First There Was Forever (16 page)

T
hat Wednesday on the bus to Clean the Bay, I sat down in the front seat across from Leo. If Hailey wanted to sit in the back and hunt for Nate, she could do it alone. I was done helping her get his attention.

But when Hailey got on the bus a few minutes later, she sat down right next to me.

“So,” she said, “your birthday is less than two weeks away. What are you gonna do? Sixteen is a big one.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I was thinking I’d do something at Meredith’s house. Nothing major. Just watch a movie.”

“Well, you know I’m not going to Meredith’s house. I don’t want anyone casting any Wiccan spells on me while I’m sleeping,” Hailey deadpanned. “But maybe we can go out to dinner with your parents or something the next day?”

Nate climbed onto the bus and I kept my eyes glued to Hailey’s, using all of my willpower not to look at him. Ignoring him was torture. I hadn’t seen him since Friday night, and all I wanted to do was smile at him or make eye contact or do something to acknowledge him.

“Yeah, okay, something like that,” I said, determined to keep the conversation going until Nate had passed.

At the beach, the sun was unusually hot and bright.

“I’m not wearing any sunscreen,” I said. “So I’m gonna try and stay in the shade today. Like, under the pier.”

“I’ll come with you,” Hailey said.

“Really?” I asked. Hailey was one of those people who was always trying to get a tan. It confused me that she would blow the opportunity to get some sun just to hang out with me, and her new clinginess was unnerving.

We wandered around for a few minutes under the pier without talking and then she said, “I’ve gotta pee. I’ll be right back.”

I watched Hailey trudge away toward the public bathroom in that awkward sand-walking way and then turned back to the ocean. Nate was walking near the water. He paused, bent down and picked something up from the sand, and then replaced it. He stood perfectly still for a long moment, squinting out into the horizon, the sun beating down on his profile. Warm light caught on his nose, his shoulders, his hands. Behind him, the surface of the ocean was a burnished sheet of metal. I thought about our kiss again, his fingers in my hair, the serious, focused look in his eyes the second before it happened. I thought about the moment we shared on the roof of the science building the week before and the way his palm had felt when he pressed it against mine.

“Lima?”

Hailey was back already.

“What are you looking at?” she asked. She turned her head, following the line of my vision until she saw Nate, and then her eyes moved slowly back to mine. The expression on her face was like she was solving a math problem.

“Nothing,” I said. “I was just zoning out.”

“Oh, okay,” she said, sounding skeptical.

And then feeling a little weak, or worried or something, I took a step toward her and wrapped my arms tight around her neck.

“I’m just so glad we’re friends again,” I said. “I missed you.”

That night, I left my cell phone on my desk. I hadn’t been more than an arm’s length away from it since I gave my number to Nate on Friday. Would he ever call? All I wanted was to see the screen light up with his number.

The waning evening sun washed into my room, streams of mild light stretching across my desk. Next week, we’d move the clocks forward and the days would get longer. Daylight Savings was always easy for me to remember because it usually fell within a day or two of my birthday. I always looked forward to it, too, maybe even more than my birthday itself. Turning the clocks ahead an hour was like switching the season from winter back to summer again.

Time was such a weird, subjective thing. The five days I’d spent wondering if Nate would call had felt like an eternity, and meanwhile the whole school year was slipping by like a ghost, too fast and elusive for me to catch.

L
ast year, when I turned fifteen, my birthday had fallen on a Friday, and I spent that whole weekend at Hailey’s. Double sleepovers had always been our specialty. All day Saturday we stayed in our pajamas, eating snacks and watching TV. Because it was my birthday weekend, Hailey had let me watch all the episodes of
Top Chef
that I’d missed, even though she hated that show. My TV at home was bigger and fancier than Hailey’s, but I always preferred watching TV at her apartment. Her TV room was small, carpeted, and windowless. There was an inside-ness to it that I could never find in my own house.

We didn’t even leave Hailey’s apartment until Sunday morning when we walked to the Baskin-Robbins on Venice Boulevard and had ice cream for breakfast. Ice cream for breakfast for our birthdays had been our tradition since fourth grade.

It had been my idea to go to this Baskin-Robbins, but once we got there, my excitement deflated. The strip mall was dingy in the broad daylight. A group of men were smoking cigarettes outside of a liquor store, shouting to each other in a language I didn’t recognize.

“We should go home,” I said to Hailey. “This is depressing.”

“Are you kidding?” Hailey responded. “You have to have ice cream for breakfast on your birthday weekend. It’s good luck.”

