CHAPTER ONE
The whole thing was Penny’s idea.
“Lydia,” she’d said, in her most serious tone. Penny is thirteen months younger than me, but she’s hit almost every milestone earlier. Walking, talking, reading, writing. After she got her period before I did, it was like I was officially demoted to younger sister and there was no coming back. “We need a reset.”
I don’t remember exactly how I’d responded, but my best recollection is that I made a confused noise while crunching a mouthful of Cheddar Chex Mix.
“You were almost kicked off the crew,” she’d said.
“No one calls it the crew—”
She’d waved her hand dismissively. “I nearly got a D on an organic chemistry test. Ms. Balsavias made me go talk to Mr. Hockseye, who we would all agree is barely competent enough to be a guidance counselor, because I seemed so distracted. Mom and Dad nearly got called in.”
Then it had been me waving my hand dismissively. Penny is such a good student, and it was only a C– on a single test, and if school administration had called Mom and Dad in over anything, it would have been the near-death I’d almost caused in the theater department, not a dip in performance in organic chemistry.
“We can’t have another year like this, Lydia.” Even though she was maybe blowing things out of proportion, Penny wasn’t wrong. Unfortunately, Penny was hardly ever wrong.
It’s so annoying.
“What do you suggest?” I’d asked. “Get theeselves to a nunnery?”
“Sort of,” she’d said with a raised eyebrow, which, to me at least, had signaled trouble. That eyebrow doesn’t come up for general fun. That eyebrow height occurs only when schemes are hatched.
Because Penny is the way she is, I didn’t manage to get another single detail from her that night. “It’ll be better if it’s all from me,” she’d said, which was an excuse but also probably accurate, because Mom and Dad know which one of their daughters is more responsible. I’d left it all in her overachieving hands.
***
We are not on our way to a nunnery, or anything even close to a nunnery. We’re in the back seat of Mom’s Prius sitting in traffic on the 5 freeway on our way down to Los Angeles. Has anyone, in the history of the world, used Los Angeles as some kind of metaphor for sacrifice, restraint, celibacy? Doubtful.
I was sure right about that eyebrow scheme.
“I can’t believe you talked me into this,” I mutter to Penny.
“You’re lucky that I did,” she says. “This is exactly what we need.” Ugh, her accuracy is so irritating. Of course it’s true. I’d be a huge disaster without her.
“What are all these people doing out?” Dad asks. “It’s a Saturday morning. Where could they all be going?”
“Exactly,” I say. “LA is stupid.”
“We’re here, too,” Penny says. “So who are we to judge?”
“That’s a great point, Pen.” Mom shoots Dad a look. He probably knows that if he doesn’t go with the flow his summer could be ruined, so I’m not surprised that he shuts up. I’m not sure how I feel about my dad’s dream vacation having absolutely nothing to do with my sister and me, but Penny pointed out that the cost of the cruise and European tour is already high for two people. For four it would be impossible.
“Grace says that the thing about LA is you just need to pick your neighborhood and plan your life around it and everything’s fine,” Mom says. “I don’t get it, but she seems happy enough with that kind of situation.”
“That sounds terrible,” I say. LA, an hour south of us, has never been appealing to me, with its noise and bad air and lack of greenery, but even so, I don’t understand the point of choosing to live somewhere and then sectioning yourself off into only a tiny part of it. Isn’t the whole point of living in a big city that you have all of it at your fingertips? But also, I can feel how I don’t want to understand, because literally none of this was my idea.
I glance down at my phone, but the lock screen is blank. Who would be texting me anyway? Not since Tate. Not since, as my theater advisor Mr. Landiss calls it, the incident.
And even before all of that, I can’t help but remind myself, my phone was hardly buzzing nonstop. For some stupid reason, I can’t stop thinking about the screenshot Darren Nygard posted to his Insta Stories a couple months ago, with his texts showing sixty-nine unread messages. tfw you sleep an hour later than everyone else on the react group text. Nice.
Sixty-nine messages in one hour, and none of them including me, the copresident of the Rancho El Aderezo Theater Tech Club (REATTC, which we call REACT, because, close enough). The messages weren’t about paint or lighting or coupons we found for Home Depot that made our small budgets feel less small, I assumed. They were about crushes and parties and who hooked up with who and who’s hanging out after rehearsal, and I wasn’t required for any of that.
“Why don’t you look excited?” Penny throws a Cheeto at me without warning,
and it bounces off my nose. I laugh, despite my mood, and despite everything else.
“You know I’m not excited,” I say, even though that wasn’t completely true. It was hard not to be at least a little thrilled about a whole plan with my sister, a person I never feel on equal footing with. But of course I couldn’t let Penny know all of that. “This is your thing. This isn’t a nunnery.”
“I’m still confused at how you wanted our summer to be more like a nunnery,” she says. “Less is more, remember?”
