SUNDAY
ONE
When I tell Noah it’s time to sink or swim, I mean it quite literally.
After all, it’s an unspoken rule of meet-cutes that if one of the people can’t swim, the other has to save them. It’s dramatic and romantic, and it doesn’t matter that this particular meeting isn’t taking place in the ocean or at an engagement party, but instead at the local pool surrounded by little kids with sticky Popsicle fingers trying to out-splash each other with subpar cannonballs.
The location may not be ideal, but the meet-cute is. I made sure of it.
I’ve known Noah Chen since kindergarten, when we’d play spies on the playground and footsie in class, and though we grew apart eventually, we’ve always been there for the other when absolutely needed. And Noah absolutely needs me.
Next to me, he sits on a rickety rental chair, crossing his tan arms and legs tightly like I do when I’m warding off menstrual cramps. If he’s attempting to melt out of existence in this early-morning sun, he better try harder. We’ve been at the pool since it opened at eight o’clock, waiting for Justin Carroll to mount his lifeguard stand for his shift—typically eight in the morning to four in the afternoon—but he’s apparently running late. Not part of my carefully crafted plan, but nothing to worry about yet. Noah, however, takes this to mean the day is doomed, because Noah is a pessimist. He takes even a hint of rain as a personal attack against him.
“This was silly,” he says, scuffing his leather flip-flop against the grass. “He probably heard I had a crush on him and knew he shouldn’t show up. He probably called the police.”
“No one but you and I know this plan; I’m discreet.”
“As discreet as your outfit maybe,” he mutters from the side of his mouth. “Why aren’t you wearing a bathing suit?”
I dip my head to glare at him over the top of my round retro prescription sunglasses my parents gave me for my birthday. Despite the other things I could have gotten for the same amount of money, I have no regrets about begging for these nonstop for two weeks. I had grown embarrassed by the dorky clip-on sunglasses I had to wear over my everyday glasses. The fact is, no one with clip-on sunglasses has a summer fling. There are no meet-cutes or romances or even Instagrammable moments for those people. I couldn’t let my eyewear be the reason I remained dateless and alone for one more day.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “You know I get snippy when I’m nervous.”
I smooth down the front of my floral dress and cross my legs at the ankles to highlight my chunky sandals. With a full face of makeup on top of the outfit, yes, I’m overdressed, but it’s my battle armor. “I’m going to brunch after this.”
“With the Queen of England?”
Don’t give her any ideas. “With my family, for Summer’s birthday.”
He grimaces, because it’s no secret that my cousin and I don’t get along. He’s witnessed the minor spats in the school hallway more than once this past year. “Well, I sure hope me ruining my romantic life forever doesn’t make you late.” Before I can even react, he says, “Sorry. Nervous.”
I grab his sweaty hand in mine. “Don’t be nervous. I planned this well.”
“I know, I know,” he says with a sigh. “I’ve seen you work your magic.”
I beam. They say middle children crave attention, but not me. I crave appreciation. Validation. And my favorite way of getting it is matchmaking. Couples I’ve set up, like Noah and Justin, sometimes have next to nothing in common until I make some adjustments. All it takes is a bit of internet sleuthing, some harmless stalking, and occasionally a makeover montage. Noah would not let me have the last one even though I know he has a closet full of heinous Nintendo T-shirts that I feel ideologically clashes with his vanity bursting with makeup and skin care products.
“I try my best.” Some people, pleased with their own meet-cute matchups, have insisted I start charging for this service, but I’m honestly just in it for the feels. I love love. “There’s Justin.”
“Where?” Noah’s neck cracks whipping his head toward the pool entrance. Justin strolls inside, looking every bit the Ken doll. Lifeguard Ken, one might say, equipped with the following accessories: tiny swim trunks, a whistle, sunblock, and a set of four-pack abs.
“So, we’ll give him a moment to settle in. He’s going to put his cell phone on the arm of the chair, like he does every day, and when he’s looking the other way, I’ll snatch it and drop it underneath the stand. You’ll walk by and do that stretchy thing that shows off your arm muscles, and then you’ll ask him what time it is. He’ll realize his phone is gone and panic because—well, obviously; it’s his phone. He’ll be so grateful when you find it for him, and it’ll give you a chance to tell him that story about when you lost your phone.”
Noah chews on his lip. “The fake one?”
“It’s not fake, it’s exaggerated,” I say, pushing my glasses to the top of my head. If Noah doesn’t know which fake-not-fake story I mean by now, we’re in trouble. “We didn’t come up with a story about you losing your phone on the subway in New York just for you to not use it. He’s going to NYU this year. Keep up.” I take a breath. “Sorry. I get snippy when I don’t have breakfast.”