All the details from that weekend were seared into my memory, and now, on the eve of my sixteenth birthday, one moment in particular kept coming back to me. After our
Top Chef
marathon and an impromptu dance party, and after trolling around online looking at boys from other schools, we climbed into bed and whispered about turning fifteen. We talked about whether we would ever have boyfriends, and wondered what it would be like to have sex. It didn’t seem possible that those things might be in our futures.

I lay awake after Hailey had turned off the lights, not tired. As my vision adjusted to the dark, I scanned her room and my eyes landed on the drawings we had done on the back of her door. I glanced at Hailey. Her back was to me, but I could tell from the slight puff of her exhale that she was already sleeping. I remember looking at the back of her head, the straight line of her back and rib cage, her legs under the sheet, and thinking, or actually kind of knowing,
that she would get a boyfriend and have sex before me. It’s like I just always believed she was going to leave me behind.

T
he night before my birthday it rained. I went straight from school to the twins’ house. Walker drove and Meredith sat shotgun, and I sat in the backseat, watching the rain splash hard against the windows of their car.

Back at their house, Meredith lit candles and the three of us listened to music and ate leftover Indian food.

“This is so good, where is it from?” I asked Meredith.

“It’s from this amazing vegetarian place on Sunset near Franklin. It’s the best,” she said. “We went there last night.”

“Just you two?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Meredith said, like it was obvious.

I had never really asked myself what Meredith and Walker usually did for dinner, and now it occurred to me that they probably went out every single night. I could picture it easily, the two of them, sitting across from each other in restaurants around LA night after night, ordering glasses of water or soda and then waiting for checks, looking for parking spots, climbing in and out of the car. Their life, which always seemed so glamorous and wild, struck me suddenly small and lonely.

“You’re not coming to the movie?” I asked Walker, when he didn’t put on his shoes after dinner. He was lying on his back on the couch, his phone resting on his stomach like a pet.

“Nope,” he said. “Do you know how many times she’s made me watch
Darling
? And once was enough.”

“Why are you being an asshole, Walker?” Meredith asked calmly. “You’ve seen it once and we didn’t even finish it. Don’t lie.”

He mumbled something inaudible, not looking at either of us as we left.

The city was slippery and dark in the rain. We ran from the parking lot to the theater without umbrellas and were soaked by the time we got inside.

I was waiting on line to use the bathroom before the movie started when my phone beeped.

What r u doing this weekend?

And then a second later:

This is nate

My pulse quickened. I stepped out of the line to let an older woman go ahead of me. I wanted more time to craft my response.

At a movie now. Tmrw is my birthday so spending time with fam.

I replied, deliberately not mentioning Hailey.

!!! happpyy birthday

I wrote back,
thanks
.

By the time I got to my seat, I was giddy.

I put my phone into the silent position and looked up at Meredith.

“I’m so glad you’re excited about this movie,” she whispered, misreading my enthusiasm. “It’s going to break your heart, I promise.”

T
he next day, the sky was a post-rain, shiny blue. Perfect beach weather.

“You guys all know each other, right?” I said awkwardly as Hailey climbed into the backseat of the twins’ car. We had made a plan to pick Hailey up on the morning of my birthday and all go to the beach together.

Meredith and Walker smiled and nodded, and Hailey tried to smile, too.

“Happy birthday, Li! How does it feel to be sixteen?” She asked, handing me an enormous bag of candy. I recognized the stamp on the clear plastic bag, and I felt a stab of guilt as I realized she must have gone all the way to Santa Monica just to go to the best place. The bag was full of all my favorite candy: cotton-candy jelly beans, sour belts, and chocolate-covered gummy bears. “Since we couldn’t do ice cream for breakfast, I thought candy for breakfast would be the next best thing.”

“Yay, thank you!” I ripped open the seal on the bag, and held it out to her. She popped a jelly bean in her mouth. I offered the bag to Meredith and Walker, but they turned it down.

“Thanks for picking me up,” Hailey said nervously to the twins. She tucked her hands under her thighs so that they smashed into the car seat. “What did you guys do last night?”

That was such a typical question for Hailey, and something Meredith and Walker would never answer. It was weird watching Hailey try to relate to Meredith. It reminded me of trying to get the positive ends of two batteries to touch.

“We went to a movie,” I said. “What about you?”

“I went to this party that Skyler told me about. It was so dumb. I was sure Nate was gonna be there because it was totally his scene. But he didn’t come,” she sighed. “Ryan said he’s been being really antisocial lately.”

“That’s weird,” I said too quickly.

