The Next Chapter of Luke Read online

  My eyes had adjusted to the darkness and I could finally make out my room for the next seven weeks. Josie’s discarded clothes were piled in a heap on the floor next to her bed, probably exactly where she was standing before crawling into bed last night. The shade of the lamp on the nightstand between their twin beds was tilted toward Lucy’s bed, as if she’d bumped into it before falling into bed the night before and hadn’t bothered to set it straight. (I knew if my mom came upstairs to see my new room, the first thing she’d do was align it into its proper position.) The night table was piled with tokens from their weeks without me—seashells, a crumpled-up paycheck, a bottle of suntan lotion, and what looked like a fish-shaped bottle opener, its gaping mouth ready to pop the cap off whatever Josie and Lucy were enjoying on the beach with their new summer friends.

  Lucy flung her blankets off and flipped over so she was on her back facing me. “Oh, you’ll find out tonight. We’re just warning you.”

  “You’re heading over to see Luke?” Josie asked, and I wondered if she was just confirming my plans or asking if I’d changed my mind. There still wasn’t enough light in the room to tell for sure.

  “Yeah,” I told them. “But I’ll be back by five.”

  “You better be. We need reinforcements.” Lucy rubbed her eyes and yawned. “So what do you think of Casa Holden, your new home for the summer?”

  Our room wasn’t large by any stretch of the imagination. With the three of us living together, and Josie’s tendency to prefer piles of clothes to drawers, it was actually going to be pretty cozy (my mom’s code word for small). The dormered windows and pitched ceiling made me realize the room was actually above the garage, which didn’t have room for four cars like Josie’s house back in Branford, but just two bays like my house. Our room was almost half the size of Josie’s bedroom back home, where she had her own bathroom and a sitting area. Still, from what I could tell, the Holdens’ interior designer had lent her expertise to make our room as color-coordinated and comfortable as possible. “I thought this place would be more…”

  “Obnoxious?” Josie offered. She was always appalled by the house her parents had built back home.

  “Bigger?” I tried instead. “It’s not as extravagant as I thought it would be.”

  “Yeah, I actually like it here better. My dad used to pass by this place growing up, and he always thought it was the nicest house he’d ever seen. So when he heard it was for sale, he bought it, fixed it up, and now it’s home away from home. I think when he was a kid, it seemed a lot bigger.”

  Even though the only light in the room glowed around the curtains concealing the windows, I could still see why Josie preferred this place to the house back in Branford. The Holdens had built the other house from the ground up and, years later, it still smelled new, the immaculate paint and floors creating a flawless and pristine space, like a beautifully preserved museum. I could already tell the ceiling in our bedroom was slightly uneven, the blue-green walls freshened up with new paint but highlighted by white crown molding that imperfectly ran the circumference of the room. Much like the outside of the house, with its crushed shell driveway and window boxes overflowing with purple and hot pink petunias, our room felt more relaxed.

  “I like it here already,” I told them.

  Lucy started braiding her hair, wide awake now. “What’s not to like? We’ve met a ton of people. Wait until you meet them tonight.”

  “And there’s a huge party in August before everyone starts going home. It’s going to be amazing.” Josie stretched her arms over her head and let out a huge yawn. “Are you sure you can’t just stay now?”

  I could, we all knew that. I had a feeling what she was really asking was, did I want to?

  “We could give you the lowdown on everything—the beaches, the stores, the hot guys.” Josie grinned at Lucy, who laughed under her breath.

  “You’re missing out on some great stories,” Lucy teased, and I could tell she was trying to get me to change my mind.

  “I told Luke I’d be on the eleven o’clock ferry over from Woods Hole.”

  I stared down at my flip-flops and could almost hear the left one telling me to stay with my friends while the right one told me to go be with my boyfriend. But flip-flops don’t really talk. They just sit there waiting for you to make up your mind—either let them stay on the floor while you curled up on your new bed and talked to your best friends, or slip your toes into them and leave.

  I unfolded my legs out from under me and set my feet on the floor. “I’ll be back tonight for work, promise.”

