Every Summer, The Same Boy

The lake smelled the same as it always did, like wet stone and pine sap and something underneath that Nomi could never name, something that reminded her of the inside of a shell held up to the ear. She stood at the top of the gravel path with her duffel bag cutting into her shoulder and looked down at the water, and for one long second she let herself hope that this year would be different. That she’d walk down to the dock and it would just be a dock. Old boards, one loose nail, a heron picking through the shallows.

It wasn’t. He was there.

Rian sat with his knees pulled up and his arms wrapped around them, facing out toward the middle of the lake where the light did that thing it always did in late June, scattering itself across the surface like something had been dropped and shattered. He didn’t turn around. He never turned around first. That was the rule, or the pattern, or whatever it was that had governed the last eight summers of Nomi’s life without either of them ever agreeing to it out loud.

“You’re late,” he said, when she was close enough that the boards creaked under her sneakers.

“Grandma made me help unload the car.”

“You’ve been saying that since you were nine.”

“It’s been true since I was nine.” She dropped her bag at the foot of the dock and sat down beside him, close enough that their shoulders almost touched, not quite. Eight summers of almost touching. She had stopped being embarrassed about counting them somewhere around summer five. “You look exactly the same.”

“So do you.”

“I don’t. I grew two inches. I got my braces off. I dyed the ends of my hair and my mom cried about it for a week.”

Rian glanced sideways at her, and there it was, the thing that had been catching in her chest every June since she was too young to understand why: he really did look exactly the same. Same soft dark hair that fell wrong over his left eyebrow no matter what he did with it. Same gray T-shirt with the collar stretched from being pulled over his head too many times. Same easy, crooked half smile that showed up before he meant it to, like it had snuck out ahead of the rest of his face.

Seventeen. He’d always been seventeen. She used to think that just meant he was older than her, an unreachable, glamorous seventeen when she was nine, ten, eleven. Somewhere around thirteen she’d started doing the math without meaning to. This year she’d turned sixteen in March, and the gap between them had gone from a canyon to a stream to nothing at all, and still he was seventeen, still exactly seventeen, and something about that fact sat wrong in her stomach in a way she hadn’t let herself examine too closely before.

“Hair looks good,” he said. “The ends. Whatever your mom’s problem with it is.”

“Thank you.” She bumped her shoulder against his, and it went through him, not into him, not enough to knock him even slightly off balance, and for a moment neither of them said anything about that either, because that too was a rule that had never been spoken and never needed to be.

The lake had a name on the maps, something official and forgettable, but everyone who actually lived around it called it Half Moon, for the curve of the shoreline that bent the water into a shape like a fingernail clipping. Nomi’s grandmother had a house on the north side, faded blue with white shutters, a screened porch that smelled like citronella candles from May through September, and a dock that had needed replacing for at least a decade and never would be, because her grandmother liked the loose nail. Said it made the sound of home. Nomi had always assumed that was just something older people said about things they didn’t want to fix.

She had come here every summer for three weeks since she was nine years old, ever since her parents’ divorce had settled into its permanent shape and her mother had needed, every June, a few weeks where she didn’t have to be anyone’s mother. Nomi never minded. She loved her grandmother’s house with a simple, uncomplicated love that she reserved for almost nothing else in her life, the kind of love that didn’t require her to think about it.

And every summer, for eight summers, there had been a boy on the dock.

She hadn’t told anyone. Not her mother, not her grandmother, not her friends back home who wouldn’t have believed her and would have looked at her differently afterward even if they pretended not to. She hadn’t told Rian, either, the thing she’d started to suspect a few summers back and had spent every summer since trying not to think about too hard, because thinking about it too hard led somewhere she didn’t want to go, not on the first afternoon, not with the light doing that scattering thing on the water and his shoulder almost touching hers.

“Three weeks,” she said instead. “Same as always.”

“Same as always,” he agreed, and something moved behind his eyes when he said it, something quick and shadowed that she’d seen before and never managed to name. He looked back out at the water. “Your grandma still make that terrible lemonade?”

“It’s not terrible.”

“It’s got about four pounds of sugar in it.”

“She says the lake water makes people thirsty in a specific way that only extremely sweet lemonade can fix. It’s a whole theory. Don’t argue with her about it, she’ll win.”

Rian laughed, and the sound of it did the thing it always did, loosened something in Nomi’s chest that had been wound tight since the drive up, since she’d said goodbye to her mother in the driveway and gotten in her grandmother’s ancient Buick and watched the suburbs give way to trees for two and a half hours. Three weeks. Every June since she was nine. The strangest, steadiest relationship of her entire life, built entirely out of three-week windows and a boy who never got older and never explained why.

She didn’t ask him why. Not that first afternoon. She never did, that first afternoon. There was a rhythm to it, an unspoken order of operations, the same way there was a rhythm to walking into her grandmother’s kitchen and finding the same chipped yellow mug waiting on the same hook. You didn’t ask the big question on day one. You let the lake settle around you first.

“I brought a book,” she said. “For the porch. In case it rains.”

“It’s not going to rain.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve been here longer than you have.” He said it lightly, like a joke, but something underneath it wasn’t a joke at all, and Nomi felt it land somewhere behind her ribs even though she couldn’t have said exactly why.

The sun kept sliding down toward the tree line on the far shore, turning the scattered light on the water from white to gold to something closer to copper, and Nomi sat there with her almost-touching shoulder and her hope that this year would be different already gone, replaced by something that felt, if she was honest with herself, a great deal like relief. This was the one constant of her whole scattered, divided, back-and-forth life. A boy on a dock who never got older. She didn’t understand it. She had stopped trying to understand it, most years, somewhere around the second week, when the not-understanding stopped feeling urgent and started feeling like just another fact of the lake, the way the loose nail was a fact, the way the sweet lemonade was a fact.

This year, though. This year something in the air over Half Moon felt different in a way she couldn’t name yet, a kind of held breath, a kind of ending waiting politely for her to notice it. She didn’t notice it. Not that first evening. She sat on the dock until the mosquitoes came out and her grandmother’s voice carried down from the porch calling her in for dinner, and Rian said, “Same time tomorrow,” the way he said it every year, and she said, “Same time tomorrow,” back, and she went up to the house without once looking behind her, because if she looked behind her she would see the empty dock, and some part of her, some old and careful part, had learned a long time ago not to look.