Four Summer Plans, and I Stopped Pretending

The brochures fanned across the quartz countertop like a losing poker hand. My cousin Wren had spread them out herself, sliding each glossy photograph closer to my brother Nathan, who was not looking at any of them because he was watching his phone light up with raid notifications. She had the kind of patience that looked graceful if you didn't know her. I knew her. I was nineteen, a year older than her, and I had spent the first fifteen years of my life thinking of her as family in the way you think of weather: permanent, unremarkable, something that happened around you whether you noticed or not. "I was thinking we do the coast first," Wren said. "The little towns. The water. You always feel better near the water, Nate." "Sure," Nathan said. I finished wiping the counter and folded the rag. My brother and my cousin occupied the far end of our kitchen like a matched pair, dark hair, long legs, the same careless slouch they had adopted in their teens and never outgrown. Nina was at the head of the table, watching the conversation the way she watched everything these days, quiet but alert, the fine lines around her mouth drawn in deeper than they had been the year before. Outside, the late afternoon was hot and flat and the smell of cut grass drifted in past the screen door. My father was in the workshop at the back of the property, which is where he was most evenings, and where I knew he would stay until Wren left for the night. I had one more year at Ridgecrest, a small coastal college where I had a biology scholarship and a lab slot I had fought for and a faculty mentor who told me last semester the words that had been rolling over in my head for months: You could have your pick of programs if you applied, but applications mean leaving. "Poppy," Wren said. My name, in her mouth, was always slightly underflavored. Not mean. Just empty. "You haven't said anything." "I'm thinking," I said. "About?" "Whether I want to swim this summer or whether I want to be on time for anything." Nathan laughed, quick and short, without looking up. Wren's chin tipped slightly, a motion she used when she was being generous. "It's a decision, not a thesis. Pick a town." Cam was leaning against the refrigerator with his hands in the pockets of his jacket. He had come in an hour earlier when Wren called and asked him to pick up something on his way over. He was twenty, a year ahead of me at Ridgecrest, and he had been the boy next door until he was the boy in the car next to mine and then, eventually, the boy I did not have a word for. He is my brother's oldest friend. He is Wren's ride when her car was in the shop. He was the person I found myself constantly looking at in a room before I looked at anyone else. He was looking at her. "You always plan everything anyway," Cam said to me. His voice was easy. His eyes were not on me. "You'll make it work." I looked at the brochure nearest my hand. A photograph of a tide pool, sun on the water, small flat leaves glowing against wet rock. It was a place I had never been and would almost certainly never go, because every year we went where Wren wanted and every year I booked the flights and the rental van and the house with enough bedrooms and made the checklists that no one read. "Put me down wherever," I said. "Doesn't matter." "See," Wren said, smiling. "Agreeable." Nathan finally looked up from his phone. "Are you going to make the spreadsheet, though? Because last year it went sideways when you didn't." "I always make the spreadsheet," I said. "Don't worry about it." He nodded and went back to his phone, and I went back to the sink and finished the dishes and set the kitchen in order the way I did every night, and Cam watched me the way he sometimes did, without meaning anything by it, and I felt the shape of my life settle into the shape it had always had. One more year of not saying the thing. One more summer of holding everyone else's plans in my hands. I was fine. I was extremely not fine, but I was the only one who needed to know that, and I had gotten very good at keeping the information to myself. That night I sat on the porch swing with the lights off and listened to my father's workshop radio at the far end of the property, an old country station that went soft and crackly in the summer. Nina came out and stood in the doorway with her cardigan around her shoulders. "You could have said something," she said. "About what." She came out and sat beside me. She did not touch me, which was how I preferred it. Nina and I were not a touching family. "Wren always wants everyone to agree with her first," she said. "It isn't the same as being kind." "I know." "Then why do you let her do it?" I looked at the black line of the trees. "Because if I stop," I said, "I'm not sure what I have left." Nina was quiet for a long time. "You have me," she said. "I know that isn't the same." "No," I said. "It isn't." She didn't argue. She just sat with me in the dark until the radio finally went off and my father's shadow crossed the drive and went inside, and then she touched my shoulder once, quickly, and went to bed. I stayed on the swing until the mosquitoes found me.