  “Okay,” Lucy conceded. “We’ll fill you in later.”

  Josie burrowed beneath her comforter again, covering her head until she disappeared.

  Lucy turned over onto her stomach and pulled her blanket onto her bed so that it hid almost all of her. “If I have one more dream about drowning in a pool of butterscotch topping, I swear I’m quitting,” she mumbled into her mattress.

  Once again, the room was silent. As I quietly walked to the door, I turned around one last time and saw that they’d both vanished into a sea of seafoam green and white starfish. “See you guys tonight,” I whispered.

  “See ya,” Lucy whispered back.

  Whether Josie had already passed out because she was exhausted from their late night, or she couldn’t hear me, I didn’t know. All I knew was that she didn’t answer me, and I had a ferry waiting to take me to Luke.

  I closed the bedroom door behind me and headed downstairs.

  • • •

  It finally felt real, that in less than an hour I’d be with Luke. I found a seat outside on the upper deck of the ferry, where I could see the island in the distance and feel the wind on my face as the boat roared toward Martha’s Vineyard. I tried not to think about Josie, although it was hard not to. She was the one who helped get me and Luke back together after he found out about the guide. I knew it couldn’t have been easy for her. But I also knew that she did it because I meant more to her than Luke did, and she knew how much Luke meant to me. Josie had moved on—that was obvious from the pictures and texts I’d received since she’d arrived on the Cape—but she never talked about what happened between her and Luke, or her and me. There were times, though, like back in the bedroom, when I couldn’t help but feel like it was still there, the lingering hurt and the feeling that I’d betrayed our friendship, or at the very least, somehow made it less important.

  When you screw up so monumentally, it’s hard to imagine that other people can forgive you, and it’s nearly impossible to believe they could forget. Josie, Lucy, and Luke had decided to forgive me, but there were still times when I felt like I had to prove myself, as if I was on probation for a crime I committed instead of being exonerated and given a clean slate. Not that it was anything they did or said. Maybe it was my imagination—or lingering guilt—that made me feel like I was always on the verge of losing them all for good if I made even the slightest mistake.

  I watched the seagulls soar beside the ferry railing, dipping up and down with the breeze, keeping pace with the boat as if they were hitchhikers looking for a ride. Soon we were close enough to the island that I could make out the houses lining the water’s edge. As the wide mouth to Vineyard Haven harbor opened to greet us, I went to the railing to look for Luke. I had been preparing myself to be away from him for the summer, and now here he was, just across the water, within reach.

  As the ferry slowed, a white froth of water surged from the front of the boat until an unexpected bump against the dock jarred me back from the railing. I hadn’t spotted Luke, but I had no doubt he was waiting for me.

  Long-Distance Relationship Tip #11:

  Unless you wear a turban and own a crystal ball,

  you’re not a mind reader. Even if you’re convinced

  you know exactly what the other person is thinking,

  you’re probably wrong.

  “Here it comes,” I told Sam, maneuvering my leg so my foot pressed up against the
back of the driver’s seat to take some of the pressure off my knee. The leg brace made it practically impossible to get comfortable, even laying across the backseat of the convertible Jeep. I’d left the ice pack at the house. I was supposed to place it on my knee every two hours to keep the swelling down, and I figured we’d be back in time. I still couldn’t figure out how to keep the ice pack in place without sitting completely still, and Charlie suggested duct taping it to my knee, which didn’t actually sound like a bad idea. I wouldn’t start physical therapy for another two weeks, and if that didn’t help, Dr. Thomas told me we’d have to think about surgery—which meant I’d still have six weeks before I’d know if I had to call the Tufts lacrosse coach to let him know I couldn’t play. Everyone kept telling me to stay positive. I knew they were just trying to keep me from dwelling on the worst-case scenario. It didn’t work, even though I pretended it did.

