, the team is better, the classes are fine . . . I’m happy to be where I am.”
“Your family’s still mad? After all this time?”
I have this image of Cass’s dad bringing a bunch of us—summer kids, island kids, whoever wanted to come—out in their Boston Whaler that summer. He’d take a pack of us tubing or waterskiing, things we island kids never got to do. Keep going out all day to make sure everyone who wanted a chance got one. He let us take turns being in the bow, holding on tight as it rose up and slapped down, soaking us with spray. And once, when I stepped on a fishhook at the end of the pier, he carried me all the way back on his shoulders to the house they were renting so he could clip it off with pliers and ease it out, telling me these horrible knock-knock jokes to distract me.
“They’re not mad,” Cass says. “‘Disappointed.’”
In the universal language of parents, “disappointed” is nearly always worse than “mad.”
“After a year?” I ask. I should change the subject. The knuckles of Cass’s fist are white. Clench. Unclench.
“After yesterday. My grandmother and my mom went and talked to the headmaster a few days ago. He said he regretted kicking me out, since he knew I would never have done that stuff myself, that it was all Spence’s bad influence. Which it wasn’t. But he said if I apologized and admitted I wasn’t the one who came up with it, I could get back in. Which would be great for my transcript and probably get me into a better college and . . . you know the drill.”
His voice has deepened, mockingly, on the last sentence. Clearly a lecture he’s heard often.
And I do—I know the drill. I know it exactly. Realizing I do, that I get it, is like cold, hard ocean spray in the face—a shock, but then sort of soothing. Sure, no one’s imagining me winding up at some Ivy—but it’s that same sense of what’s next. I look at Cass now, at his hair blowing all those shades of blond, at his eyes, focused, determined, the stubborn set of his mouth. And this is the hardest, weirdest part of not being that barefoot girl and that towheaded boy ru
His blue eyes are grim. I slip my hand over his now fisted one again. He turns his head sharply, closer to mine.
Then the Boston Whaler full of bikini-clad girls sweeps a wide horseshoe, zooms past us one more time. One of the girls is waving the top of a bright orange bikini in the air, sun gleaming on her wet skin. No sweatshirt for her. Or life jacket.
The waves slosh into the boat, surf slapping us in the face and we rock back and forth crazily.
“Friends of yours, Cass?”
I have this sudden awful fear that they are. Former classmates, fellow Bath and Te
“Nope. Yours?”
“Despite the island girl rep, no. We usually save our topless antics for land.”
“We’d better head in, then,” Cass deadpans. I whack him on the shoulder as though he’s Nic, and he grins back at me with an expression that is . . . definitely not my cousin’s way of looking at me. And a slow smile that builds. I feel that race of electricity slip-slide over my skin again, and meet his eyes full on, the way we did in Mrs. Ellington’s kitchen. And that March night.