I knew I was in love with Verona Cove on the first day, but I waited until the seventh day to commit.
This is why I want to stay forever, not just for the summer
Everything is clean but not totally pristine, like every inch of town is lived in and loved.
A world of male shepherds trained to rip out a criminal’s throat, and he named his regal girl for what she is: their equal.
“As I understand it,” I say, trying to sound academic, “it’s an untranslatable word. Wabi can mean rustic or stark or transient. Sabi is like . . . faded. Or fading. Old. Together, I guess it’s like seeing beauty in simplicity and nature. In fleeting moments and even in decay.”
Turning my back to the Pacific, I start toward the pottery shop. I can’t imagine a better summer job. I don’t have to wear a uniform, and I get to watch people create art, which is almost voyeuristic—a glimpse at the bare soul. Magic, I tell you. Magic.
Everything about my dad was big. His height, his laugh, his personality. Now I look at pictures of the eight of us and, when I imagine him not there, the whole picture is off balance. And so are we.
On the good days, I know it’s a matter of time before she wakes up. On the bad days, I think I’m watching her die in slow motion.
There’s no point in guilt-tripping. She can’t make herself feel better. I can’t make her feel better—none of us can. The least we can do is not make it worse.
It makes me believe my mom when she says Richard may be a gajillionaire businessman, but he also has a very deep soul—like a tide pool with a drop-off you wouldn’t expect from such a serene surface.
She’s the captain, steering at a glass bow that points seaward. She’s been working on this same painting since she first set eyes on this glorious view, and my instinct is that it is almost done.
The painting is an abstract, like tangled ribbons of color all over the canvas. Most of her pieces look, to the untrained eye, like a total mess. A joyful, colorful, total mess. It is not so hard to see how she made me, too.
I hate to be reminded, and I hate that she still thinks about it. I don’t think about it—at least, barely, because I don’t see the point in reliving the bad parts of your life. Earlier this year, I got too low. And then too high. They put me on medicine that pulled me out of my rabbit hole, and one of the side effects was weight gain. That’s why my mom is being suspicious and suggestive and unfair.
I try to do this thing when I get upset, when I start to float upward in a rage: I push all my anger down my arms. And then I snap my fingers, with both hands, trying to crush those feelings. The sound, the feel of that snap. Sometimes it brings me back to earth.
I feel oddly out of touch with my own self, that I don’t know what I used to be. Or, apparently, who I used to be. “I must be new to the world.”
I don’t know if you’ve ever sprawled out in a wide-open field and stared up at the blue sky and felt the planet humming all around you, but that’s what my days feel like here. The world moves a few paces slower—so slowly that my movement feels like zipping, like crackling energy through the streets.
I’m going to spend my whole summer changing the expressions on Jonah Daniels’s face.
The next morning, I go about business as usual: throw a pill into the ocean, feel the breeze on my face, and thank the constellations that I can feel things.
The first bite reveals a bit of balsamic vinegar somewhere and a sprinkle of salt, against the near-sweet tomato and the freshness of the basil. It’s heavenly and hearty and somehow creamy. And I feel . . . cared for. Like part of a family. What a simple need, to eat—and to have someone prepare a meal for me with such care, such love? It’s like I can taste it.
There’s a flutter in my chest and wet handprints on my shirt where he touched my waist, and this warm, glowing sense that I’m not nearly as in control of this situation as I believed. The feeling rises in tiny champagne bubbles, fizzy and sweet and full.
Movies make it seem like the first kiss is the big deal, and it is. Hell yeah, it is. But they never tell you about the pressure for the second kiss—all that time to think and build up expectations. What it will be like when you see each other again.
When we leave the theater, the world has gone dark around us.
Here is something I never expected to feel: love at first sight for an entire family. But life surprises you. It tells you to close your eyes and blow out the candles, and then sometimes smashes your face into the cake before you can even make a wish. But! Sometimes, every once in a while, you get your wish in. You wish for a boy to spend the summer with, and instead life gives you his whole beautiful family.