He wipes his palms against his swimming trunks, eyes tracking Justin’s movements as he climbs onto his chair to oversee the deep end. I’m not even sure he heard me.
“Noah?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you still want to do this?”
He turns to me, and what had once been a faraway expression on his face has now cracked to panic, his cheeks filling with red. “I don’t know.”
I soften. “He’s a nice guy. But I don’t have to tell you that.”
I start ticking things off on my fingers to remind Noah of the list of reasons he gave me for why Justin Carroll is not only a babe, but the babe for him. “He doesn’t overshare on social media, he recycles, he’s part of a book club—oh, maybe you should maneuver the conversation from the phone story to his book club by saying searching for your phone made you late for your book club.”
“And what book was this fake book club reading?”
“What books have you read recently?”
He blinks.
“What books have you read ever?” I correct quickly. “For school?”
A blank face, again. “Why would I be part of a book club in a state I don’t live in?”
“You spent a summer in New York visiting your grandparents.” This is actually true. The best way to exaggerate—read: not lie—is to start with an undeniable truth. “You had a ton of free time and needed to be around like minds.” Sort of true. He did have a ton of free time, but he spent most of the summer playing video games in his grandparents’ brownstone. But Justin doesn’t appear to like video games. He likes books.
“Okay. . . . What sort of things did you do outside the apartment when you were there?”
“I walked my grandparents’ dog, Bunny.”
“Perfect. Forget the book club, say you were late for a volunteer gig. You walked dogs for the elderly.” Who wouldn’t like that?
His face brightens. “Okay, yeah.” He takes a deep breath and nods. “I’m ready.”
I stand up, put my shades back down, and walk slowly toward the lifeguard chair. A little girl in pigtails and swimmies runs past me. I lean into the chair to avoid her and snatch Justin’s phone while he’s too busy tracking the girl. He blows his whistle lightly and says, “No running!” His orders sound like suggestions; his tone is too sweet to be intimidating. Noah’s a lucky guy to (soon) have a boyfriend who doesn’t yell and cares about the environment and looks illegally hot shirtless. To think, Noah and I once got married in a very classy ceremony held between the swings and the merry-go-round during recess. Now he’s about to spread his wings and fly away from me, right into Justin’s toned arms.
I plant the phone beneath the chair and walk until I’ve reached the closed snack bar. It won’t open until eleven, but despite that, my traitorous stomach growls as I skim the menu. Normally, I schedule my meet-cutes in the afternoon, ensuring I’m rested and nourished, but today was an exception. Starting tomorrow, Justin will no longer be working at the pool. He signed up to be a camp counselor, and it’d be pretty hard—not to mention quite weird—to sneak Noah into a children’s camp for the purpose of flirting (or, in all honesty, probably just open-mouthed staring). So many questions would be raised, and none of them would be Justin asking, “Would you like to go out with me?”
Noah makes his move, doing a slow stretch, but Justin’s not looking. By the time Noah awkwardly moves to the other side of the chair—still stretching—Justin is having a conversation with another lifeguard in the opposite direction. It’s the type of idiocy you’d expect on a sitcom still airing long past its expiration date, but this is very clearly a rom-com and, therefore, this is unacceptable!
Objectively, one of Justin’s best personality traits is that he’s kind. It’s also his biggest flaw. He needs to brush off the leggy coworker with shiny brown hair and notice Noah in his green swim trunks that I made him buy because it’s Justin’s favorite color.
If I’m late for brunch, that opens the floor for Summer to start shit-talking me before I even get there, so I need to speed things up. I never told Noah about plan B—there’s always a plan B—because he would have been very, very against it.
Shoes clacking against the pavement, wind blowing my dress cinematically, I dash up to Noah and push him toward the pool.
His flip-flops scrape the concrete as he struggles against me. “Hey, wait, Lahey, I can’t swim,” he says, hands clenched on my shoulders. He may have been working out his arms the last few weeks, but I’ve had years of evolving into a strangely strong human being courtesy of my jock older sister who likes to wrestle as a means of
settling arguments.
“I know. Sink or swim time.” I give him one last shove and things move in slow motion.
Plan B:
He’ll fall into the water.
I’ll scream for Justin to save him.
CPR Ken to the rescue.
The thing is, I should have prepared a plan C. Or at least a plan B-and-a-half, because Noah never unclenches. He pulls me and my brunch-ready body into the water with him. It’s cold and jarring, and my makeup and brand-new dress are not waterproof. I hate to admit that my first concern when I surface is my sunglasses. My second is that Noah does not know how to swim.
“Help!” I say, swimming to the edge, my dress clinging to my legs as I tread. “My friend can’t swim!”
