The Summer of Impossibilities

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for and may be obtained from the Library of Congress.

  ISBN 978-1-4197-4112-8

  eISBN 978-1-68335-821-3

  Text copyright © 2020 Rachael Allen

  Book design by Hana Anouk Nakamura

  Published in 2020 by Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

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  To mothers and daughters,

  especially Kim Laver,

  who taught me to chase big dreams

  and helped me realize that writing books

  made me feel like me

  Skyler

  I need this to be the last pitch I throw for the rest of the scrimmage. On a regular day, I’d strike Carter out no problem. She always swings a half second too late. But today, my fingers and wrists have turned against me. My best friend, Paige, our catcher, signals to throw a change-up—my least painful pitch. I cringe. She knows. But I’ll worry about that later.

  I wind up, attempt to lock the pain away where I can’t feel it, and send the change-up flying.

  Carter gets a piece of it, and it pops up up up. It’s gonna be a foul, I can tell, but she’s already tearing toward first, because you don’t wait around to see. And then the ball is coming down, and Paige is rushing to get underneath it. I close my eyes. If she catches it, the inning is over. I hear the thump of the ball in her glove. Thank. Goodness. I run over to her, screaming some unintelligible softball raving. Our first rec league scrimmage is finally over. She claps me on the back on the way to the dugout.

  “You okay?” she asks as we slump onto the grass with our water bottles.

  I nod. I’m always okay.

  The doctor says it’s senseless to fight my pain. That I have to listen to it.

  Which kind of goes against everything I know about softball. Daddy taught me and my sister, Scarlett, how to play when we were five. I remember Scarlett throwing the ball down after about two minutes and saying, “This is boring.” But I threw it back, hard as I could, and you should have seen the way my dad looked at me. He grinned and said, “You’ve got an arm, kiddo.”

  I was used to my sister getting all the attention, usually by any means necessary. I threw the ball back to my dad even harder.

  Today, my hands couldn’t hurt more if someone ran them over with a truck and lit them on fire. But none of the girls seem to notice (well, except Paige, who is totally looking at me with question-mark eyes). I want to keep it that way, so I paste on a grin and skip over to Emmeline.

  “You killed it today, girl!” I bump my hip against hers.

  “Thanks.” She blushes. The freshmen, they are big on blushing.

  “Just, like, keep waiting for your pitches, and you’re going to crush it this summer.”

  “Awesome. I will! Hey, you’re pitching next game, right?”

  “Uh . . .” My smile falters. “Well, my hands have been bothering me a bit, so I don’t know . . .”

  All the girls—all my favorite girls from years and years and years of playing rec softball together—start pressing in on me and talking all at once.

  “Sky, you have to!”

  “We can’t win without you!”

  “You said that last practice too, but you always push through, don’t worry!”

  “Yeah, and even if you have to sit out a few games, you can be like our mascot!”

  Is that what I am now? I don’t want the girls to see how that makes me feel, so I plaster on an even bigger smile and say, “Totally. Her-ricanes for life.”

  And then they’re cheering and dancing and yelling around me, and it feels wonderful. But also like it’s going to be the thing that breaks me.

  I remember a game a couple months ago, midway through the varsity season. The pain was so bad I had been planning to ask Coach if he could sub me out and put in a closer. But then my dad came down to the dugout, and he was all, “How are your hands feeling? How’s the new medicine working?” He couldn’t keep the eagerness out of his voice. The thought of telling him the truth made me queasy.

  So, I went back in and finished the game.

  Because that’s what athletes do. Because you always give 110 percent and pain is weakness leaving the body and winning isn’t everything—it’s the only thing.

  And we did win.

  Three outs and sixteen broken-glass-in-my-knuckles pitches later.

  I iced my hands and thought everything would be okay.

  Until the pain knocked me out of bed in the middle of the night.

  I remember my dad kneeling on the floor next to me, saying, “What’s the matter?”

  And my mom standing over him. “What in the damn hell do you think is the matter? You pushed her too hard, and now she’s paying for it. She needs to quit the team.”

  It turned into one of the worst fights they’d ever had. I remember being surprised that it was over me and not my sister. While they yelled at each other about what to do with me and everything else under the sun, Scarlett got me into a warm bath. She tried to distract me, but I couldn’t block it out. The pain or the fighting. Even when they went in their room and shut the door.

  I was hopeful at the start of rec season. Dr. Levy said that since my rec softball team is less intense than varsity, it would give me a chance to see how my arthritis does in a lower stress environment. It felt like my last shot at making softball work.

  But it’s too much, trying to play softball and sorting through this arthritis stuff at the same time. Too much for all of us.

  I walk up to Coach after practice. I wait until no one is close enough to hear. And I open my mouth.

  “See you tomorrow!” is what comes out.

  “See you, Skyler,” he calls back.