I looked out the window, but not before I caught Meredith’s eye in the rearview mirror. There was a little more focus in her eyes than I was used to seeing. She must have seen I was uncomfortable and I wondered how much she knew. Had she known that Nate and I had slipped off together that night when he’d come to their house? Did she even know who Nate was? I had never talked to her about him, but for some reason, I felt certain that she had deduced some version of the truth in that one instant.

And then Meredith’s eyes flicked back to the road, and we sped along the PCH, the wind and salty air washing away all the remnants of the conversation.

Finally, we got out and climbed over a rocky wall to sneak down to a special beach that the twins had named “The Black.”

Hailey seemed surprised at my adventurousness.

“Why do you call this beach The Black?” Hailey asked as we padded through the sand. “There’s nothing black here.”

Meredith and Walker exchanged a look. “It’s a long story,” Meredith said.

I was used to those kinds of answers from Meredith, but Hailey rolled her eyes.

On the beach, Meredith popped open a bottle of champagne and gave me a wooden beaded bracelet. It felt so magical and perfect that I even let myself have a few sips of champagne from the bottle. The alcohol went straight to my head, and I lay on the sand.

Meredith and Walker splashed in the water up to their knees, while Hailey and I watched. The space between us felt big and strange. I don’t know if she noticed it, too; she seemed pretty content. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Nate. My secret was so big and so real that it formed a huge barrier between us. It was weird how something you didn’t say could be such a presence.

Suddenly, Hailey broke the silence.

“I have to tell you something,” she said. “I’m kind of embarrassed, but I just hate having a secret from you.”

Hailey covered her eyes with her hands. “I can’t look at you while I say this. But I hooked up with Max last weekend. And then we kind of had sex at that party last night.”

“Oh my God!” I was really surprised. I remembered Hailey mentioning she thought he was okay, but having sex with him was a whole other thing. How had she jumped from liking him a little to going all the way? And on top of that, Max was kind of unbearable. He was always flaunting his fancy car, designer jeans, and expensive haircuts.

She squeezed her eyes tight. “I know. It’s horrifying. But it was just for a second. Basically it was just a lot of sloppy making out. I’m so grossed out thinking about it.”

“So why did you hook up again yesterday if you’re grossed out by it?” I asked.

She sighed, “I don’t know. I mean, last night was a little better. And making out can be fun. Like, if I close my eyes and imagine it’s Nate, I can kind of get into it.”

I went livid. I was so sick of hearing Hailey talk about Nate like she really knew him. I felt suddenly protective of him. Her crush felt like a violation.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said a little defensively.

I shook my head. “No, you don’t.”

“You’re thinking I’m a stupid, dirty slut, right?” she asked.

My anger turned into pity.

“No, not at all,” I said gently. I tried to think of something generic to say so we could stop talking about boys. “I think you’re probably normal.”

She heaved a sigh of relief, and her body seemed to go a little limp.

“I love you, Lima,” she said. “You’re the only really good person I know.”

• • •

Hailey stayed over that night and I waited until she was fully asleep to crawl out of bed. I’d kept my phone off all day because I didn’t want Nate to text or call when Hailey was around, and now I was itching to see if he had. I grabbed my phone off my desk and tiptoed downstairs to check.

All the lights in the house were off, so the ocean and the sky outside look bright. I could hear the muffled sounds of the waves crashing outside the glass doors. I put some leftover cake on a paper towel, curled up on the living room couch, and turned on my phone. I watched the screen power up and after a minute, a text from Nate appeared on the screen. It was from nine thirty.

Happy bday ;)

It was after midnight now. All I wanted to do was text him back but I worried it was too late. I felt suddenly exhausted. I didn’t know how much longer I could keep this thing with Nate a secret. I had to tell Hailey about us soon or I might ruin everything.

Back in my room, Hailey was sleeping on her stomach, her face smeared across my pillow. I turned off the lamp and climbed into bed beside her. She curled up behind me, her body folding neatly next to me like a shell.

It’s crazy, I thought, how some things never change while other things change so drastically. From the outside, things looked exactly the same as last year: me and Hailey sleeping together in a bed like sardines. But inside, under the surface, everything was different. Patty had gone on a tangent recently about how the magnets at the North and South Pole are constantly shifting. They move too slowly for people to notice, but then, once every several hundreds of thousands of years, they just switch and everything starts moving in the opposite direction. I didn’t totally understand the science, but it felt true. Lying there with Hailey’s arm around my stomach, and this huge secret eating away at my heart, I wondered if that was what had happened to my life.