Vanishing Girls

Tomorrow FanLand will close down for the season. I haven’t been back to FanLand except for once, with Sarah and Maddie Snow. I couldn’t stand the way that everyone greeted me, with fear or gentle reverence, as if I were an ancient artifact that might disintegrate if mishandled. Even Princess was nice to me.

Mr. Wilcox has left several messages for me, asking whether I’d be up for helping tomorrow and attending the end-of-the-season FanLand pizza party. So far, I haven’t responded.

Parker uses his feet to move us back and forth on the swing. Every time he shifts, our knees bump together. “How’ve you been?” he asks. His voice has turned quiet.

I tuck my hands in my sleeves. He smells the same as always, and I’m half-tempted to bury my head in his neck, and half-tempted to run. “Okay,” I say. “Better.”

“Good.” He looks away. The sun has started to sink, pinwheeling golden arms through the trees. “I’ve been worried about you.”

“Yeah, well, I’m fine,” I say, too loudly. Worried means there’s something wrong. Worried is what parents and shrinks say. Worried is why I didn’t want to see Parker before he left for New York, and why I didn’t respond to any of the messages he’s sent me since he arrived at school. But Parker looks so hurt, I add, “How’s New York?”

He thinks about it for a minute. “Loud,” he says, and I can’t help but laugh a little. “And there are definitely rats, although so far none of them have attacked me.” He pauses. “Dara would have loved it.”

The name falls between us like a hand, or a shadow passing across the sun. Just like that, I feel cold. Parker picks at a bit of denim unraveling at his knee.

“Look,” he says carefully. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you about what happened this summer.” He clears his throat. “About what happened between . . .” He ticks a finger back and forth between us.

“Okay.” I wish, now, that I hadn’t come. Every second, I expect to hear him say it: It was a mistake. I just want to be friends.

I’m worried about you, Nick.

“Do you—?” He hesitates. His voice is so quiet I have no choice but to lean in to hear him. “I mean, do you remember?”

“Most of it,” I answer cautiously. “But some of it feels . . . not exactly real.”

There’s another moment of silence. Parker turns to look at me, and I’m achingly aware of how close we are—so close I can make out the faint, triangular scar where he once took an elbow to the nose during a game of Ultimate; so close I can see a little bit of stubble across his jaw; so close I can see his eyelashes tangled together.

“What about the kiss?” he says, his voice raw, as if he hasn’t spoken in a while. “Did that feel real?”

Suddenly I’m afraid: terrified of what will come next or what won’t. “Parker,” I start to say. But I don’t know how to finish. I want to say I can’t. I want to say I want to, so badly.

“I meant what I said this summer,” he rushes on, before I can say anything. Then: “I think I’ve always been in love with you, Nick.”

I look down, blinking back tears that overwhelm me, not sure whether I feel joyful or guilty or relieved or all three. “I’m scared,” I manage to say. “Sometimes I still feel crazy.”

“We all go a little crazy sometimes,” Parker says, finding my hand, interlacing our fingers. “Remember when my parents got divorced, and I refused to sleep inside for an entire summer?”

I can’t help it; I laugh, even as I’m crying, remembering skinny Parker and his serious face and how we used to hang out together inside his blue tent eating Pop-Tarts straight from the box, and Dara would always shake the leftover crumbs onto her tongue. I swipe the tears away with a forearm, but it doesn’t do any good; they keep coming, burning up through my chest and throat.

“I miss her,” I blurt out. “I miss her so much sometimes.”

“I know,” Parker says softly, still squeezing my hand. “I miss her, too.”

We stay like that for a long time, side by side, holding hands, until the crickets, obeying the same ancient law that pulls the sun from the sky and throws the moon up after it, that strips autumn down to winter and pushes spring up afterward, obeying the law of closure and new beginnings, send their voices up from the silence, and sing.

September 27

“Oh my God.” Avery, Cheryl’s daughter and my maybe-soon-to-be stepsister, shakes her head. “I can’t believe you got to work here all summer. I had to be at my dad’s insurance company. Can you imagine?” She mimes holding a phone to her ear. “‘Hello, and thank you for calling Schroeder and Kalis.’ I must have said that, like, forty times a day. Holy shit. Is that a wave pool?”

When I told Avery I was going to spend the day helping shut down FanLand, I assumed she would want to reschedule our mandated girl time. To my surprise, she volunteered to help.

Of course, her version of helping has so far involved stretching out on a lawn chair and occasionally switching positions to maximize sun exposure, while offering up a stream of random questions (“Do you think there are so many one-legged pirates because of sharks? Or is it, like, malnutrition?”) and observations that range from absurd (“I really think purple reads more nautical than red”) to bizarrely astute (“Have you ever noticed that really happy couples don’t feel the need to, like, hang on each other all the time?”).