Page 33 of The Summer List

As I reach for the bottle Naomi described, I tell myself I’m just excited to meet an out lesbian and that I’m still in the rebound zone after Nick.

I’m not developing some middle school style crush on Naomi after only a week of knowing her.

By the time I’ve poured the juice and walked over to prop one of my elbows on the island, I’ve got a grip on reality again. I roll my shoulders back a few times to shrug off the last of the thoughts about her mouth and ask what she’s working on.

She pauses her typing and leans back in her chair. “It’s my summer job. It’s just this basic data entry position, but it pays pretty well, and I don’t have to go into an office or anything.”

I nod. “The dream. So is that what you’re studying next year? Data…stuff?”

She huffs a laugh. “No, not at all. I’m not bad at math, but I didn’t want to do a whole degree in it. I’m majoring in English.”

I nod again and take a sip of my drink, the tiny bubbles in the juice fizzing on my tongue.

“That makes sense,” I say. “You do seem to like reading.”

Every time I’ve seen her around the house, she’s either been on her laptop or had her nose buried in a book.

“So where will you be going to school?” I ask. “I don’t think I’ve even asked you that yet.”

“Carleton,” she answers. “It’s here in Ottawa. Actually, wait, I’m sure you know it’s in Ottawa. Sorry. I probably didn’t need to specify.”

I press my lips together to keep from grinning. I don’t want her to think I’m laughing at her, but those little stream of consciousness tangents she goes on are quickly becoming one of my favourite things about her. I could stand here and listen to her thoughts until dinnertime.

“It never hurts to be specific,” I say. “So, sticking around Ottawa, huh?”

An image of her walking around some generic college quad with a backpack on and an armload of English classics and poetry books pops into my head. I bet she’d have a pickle-shaped keychain dangling off the bag.

I wonder who she’d eat lunch with. I wonder if there’s some alternate universe out there where I’d live in an apartment in Ottawa and take the bus over to meet her at one of the picnic tables sometimes.

For a second, I see our futures hanging in front of me like two strings dangling just out of my reach, twisting around one another before they uncurl and drift away in opposite directions.

I shake my head. Maybe I really have come down with heat stroke.

“Yeah,” Naomi answers. “Priya and Shal are going to Ottawa U, so they’ll still be here too, but Shal almost picked the University of Toronto. Are you from Toronto originally?”

I shake my head again. “No, but my mom is. I was actually born here in Ottawa. We lived here until my parents split up when I was seven. My mom moved us to Toronto once they got the whole custody thing sorted out. My dad stayed here.”

Naomi slides her laptop a few inches away. I feel a twinge of guilt over distracting her from work, but besides the night she was so high she couldn’t get off the deck, she hasn’t ever said this much to me.

“That must have been hard,” she says, her voice soft, “at that age. Especially with a big move on top of the divorce.”

I shrug and start tracing the veins of the marble with my fingertip. “I guess so.”

The move wasn’t the hardest part.

The hardest part was realizing my dad didn’t really care what I did with my life while my mom cared way too much. It was like growing up in some hellish version of Goldilocks, where everything was either too hot or too cold and never just right.

“Not that I’d know. My parents are still together.”

She sucks in a breath, and I look up to find her wincing.

“That sounded really insensitive, didn’t it?” she asks. “I’m so sorry. I just didn’t want you to think I was pretending to understand something I can’t really understand because I’ve never been through it…and now I just keep sounding like I’m bragging.”

Her shoulders curl in with embarrassment. I chuckle and lift mine in another shrug.

“Don’t worry. I get it. It’s no big deal. It’s not like I’m the first kid to have their family ripped apart by divorce, and all things considered, it could have been way worse.”

She nods and then gulps down a few sips of her drink before she asks, “So you’re not doing the whole university thing?”

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