Page 38 of The Summer List

“I wish I knew what he likes.” Her voice sounds like it’s coming from far away even though she’s sitting right beside me, like it’s echoing from some deep part of her she usually keeps locked up. “My mom makes it clear when I don’t live up to her standards, but my dad… It’s like there’s some code I’m supposed to know how to crack. I don’t think he dislikes me. We just feels so…distant, like there’s this gap between us I don’t know how to close.”

She looks so lost, like the couch cushion she’s sitting on has drifted out to sea with nothing but miles and miles of empty water surrounding her.

Something she said while I was lying on this deck the night we got way too high drifts into my mind.

She said she was lonely. She looks like the kind of person who’d never need to spend a single moment alone unless she wanted to, but I’ve spent enough time feeling isolated in crowded rooms to know that’s not really how loneliness works. You can listen to a hundred voices speaking around you and still feel like no one can hear yours.

I want to reach for her hand. I want to thread my fingers through hers and pull her back, just to let her know I float away sometimes too.

Just to let her know she’s not all on her own.

Only I’m not sure I’m brave enough to do that. I’m not sure if I can find the words. People in books and poems always make it seem so easy to know what to say.

That’s part of why I love reading so much; it makes everything seem easy, but in reality, words rarely show up when I need them, so instead, I blurt the first thing that comes to mind when I glance away from her and find myself staring at the barbeque station again.

“My dad tried to teach me and my brother to use the barbeque once.”

I see her shift to squint at me out of the corner of my eye.

“I blew up my brother’s eyebrows. He was fine. He just had no eyebrows for like three months.”

A moment of silence passes before Andrea starts laughing so hard she doubles over and clutches her stomach.

“Wow, Naomi,” she says once she can talk again. “How did you know that’s exactly what I needed to hear?”

CHAPTER 10

Andrea

Iwake up to find four voice mail messages from my mom waiting for me on my phone, which makes this the perfect day to continue distracting myself from my own future and go get a piercing instead.

My mom has been demanding an explanation ever since I cancelled my return to Toronto last week, and my vague texts about making arrangements and figuring things out have only made her double-down on her efforts. I swipe the notifications away before heading down to the kitchen, where I find Naomi washing some dishes at the sink.

“You look like you need coffee,” she says when she looks up and sees me.

She must have just finished giving the cats their disgusting slop for breakfast; they’re shoving their entire heads into their food bowls and chewing loud enough for me to hear halfway across the room.

“Wow, do I really look that bad?” I ask, combing a finger through my sleep-disheveled hair as I yawn.

Naomi’s face pales, and the dish she was washing clatters to the bottom of the sink.

“I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant you look sleepy. It’s nice. You look nice.”

She drops her gaze to the sink basin and starts scrubbing so hard I half-expect the dish brush to snap in half.

“I wouldn’t be offended if I didn’t look nice,” I say with a grin, “and I do need coffee.”

I head for the fancy machine that’s got its own special built-in section below the microwave and pop a coffee pod into the slot. While I wait for the coffee to pour, I turn around to lean against the counter and watch Naomi start drying off the dishes, which turn out to be some spare cat food bowls shaped like porcelain mice.

“You ready for today?” I ask her.

Priya and Shal are supposed to arrive in a couple hours to drive us all to a tattoo and piercing shop that does walk-ins. The last I heard, only Shal is up for a tattoo, and the rest of us are going with piercings.

“Not at all,” she answers, “but I guess I’m doing it anyway. Did you decide what piercing you’re getting?”

I’ve already got three in each earlobe and my helix done. I thought about getting something else on my ear, but if I’m going to be putting off Toronto for a few weeks to participate in this whole bucket list thing, I might as well go all out.

“My nipple.”

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