Page 24 of The Summer List

“Okay, we might as well show her,” Shal says with a huff. “We’re not cringey enough to have a secret pact. It’s just a list of things we want to make sure we’ve all done before we go off to school in the fall.”

School in the fall.

The words feel like a chilly breeze sweeping into the kitchen, sucking up the summer before it’s even had time to begin. That cold wind carries my mom’s voice from this morning back to my ears.

Just because you decided you needed this whole gap year thing does not mean you get to opt out of being a grown-up.

To her, it didn’t matter that I’d been working a full-time job and paying my share of the rent every month. It didn’t matter that I did my groceries, my laundry, and even my taxes. If I wasn’t working for the company, I was giving up.

On her.

On myself.

If I had any idea of what else I’d do with my life besides take the internship, maybe her disappointment wouldn’t matter so much. Maybe I’d feel like I could be enough to make her proud even if I didn’t take the job.

Only I don’t know what else I’d do. I don’t know what I’m good at besides bantering with customers while I wait tables and keeping people entertained at parties by playing stupid little songs on my guitar. I spent a whole year trying to build a life that let me finally breathe the way I never could in Toronto, but all I did was postpone the suffocation.

My shoulders tense, and I have to fight to keep all the muscles in my face from clenching.

If I’m going to get on a train straight back to where I started, the least I can do is make the most of the time I have left.

“Let’s see this list then, ladies” I announce, my voice loud enough to echo through the kitchen, “and then let’s get high.”

“I don’t think I’m feeling it.”

Naomi’s voice is sluggish and dreamy. She keeps running her hands over the planks of the deck, where she’s lying flat on her back. I’m sitting on one of the rattan couches with a blanket wrapped around my shoulders and a bowl of popcorn in my lap.

“Like, my brain is all fuzzy, but I don’t think I’m high.”

I laugh, and a piece of popcorn flies out of my mouth. I’m buzzed enough that I think it’s funny instead of embarrassing. “Yeah, hate to break it to you, but that’s kind of the definition of being high.”

“Oh.” She screws her face up like she’s thinking really hard. “Ohhhh. Okay. Yeah, yeah maybe I’m high.”

I laugh again and pull the thin blanket a little tighter around me, mostly to ward off the couple mosquitoes that have started to buzz around the deck. The air outside is still hot enough to feel heavy against my skin, but the sun has almost sunk below the horizon in the pink-streaked sky, and I know the temperature will be dropping fast.

The girls took so long to work up their nerve that we ended up eating dinner together before anyone even took the pre-rolled joints out of the bag. We each took a few puffs while sitting out here on the deck.

Priya somehow got way higher than all of us despite smoking the least. We spent a good half hour trying to keep her calm and assure her that her heart wasn’t beating loud enough to burst her eardrums. At some point, she went from paranoid to extremely sleepy and passed out on one of the lounge chairs, where she’s still snoring loud enough to make Naomi and I jump at the noise every few minutes.

Once Priya was out of commission, Shal decided she wanted to experience music while under the influence and has been sitting cross-legged on one of the pool chairs while staring up at the sky with her headphones on for long enough to put a meditation master to shame.

Turns out I’m the only one who’s got the munchies.

“You doing okay?” I ask Naomi when she pauses her stroking of the deck and frowns.

“Yeahhh.” She drags the words out and bobs her head in a couple slow nods. “I’m just not really sure what to do about my existence, you know?”

“Huh.” I pop another handful of popcorn in my mouth and chew for a moment. “That’s a really stoned thought, and I don’t think I’m quite on your level, but somehow, I think I know what you mean.”

She wrinkles her nose, and even my high brain can’t ignore how cute she looks doing it.

“You do?” she asks.

I nod. “Uh-huh. I was taking a gap year in Montreal before I start this internship at my mom’s company in Toronto, but honestly, I was hoping a year would be enough time to figure out what else I could do with my life. I thought a new city and a new guy would help me find the answer, but I just…didn’t. Sometimes it felt so close it was like…like a little butterfly flitting around my head, but every time I turned to look at it, it was just gone.”

I swirl my one of my fingers through what’s left of the popcorn and realize I might be higher than I thought.

“Sometimes I feel like there’s this…this thing other people have that I don’t,” I continue, “or at least, I haven’t found it yet, but everybody expects me to have it, so I look for it, but I never find it. Sometimes I get so close, but it always slips away. Always. So I fill myself up with other things instead, but they…they just make me feel even more empty. Sometimes everything in the world makes me feel so goddamn empty, and I don’t know why.”

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