Grace laughed and ran her fingers through her hair, which was dyed the same dirty blond that Jason’s hair was naturally. “Try it and spend the rest of the year paying me back,” she said. Apparently it cost a ton to do international texting, and even though the Robinsons had plenty of money, they weren’t the type of parents to give Jason and his sister whatever they wanted whenever they wanted it. While he was in France, Jason and I were going to have to email, which his mom insisted was very romantic and old-fashioned.
“Remember,” Grace added, “absence makes the heart grow fonder.” She glanced at the thin gold watch on her wrist. “And … we’ve gotta go. We’ll miss you, Juliet.” After my dad moved out, Grace had asked me if I wanted her to ask my parents if I could join the Robinsons on their vacation, but I’d told her I couldn’t miss the end of my internship at Children United. I’d competed against kids from all over the world to get accepted, and my English teacher who’d written my recommendation for the summer was also writing my recommendation for college. I told Grace that if he found out I’d ditched the program, he might not write my rec in the fall. My reason was a lie, but it was plausible enough that she just smiled and told me how impressed she was by my living up to my responsibilities.
Living up to your responsibilities was a big deal to Jason’s mom.
I was embarrassed by how my throat got tight when she said she’d miss me, and I forced myself to give her a cheerful wave and a jaunty “bon voyage.”
She waved back. Jason’s mother was always beautifully dressed, and today she wore a simple but flattering red linen dress and a pair of red-and-white strappy sandals. The whole ensemble was très Français. “Let’s go, Jason,” she said again.
As soon as she shut the door, Jason put his arms around me. I leaned against him, trying not to see the next two weeks as a black hole I was getting sucked down into.
“You’re gonna be okay,” he said quietly.
Lost in my own thoughts, I wasn’t quite listening to him, which seemed to happen to me a lot lately. “It’s all so weird. Like, who am I now?”
Jason stepped away from me and took my shoulders in his hands. “J, that’s crazy. You’re still you.”
“I don’t know, J,” I said. My eyes hit Jason right at his collarbone, and I didn’t lift them to his face. I tried to find the words to explain what I was feeling. “You know that thing where you look at your hand and suddenly you’re like, ‘It’s so weird that that’s my hand.’”
“Stop.” Jason’s voice was commanding. Confident. It was his debating voice, the one that had won our team the regional championship last spring. He let go of my shoulders and lifted my chin. His dark gray eyes stared into mine as he enumerated points on his fingers. “One: you’re a third-generation legacy. Two: you’ve got a 4.0 average. Three: you’re one of ten Children United interns in the whole world. Four: you’re going to spend every second while I’m away studying for your SATs, on which you will get a near-perfect score.” I hip-checked him on that. “Next year, when we’re at Harvard, this will all seem like a bad dream.” When he said Harvard, he tapped me lightly on the nose. That was our plan: to get into Harvard early action.
Jason was our lead debater, but I was no slouch. I thought of countering his points one by one. First: half the kids applying to Harvard are legacies. Second: there are thousands of applicants with 4.0 averages. Third: my internship has consisted of reading useless reports, summarizing them for no one, and sitting in on endless lectures delivered to nearly empty rooms. Fourth: every time I try to sit down and study for the SATs, the words just swim around on the page.
But I didn’t want our last few seconds together to consist of my whining. Instead, all I said was, “Hey! Don’t jinx Harvard.” I was superstitious about our acceptance, which was why, while he was wearing a white T-shirt that spelled out HARVARD in red letters, I’d made him remove the Harvard bumper sticker that he’d put on my Amazon wish list.
The front door opened again, and Grace stuck her head out. “Jason! In the car! Now!”
You didn’t mess with Grace when she said Now! like that. Jason opened his arms, and I slipped into them, hugging him back as tightly as he was hugging me, hoping some of his optimism about senior year—which was only two and a half weeks away—would enter my body by osmosis.
The jerk of the garage door rising was followed by the car honking as Mark backed the Lexus into the driveway. Isabella, Jason’s little sister, rolled down her window and shouted, “Bye, Juliet! Bye! We’ll miss you.”
“Bye, Bella,” I called back. I’d always wished I had a little sister; Jason and I had been together since Bella was six, so sometimes it felt almost like I had one.
His dad gave me a little salute. “Take care of yourself, Juliet,” he said. Mark Robinson was always saying dad things. Take care of yourself. Drive carefully. Do you kids need any money? His saying that made me think of my own dad and how my mother said he was having a midlife crisis. My dad, on the other hand, said it was more complicated than that, that they’d both been unhappy for a long time. My older brother said I shouldn’t even bother trying to figure out what was going on with them, that I had to focus on school because if my grades dropped first semester of senior year, I was screwed with colleges.
Apparently everybody understood and accepted what was going on with my family except me.
Jason gave me one last squeeze, and then he linked his pinky with mine. “J power,” he said, gently squeezing.
I smiled and squeezed his pinky back. “J power,” I echoed. Then he let go and headed toward the car. I stood on Jason’s perfect lawn in front of Jason’s perfect house and watched the car carrying his perfect family back down the driveway, and then—with Mark honking the horn good-bye—I watched it drive down the block, turn the corner, and disappear.
Pulling up into my own driveway ten minutes later, I had to admit that my house looked just as perfect as Jason’s. The gardeners and the pool guy still showed up right on schedule, so it wasn’t like in the movies where you know the family inside is falling apart because the grass is waist high and weeds are growing everywhere.
But as soon as I got out of the car, I could tell my mother was having a Bad Day. Exhibit A: it was a beautiful August afternoon, yet all the shades in the house were drawn. Ever since my dad had moved out, my mother had Good Days and Bad Days. On Good Days, she met friends for tennis, went for lunch, shopped. Maybe had a committee meeting.
On Bad Days, the shades stayed down. And so did she.
Bad Days were the real reason I hadn’t gone to France with Jason’s family.
“Mom?” I pushed open the front door. My whole life, my house had had the same smell—I’d always assumed it was some combination of my mom’s perfume and this lavender-scented powder she had the housekeeper sprinkle on the rugs before she vacuumed. But now the house smelled ever so slightly different, and I’d started to wonder if what it had smelled like before hadn’t been plain old happiness.
“Mom?” I called again.
I heard a faint response from the direction of my parents’ bedroom. Or I guess I should say my mother’s bedroom, since my dad had a new bedroom in his new apartment in Manhattan.
I walked up the stairs, passing the pale squares that lined the walls in place of the family photos that used to hang there. My mother had always been astonishingly organized. The minute there was the hint of a chill in the air, I came home to find my T-shirts replaced with sweaters, my shorts replaced with jeans, my sundresses in plastic bags at the back of my closet. So it wasn’t exactly shocking that she spent the weekend after my father left removing evidence of our happy family from the walls. The surprising thing was that she hadn’t already had the walls repainted and hung with replacement art.