Forget You(4)
Author: Jennifer Echols

The smell of smoke startled me. I hoped my dad wasn’t smoking in the apartment, because my mom was allergic. I shoved the sweater box back under my bed, zipped my suitcases, and hauled them into the den.

The apartment door was wide open, letting the air-conditioning out, making room for the warm night air my dad had just smoked. He stood over my mom’s desk, reading her note with his nostrils flared again.

"I’m ready." I left one suitcase for him and wheeled the other past him and out the door, hoping to distract him from what he’d already seen. He followed me. I pulled the door shut behind me and locked it. When I turned around, he held his hand out.

I looked up at him, puzzled. "The key? Why?"

"Because you’re a teenager," he said, "and I’m your father."

I didn’t like the finality of it, or the implication that I was a wild child who couldn’t be trusted with the key to an empty apartment. But a part of me was grateful my dad was taking charge. I wiggled the key off the ring and held it out to him. He didn’t notice. He was looking at the screen on his phone.

"Dad."

He pocketed my key but kept his phone in his hand as he wheeled my suitcase around to the open trunk of the Benz. After hefting both suitcases inside and slamming the trunk, he opened the driver’s door. He nodded toward my Bug. "Y ou’re bringing your car, right? I’ll see you at home."

Home. He meant the house on the beach. I hadn’t been back there since my mom and I had left. He had joint custody of me, but I figured we saw enough of each other every day at work. Besides, Ashley had gleefully warned me that if I ever did want to visit, the house was a mess. She was having the kitchen remodeled.

I did not want to follow my dad back there right now. I pictured myself in my old bedroom, staring out the window at the ocean I couldn’t see in the black night, wondering what was happening to my mom. I had stared at white emergency room doors for hours tonight. Panic at what she had done rushed through me like pain to my numb fingertips when I warmed them inside on a rare cold winter day. I could not sit in that bedroom tonight, wincing at my heavy heartbeat. There was just so much I could take.

"Actually," I said, "if you don’t want anyone in town to know about Mom, there’s a beach party I need to go to tonight, the last blowout of the year. If I’m not there, my friends will want to know why." The Slide with Clyde employees had thrown beach parties all summer. Tonight’s party was special because today, Labor Day, had been our last day of work. Slide with Clyde had closed for the season. This much was true.

It was not true that my friends expected me at the party. They expected me to stay home with my mom. Some days when I came home from work, she seemed energetic as ever. Better, even. But most days she hardly ate dinner, and she went to bed early. In the last couple of weeks she’d complained that she couldn’t sleep. I’d suggested that she didn’t need twelve hours. Her response was to ask for those sleeping pills from her doctor. Now I wondered whether she’d had suicide in mind all along. I had worried about her all summer, so I’d stayed home from my friends’ parties, not that it had done any good.

Tonight I would go.

My dad nodded absently, sinking into the driver’s seat of the Benz.

"I may be out late," I warned him. "Is that okay? I know I have school tomorrow–"

He closed the door of the Benz and started the engine, already thinking of someone else. 2 My friends’ beach parties were as starlit and romantic as the ones on TV and in movies, except there was no bonfire. Fires and bright lights weren’t allowed on the beach because they disoriented the endangered sea turtles. Dozens of teenagers invaded the city beach park, guzzling beer in the sand and heavy-petting in the parking lot, but as long as they didn’t mess with the turtles, nobody seemed to care.

I’d popped in and out of a few of these with my friends Keke and Lila when we were younger and didn’t dare stay long at a party full of seniors. Now we were the seniors. I parked the Bug in the crowded lot near Keke and Lila’s rusty Datsun and Brandon’s laughably large 1980s Buick. I was curious, but I tried not to peer through a few steamed-up windows in familiar cars. Then I crossed the wooden bridge over the scrub and sand dunes to the beach.

Ours was not the only party. Circles of teenagers stood in the sand or sat on towels in the darkness, sipping beer. I recognized the Slide with Clyde party by Keke and Lila’s laughter cackling above the roar of the ocean and the wails of a boy band on a radio. I kicked off my flip-flops at the foot of the wooden stairs, crossed the sand glowing white in the starlight, waded into the surf, and put one hand on each of their backs.

They turned around with wide eyes. "Zoey!" they both squealed at once as they rushed me, splashing water up on my shorts. They both jumped up and down and hugged me too but Lila stopped soon and gave me some air, whereas Keke did not let go until I said, "Okay," and pressed her shoulders to stop the bouncing. It was clear to me which one was drinking tonight and which was the designated driver. They were twins–not identical, but they might as well have been, the way they finished each other’s sentences. They did look similar, both petite with bright red hair, but from there they diverged.

Keke put on the first clothes she found on the bedroom floor, whether they were hers or Lila’s, dirty or clean. I had seen her do it. Lila handled the personal upkeep better, though she obsessed about it until she looked like a parody of a girl. Tonight her hair was hot-rolled and pinned and overfixed for a windy beach party. I had told them they both looked so extreme because they were trying to differentiate themselves from each other. If they’d relaxed and settled for the happy medium, even if that meant looking alike, boys would have asked them out more. They did not listen to me. If there had been one of them, they might have taken me seriously, but it was hard to give unsolicited advice to two people at once, because they could drown you out with protests. They told me they could never be as pretty as me, so my advice meant nothing. I started to explain that looking like I did took work, and my mother had taught me this in turn–but they shut me down.

Tonight it was impossible to tell there had ever been any tension or unwanted advice between us. "I can’t believe you’re here!" Keke squealed. "It took the whole summer, but for once the whole swim team is at the Slide with Clyde party!"

She gestured to the circle standing behind her–Stephanie Wetzel and the other three junior girls on the team, plus lots of boys. They all waved at me and called, "Zoey’s here!"

"Wait," Keke said. "We gained you, but we lost–"

A distant boat horn cut her off. The lights of a fishing boat and their reflections skimmed parallel to each other across the blackness of the ocean and the sky.