“That summer changed everything, Em. Everything just… fell into place.” She would always say that to me, a wistful look in her blueberry-blue eyes.
She never told me why though, and looking at all the stuff in this box, I feel like I understand it even less. It looks like she already had everything in place.
I always thought maybe she’d tell me more when I was the same age she had been that summer. That the summer before my senior year would be the same. Big. Life changing. Things falling into place for me the same way they did for her.
I wonder what she would say to me now. Instead of everything falling into place, my senior year has blown into a million pieces before it even starts.
I go to slide everything back into the envelope when I catch sight of a ripped-up piece of paper, tape holding it together.
It’s my mom’s SAT scores from the spring of her junior year. I scan the page, surprised to see she bombed the reading section. Like… a 230.
I’m pretty sure you get 200 just by signing your name.
That’s weird. And, sitting in this stack of accolades, it’s… super not like her.
“Henry Huckabee Lodge?” Blake asks. I look up to see she’s holding a metal room plate, the number five embedded on it. “What’s that?”
I put the taped-up paper on top of the stack, closing the envelope. “It’s this big lodge three hours away that the family of Huckabee’s founder still owns,” I say, pulling a moose stuffed animal out of the box. “My school has a lake trip there every August for the incoming senior class as a ‘Congrats, you almost survived high school’ kind of thing. It’s a tradition. They’ve done it for, like, a hundred and sixteen years. My parents actually started dating during their senior-year lake trip.” I toss her the moose, grinning. “Our school, rather.”
She grins back at me, catching the moose and holding it up, her brown eyes inspecting its face. “It kind of looks like your dad,” she says as she spins it around to face me.
I pretend to be offended on his behalf, but… I definitely see it. The eyes, the unruly brown hair, the stocky build.
“So, are you going?” she asks as she carefully places the Joseph Clark moose down on top of the manila envelope. “On the lake trip?”
“Absolutely not.” I grimace. I decided pretty much my first day of high school I wouldn’t be going because of 1) the three-hour bus ride there, 2) the three-hour bus ride back, and 3) I’m definitely not a Lake-Going Person.
Oh, and, newly added: 4) I’d rather not be stuck at a lake for three days with my ex and a bunch of people who either want to gossip about me or hate me.
“Why not?” she asks, clearly surprised by my adamant decision.
Blake is obviously a Lake-Going Person.
“Do you have any idea how much bacteria is in a lake?” I ask. “When I was in middle school, Huckabee Lake was shut down for the whole summer because of a massive breakout of carp herpes. The shore was literally lined with dead fish.”
Carp herpes is no joke.
She snorts, shaking her head as she puts the room-number plate down. “I didn’t even know carp could get herpes.”
I turn back to the box, pulling out two cassette tapes’ worth of music, a worn blue baseball cap, a small jar of sand, a worse-for-wear book by Albert Camus, and wait.…
My eyes widen when I see what’s at the very bottom.
I’ve just hit the jackpot.
A yearbook. “Huckabee High Class of 2000” is printed in big block letters on the front of it, a picture of the graduating class on the cover in matching royal-blue graduation attire. I pull it out, flipping through the brightly colored pages.
“Oh my gosh,” I say, “look at this.”
I spin the yearbook around to face Blake so she can see the picture that stopped me dead in my tracks. Two boys decked out in face paint, one perched on the other one’s shoulders, swinging a T-shirt wildly around over his head. Joseph Clark and Johnny Carter, our dads, in all their high school glory.
My dad looks almost exactly the same, except for the lack of a beard and the backward blue cap he’s sporting in the photo. He’s even got on a leather jacket that I am 99.9 percent certain he still has to this day.
Johnny, on the other hand, looks completely different. Perched on my dad’s shoulders, he looks nothing like the lady-killer at bingo night. He’s pretty much just a clone of young Blake. Small, lanky, and wearing a pair of glasses that takes up most of his paint-covered face.
“I can’t believe your dad was so tiny!” I say, shocked.
Blake laughs and takes the yearbook from me. “He grew five inches the year after he left for Hawaii.” With her free hand, she reaches into her back pocket and pulls out her phone. “I actually have a picture.”
She scrolls through her photos, stopping finally on what’s clearly a picture of a printed photo, the color slightly faded, the image just a little blurry. As she turns her phone around, I see Johnny Carter in all his chiseled bronze glory, one arm slung around the shoulders of a stunning Japanese woman while they stand on a breathtaking Hawaiian beach. They’re sun kissed and in love and wearing matching blue-and-white-striped bathing suits as they gaze into each other’s eyes in that magical way we all hope someone will share with us one day.
I wonder what that must be like.
If this were Tumblr, I’d reblog the crap out of that photo. It looks like it’s something out of a magazine.
“That’s your mom?” I ask, seeing Blake in her eyes and the bridge of her nose and the curve of her smile.
“Yep!” Blake says happily, nodding as she cranes her neck to look at the picture, an identical smile playing on her lips. She definitely isn’t a carbon copy like