I dismiss her with a hand wave, and she does the same right back to me. I have no idea why this has caught on between us. Sometimes sisterhood is inexplicable.
Grace is waiting in front of her house when we pull up, but unlike up in the far-flung suburbs where we live, there’s no driveway and so we have to keep driving. Mom’s phone rings with a call from Grace as Mom is slowly circling the Prius around the block.
“Answer it, Craig!” she shrieks, so Dad taps the button on the dash.
“Hello?” Mom and Dad answer at the same time. Penny and I exchange a look. It’s not that they aren’t always weird, it’s just somehow impossible to fully get used to it, ever. It always feels like something new and awkward and unusually loud.
“Hope, you can just double-park right in front so the girls can bring in their bags,” Grace says in her cool-as-hell tone. Mom and Grace make Penny and me seem like identical twins. “It’ll take forever to find a spot.”
I still don’t understand living somewhere you can’t even park a compact car, but Grace’s voice makes me hate it a little less, and by the time Mom swings the car back around, I’m ready to bound out to greet my summer life.
“Lydia, close the door,” Mom says. “We have to put the hazards on first.”
“I’ve never used the hazards in this car,” Dad says. “Where are they again?”
“You know, that’s funny, I haven’t, either,” Mom says. “Maybe not in the last Prius, either. I still miss driving that one sometimes, that cute little hatchback.”
“The hazards are right there,” Penny says.
“Time goes by so quickly,” Mom says with a sigh. “Remember how little the girls were when we got that car?”
“They’re literally right in the middle of the dash,” Penny says.
“That giant triangle button,” I add.
“Remember when Lydia was born,” Dad says with a sigh. “I realized I could put her whole hand in my mouth.”
I shriek. “Dad!”
“Dad, why would you say that?”
“Oh, there are the
the hazards,” Mom says, and presses the button.
“Dad, that sounds like something a goddamn cannibal would say.”
Mom sighs loudly. “Lydia, don’t curse, please.”
“It’s not as weird as it sounds,” Dad says. “I was holding you and eating applesauce—”
“I have literally never seen you eat applesauce,” Penny says.
“I used to love applesauce,” Dad says. “Then one day, I just didn’t. Isn’t life funny like that?”
There’s a knock on the window and we all scream, though of course it’s just Grace.
“What does applesauce have to do with your cannibalism?” I ask.
“Do you understand what cannibalism is?” Penny asks.
“Or are you secretly made out of apples?” I ask, only to make Penny laugh, but it works.
Mom rolls down the window. “Is this OK? Where I parked? If these cars need to get out—”
“So I spilled applesauce on your hand,” Dad says. “And I’d dropped my napkin, so I thought I’d just—”
“Ew,” Penny and I say together.
“You licked applesauce off of my baby hand?”
“Hey, guys, welcome,” Grace says. Her red hair is longer than last time I saw her, and she’s wearing a faded T-shirt that hangs in that perfect vintage way. I guess there’s something in Grace’s face that echoes Mom’s, but their styles are so different it can be hard for me to see. Mom’s hair is always right at chin length, low-maintenance and style-less.
“Come on in,” Grace says. “I’m so excited you’re here.”
“You’ll understand when you’re a parent,” Dad says in a misty-sounding voice. Oh god, I can’t handle Dad Nostalgia Tears today. I throw open my door and jump out.
“Lydia! You look amazing.” Grace wraps me in her arms and gives me a super tight hug. It’s so good to see her that I don’t point out that unless amazing has a new meaning that equals something along the lines of sweaty-plus-annoyed, she’s being way too nice. But I guess that’s Grace for you.
I get my bags out of the trunk, though Grace’s boyfriend, Oscar, appears and attempts to take them from me. “You can get Penny’s. You know she’s way more delicate.” I say things like this all the time when all that’s really true is that Penny is thin and I’m not. It doesn’t actually make me better at carrying heavy stuff.
He laughs. “Good to see you, Lydia.”
“Come on inside.” Grace ushers me toward the walkway, and it turns out that even though Oscar isn’t tall or particularly built, he grabs Penny’s bags in addition to mine and casually walks them inside. I follow him in as Mom and Dad loudly debate if they can leave the car for a moment or if this will get them “arrested or something like it.”
“Everyone on the boat is going to want to murder them,” I say, and Grace laughs.
“Only a little,” she says. “And only if they talk to anyone else.”
Fair point. Mom and Dad don’t really have friends; they have each other and they have their jobs, and that seems enough for them. I’ve been reminding myself of this a lot lately, since Darren’s Insta Story and Valentina’s party that I found out about from Instagram and not an invitation. High school’s a thing to get through and then it doesn’t matter if you rank high enough for party invites or group texts. Fall in love and the whole thing is solved. You have your person, you build a life together, and that’s that.