He’s always reading their moods and needs, and it’s only once in a while that I catch his eyes on me. But when I do, he gives me a slow smile, like we’re both in on a secret. Jonah Daniels and his gaze are enough to make a girl feel like she emerged from a huge seashell in the middle of the ocean, like the painting of Venus, surrounded by sea foam. And maybe I did; I don’t remember being born, and I wouldn’t put it past my painter-mother to pull it off.
Oh, how I’d love to be eternal in one life. “I’m just looking for some kind of permanence, so my mark will linger on the world once I’m gone, in the places where I found joy.
There. Right there. Some kind of pain is pressing itself into Jonah’s skin—a cigarette burn for each time he thinks of it—and I am ready to know what it is. The anticipation of being alone together grows like steam in the air. But that heat is not why I need to get him alone—at least, not at first. It’s because I want to know if he’s ready to tell me about the pulsing sadness that I feel in this beautiful family, an undercurrent beneath us.
Jonah is a truly beautiful boy—that gorgeous hair and olive skin and strong arms from carrying groceries and his little sister. He has those deep, dark eyes that show he carries a lot of heavy things inside himself, too.
But what I mean is, depression, it settles like a shadow over your body while you sleep, and it mutes every frequency into blankness, into fog. Everyone thinks you can’t laugh when you’re depressed, but I couldn’t cry either, because I couldn’t feel.
“I’m not scared of the dark places.”
So we stay there above the town, being here and being now, until the last possible moment. Until the last scrap of sunbeam lights our path back across the roof and through the door and into whatever happens next.
A single yellow flag beats against the ocean wind, and the sky stretches for every mile of ocean, and then longer and farther. We’re the only people as far as the eye can see, and all the world feels like a private show, screened on the endless black sky. The universe is unfurling its whole self to us, arms wide and beckoning.
The water hits the hem of my nightgown, and now my whole lower half feels supported. Ah yes, my soul knows this feel of submersion, of fluidity and bottomless freedom.
Jonah looks at me like I’m absolutely off my rocker. Or maybe it’s a look of amazement, like I’m a whole galaxy, glittering and vast and unchartered. But then he smiles in this way that makes me feel known. And now I can’t think of anything but snacking on black cherries at the beach earlier today. The way he licked the juice off his lower lip.
Jonah’s eyes are more open than before—but not in height or width. In depth. Like he’s more awake.
I expect to feel triumphant, but all I can do is stare back, clinging on to him still. My vision tilts, perspective shifting like everything I see is now one degree different—finally clicked into place. Like an opera singer onstage who believes she is the performer, only to find the orchestra—its earnestness, its unexpected soul—nearly moving her to tears. You mean to give, and find yourself taking and taking, soaking it in. “All right, fine.” Jonah grins as he takes my hand, and we run into deeper waters, gasping at the cold and the beauty.
When running along the beach, I listen to metal. I used to hate the sound of all that screaming, but now it helps. It usually drowns out my thoughts, but not today.
I needed to run in a place where memories don’t fill my peripheral vision, the ghosts of who we used to be watching me like marathon spectators.
Happy? I thought. I’m nowhere freaking close to happy. Happy is a distant continent. I was thrashing in the storm. Sarah didn’t understand anything about my life. I hated being hustled out of pain I earned.
My life still sucked. But at least it felt like mine again.
Without giving me even a moment to prepare, she leaps onto me, locking her arms around my neck. She kisses me like someone with failing lungs, like her only source of oxygen is me.
“You don’t want to make changes to something that was your dad’s. Because then you’d be admitting that there are imperfections to his work here and, by extension, that he had imperfections, too. And I get that; I honestly do. But you’re not dismantling his work if you’re adding to it. You’re helping a dream grow more, not cutting it down.”
A nightmare, a memory. A thing can be both.
White, white, white. The emptiness of it aches.
But I’m better now. I’m best, even! Besides, I still take my other pill because that one keeps the shadow creatures at bay. Last year, they curled their inky arms around me until my Technicolor world became crackling gray static. Until I felt nothing but blankness.
When I kiss him, it’s like a sedative, a warm feeling that rushes through my whole body and soothes my busy brain.
