Float, page 25
I watched Lena jog back to the house and bound up the steps just as Rachel and Gummer came outside—Gummer with a bowl of salad tucked in each elbow and Rachel with several tinfoil-sealed pans stacked in her arms. It seemed it was almost time for the party to start. Jesse and Isabel were still in the house, I guess, and Alissa was running a little late, but soon, we’d all be digging in to some much-awaited and much-hyped lunch.
George rounded the pool and stopped briefly beside his wife, bending down for a moment to brush her hair off her face and over her shoulder, and then shook her gently.
It was such an intimate moment, I had to look away.
I turned to Blake, who was watching his dad and his stepmom with a slightly sour expression. I could read his face too well—the bitterness, the guilt, the hurt. It was eating at him, that he didn’t know how to get along with the new half of his family. He played it off with smooth teen angst, but I knew him too well now to not see it.
Blake Hamilton was a big, bruised softie.
Right.
Say something. Cheer him up.
“You know,” I said, nudging his side with my elbow, “today is perfect. It’s not too sunny, not too cold. There’s food. I’ve never been to a real family barbecue. You know”—oh hell, here came the nervous oversharing—“I’ve never really had real friends. And my parents would never come to something like this. This is, like, really, really cool. And there’s sweet tea and key lime pie and a bunch of other stuff I’ve never tried before—”
Blake made a choked sound.
“Waverly,” he said, very softly.
I refused to meet his eyes. Or stop talking.
“—and it’s gonna be great. Literally, the best day. Perfect.”
It was at that moment that Jesse burst through the back door and pounded down the porch steps. Isabel was seated on his shoulders, wearing the smallest white taekwondo dobok I’d ever seen and an enormous, gap-toothed grin. She had two fistfuls of Jesse’s dark curls in her tiny hands and was tugging at his hair like she was handling the reins of a horse.
But her steed didn’t look all that great.
Jesse raced across the lawn, each thump of his bare feet on the grass urging a gleeful squeal from Isabel’s tummy. He slowed to a cautious walk as he made his way around the pool (it was then that I noticed he was breathing heavily and clacking his tongue rhythmically in time with his steps, making a noise that resembled the trotting of a horse) and then came to an exaggerated halt in front of Blake and me, which he punctuated with his impression of a horse’s whinny.
Then Jesse slumped, as if exhausted, and tried to catch his breath.
“Hey, there, Secretariat,” Blake said.
Jesse held up one hand.
“Gimme—a minute,” he panted. Then, “Hey—Waverly—so glad—you made—it.”
“What’s up, Jesse?” I asked.
Isabel giggled.
“Horsie! Go!”
“Horsie no,” Jesse huffed.
“Jesse,” Blake urged, “what’s up?”
He stood up straighter again, his hands still clamped around Isabel’s little ankles, and shook his head at Blake.
“Alissa’s here,” he said. “With her mom—”
Blake wrinkled his nose.
“Ugh,” he groaned. “The supermodel. Well, I guess we can try to wrestle up some diet soda or something. Or maybe she can have a wet piece of lettuce to eat—”
But Jesse was still shaking his head.
“—and her dad,” he added, ominously.
Blake’s spatula clattered to the ground.
Chapter 20
The Hastings arrived at the barbecue in three separate cars, each worth more than a year’s tuition at a private liberal arts college, which was the first warning sign that things had taken a turn for the shitty.
Blake, upon hearing that his ex-girlfriend’s parents were in the vicinity, promptly attempted to strangle himself with the ties on his novelty bikini-girl apron. At least, that’s what it looked like he was doing, given how violently he was struggling to get the thing off.
“Calm down,” I snapped as I tried to undo the knots with my fingernails. “Would you stop moving? You’re going to choke yourself.”
He let out a single panicked laugh.
“That’s a great idea, actually. Quick. No one’s looking.”
I huffed and smacked him on the back of the head.
