Killer Swell

9

“I lied,” Kate Crier had said to me.

It was a July night, two months after our high school graduation. We were sitting on a bench on the boardwalk on Catalina Island. We’d had dinner at a small Italian place, near the casino at the north end of the island.

I didn’t know what she was talking about.

“What?” I said. “You lied?”

She took a deep breath and brushed the blond bangs from her tan forehead.

“You asked me earlier if I was alright,” she said. “When we got off the ferry. And I said I was.”

I was puzzled. “And you’re not?”

Kate looked at me, her green eyes sad. She was trying to smile but it wasn’t reaching her face.

“No,” she said. “I’m not.”

We sat there quietly for a few minutes, watching the people stroll up and down the walk, their sunburnt faces glowing in the evening air. They looked comfortable, carefree, happy to be on an island off the coast of southern California. Everything that, at that moment, I was not.

“So what’s wrong?” I finally asked.

Kate folded her arms across her chest, tugging at the sleeves of her white cotton blouse. She turned to me, but her eyes were just missing my face.

“Us, Noah,” she said. “Us is what’s wrong.”

Any time a girl breaks up with you, it’s painful. Always. But it may never be more painful than when you hear it for the first time.

I leaned back into the stone bench. “What’s wrong with us?”

She looked away for a moment, biting down on her bottom lip.

“I’m leaving next week,” she said.

“I know. So?”

She turned back to me. “So what happens then?”

I shrugged. “You get on a plane and go to Princeton?”

She frowned, faint lines of irritation tying up around her eyes. “Noah, you know what I’m talking about.”

“No, I don’t,” I said. “We came over here to have dinner and spend the night at your family’s place. Now you’re telling me there’s a problem. Between us.” I paused. “Kate, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She let out a sigh and shook her head. “Fine. I’m going to the other side of the country. You’re staying here. How does that work?”

I shifted on the bench. “I don’t know.”

“I don’t either,” she said. “And that’s the problem.”

“That’s a problem with location. Not with us.”

She glanced at a group of junior high school kids ambling by, talking loudly and laughing. She looked back at me.

“We’re eighteen,” Kate said. “We’re going in different directions.”

Her words stung me. It didn’t matter to me if they were true. They hurt. And I didn’t like the feeling.

“Your mother write that speech for you?” I asked.

She rolled her eyes. “You know better.”

“Sounds like her,” I said. “All of a sudden, we aren’t compatible because you’re going to live in another state? That sounds exactly like her, Kate.”

We sat there quietly for a few minutes. Her parents had been a sore spot during the entire year we’d been together. They didn’t approve of their daughter dating someone who wasn’t going to an Ivy League school and whose family was dysfunctional at best. I hadn’t made it any easier by playing the surly, disaffected teen. We had put Kate in a difficult spot. And until that moment on Catalina, she’d always chosen me.

“Maybe it does sound like her,” Kate finally said. “But maybe she’s right, Noah.”

“She’s right about me, you mean.”

“That’s not what I meant and you know it,” she said. “But is it realistic to think that we’re gonna stay together over the next four years, three thousand miles apart?”

I turned and looked at her, her eyes tearing into the heart that she had created.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I never thought we wouldn’t try.”

Her eyes fluttered, maybe surprised by what I said. She bit her bottom lip again. Tears formed at the corners of her eyes.

“Noah,” she started, but choked up and stopped.

I looked away, my throat tightening.

She cleared her throat and tried again. “Noah, they won’t…” Her voice trailed off.

The smell of popcorn wafted in the air from somewhere down the boardwalk. That same smell would forever evoke an unpleasant reaction in my gut.

“They won’t what?” I asked, turning to her.

The tears were now rolling down her cheeks, dancing off her face and into her lap. She shook her head, her lips pressed together. The pain in her face answered my question.

“They won’t let you go to Princeton,” I said for her, “unless you cut me loose.”

She nodded quickly, a sharp sob escaping from her mouth.

I leaned forward, resting my elbows on my knees, my brain numb. Her parents had played the toughest card. Me or her future. She’d tried to do it herself without laying the blame on her parents, trying to save me the embarrassment of being a black mark on her life.

“It’s not fair,” she mumbled.

“No, it’s not,” I said. “But that’s your parents.”

We sat there, not looking at one another for a while. Over the years, I would come to realize that it was a no-brainer of a choice for too many reasons to run through. But at that moment, my second-place finish filled me with unfettered bitterness.

I stood up and shoved my hands into the pockets of my shorts. “You gotta go to Princeton.”

“I don’t have to,” she said, trying to hold the sobs in her chest. “I could figure out another way to go, without their help.”

We both knew that wasn’t true, not at that point in our lives. And I knew, somewhere in my mind, that Kate wanted to go to Princeton. She wouldn’t say it and I couldn’t admit it, but even then, I think, I knew it was true.

“It’s okay,” I told her, turning to her. “You need to go.”

She looked at me, the rims of her eyes red. “We don’t have to tell them. We can still be together. Call each other, you can come visit, I’ll see you when I come home.”

I shrugged. “We can’t hide from them forever. They’ll know. They always do.” I shook my head. “And what if they did find out? You come home for a break or something and they won’t send you back.” I shook my head again. “Not worth it, Kate.”

She looked at me, frustrated, upset, knowing I was right. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just…I don’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to say to you.”

My chest felt like it was being squeezed. “You said it fine. I get it.”

“I’m sorry, Noah,” she said, her tears spilling onto the concrete of the sidewalk.

“Me, too,” I said.

I turned and headed up the walk. I heard her call behind me, probably wondering where I was going, since we’d planned to spend the night. But it was easy to lose her voice in the commotion of the evening revelers. I was heading to the dock to catch the last ferry. I didn’t turn around because I couldn’t look at her, couldn’t spend one more minute with her if we couldn’t be together the way I wanted to be together.

And she didn’t come after me.

If I’d known that was the last time I’d see her alive, I would’ve turned around. Maybe I would’ve even taken on her parents. But I didn’t know that. You can’t ever know that. So I kept walking, hoping that the feeling in my chest that was squeezing tears out of my eyes would eventually go away.