Now, normally, I’m one of those people questioning why someone who can’t swim is at a pool, but today, there’s no question about it: he’s at a pool for romance.
Justin grabs his red life floaty thing and jumps into the pool without a second thought. Of all the days I’ve watched him lifeguarding, this is the first he’s actually done any lifesaving. He cuts through the water and wraps his arms around Noah’s flailing body and hauls him to the edge beside me. Justin, busy tossing his float onto the asphalt, doesn’t hear me whisper to Noah, “Play dead.”
Noah forces himself to stop coughing and, after glaring at me, goes as limp as possible. His eyes shut last, but he couldn’t hide that familiar glimmer of hope from me, even without my glasses. Justin pulls him over the edge and I follow.
“Hey,” Justin says, suddenly smacking Noah on the face. Not the peck on the cheek Noah and I discussed might happen today, but, hey, it’s physical contact. “Wake up, Noah.”
“Oh my god,” I say frantically and most definitely too over the top. I never claimed to be an actress. I’m the director, if anything. “Do CPR!”
A crowd forms around us, but Justin’s oblivious. He takes his job very seriously, even though he only earns about twelve dollars an hour. That doesn’t seem like enough if he’s supposed to be keeping people alive. He leans over Noah to start what looks like very painful chest compressions. Noah has crushed on Justin for a year, though, so he’s taking it like a champ. All for love. All for the chance of lip-to-lip action, even if it’s not the kind he was hoping for. It’s a start, and I don’t do failure.
Justin’s mouth hovers over Noah’s for o n e a g o n i z i n g s e c o n d before making contact.
It’s not a kiss, no, but it does make me tear up. The hopeless romantic in me ignores the rational part of me that says my eyes are just watering from the chlorine. Noah fake-chokes himself miraculously
to life and I leave the two of them engaged in conversation as the crowd disperses. Noah manages to rip away from Justin’s gaze long enough to raise one thumb in my direction.
Justin says to him, “I think we had chemistry together last year.”
Noah nods, dazed in the dreaminess of Justin, and says, “Yeah, we definitely have chemistry—had chemistry together.”
TWO
“Didn’t you already shower? You’re really pushing it with the time, Lahey,” Liberty calls after me when I run upstairs and into our small shared bathroom. My older sister didn’t see that I’m drenched and, therefore, doesn’t know the driver’s seat of her car, which I borrow out of the kindness of her heart, is also drenched. It’s something we’ll just have to deal with when the time comes . . . in about fifteen minutes.
“I’ll be quick!” I yell back, shutting myself in.
I place my sunglasses on the counter—I took it upon myself to use the pool skimmer to rescue them from the depths of the most epic meet-cute I’ve ever concocted, since Justin was a little too busy to do so himself—and turn the shower on, praying Lily hasn’t wasted all the hot water with her typical morning soak. She claims it’s the only way she can properly wake up.
I peel my chlorine-soaked dress off my body and let it rest over the shower curtain rod. I was really excited to show it off today, especially to my aunt, because she always, always compliments my outfit choices and my cheap finds from the thrift store, but I guess it’ll have to shine another day. Maybe at Summer’s birthday party. I envision her jaw dropping when I walk in. It hits the ground and doesn’t stop lowering until it pops out of Australia or wherever. I imagine her accidentally swallowing a kangaroo.
It’s not until I’m rinsing shampoo from my hair and reaching for the conditioner that I realize someone truly evil used the last of it and didn’t replace it. I’m a hundred percent sure it wasn’t me—I would have set it aside for a deep cleaning before recycling it like the little green Democrat my parents are raising me to be. I go through the process of wringing out my hair and lathering bodywash in every reachable place, trying to stall until I absolutely need to call for help, but then the door creaks open.
“Hey!” I say, whipping my head toward it. “Can you get me a bottle of conditioner, please?” I refrain from accusing whoever entered of finishing it, because that’s one surefire way not to get what I want. Lily, since turning thirteen, has become especially petty and would revel in my tangled, dull hair if I pissed her off.
Whoever walked in doesn’t respond to my question, though. All I hear is the overworked fan and the water splattering on the tub floor below me.
“Uh, hello?” Goose bumps prickle over my skin because I swear I heard the door open, but now I’m feeling very alone.
“Here.” The voice startles me first, then the sight of a hand that very much doesn’t belong to either of my sisters does next. It’s holding the conditioner and has something black caked under a few fingernails and that’s how I know it’s—
“Adler!” It’s just his grease-and-dirt-stained hand from working on cars, but it feels like a thousand eyes he’s just shoved in here. My entire body gets hot, even as the water starts fading to a lukewarm temperature. I try to cover the front of myself even though I rationally know that he’s not a pervert I need to worry about, just Liberty’s best friend with a lack of boundaries. “Get out!”