Ugh. His hair’s softer than mine. How’s that fair?
“Don’t joke like that,” I told him. “It’s not funny. And what am I missing? What’s so bad about Alissa’s dad?”
“It’s not her dad,” Blake said, shaking his head. “It’s her mom and dad together. They’re—”
They’re here. On the back porch.
I’d missed the first warning sign. The second was that Alissa’s mother looked like an Instagram model. She was a walking embodiment of the sponsored post on your feed that you don’t really want to see because it reminds you that your last vacation was spent on your couch and also you are, in the grand scheme of things, not very pretty. Her hair was dark and blown out in perfect curls, and her eyeliner was so sharp it could’ve slit a man’s throat.
She didn’t smile, and she’d brought her own bottle of rosé and didn’t look like she was going to share it.
Then there was the last red flag of the day. Alissa’s father, the founder and owner of Hastings Yachts, had shown up to a casual family barbecue wearing white linen pants, a white button-down shirt, crocodile leather shoes, and a Rolex watch nearly the size of my fist. He barely came up to my shoulder when we stood on level ground, but he had the ego and the bank account of LeBron James, so he carried himself like he was closer to seven feet tall than to four.
Standing between them on the back porch was Alissa, whose face was blank in a way that screamed I am dissociating.
Jesse and Lena’s mother, Boss—who was both the host of the party and the bravest matriarch at the family barbecue—welcomed the Hastings without batting an eyelash.
“Penelope!” She greeted Alissa’s mother just loudly enough for me to hear from across the yard. “It’s been months. You look phenomenal, as always. What’ve you been up to?”
“I’ve been doing business abroad,” Penelope replied shortly.
“We’re glad you could make it,” Boss said, smile unwavering as she turned her attention to Alissa’s father. “And you must be Santiago! It’s wonderful to finally meet you. I feel like I know you already—your daughter’s told me so much about you.”
Santiago Hastings cocked one eyebrow.
“Has she?” he drawled.
Blake was still very tense beside me, despite the fact that he was no longer wearing an apron with cartoon boobs on it, and had resorted to giving his undivided attention to the grill.
“You’re going to burn the burgers,” I whispered.
He hummed noncommittally.
“Blake,” I whispered again and set my hand on his bicep.
The tension in his shoulder eased almost immediately (which was kind of flattering and made my heart feel all melty). He leaned into my touch and sighed.
“Her parents suck,” he grumbled.
I scoffed, and because I was both painfully oblivious to all the ominous warning signs and blissfully optimistic, I squeezed Blake’s arm and said, “They can’t possibly be that bad.”
I totally jinxed it.
Boss called us all to come take a seat at the two folding tables that’d been set up end to end across the length of the back porch. There was enough food to feed half of Holden—turkey wraps and chicken wings and zucchini fries and pie and chocolate chip cookies and grilled vegetables and burgers and hot dogs and literally every variation of salad that I could think of—and the whole setup was large enough that we probably could’ve seated twenty people comfortably. This all proved deeply ironic, given that there were just thirteen of us and we somehow managed to achieve the exact opposite of a comfortable dining experience.
Blake and I had to make two trips to the table to transport all the platters of meat and grilled vegetables. On our return lap, halfway back to the grill, he started dragging his feet a little. I shot him a look—an eyebrows-raised You good? kind of look—and he responded by grimacing like he might actually throw up.
“Sit next to me,” he whispered in a tone that suggested this was life or death and not hot dog or hamburger. “Please.”
I chuckled in a way that retrospectively makes me want to kick myself in the face just a tiny bit and bumped my hip against his.
But by the time we got back to the porch, everyone else had taken a seat and started filling their paper plates. Two chairs remained. They were at a diagonal across the table from each other—not far, given the size of the table, but still not, like, together. Blake and I exchanged a quick glance before taking these seats. I was a bit disappointed. Blake, on the other hand, looked like the world had come to an end.