  I hesitate, shifting my weight from foot to foot, hoping for something—the truth? A miracle? But I can’t seem to make myself tell him.

  I’ll do it tomorrow.

  Paige drives me home, but since Emmeline and Carter are in the car, I still have to pretend like everything is OMGOMG-AMAZING. It’s really not that hard. Beyoncé comes on, and I turn it up, and we sing at the top of our lungs as we fly through downtown Winston-Salem in Paige’s convertible.

  Mama’s car is at the house when we pull into the driveway, but not Daddy’s. He’ll be home from his work trip later tonight though.

  “Hey, call me if you change your mind about the sleepover, okay?” says Paige. “I don’t mind driving back over here to get you.”

  She’s making the Paige face—the one that means she can see right through me. “Thanks. You are such a sweetheart. My mom’s forcing us to do family time since my dad’s getting back, but next time?”

  “Next time!” they yell.

  Then Paige turns the car around in my driveway while they squeal/giggle/fight over music
.

  I smile and walk up the cobblestone path to the front porch. I smile and climb the steps. I smile so dang hard I think it might break my teeth, and I open the door and I close it.

  It is such a relief to finally be able to stop smiling.

  I sag against the front door. I have to come up with an alternate plan for this summer. Because going to practices is killing me by degrees, but quitting the team feels just as impossible as playing through the pain. Why does everything have to hurt so much?

  I really don’t think the pills I’m on are working. I’ve been thinking it for a while, first a creeping suspicion and then a bell clanging over my head. I picked the pills over a biologic, because needles scare the bejesus out of me, and they expect you to do the injections yourself. But even needles would be better than this. I’ll tell my parents today. When Daddy gets home. I’ll ask them to take me back to the doctor. Maybe I’ll even talk to them about how I don’t think I can play softball anymore. If I’m calm, if I say it right, everything will be fine, and no one will get upset.

  I’ll have to sew my smile back on. But first, a break. I imagine closing the door to my bedroom and sliding down to the floor, ready to let the sobs flow through me.

  Then I hear the noises coming from upstairs, and I realize I’ve got bigger problems.

  “Scarlett?” I call. No response. She’s probably still out with her boyfriend.

  I pull out my phone and text her, even though my fingers hiss at me with every letter.

  Something bad is happening at home. Can you get here soon?

  Scarlett

  “I can’t believe we get to spend the whole summer like this,” I say.

  “I know.”

  Reese kisses me to oblivion in the backseat of his car while his fingertips make circles along the outside of my leg. Circles that move farther up my thigh with each passing second. I shiver. My hand twitches, ready to block him, but he stops on his own when he reaches the hem of my skirt. He pulls away, and I realize his face is way too serious for oblivion-kissing.

  “Do you want to, you know—? Have you thought any more about sex?”

  Well, yes, actually. I think about it all the time. The bulk of these thoughts are devoted to how to keep myself from having it. With you. Before I’m ready. In the heat of the moment (because holy hell, are you good at creating heated moments). “I always thought I would wait,” I say. “Maybe not until I’m married, but at least until I know for sure I’m in love.”

  “Thought?”

  “Think.” Stupid oblivion-kissing. “Still think. I just. I really want to make sure my first time is with the right person.”

  Reese scoots close to me and holds my face in his hands and looks into my eyes like he’s trying to see my soul. “I love you. I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”

  I objectively know that if I heard anyone else say something like that to another person, I would think snarky thoughts about how cheesy they sounded. Instead, the words make me feel a little dizzy (though maybe that is a residual effect of the kissing).

  “Me too.”

  He smiles. “Cool. I just want to make sure you know how I feel. I don’t want that to be the reason you’re not ready to have sex with me.”

  “Okay.” We’ve only been dating five months. How are we already here, at this conversation?

  He runs his hands down my shoulders, my arms, gently touching the scars that lead like ladder rungs from the crooks of my elbows to my wrists. They’re white now—faded. It’s been months since I’ve cut. When we started dating, they were still an angry purple-red. I had almost no friends. Reese plucked me from the fringes, and I became someone people wanted to be around. He kisses my scars here and there like he’s making me all better.

  “You’re perfect,” he pronounces.

  It bugs me and makes me feel beautiful at the same time, but I don’t say anything. He’s so steady and calm and good. I’m lucky he sees something in someone like me.

  “I still don’t think I’m ready,” I say.

  His face falls.

  “For sex,” I add quickly. “But maybe I’m ready for other things.”

  He grins. “Other things would be cool too.”

  Other things. My brain is sizzling. Holy hell, I actually told Reese I’m ready to do other things. And I am. But I don’t know, I’ve never done these other things, and what if I’m bad at them or what if I like them so much I totally lose control of myself or—

  His fingers run along the hem of my skirt, and this time they don’t stop.

  Oh. So apparently Other Things are starting right now. Cool.