  My crutches got to ride shotgun on the way to Vineyard Haven, which meant every time Sam said something, I shouted, “What?” from the backseat and tried to understand at least every other word as the wind blew them past me. After four days of riding in the back, I’d given up actually trying to have a coherent conversation in the car and was just thankful Sam and Charlie were willing to chauffeur me around. There was no way I was going to push my luck and ask them to put the Jeep top on just so we could talk.

  In the Steamship Authority parking lot, Sam held the car door open and handed me my crutches from the front seat. “I’m going to grab a drink in the ferry terminal. I’ll meet you back here.”

  I probably could have used the help navigating between the cars jockeying in line for the return ferry to Woods Hole or impatiently waiting for passengers to arrive, but I knew the last thing Sam wanted to do was wait for me to find my girlfriend. So instead of asking Sam to stay, I quickly scanned the deck of the boat for Emily and decided that, since I was a slow-moving target, it was probably smarter to make it to the sidewalk before trying to identify Emily among the bodies that were about to begin spilling out of the ferry’s side exit.

  Fortunately, the combination of my crutches and the black neoprene brace with aircraft-grade aluminum was enough to stop traffic while I hopped over to the sidewalk beside the ferry terminal. I guess that was one upside to having to be on crutches for the next seven weeks—people tended to get out of your way.

  After cars started emerging onto the ferry ramp, the first passenger exited. It wasn’t Emily. I almost had to laugh, because I could picture her just inside the doorway, letting little kids and families leave ahead of her, Polite Patty’s voice in her head telling her to let them go first.

  I lifted up my left arm, then my right, to air out my T-shirt. Crutches may be essential when attempting to walk without the use of one leg, but it was obvious that whoever invented the rubber cushions pressing against your armpits all day never had to use them in eighty-seven degrees of humidity.

  I watched the stream of people zigzagging down the steel ramp until I finally spotted her. Emily was scanning the parking lot, her head craning from side to side as she searched for me among the waiting crowd. It had been almost four weeks since our last day together, I probably should have waved and drawn her attention, maybe taken off my faded Red Sox hat so she could tell it was me, but there was something nice about watching Emily without her knowing, the way she shielded her eyes against the sun and squinted. Even from the sidewalk, I could see her lips muttering, “Excuse me,” as she accidently bumped into people on her way down.

  There was a part of me that had thought maybe Lucy and Josie would try to convince Emily to stay in Falmouth with them. It wasn’t until Emily texted me a picture from the deck of the ferry that I actually believed she was really coming over for the day. It wasn’t something we talked about, what had happened between me and Josie before Emily moved back to Branford, and I was glad, because the last thing I wanted to do was rehash the whole scene at Owen’s New Year’s Eve party.

  At this point, I think all of us—especially Emily—wanted to forget about everything that happened with the time capsule and the Guy’s Guide and how it all blew up. And even though it was Josie who helped get me and Emily back together, I knew she did it because she was Emily’s best friend, not because she’d forgotten what I did to her. I think Josie just decided that it was more important to be Emily’s friend than it was to be my enemy.

  I didn’t cheat on Josie with the sophomore from St. Michael’s at Owen’s party like everyone thinks. Well, I did, but what Josie didn’t know was that I wasn’t surprised when she walked into the laundry room and found me making out with some random girl from St. Mike’s. I knew Josie was looking for me, and that she would eventually look in the laundry room, so I just grabbed the first girl who walked by—who actually had a name, Allison, which I found out later—and started kissing her. And she kissed me back, which probably had something to do with the champagne she’d been guzzling with her friends for the last hour rather than a burning desire to make out with some guy beside an ironing board and a bag of Tide Pods. I’d planned the whole thing. But Josie never knew it was a setup, or that it was easier to let her think she caught me and assume I was trying to hide what I was doing instead of actually making sure she found me.

  I’d wanted to break up with Josie but couldn’t figure out how to do it, especially with Christmas coming up and Josie’s hints about presents she wanted. That’s why I emailed her that I wanted to end things—she rarely checks her email, but I knew I could always tell her it was over before she even found me in the laundry room. It wouldn’t make what I did all right, but I figured it would take some of the heat off me. Was it a dick move? Sure. But sometimes it’s easier to let people think you’re an asshole than letting them know you’re actually a coward. So I didn’t cheat. I wasn’t a cheater. That time.