I watched him slump in his chair and wished, more than ever, that I had a cell phone so we could communicate privately. He looked like he could use a meme.
“Dig in, everybody!” Boss informed the table.
And so the barbecue began—memeless and with a great deal of obvious discomfort for the majority of parties involved.
I sat at the center on one side of the table. To my right, George and Aunt Rachel debated the pros and cons of using different brands of waterproof exterior paint on window trim—a topic so obscure and mundane that I was sure they’d started talking about the first thing they could come up with just to break the awkward silence. Across from them sat Gummer, who was listening far too intently to their paint debate. Then there was Blake, who’d consumed four glasses of sweet tea in quick succession out of sheer discomfort.
To my left, Isabel—still dressed in Lena’s old taekwondo outfit—jumped between the laps of Jesse and Chloe, who were comparing notes on schools in the district. Across from the future PTA stars sat Lena and Boss, who were both loading potato salad on their cheeseburgers in what was clearly an old and beloved mother-daughter ritual. Directly across from me sat Alissa, who kept one hand shielded over her manicured eyebrows and squinted like the sun was blinding, even though it was so overcast I was half expecting it to rain.
I could see it in her posture; she was mortified.
Her parents clearly hadn’t come to the barbecue together because they wanted some quality family time. Penelope and Santiago had chosen to sit at the opposite ends of the table, facing each other, and did little else but glare and set down their plastic cutlery with unnecessary force for the sheer dramatic effect.
Everyone at the table felt the heat of their mutual hatred and was withering under it, unsure what to do. Twice, Boss tried to start a tablewide conversation to cut through the awkwardness. Twice, she failed. Then Chloe tried her hand.
“I absolutely love your dress, Penelope.”
“I do too,” Alissa’s mother replied, eyes fixed resolutely on her ex-husband. She took a long sip of rosé and said nothing else.
Emboldened by this tiny measure of progress, Gummer turned to Santiago and attempted some similar small talk.
“You’re in the boating business, I hear,” he said.
“Yachting,” Santiago corrected brusquely, then turned to fix the glare he’d been giving his wife on Gummer. “I hear that your son is dating my daughter.”
Beside me, Jesse gasped, then coughed, then made a gagging noise. When I turned, his eyes were watery and he had a wet grape in his palm.
“I think I inhaled this,” he wheezed, then set the grape back on his plate gingerly.
“Daddy—” Alissa groaned.
“It’s true, isn’t it?” Santiago insisted.
Gummer looked at Jesse, who was a bit red but had managed to dislodge the grape from his windpipe, and then back at the short, leathery man at the end of the table.
“Well, yes,” he admitted, “I think they’re hanging out.”
“And your son,” Santiago began, looking Jesse up and down. “He’s a senior this year, too, I presume. What’s his sport? Has he had any scholarship offers yet?”
There was a brief silence in which no one at the table seemed to know how to handle this inquiry. And for one brilliant and horrible moment, I realized that Alissa Hastings and I had the very same brand of parents, even if hers looked like they’d stepped out of a perfume advertisement set on the Amalfi Coast and mine were probably wearing parkas zipped up to their noses while their glasses frosted over.
“He surfs,” I spoke up. “And he’s really good.”
Penelope laughed, and it was exactly the kind of laugh you’d imagine belonging to a woman getting hammered by herself at a family barbecue while her ex-husband picked fights with his daughter’s new boyfriend.
“Mom, please,” Alissa moaned.
“I’m on your side, darling,” Penelope said. “You don’t need to land a professional athlete just yet. You’re young. Enjoy yourself.”
Santiago barked out a cruel laugh.
“Oh, I think she’s enjoying herself plenty.”
Several things happened at once.
