First There Was Forever (4 page)

N
ana lived with Dad’s sister, Caroline, in a huge, mustard-colored Spanish-style house overlooking the ocean in the prettiest part of Santa Barbara.

“Come in, ladies,” Caroline greeted us. “And gentleman.”

Caroline’s shoulder-length hair was white as powdered sugar. Light seemed to shoot through it, giving the impression that she was always standing in front of a lamp. My cousins were away at college, so I was the only kid around. I actually didn’t mind being alone with grown-ups. Sometimes I even preferred it to being with people my own age.

Nana was sitting under an umbrella on a white canvas recliner by the pool when we came in. Every time we visited, Nana looked smaller. I must have been growing up at exactly the same rate that she was growing old, like we were sitting on opposite sides of a seesaw.

“How are you, Nana?” I asked.

Nana wrapped her fingers around mine and they clung tight, like claws.

“I can’t complain,” she said. Even though Nana was old, she still always wore red lipstick and blue eye shadow. “How are you? Tell me about school.”

Everyone always said I looked like Nana when she was young, but that was hard for me to imagine. The only thing that I could tell for sure was that Nana, Dad, and I all had the exact same eyes. They were clear, even pools of blue.

“School’s hard,” I said. “Harder than last year.”

“You’re a smart girl,” she said. “You’ll do fine.”

Mom and Dad made lunch while I swam in the pool. The water was warm and velvety. I did flips, handstands, and somersaults until my fingertips turned into raisins. And then I climbed out of the water and ate under the sun. The taste of chlorine mingled with the salty food. The sun grew lazy and tired and sunk lower in the sky. The light changed to that mild orangey afternoon color and soon we all went inside.

During the car ride home on Sunday, Mom, Dad, and I listened to the Rolling Stones. My favorite Rolling Stones song had always been “Wild Horses,” and it was easy to sing along to. We took the Pacific Coast Highway all the way back to LA.

When we were about twenty minutes from home, I got a text message from Hailey:
Nate and I kissed last night. My life has finally begun.

H
ailey texted me during lunch on Monday to come find her in the bathroom in the science building. She was sitting on the floor of the handicap stall, her face in her hands. She looked up at me, revealing puffy red eyes. The way she had tucked her knees up to her chest, I could see her underwear. Even though Skyler was acting like Hailey’s new best friend, I was clearly still the one Hailey wanted to cry to.

“I thought I looked so pretty today,” she stammered between sobs.

“You do!” I said, crouching down and putting my hands on her knees.

Her bottom lip quivered as more tears came. She flicked them away with the tips of her fingers. She always cried like that—wiping away tears before they could run down her face and ruin her makeup. I leaned in and gave her a hug. My cheek touched her forehead, and her skin felt oily and hot.

“He doesn’t like me, Lima,” Hailey said, her voice cracking. “He told Ryan, who told Sara, who told Skyler that he only kissed me ’cause he was really drunk. He said it was a mistake.”

“Nate? What a moron,” I said, rolling my eyes. “You can do better.”

She looked at me with empty eyes. “I can’t,” she said softly. “I can’t do better than him.”

“He’s a spoiled, rude, too skinny, cocky, stupid sixteen-year-old,” I said, trying to come up with accurate insults. “He thinks he’s so cool and edgy, but he’s just the same as everyone else.”

She half smiled, and then her eyes went blank with pain again. “Lima, he was such a good kisser.”

I hated that detail, but I tried to keep my tone light.

“Just forget about it. Think about that hot guy you hooked up with in San Diego.”

“Everyone hooks up with random guys from out of town. Out-of-town guys don’t count.”

I laughed; I couldn’t help it. And then Hailey started laughing. After a few minutes I think she actually seemed a little less sad.

S
aturday morning I woke up early enough to watch Dad surf behind our house. He usually went in around six or seven, not like the hard-core surfers who went in at five, or even four in the morning. Sometimes I’d see those surfers piling into their cars on the Pacific Coast Highway, sunburned and raw, already having been in the ocean for several hours by the time I was leaving for school.

Now I sat beneath a damp gray sky, watching Dad ride the choppy waves. I wore a fleece jacket over my sweatshirt but I was still cold. I wondered how Dad could stand to be in the icy water.

I know it’s weird, because I grew up practically on the beach, but for the longest time, I was afraid to go in the ocean. I liked swimming in pools, where the water was predictable and calm. But the ocean was ragged and wild, always threatening to pull you in and never let you go.