  My phone makes a pinging noise from where it’s sitting on the floorboard, effectively interrupting my summer of oblivion kissing. I see a text from Skyler.

  Something bad is happening at home. Can you get here soon?

  “Hang on.” I push away Reese’s chest and sit up straight. He stifles a groan. “It’s from Sky. I think it’s important.”

  I text back: What’s going on? Is Grandma okay?

  My brain starts running through a list of possibilities to be anxious over; I can’t help it. My sister is kind of sensitive, but she’s very low drama.

  Everyone is fine. Just try to come home now, okay? And maybe have Reese drop you off at the bottom of the driveway.

  wtf sky

  Just do it. I twin promise.

  Oh, shit.

  “We need to get home now,” I tell Reese.

  His hand is on my arm, his face concerned. “What’s going on? Is everything okay?”

  “No. I don’t know. Skyler said I need to come home right now. It sounds bad.”

  “Of course. I’ll get you there as fast as I can.”

  For the moment, Other Things are completely forgotten.

  When we get to my house, I ask him to stop at the mailbox, per Sky’s instructions.

  “Are you sure you can handle it on your own?” he asks. “I’m happy to go in with you.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  Reese doesn’t look convinced. “Well, call me when you find out what’s going on.”

  “I will.” I kiss him on the cheek and wait for him to drive away.

  Then I jog up our driveway—it’s long and kind of winding, with huge oak and beech trees that block most of the house from the street. When I get halfway up, I see why Sky told me to have Reese drop me off at the road.

  There are clothes all over the front yard. Button-down shirts scattered across the grass. Gym socks in the hydrangeas. A pair of plaid boxers hangs forlornly from a dogwood tree. What the ever-loving hell.

  I look at our house, trying to locate the source of the mass laundry exodus, and I find it in a second-story window. My parents’ bedroom. The window is open, the screen is gone. My mother has her head poked out, and she’s waving a red flag. Nope, those are my dad’s swim trunks. Mama flails her arm, and the trunks end up flattening some hostas.

  “Asshole!” she yells.

  And then she spots me.

  “Oh. Not you, dear. Your father’s not going to be with us much longer.”

  Really loud, angry ’90s music pours out the window all around her silhouette. Something about reminding someone of the mess they left when they went away.

  I open the front door, and Sky flings herself at me, wrapping her arms around my neck.

  “Oh, thank goodness,” she says into my shoulder.

  “What the fuck is going on?”

  Her mouth pinches the way it always does when I swear, but she knows we’ve got bigger problems than F-bombs right now. “Daddy cheated on her,” she says, her face white.

  “Wait. WHAT?” I can’t even put those words together in any kind of way that makes sense. My dad would never—I mean, he couldn’t. My parents are happy. Like, for parents. I look at my sister as if I’ll find the answers in the scrunch of her delicate eyebrows, in the 80,000 pounds pressing down on her shoulders. The words finally fall into place. “That fucking bastard.”


  “Scarlett.”

  “Don’t tell me he’s not, Sky. I swear, I’ll—” I don’t know what I’ll do. Join Mama throwing clothes out the window? Maybe.

  “I tried to ask her if she was okay, and it just made her throw the clothes harder,” Sky whispers. “I’m not going up there again without you.”

  We climb the stairs, hand in hand, like when we were little, and the jagged voice over the speakers gets louder. Every now and then I pick up a piece of what she’s singing, and—ugh, why would you want to do that with someone in a movie theater?

  We get to the door of the bedroom. All of Daddy’s drawers are empty, and Mama has moved on to his shoes.

  “Oh, good.” She smiles brightly when she sees us. “Pack your bags, girls. We’re going to the lake.”

  She looks like she’s wearing a mask of someone else’s face—that’s how little I recognize her right now. I have about a million questions, but the only thing that comes out is “The lake house? For how long?” Are they separating? Leaving means they’re probably separating, right?

  “I don’t know. A few weeks? The whole summer? Your daddy’s a lying son of a bitch, and we are not gonna be here when he gets back.”

  Sky frowns. “Doesn’t he get back from Chicago in a few hours?”

  Mama’s head practically explodes. Her curly brown hair looks like tentacles. “From Ber. Mu. Da.” She says the syllables like shotgun bursts. Like the entire island of Bermuda has personally wounded her. “He went to Bermuda with that ho from HR with all the cat photos on her desk, and I found the receipts on his laptop.”

  Usually I would correct someone for calling someone else a ho, but sometimes you make exceptions, like when a person’s eighteen-year marriage is unraveling. “Are you sure—” I begin.

  “Yes. Yes I am sure because I found texts and pictures starting two months ago, and he’s been coming home from work at lunch and sleeping with her in our own damn bed, and apparently that’s why he was ‘sick’ the night of Skyler’s awards banquet.”

  I look at my sister in horror. She and my dad have shared this weird softball connection since practically forever.