Jonah swings his head back to down the rest of his beer—the eighth of tonight. That I’ve noted. He gives me that glare. The one I know never to try and decipher, because it can lead to anything from a wild confession of affection, to a horrible display of... I’m not sure. Distaste? Loathing? Definitely resentment. He sure knows how to keep me on my toes. We both graduated from Ocean High School West barely weeks ago, and it was he who’d pursued me for, quite literally, years at this point. You wouldn’t know it on nights like this, though.
Jonah stretches his neck, cracking it like he does when he seems stressed. Though I can’t fathom what he’d have to complain about. He doesn’t much care about anything other than surfing, drinking, and me, or so he claims, and with nothing on the agenda for the next couple of months before he leaves for culinary school and I leave for Boston, he should be content. But he never does.
He refills his beer at the keg behind the dunes, hidden from the rare prying eyes of parents or the rare beach cop on a four wheeler, and gestures it in my direction. “I don’t even have to listen to this shit from my mom. She would just fill another for herself and shut the fuck up about it. Wouldn’t kill you to take a lesson from her, Liz.”
His mom. I swallow down the small gasp and indignation. He doesn’t want me to be like her, and he knows it. He resents her. So why would he want me to drink myself stupid—after all, I’m not exactly sober—when he talks shit about her for doing exactly that. In his most vulnerable of moments, as few and far between as they are, he’s confided that it was exactly that behavior she chose over protecting him from his ex-stepdad. Before the asshole got picked up by the Atlantic Beach cops and thrown into county jail, where he belongs. Too bad they couldn’t keep him there indefinitely. But the two years he got for regularly beating the crap out of both Jonah and his mom, Marybeth, helped get him out of their lives at least. So why would he resent me for not mimicking those choices? Didn’t he tell me my maturity and “good-girl judgment” was why he loved me so much? Not that anyone could mistake me for an actual good girl.
I take an extra long drag of my cigarette, letting the menthol flavor fill my lungs and prolonging my response. I hope he will be chill tonight, regardless of how much he’s consumed tonight. Something tells me it wasn’t just beer, either. But I don’t call him out on it. I don’t want to set him off.
“I’m just tired and I want to get home. You clearly can’t drive me,” despite promising otherwise. “I’ll just walk.”
Jonah and I are what you’d call townies. Not that Atlantic West is primarily a vacation town, since there are tons of people who live here year-round, in perfectly nice, middle class homes just about forty-five minutes from New York City, depending on traffic. But then there are the Atlantic Beach Estates.
Very few of the Estates are used as primary residences. In fact, most of the owners spend most of the year in the most expensive parts of Manhattan, considering Atlantic Beach—and its semi-exclusive private beach clubs—their summer home. Some locals, like Jonah, aren't particular fans of the “summer people”, a term most people around here use without any particular connotation, but which Jonah uses with express disdain.
He thinks they’re all snobs who ruin our otherwise perfect beach town with their mere presence. And some of them do kind of suck, shoving their self-entitled attitudes in the faces of everyone in their vicinity. But mostly, our summer people are the ones looking to avoid the pretentiousness and status-obsession that’s often perceived—perhaps rightfully so, I wouldn’t know—of the famed Hamptons communities located about an hour or two east of our own. The ones who think it ridiculous to pay a thousand bucks to charter a helicopter from the city to their summer home when they can just as soon drive in the time it takes to listen to one good podcast episode. The ones who don’t believe themselves far too utterly important to, God forbid, take the Long Island Railroad, which just so happens to be one of the cleaner, safer forms of public transportation out there.
Personally, I grew up going to the Gold Coast Beach Club day camp with just as many summer people as local kids, and barely much noticed the difference until Jonah and his boys started making sure to almost constantly point them out.
Jonah’s mouth is a solid, unbroken line, and I can see in the way he clenches his prominent jaw that he is less than thrilled with my response. I’ll see you home when I’m ready to leave. I’ll let you know what then is.” He squares his shoulders, and walks the ten feet over to Stern and Jared, his best friends since I can remember, to light up yet another blunt. The smell of marijuana instantly coats the saltwater perfume, and I wonder if the two joints we all smoked earlier weren’t more than enough, considering his eyes are blood-red, not to mention barely open.
It’s times like this that I struggle to remember why, after literal years, I finally cracked and gave into dating the boy. He has his good moments, for sure, some where, for the life of me, I can’t seem to reconcile this Jonah and the one who charmed me into sneaking into Aqualina Beach Club at sixteen to hit their fancy seafood buffet, to take my very first bong hit. The one who snuck roses into my locker on Valentine’s Day, even after I turned down his date...at first. The one who laid more than one surprise candle-lit picnics on the beach, who took my virginity last July 4th under a firework sparkling sky.