“How about a thank-you?” He waves the bottle around blindly until it accidentally makes contact with my slick shoulder and topples to my feet with a clatter.
“I thought you were my sister.” This is certainly not the situation I expected to be in when Adler and I would finally have a one-on-one chat after the disastrous matchmaking incident. He’s been avoiding me since his graduation party over two months ago, when my attempt to meet-cute him and this really sweet girl, Brighton, went sour. Adler very much did not appreciate my help like Brighton had—until Adler kindly, but wrongly, turned her down, that is.
“Which one?”
I pull a face I’m lucky he can’t see. “Does it matter? Get out!”
“I have to brush my teeth.”
“I’m naked in here.” I hate how my voice shakes on the word. It feels too intimate to be used between the two of us.
“I would hope so; it’s a shower.”
I hear the sink running. “Are you really brushing your teeth right now?”
“Well, I’m not here for this great conversation. Mom and Pop are using the bathrooms, and I have to get to work.”
I peek through the
crack between the wall and the curtain, making sure nothing of mine is showing. This is not the first time Adler Altman has wandered in from next door to use the bathroom, cook some food, or spend the night. He’s been Liberty’s built-in best friend since he moved here the summer before their sixth-grade year and it’s usually fine that he’s around—one could even get used to his teasing if exposed to it enough, because he has redeeming qualities like his unparalleled comedic timing and perfectly baked Pizza Rolls—but right now, as he hunches over the sink, toothpaste foam dripping from his mouth, he needs to disappear. He puts the toothbrush into his mouth again. My toothbrush.
“Oh, come on,” I groan.
“What?” He swings toward me, some of his chin-length, wavy brown hair getting stuck in the toothpaste around his mouth. His eyes shine in the overhead lighting, but there’s no hint of laughter to be found there, none of his typical openness or warmth. He’s usually such a smiley person that it must take a great effort to refuse me that kindness lately; he hasn’t even slipped up once to accidentally greet me with his go-to “Lay-hey, Lahey.” And that’s his favorite way to get an eye roll from me.
I hold the shower curtain tight against me before realizing that just makes it even easier to see me. My face truly cannot get any hotter. If I had a crush on Adler, or was even remotely attracted to him, this incident might mean everything to me. I’d replay it in my head at night, wondering what he thought of me in this moment. Did I look like a drowned rat, or was the water dripping down my face appealing to him?
But that doesn’t matter because I don’t feel that way about him and he definitely doesn’t feel that way about me. I’m kind of offended that I’ve never even been a small sexual threat to him. I’m just one of Liberty’s little sisters who overstepped and pissed him off.
Liberty yells from somewhere outside the door about how we still need to pick up Sophia before brunch and I’m wasting my time heckling Adler. Imagine, me bothering him right now.
Water drips into my open mouth as I struggle to find the words. “That’s my toothbrush.” In his mouth.
“Berty said you wouldn’t mind,” he says, biting the words around the toothbrush handle. He goes back to brushing his teeth with vigor.
“Don’t you have a kitchen sink and your own toothbrush you could have used?”
“Yes, but the toothbrush is behind locked doors.” He makes a gesture like, So now I’m here.
I roll my eyes, picking up the bottle of conditioner and applying too much to my hair. It takes a lot of effort for me to stand here, stretched out and uncovered—even behind a shower curtain—with him so close. I want to curve into myself and disappear. “Just throw it out when you’re done. I don’t know where that mouth has been.”
“And it’s better if you don’t know,” he says without missing a beat.
“Please go.”
I hear him wind up and spit before flooding the sink with water. “Your wish is my command,” he says without a hint of the sarcasm I know lingers right beneath his words.
“Then, while you’re granting wishes, could you get me a new toothbrush and never interrupt me in the bathroom again?”
“What was I interrupting?”
“GOODBYE,” I say pointedly, combing my fingers through my hair. I keep telling myself to just keep showering, because Liberty will literally drag me out of here, ready or not, when the time comes, and I’d rather be ready. She won’t take Adler coming in to brush his teeth as a good excuse.
“Liberty said you need to hurry up. This might help,” he says.
The toilet flushes without warning, and the shower water runs freezing cold. “What the hell, Adler!”
The door shuts loudly behind him as he makes a quick exit. I miss the days before he declared me public enemy number one—no, I miss the days before he even moved here. Our old neighbor, Mrs. Winthrop, was so nice and kept to herself except to deliver bouquets from her garden and ask my dad to shovel her driveway in the winter. ...
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