“Your mom’s watching the car,” Dad says, even though we haven’t even made it inside yet and the car is about twelve feet away. “Be good for Grace and have fun, Lydia.”
I hug him and it hits me I’ve never been away from my parents for so long before. There’s a dangerous chance I might actually cry, so I just make a joke about him falling overboard that isn’t very funny and end up hiding behind Grace while he says goodbye to Penny.
“We’re going to have so much fun.” Grace tightens an arm around my waist. “You’re excited, right?”
Suddenly I feel anything but, so I just nod very slightly while pasting an extremely fake smile on my face. Mom rushes in, and I cling to her probably for one to two seconds longer than I should. And before I know it, she’s saying goodbye to Penny and the Prius is slowly rolling away down the block as I can faintly hear “Craig, how do we turn the hazards off?”
“They’ll figure it out,” Grace says with a smile. “Come on in, guys.”
We’ve of course been to Grace’s before, as she’s our only aunt (Dad’s an only child) and lives only about forty miles away. But usually Mom convinces Grace and Oscar to drive up to us, because we have a guest bedroom and, in general, a lot more space. I guess also so that Grace and Oscar can sit in traffic on the freeway, and not us.
Grace and Oscar’s house isn’t a tiny home or anything, but it’s little. The living room is about half the size of ours, and the kitchen and dining room are the same way. There are only two bedrooms, total, which means for the first time in our lives, Penny and I will be sharing.
“That’s better for our plan anyway,” Penny had said when Grace brought up this fact earlier in Penny’s planning. “We can keep an eye on each other.”
She was probably right, but seventeen years is a long time to develop plenty of alone-in-my-room-no-one-can-witness-this habits. Two and a half months will be a test.
“If it’s not set up how you guys want it, just move stuff however you want.” Oscar walks ahead of us down the hallway with, again, somehow, all of our luggage in his arms. He’s shorter than Dad, and thinner, too. Mom says when Grace met Oscar, she gushed to her that he had the good looks of an NPR host. I knew Mom expected us to laugh along with her, but when I think of the boys I’ve crushed on, k
issed, dated, been brokenhearted by . . . it’s not like they fit one particular mold. I’m sure there’s room for a wiry public radio type in there, though not now, because now is specifically not the time to worry about boys of any build.
That’s why we’re in Grace’s house to begin with.
If Penny and I keep screwing our lives up because of boys, boys are the problem. Boys must be the problem. OK, to be fair, boys themselves probably aren’t the actual problem. It’s us with boys, us around boys, us thinking of boys when we should be thinking of anything else.
So we’re here, in a little bedroom in a little house in a little part of Los Angeles, away from Tate and Miguel and Drew, away from the boys we know and the boys we don’t. This summer we’re going to hit reset, and that means no boys.
CHAPTER TWO
I’m dreaming of sailing in a gently rocking boat, under a moonlit sky, all bliss and beautiful views, when suddenly the boat shakes rapidly and even though I’m semi-aware it’s a dream, my heart pounds and I clasp the edge of—
“Hey, Lydia,” Grace sort of whispers, though at least she stops shaking me. “I think you slept through your alarm. We need to head out soon to get to the shop on time.”
“I thought I was going to drown,” I say, and—at Grace’s raised eyebrows—add, “in a dream!”
I’m not sure it helps.
“Meet me in the living room in twenty,” Grace says. “Feel free to use anything in the bathroom.”
I take a very brief shower even though I feel fuzzy from the early morning and the fact that it’s barely even light out yet. I felt lucky when Penny worked out this whole plan and told me I’d get to help Grace at her coffee shop while Penny would be interning at Oscar’s office. There was no question who could handle business casual and who could focus on latte art. But Penny won’t have to be at Oscar’s office until nine, and while I’m not exactly sure when the sun comes up, it hasn’t made its full grand appearance yet.
“You’ll get used to it,” Grace says when I zombie into the living room exactly twenty minutes later. There’s no uniform, luckily, so I’m just wearing jeans, my usual boots, and my REACT T-shirt from last year’s production of Into the Woods. Sometimes even a free T-shirt has a perfect fit.
Also, I don’t really care about clothes.
“That seems impossible,” I choke out through a yawn. My eyes feel too dry, and I’d take off my glasses if I thought that would help or if I’d still be able to see. And I’m worried about what my hair actually looks like, because I pulled it into a messy braid while walking from the bathroom to the bedroom and I have a suspicion that it looks less like a cute hairstyle and more like a hacked-up fraying rope. Suddenly I’m envious of my mom’s no-maintenance haircut; mine doesn’t have any style, either, but at least hers always looks done.
