The Summer We Forgot Each Other

Chapter Four

Chapter Four

Maeve

“I heard a rumor that a certain someone was back in town and didn’t even bother calling me.”

I turned around so fast I nearly dropped the tray of coffee mugs I was carrying, and there she was, leaning against the diner doorway with her arms crossed and the same crooked grin she used to wear when we were kids sneaking candy from the corner store.

“Priya.”

“In the flesh.” She crossed the room and pulled me into a hug before I could set the tray down properly, mugs rattling dangerously between us. “You look terrible, by the way. In a good way. Like you’ve been through something.”

“Thanks, I think.”

“I mean it as a compliment. You used to look like you were trying too hard to be fine all the time. Now you just look tired, which is honestly more believable.”

That was Priya. She had never once softened a single thing she said to me, not when we were nine, and she told me my drawing of a horse looked more like a dog, not when we were fourteen, and she told me my first boyfriend was clearly using me for my mother’s boat, and not now, apparently, three years and a whole lifetime later.

I set the tray down and let myself actually look at her. Same wild curls, a little longer now. The same paint-stained fingers, because she had always drawn on everything, napkins, her own arms, the inside covers of her textbooks. She worked at the art supply store two towns over now, she told me, settling onto a stool at the counter like she had never left, like three years had not happened to either of us.

“So,” she said, “are you going to tell me why you really left, or are we still doing the thing where we all pretend it’s a mystery?”

I felt my whole body go tight.

“Priya.”

“I’m not asking for details,” she said, gentler now, catching something in my face. “I just want you to know I never believed the stuff people said. Not for one single second. I know you, Maeve. Whatever happened, I know it wasn’t you being cruel for no reason. You’ve never been cruel a day in your life, even when people probably deserved it.”

My eyes stung so fast I had to look down at the counter and pretend to wipe a spot that did not need wiping.

“Thank you,” I said, quietly.

“Don’t thank me. Just come get dinner with me sometime this week. I want to hear about your actual life, not the town gossip version of it.”

“I’d like that,” I said, and meant it more than I expected to.

She left twenty minutes later with a promise and a to-go coffee, and I stood behind the counter for a moment just breathing, feeling something in my chest loosen slightly for the first time since I had crossed the county line. It was a strange thing, being known by someone who had not watched the last three years happen. Priya’s version of me was frozen at seventeen, laughing too loud, drawing bad horses, sneaking candy. She did not know the girl who counted exits or kept her voice low in restaurants. For a few minutes, sitting across from her, I had no need to be that girl either.

I wondered, wiping down the counter after she left, if that was the difference between the people who stayed in this town and the people who left it. The ones who stayed got to keep believing in the versions of us that existed before everything broke. The ones who left had to carry both versions at once, the before and the after, and figure out how to be a whole person out of two halves that did not always fit together cleanly.

Diane came out from the back with the festival flyer in her hand, bright yellow letters, and I could already tell from the look on her face that I was not going to like whatever she was about to say.

“Carol wants you and Rowan to co-lead this year,” she said, holding it out to me like a peace offering.

“Absolutely not.”

“I already told her you would.”

“Diane.”

“It’s one summer, baby. You said it yourself. One summer, and then you’re gone again, so what does it matter if you spend a few afternoons arguing about tent placement with a boy you used to love?”

I opened my mouth to argue and found I did not actually have one, not a good one anyway, not one that did not sound like I was scared, which I was, though admitting that out loud felt like handing someone a weapon.

“Fine,” I said instead. “One summer. Tents. That’s it.”

“That’s all I’m asking,” Diane said, though the small, knowing smile on her face told me she was asking for something else entirely, something neither of us said out loud.

She went back to the register humming something under her breath, and I stood there a moment longer holding the flyer, feeling the weight of it in my hand like it was heavier than a single sheet of paper had any right to be. Rowan’s name sat right below mine in plain block letters, boat parade logistics, like the whole thing was ordinary, like it was nothing more than two names on a committee list instead of two people who had spent three years building entire lives around not speaking to each other again.

I almost laughed. Almost. It came out instead as something closer to a breath, shaky and thin, and Diane glanced over at me with an expression that was somewhere between sympathy and satisfaction, the look of a woman who had gotten exactly what she wanted and knew better than to gloat about it out loud.

I took the flyer up to my room that night and pinned it to the same cork board where I used to pin concert tickets and photo booth strips a lifetime ago. I stood there a long time looking at it, at Rowan’s name printed right below mine in plain block letters, boat parade logistics, like the town had no idea what it was casually asking the two of us to survive.

I thought about what Priya said, about carrying two versions of myself at once. I thought about the flyer, and the committee meeting waiting for me tomorrow, and the boy across the street who still looked at me like I was a puzzle he used to know the answer to. I thought about Diane’s hands shaking over the coffee pot, a small wrongness I still could not name, sitting quiet at the edge of everything else.

Maybe this summer was not about choosing which version of me got to survive it.

Maybe it was about finally letting both of them sit in the same room together, and seeing which one was still standing when the tents came down. I fell asleep with the lamp still on, the flyer’s yellow glow the last thing I saw before my eyes finally gave out, and I did not dream about Rowan at all that night. I dreamed about the dock, empty, waiting, the water perfectly still.