I finally went in when I was twelve. It was perfect beach weather that day, hot and sunny, with only a few dense clouds in the sky, like scoops of vanilla ice cream. Hailey and Dad were wave-diving, and I was lying on the sand reading and eating chips. Every now and then I’d look up and see their heads, bobbing just beyond where the waves were breaking.

“There’s no time like the present, Lima,” Dad announced when they came out to shore. They were both all wet, an even layer of sand stuck to their calves and feet, like a rough second skin.

“C’mon, Li,” Hailey said. “The ocean isn’t scary. You’re being totally psycho.”

I looked from Hailey to Dad and back to Hailey, and I knew I wasn’t getting out of it.

We walked toward the ocean. The sand felt slimy under my feet, and the water felt sharp and cold, like a million needles on my thighs. I froze. I looked at Hailey, but she didn’t look scared or cold at all. She looked back at me, rolled her eyes, and grabbed my hand, pulling me in farther. Just when my feet started to lose contact with the floor, Dad yelled: “Dive!”

I held my nose with my right hand and lurched forward through the tense surface of the water. I felt the wave crash overhead, but it didn’t hurt. Being under the wave felt like being inside of a pulse, or a big heartbeat.

I popped up out of the water and Hailey was screaming and cheering. I was treading water and gasping for breath, but I was laughing, too.

“You did it, Li.” Dad beamed.

The water felt thick and muscular, not like the limp water of a swimming pool. It was actually easy to swim out here. I remember thinking, This is it? This is what I’ve been so afraid of? I’m just
here
now. Only a hundred feet away from where I’ve always been. I’m still me. I’m just in the ocean.

“I
t’s back on with Nate,” Hailey announced. It was a cool fall day, and we were walking toward the car-pool line where Mom would pick us up.

“Really?” I asked. This was the first time she had mentioned Nate in the two weeks since her meltdown in the bathroom.

“Yeah. We hung out at Max’s house last night, and he seemed really into me.”

“You went to Max’s house? On a school night?” I asked, feeling vaguely left out.

“Yeah, I’ve had, like, zero homework all week,” she said. “It’s been amazing. Anyway, Nate sat next to me on the couch while we watched a movie, and I could just, like, tell he wanted to be near me. Our shoulders were touching, like, the whole time. I can’t wait to see him tomorrow night, now that we have some momentum.”

“What’s tomorrow night?” I asked. “The dance?” Hailey and I hadn’t gone to a school dance since sixth grade, and I was shocked she wanted to start going again now.

“Are you joking? The dance?” She laughed. “I feel awkward just thinking about all those streamers hanging from the ceiling in the gym.”

I laughed, too. “It’s not that bad.”

“Well, you should go,” Hailey said. “Say hi to the fruit punch for me if you do.”

“So if you’re not going, where are you planning on seeing Nate?” I asked.

“Max’s. He’s having people over. His house is so fun when his parents are out of town.”

“Have you gone there a lot?” I asked.

“Not like, a-lot a-lot, but a few times,” she said. She pulled her cell phone out of her pocket and started typing.

“Why don’t you ever bring me, too?”

“I just didn’t think it was your kind of thing,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I was starting to feel unsteady.

“You know,” she sighed. “It’s just, like, smoking cigarettes and weed and watching dumb TV.”

“I like that sometimes,” I said shakily.

Hailey rolled her eyes. “Don’t get all bent out of shape, Li. Just come tomorrow night if you’re curious.”

“Do you want me to come?” I asked.

“Yeah. Totally,” she said, but her tone was opaque. And then, after a pause, she added, in a softer voice, “Of course I want you come.”

She pulled me into a tight hug. She smelled like cigarettes and a perfume I didn’t recognize.

H
ailey got a ride to Max’s with some of Skyler’s friends, so Mom drove me. We listened to Simon and Garfunkel in the car and sang along to “April Come She Will.” Mom and I both preferred Simon and Garfunkel to The Beatles, a fact that drove Dad crazy.

Max lived in a mansion on a broad street in Beverly Hills. The house looked like a dollhouse. It was light blue with white-shuttered windows and a neat, triangular roof.

The front door was open, and I followed the sound of music up a set of stairs to Max’s room. There were maybe ten or fifteen people from school in there, a few sitting on his massive bed and a few on the floor.

“Lima!” Hailey said happily when she saw me. “You made it! Come here, baby!”