  Emily finally spotted me and started waving frantically to get my attention, unaware that I’d been watching her the whole time. When she finally stepped off the passenger ramp, she ran in my direction, her arms flailing in the air, and for a minute I thought she was actually going to knock me over, crutches and all.

  “I missed you so much,” she gushed, wrapping her arms around my neck and squeezing me so tight I almost had a hard time breathing and staying upright at the same time. Emily started to whisper into my ear, and then pulled back a few inches. “You feel really good, but you don’t smell so great.”

  I laughed into Emily’s hair, which did smell great. It was one of the reasons I fell for Emily in the first place—her ability to be completely honest and say exactly what she was thinking. It had surprised me at first, how I never had to try to figure out what Emily was really saying, or if she meant what she said. In the beginning, it was a little unnerving, how she just spoke what was on her mind instead of making me feel like I had to guess—and hope I guessed right. When I found out about The Book of Luke, I think that’s what confused me the most—trying to decide if the girl I fell in love with was the real Emily or someone who was just pretending to be a certain way so she could prove a point.

  Josie finally convinced me it wasn’t all an act, and even though Josie was the second least likely person I should have trusted after what they did, I decided to believe her. If the person who handed me that notebook in the middle of our school assembly thought Emily was worth giving a second chance, I should, too. Even though we’d all moved on, and things with Emily had been great ever since, there was a small part of me that was still hoping Josie wasn’t wrong.

  “Yeah, sorry about that. These rubber pads are meant to be comfortable, but they’re not exactly conducive to underarm ventilation.”

  Emily grinned at me. “What’s with the freckles?” she asked, touching the small spots on my cheeks with the tips of her fingers.

  “The sun,” I told her. “And they’re not freckles.”

  She laughed. “Whatever they are, they’re cute.”

  Emily went in for another hug, but as she moved toward me, her foot accide
ntally kicked a crutch out from under me.

  “Whoa!” I shifted my weight to her as I attempted to regain my balance.

  “Sorry!” Emily stooped under my arm and tried to help me stand upright.

  Before either of us could reach for the crutch that had crashed down on the sidewalk, a tanned hand was picking it up and handing it to me.

  “Hey, thanks.” I slipped the crutch back into place under my arm and took my weight off of Emily. “Emily, this is Sam.”

  Emily looked from me to Sam and back to me again, her eyebrows slanting together like she’d just been asked to solve a perplexing puzzle and had no idea where to begin.

  “You know, the family I’m staying with on the island?” I clarified, but Emily still looked thoroughly confused. “As in Charlie and Sam.”

  “Actually, it’s just Sam. I’m not part of a crime-fighting duo or anything,” Sam joked.

  Emily laughed, but I knew her well enough to know it wasn’t a real laugh. When Emily really found something funny, it was like her whole body was in on the joke. Her face scrunches up and her eyes sort of sparkle with light, like they’re laughing, too. This time, her laugh was more like a forced breath being pushed through an equally forced smile. Emily wasn’t laughing with Sam, she was laughing for Sam. It was nothing more than a polite response.

  “It’s nice to meet you, Sam.” Emily pointed to Sam’s tank top. “You’re a lifeguard?”

  “Yeah.” Sam frowned at her, or maybe squinted into the sun; I couldn’t tell because Sam’s eyes were hidden behind blue polarized sunglass that reflected the confused look on Emily’s face. “It’s my first year and I have to say, it’s not as great as I thought it would be. It’s actually really boring.”

  “Charlie doesn’t have a job this summer and it’s driving Melanie—their mom—nuts,” I told Emily. “Sam’s actually the one who jumped in and pulled me out of the water after I messed up my knee. Charlie wasn’t even watching because he was trying out his latest pick-up line on some girls who were sitting on the rocks. If Sam wasn’t there, I probably would have drowned.”