Kate folded her arms across her chest, tugging at the sleeves of her white cotton blouse. She turned to me, but her eyes were just missing my face.
“Us, Noah,” she said. “Us is what’s wrong.”
Any time a girl breaks up with you, it’s painful. Always. But it may never be more painful than when you hear it for the first time.
I leaned back into the stone bench. “What’s wrong with us?”
She looked away for a moment, biting down on her bottom lip.
“I’m leaving next week,” she said.
“I know. So?”
She turned back to me. “So what happens then?”
I shrugged. “You get on a plane and go to Princeton?”
She frowned, faint lines of irritation tying up around her eyes. “Noah, you know what I’m talking about.”
“No, I don’t,” I said. “We came over here to have dinner and spend the night at your family’s place. Now you’re telling me there’s a problem. Between us.” I paused. “Kate, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She let out a sigh and shook her head. “Fine. I’m going to the other side of the country. You’re staying here. How does that work?”
I shifted on the bench. “I don’t know.”
“I don’t either,” she said. “And that’s the problem.”
“That’s a problem with location. Not with us.”
She glanced at a group of junior high school kids ambling by, talking loudly and laughing. She looked back at me.
“We’re eighteen,” Kate said. “We’re going in different directions.”
Her words stung me. It didn’t matter to me if they were true. They hurt. And I didn’t like the feeling.
“Your mother write that speech for you?” I asked.
She rolled her eyes. “You know better.”
“Sounds like her,” I said. “All of a sudden, we aren’t compatible because you’re going to live in another state? That sounds exactly like her, Kate.”
We sat there quietly for a few minutes. Her parents had been a sore spot during the entire year we’d been together. They didn’t approve of their daughter dating someone who wasn’t going to an Ivy League school and whose family was dysfunctional at best. I hadn’t made it any easier by playing the surly, disaffected teen. We had put Kate in a difficult spot. And until that moment on Catalina, she’d always chosen me.
“Maybe it does sound like her,” Kate finally said. “But maybe she’s right, Noah.”
“She’s right about me, you mean.”
“That’s not what I meant and you know it,” she said. “But is it realistic to think that we’re gonna stay together over the next four years, three thousand miles apart?”
I turned and looked at her, her eyes tearing into the heart that she had created.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I never thought we wouldn’t try.”
Her eyes fluttered, maybe surprised by what I said. She bit her bottom lip again. Tears formed at the corners of her eyes.
“Noah,” she started, but choked up and stopped.
I looked away, my throat tightening.
She cleared her throat and tried again. “Noah, they won’t…” Her voice trailed off.
The smell of popcorn wafted in the air from somewhere down the boardwalk. That same smell would forever evoke an unpleasant reaction in my gut.
“They won’t what?” I asked, turning to her.
The tears were now rolling down her cheeks, dancing off her face and into her lap. She shook her head, her lips pressed together. The pain in her face answered my question.
“They won’t let you go to Princeton,” I said for her, “unless you cut me loose.”
She nodded quickly, a sharp sob escaping from her mouth.
I leaned forward, resting my elbows on my knees, my brain numb. Her parents had played the toughest card. Me or her future. She’d tried to do it herself without laying the blame on her parents, trying to save me the embarrassment of being a black mark on her life.
“It’s not fair,” she mumbled.
“No, it’s not,” I said. “But that’s your parents.”
We sat there, not looking at one another for a while. Over the years, I would come to realize that it was a no-brainer of a choice for too many reasons to run through. But at that moment, my second-place finish filled me with unfettered bitterness.
I stood up and shoved my hands into the pockets of my shorts. “You gotta go to Princeton.”
“I don’t have to,” she said, trying to hold the sobs in her chest. “I could figure out another way to go, without their help.”
We both knew that wasn’t true, not at that point in our lives. And I knew, somewhere in my mind, that Kate wanted to go to Princeton. She wouldn’t say it and I couldn’t admit it, but even then, I think, I knew it was true.
“It’s okay,” I told her, turning to her. “You need to go.”
She looked at me, the rims of her eyes red. “We don’t have to tell them. We can still be together. Call each other, you can come visit, I’ll see you when I come home.”
I shrugged. “We can’t hide from them forever. They’ll know. They always do.” I shook my head. “And what if they did find out? You come home for a break or something and they won’t send you back.” I shook my head again. “Not worth it, Kate.”
She looked at me, frustrated, upset, knowing I was right. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just…I don’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to say to you.”
My chest felt like it was being squeezed. “You said it fine. I get it.”
“I’m sorry, Noah,” she said, her tears spilling onto the concrete of the sidewalk.
“Me, too,” I said.
I turned and headed up the walk. I heard her call behind me, probably wondering where I was going, since we’d planned to spend the night. But it was easy to lose her voice in the commotion of the evening revelers. I was heading to the dock to catch the last ferry. I didn’t turn around because I couldn’t look at her, couldn’t spend one more minute with her if we couldn’t be together the way I wanted to be together.
And she didn’t come after me.
If I’d known that was the last time I’d see her alive, I would’ve turned around. Maybe I would’ve even taken on her parents. But I didn’t know that. You can’t ever know that. So I kept walking, hoping that the feeling in my chest that was squeezing tears out of my eyes would eventually go away.
10
I opened the sliding screen door to my place just before one in the morning, the smell of jalapenos and nacho cheese immediately burning into my nostrils.
“Honey, you’re home,” Carter Hamm said from the sofa amidst a pile of beer cans, plastic wrap, and tortilla chips.
“How did you ever convince me to give you a key?” I asked, shutting the door behind me.
“I didn’t,” he said, wiggling his enormous frame into a sitting position. “I stole one.”
“Ah.”
He grinned, looking like a humongous Cheshire cat. “Ah.”
Carter had played center to my small forward in high school, pulling guard to my fullback and juvenile delinquent to my better judgment. Despite our differences-the main one being that I thought the law should be obeyed and he thought the law was a pain in his ass-we had remained surfing buddies, occasional coworkers, and good friends.
He stretched out his legs, the bottom half of his six-foot-nine body unfurling like a damp straw wrapper. His bleached white hair glowed in the dark room, his black eyes shining against his tan skin. The white T-shirt said DO ME in big black letters, and long red shorts hung loosely to his knees. His size-sixteen feet were bare, his sandals most likely buried somewhere beneath the tornado of crap he had created on my sofa.
He lifted a paper plate in my direction. “Nachos?”
“No thanks,” I said, tossing my keys on the kitchen counter. I walked to the fridge, pulled out a Red Trolley, ripped the cap off, and drank half of it.
Carter let out a low whistle. “Dude, if I had known we were gonna be drinking, I would’ve waited for you.”
“We’re not drinking,” I mumbled, staring out the back door. The whitecaps in the ocean did nosedives under the moonlight.