Hailey handed me a pipe and, without thinking about what I was doing, I took a long inhale. It burned. I started to cough. And cough. And cough. I felt like my body was splitting down the middle.

“Oh wow,” I said finally, over the music and the laughter. “I need water. Will you come find some with me?”

Hailey didn’t look at me, and I had the distinct feeling that she was pretending she couldn’t hear.

“Hailey!” I practically shouted. “I need water!”

She looked at me then with wide eyes. “Calm down. Just go to the kitchen if you need water.”

I left the room and voices chased me down the stairs. Max’s house felt like a maze and I paused, worried I’d never find my way to the kitchen or find my way back to his room.

“Lima.”

I looked up and Nate was standing a step below me. The stair compensated for our height difference so we were face-to-face.

“Wow. Your eyes are red. You’re pretty faded, huh?” He suppressed a laugh.

I nodded, realizing that I was. I tried to speak, but I didn’t know what to say.

“Let’s go outside for a second,” he said. “I think you should get some air.”

Air sounded good. I followed Nate.

Outside, the night was still. I longed for a beachy wind. The houses on this street looked too big and were set too far back from the wide road. I missed my own house. The feeling came on so quickly and so strongly that it felt like a punch.

“You okay?” Nate asked, as if he could read my mind.

“I don’t know. I can’t stop thinking.”

“Do you get high often?” he asked me, a crooked smile spreading across his lips.

I bit my lip. “Are you teasing me?”

He looked surprised. “No, not at all.”

Looking into Nate’s eyes actually made me feel a little better. He looked sober, mellow. I could kind of rest my thoughts when I was looking at him.

“I smoked pot once before with Hailey,” I said unsteadily. “But it was different. Right now I feel really weird.”

“It’ll be over before you know it,” he said, and he sat down next to me on the steps. “And I can sit here with you for a minute.”

Everything about this night was wrong. I knew I had only been at Max’s for a little while, but it felt like a lifetime ago that Mom had dropped me off. Getting high seemed to have severed me from the person I had been on the way over.

“Don’t you want to go inside and say hi?” I asked.

“I’m sure they’re fine inside without me,” Nate replied.

Nate pulled a cough drop out of his pocket and unwrapped it. I studied him unselfconsciously for a moment as he slipped it into his mouth. He had a slightly crooked nose and traces of lavender circles under his eyes, but his mouth was surprisingly nice. His lips were red and full and perfectly shaped, even though his bottom lip was a little chapped. He wasn’t as conventionally good-looking as someone like Ryan, but it occurred to me now that that made him even cuter. Maybe that was why he got so many girls and also part of why Hailey had always liked him so much.

I turned my attention out to the street and let my mind unwind. Being stoned made me focus on small, strange things, like the faint buzz of electricity that I could practically hear coming out of the houses. The fog created strange orange halos around each streetlight, and the perfectly trimmed plants that lined Max’s driveway were so neat they looked fake. Max’s house looked like a stage set, bright and hollow.

“So,” Nate said. “How do you feel now?”

I had almost forgotten he was there. Suddenly I felt terribly guilty that he was out here with me instead of with Hailey.

“I should go home,” I said.

He nodded. “Give me your phone.”

“Who are you calling?” I asked.

“A taxi.”

I watched and listened as he ordered the taxi, grateful that Nate was there, and that he was taking care of things.

“Thank you,” I said softly.

“It’s nothing,” he said. And then his voice had a mean, condescending tone in it. “Are you gonna say good-bye to your friend or just ditch her here?”

It was weird the way he called Hailey “my friend.” Like he didn’t know her, too. Like he hadn’t kissed
her just a few weeks ago.

I texted Hailey. When she came outside, Nate and I were still sitting side by side on the steps.

“Hey, stranger,” she said to Nate in a weird, overly flirty voice. I felt embarrassed for her.

Nate looked at her for a moment before answering. Then he said coolly, “Hi.”

The three of us waited on the curb for my taxi to come without talking. Nate was so weird, the way he could be helpful and nice one minute and withdrawn and impatient the next.

“I love you, Li. Feel better,” Hailey said to me as I climbed into the taxi, but her words contorted in my mind and all I heard was: “I told you so.”

I had completely failed at proving that I could keep up with her. I looked out the rear window as the car drove away, watching her and Nate talk on the sidewalk. As they disappeared from view, I wondered what would happen between them now that I was gone.