“I used to be a night person, too.” Grace leads me out the door and down the sidewalk. “I always had the night shift at The Roast Of, but when I opened Grounds Control, at first I couldn’t afford to pay too many other employees and the morning became mine. But now I kind of love it.”
“I doubt that’s my journey,” I say. “Ugh, how far away do you have to park? How do people live without driveways and garages?”
“Oh god, Lydia, you sound exactly like your mom,” Grace says, and I want to die, at least a little. Maybe more than a little. “And I have a driveway and a garage. They’re both behind the house. But Grounds Control is only about a half a mile away, so unless I have a lot to bring with me, I walk.”
A coffee shop job where I’d get to make real money and learn how to make latte art sounded like there would be no possible downsides, so of course it’s practically in the middle of the night and I have to walk. I thought no one walked in LA? I’d ask Grace but she really got me with that you sound exactly like your mom comment. If she says that again while I’m this tired, I might cry.
“I love the city this time of day,” Grace says. “Like it’s just mine.”
“You can have it,” I mutter without thinking, and Grace shoots me a look, and I do hear in my voice how I might as well be Mom. So far everything about today is a huge disappointment, and normally during summer break I wouldn’t even be up for at least five hours.
“I’m going to win you over.” Grace loops her arm through mine. “Mornings, walking, Los Angeles.”
“I’m hard to win,” I say, which makes her laugh. It hits me how lucky I am to be walking with my supercool aunt, to have this one-on-one time where I’m actually making her laugh, being part of her world. Mornings or walking or this city will never be for me, but they’re all worth this. When we were little, there was no more exciting day for Penny and me than a visit from Grace, and honestly that’s still true. When Penny revealed her whole grand plan, despite all my concerns, it felt too good to be real. Grace time has been so relatively fleeting, and now it’s all I have for the next two and a h
alf months.
“Hey, Ben!” Grace waves as we walk up to Grounds Control, and—oh, damn. A tall guy waves back with one hand while balancing a huge white box in his other. His hair is nearly black and falls into his face, the kind of hair I think about pushing back so I can gaze into his eyes. His eyes, by the way: extremely good, too. You can tell a lot from someone’s eyes, and so I love that his are wide, an extension of his smile. And somehow his bronze skin looks radiant at five-thirty in the morning, even though I’m pretty sure I just look pale and sweaty.
“This is my niece Lydia,” she introduces. “Lydia, this is Benjamín.”
He shakes my hand and grins at me from under that heartthrob hair and I legit have no idea how I’m supposed to adhere to my pact with Penny if I’m not even twenty-four hours in and forced to interact with the hottest guy I’ve met in months. Damn.
“Ben delivers our pastries every morning,” Grace continues, and I feel relief creep in. So I might have to look through That Hair at Those Eyes on This Face every morning, but all those parts won’t be side by side with me as I learn about lattes and muffins and milk alternatives.
“Not every morning,” Ben says with a wink. Why can hot guys get away with winking? It should be so gross. “Five days a week is enough this summer. And it’s nice to meet you, Niece Lydia.”
“It’s nice to meet you, too,” I say, “Five Days a Week Pastries Benjamín.”
Grace unlocks the front door, and once Ben walks off, I follow her inside and watch as she disables the alarm. “Don’t get any ideas.”
“About breaking in?”
“Oh, you’re cute,” she says. “Maybe your jokes work on Hope and Craig, but I am here to tell you that I see everything, and there’s not going to be any Benjamín in your summer outside of pastry delivery.”
“Pastry delivery,” I repeat back, like it’s an innuendo.
“He’s about to start his senior year.”
“So am I!”
“Of college. Anyway, don’t you and Penny have some . . . nun thing going on?”
“Unfortunately, yes.” I follow her as she deposits the pastry box on the counter. “We’re chaste for the summer. Aren’t you going to tell me the alarm code?”
“For now you’ll only be opening the shop with me, so you won’t need it.” Grace opens a drawer near the register and takes out a binder. “Here’s everything you need to know about how we open the shop, if you want to follow along or study later, but you can also just watch me work. I know everyone learns differently.”
I open the binder to the first laminated page, and even though someone—Grace, I assume—went through the effort of choosing a cute font and ad
orable space-themed clip art, I keep an eye on Grace. She starts giant coffee makers—a dark roast, a light roast, and a decaf—first, so that if people are here at six sharp there will already be coffee ready for them. Then she lines up the pastries in the pastry case and sets up little signs telling people what they are and how much they cost. She counts the cash in the cash register and, briefly, explains to me how to ring people up. Considering it’s on an iPad, I assume I can handle it.
Grace brings out four pitchers from the back room. “Fill these with half-and-half, nonfat, soy, and oat. The milk’s all under the espresso machine.”
I do as I’m told—it’s easy because of course the pitchers have been personalized with Grounds Control’s logo and what they hold in the same font—and carry them out to the self-service counter. ...
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