This is the Jonah who can’t stand not to be in control of everything and anyone. Who needs collective attention more than he does me, the girl he swore he loved. Even if I’ve never been able to bring myself to say it back. Maybe one day, I’d thought, but it’s nights like tonight that make me see more clearly than ever why those words have never felt natural when it comes to Jonah and me, and, consequently, why they’ve never entered my heart or mind, let alone come from my lips.
I know what will happen if I bother confronting Jonah. If I start the usual standoff, where I let him know his place, and, in my unavoidable defiance, tell him exactly what I’m going to do, which is, of course, the precise opposite of what he ordered. He will stage some kind of possessive display, try to put me in my place, only to find it leads to a blow-out argument. And I’m just so over the whole dynamic.
It’s not as if I think that somehow graduating from high school has suddenly made me an adult. Poof, a diploma, and I’ve been awarded wisdom and maturity! I’m not quite that naïve.
And it sure as hell didn’t happen for Jonah, either. I just feel...tired. We’ve only been dating six months or so, but he pursued me for so long before then that I’m not sure I can even recall a time when I felt free to explore the possibility of a different relationship, or, more importantly, freedom. I guess I just feel like I know things will always be the same with him, this very same cycle, in whatever degree, and it’s not a merry-go-round I want to stay on. I know I’m not wise or anything, but the one thing I do know is that the only future I
can picture with Jonah is one ride I know is not for me.
Avoiding the unnecessary melodrama, I simply turn on my heel, not bothering to locate my flip flops, which I’m pretty sure I left by Jonah’s surf board—which he’s currently leaning on—and take the sand route back toward Arizona Avenue, where I’ve lived with my mom since my dad was killed in a drunk driving accident when I was in the ninth grade. I’ll find my shoes tomorrow, I’m sure. It’s only a few blocks away, and shoes are pretty much optional around here, anyway, and I’d rather go barefoot the rest of the summer than deal with his petty, childish, possessive bullshit.
“Hi, Rusty Girl,” my mom murmurs from the couch, fighting sleep as I stroll in through the back screen door. She looks up from her paperwork. She never could go to sleep at night until I’m home from a night out. I’m even more glad I didn’t let Jonah’s mood dictate my decision to go home or not, and at barely eleven, at least my mom will get to bed at a reasonable hour.
“Hi, Mom,” I say, grabbing the band from my strawberry-amber hair and loosening the locks of my long braid.
“Home early?”
It’s not actually all that early, or it wouldn’t be if it were during the school year. But summer is a different world here in Atlantic, and there are many nights where I don’t come home at all, sleeping in one of the cots in our or one of our friends’ cabanas at the club. In fact, there were nights when my mom stayed over, too, or hosted a sleepover of my girl friends so their parents could have a free night to themselves, which were always reciprocated by all the nights I spent staying over at Quinn or Mack’s.
But most of that changed when my dad died. Or maybe it was just me becoming a teenager. Having my own social life. Even if much of it was still with the kids of her own friends.
Mom gives me her unique look that conveys both suspicion and compassion and I blow out a sigh. She likes Jonah. She always has. She’s been friends with his parents for as long as I’ve had conscious memory, after all. The problem is, she doesn’t like Jonah for me . The problem is I’m still not sure I do, either.
I’m not quite sure I ever have.
Which is probably why I resisted his advances for so long.
I wish I could say I didn’t know what did me in. But I do. It wasn’t just his long game—his sweet words and gestures—or his lean surfer body, his mid-length dirty blonde hair with highlights that literally shimmers by Labor Day. It was those rare times he showed me the rough draft version of the boy trying to turn himself into a good man. The unguarded Jonah, sans the macho, king of the beach attitude that always made me keep a bit of distance. The boy who came straight to me when he learned that his mother was having an affair, when his dad discovered it months later and he spent a year not knowing what would become of his own family. I didn’t suffer through that limbo. One minute my dad was here, and the next, my mom was sitting me down and telling me that a third of our family—and my best friend—was gone forever. There was something heartbreaking about watching him wonder if his family would suffer the same fate as mine, even if he’d still actually have both of his parents, just not together. They worked it out in the end, or they seem to have, as far as I know, but it was Jonah’s open vulnerability, and the fact that he chose me to grace with it that made me want to give him a chance. And one chance led to the next, and to the next after that.
I run my fingers through my hair, rubbing my scalp to displace any leftover grains of sand, an old trick of beach town girls, before plopping down next to my mom on the sofa. “I’m tired.” It’s not a lie.
I had my first day of lifeguard training this morning, and while the ice-cold saltwater did its job to jolt me to life earlier, after a day in the sun, not to mention a couple of wine coolers and the aforementioned weed, I’m suddenly even more exhausted than I thought.
My mom gives me that look of empathy and skepticism, but she doesn’t press me. She’s good at communicating without saying anything, with getting her point across without putting me on the defense. She knows Jonah didn’t impress me tonight any more than she’s ever been impressed by him. But she’s always been willing to let me come to whatever conclusion I come to about him myself, and tonight is no different.