Rachel, who had the same wide-eyed look she got when shit hit the fan on one of her reality shows, gasped audibly. Blake, who’d just polished off his fifth glass of sweet tea, pushed back his chair and stumbled over an excuse with the word bathroom somewhere in it before darting inside the house and slamming the screen door behind him. And Jesse, who’d only just recovered from inhaling a grape, looked even more distressed than he had during his episode of accidental asphyxiation.
“Leave her alone,” he said, his voice stronger than I’d ever heard it.
Santiago arched an eyebrow. “This one has a spine, eh? That’s a minor improvement over the last.” He tipped his head toward Blake’s vacated chair.
“Mr. Hastings,” George cut in, sounding so stern that the entire table went silent, “I think it’s time for you to go.”
It was all such a familiar routine—the backhanded compliments, the accusations of moral debauchery and personal failures—but something about George’s interruption made me feel like I was watching it all from a new angle. Alissa’s parents were children. My parents were children too. Big, overgrown children who’d never learned how to keep their conflicts and ego trips from hurting others. And it wasn’t Alissa’s fault, and it wasn’t my fault, and everyone else at the table could recognize how utterly selfish and destructive they were being.
Santiago’s eyes narrowed. “Excuse me?”
I saw what happened next out of the corner of my eye, for the most part. At the other end of the table, Penelope downed the last bit of rosé in her plastic cup, poured herself a refill, then stood abruptly, knocking her chair back, before tossing the full cup across the length of the table with a precision and grace that could’ve made Tom Brady fall to his knees and shed a tear.
The cup collided with her ex-husband’s chest, its contents splattering across his crisp white shirt and pants, staining them like a Jackson Pollock.
Isabel, who was propped up on Chloe’s knee, cackled.
“Mom!” Alissa cried. “Oh my God, would you chill?”
Santiago wiped a drop of rosé from his cheek.
“See, mija? This is where you get your dramatics,” he said evenly. Then, with a surprising amount of pride for a man covered in the drink of choice of nine out of ten Real Housewives, he stood from the table and stormed inside the house. Thirty seconds later, we heard a car engine roar to life.
“Good riddance,” Penelope murmured.
I glanced across the table at Alissa. Her hands covered either side of her face as she hunched over her plate full of untouched food, so I was the only person at the table who could see the anguish on her face. It was more than just humiliation. It was the kind of pain a child feels when her parents have let her down, irredeemably and unapologetically. I knew what that looked like, because I’d felt it. When Alissa stood abruptly and tore down the porch steps and across the lawn, I slapped my napkin onto the table and stood too.
Lena pushed her chair back to follow me.
“Let me talk to her,” I said.
Lena scrutinized me for a moment, looking torn. “Don’t be funny. She’s got no sense of humor when she’s upset. You’ve gotta compliment her hair, and then remind her she got a five on the AP bio exam and—”
“Lena,” I interrupted. “I’ve got this.”
She pressed her lips together tightly and nodded.
I turned and padded down the porch steps. Alissa was already across the yard, sitting on the ledge of the bean-shaped pool with her feet in the water and her back to the house. I marched across the grass and tried to think of an opening line that wasn’t a joke. Which was tough, because humor was kind of my go-to coping method.
Alissa sighed and sniffed when she heard my footsteps approaching. I plopped down on the cobblestone pavement with all the grace of a wet sponge, scooted forward until I was sitting next to her, and threw off my flip-flops to stick my feet in the water.
The pool was cold—way too cold to be enjoyable, much less comfortable, given the overcast skies and cool breezes.
“This weather sucks,” I blurted.
Nailed it, I thought. Just absolute slam dunk. Home run. Everyone else go home.
I fought the urge to dunk my head in the pool and inhale.
But beside me, Alissa barked out a laugh.
“It’s the worst,” she spat, kicking her foot out and splashing water across the width of the pool. Her toenails were painted robin’s egg blue, the color the sky should’ve been. “Fuck this whole tropical storm thing. It’s August. Where’s the fucking sun?”
“Yeah,” I agreed, because she seemed pretty fired up.