“It really does. The first kind they gave me was a nightmare.” That first kind set me off, untethered me and sent me flying. It began the windstorm. “But this one . . . I feel like myself still, on it.”
I told you, Jonah: I’m not intimidated by other people’s pain.”
To the deepest, most cellular level of my being, I resent people who believe that depression is the same as weakness, that “sad” people must be coddled like helpless toddlers.
My dark days made me strong. Or maybe I already was strong, and they made me prove it.
I’ll drive it all the way back to Verona Cove, and I will speed past Jonah Daniels, as living proof that sad people can do anything. Living proof that we can ride again, better than before.
*She has no idea. She was there, but she has no idea how scary it got—like my brain, my body, my whole life was on fast-forward and I couldn’t push stop or even pause. How low it got after, living with what had happened. And then how numb. How much I missed feeling music in my bones.
I remember so much of it, and I would surrender my best vintage sewing patterns to forget. My mom doesn’t know the worst of it because I’ve never told her, because saying it out loud would be reliving it, because I know she’d never look at me the same way again.*
“Honestly, Jonah, I don’t know how you can live in the same house as someone who is heartbroken without sensing it. I’ve known since the first night I met Naomi, obviously, because I can smell heartbreak on a person. It smells like incense, sweet but burning.”
I sit by myself without even looking around for someone else to talk to. I had weird motivations for coming here tonight. It wasn’t to have fun. I guess I wanted to represent my family. Like, look, we’re okay. Two of us are here. I even have a girlfriend. But all that feels stupid now. We’re not okay, and there’s no point in pretending. By the time I finish my beer, I’m ready to go home. I’ve made an appearance; I’ve said hi. I don’t have a happy face, but even my I’m-okay face is tired.
In the movies, the music always starts up right about now, slowly louder with a solid beat. When a girl sneaks into your bedroom, it’s surprisingly quiet. But everything sounds loud for fear of being caught—mouths against skin, pieces of clothing dropping to the floor. Heavy breathing and the drone of the thought, This is happening, this is happening. And eventually the sound of your own voice asking, Are you sure? What you get in return is, apparently, a muffled giggle and the words, Yes. God, you’re so cute. It kills me. You try not to think that it seems so casual for her. You try to convince yourself you feel the same. But you don’t. Your feelings fill the room like an angry fire. Your feelings for her could blow the glass out of the windows.
For two weeks after the bonfire, everything I paint is midnight and gold and maroon and ballet-slipper pink. Passionate and deep and metallic.
*Fingers pinching the top of the card, I’m tempted to rip it to scrap paper. But Ruby would never create something to make me feel guilty. Only to feel loved. Still, the guilt pushes through my veins, roiling and acidic and spreading, spreading.
After last March, I knew I didn’t deserve friends like that—I didn’t deserve friends at all, when all I did was betray them.*
For one night, I want my wings back. But not the wings of a mighty bird, beating powerfully enough to make noise against the air. I want to drift dreamily in the breeze, to let the wind direct me. I know, I know: butterflies are used in bad metaphors about metamorphosis, about bursting forth from a cocoon, born again and in flight. But I’m not dressing as a butterfly to prove that my caterpillar days are behind me—no. No symbolism. It is enough to choose things for their beauty.
The word is a hush against the night. For all the joy that tonight’s dinner gave me, all the fullness and humanity and communing, this is something else entirely. I’m at the bow of the terrestrial Earth, steering straight toward the cosmos. I’m watched over by the dove-gray moon, his gentle head bowed, and I have to wonder if this is ygen, profound beauty in the natural world—so subtle that it calls up a feeling of wonder without naming it. The word has no English counterpart and neither does this feeling, so I stand witness to the universe without any thought but enjoying my front-row seat.
“Yes, I suppose it is possible. Because I miss your dad sometimes, even though I never met him. I feel like I know him a little, like if I collect fragments of the six of you and tape them together, there he is: a mosaic of your pieces.”
Jonah looks at me so admiringly, and my heart bounces like a pinball from my stomach to my throat to either side of my rib cage. I know I am something special—I know that I am because I am trying to be, and it is nice to be seen, the way I see him.
I face the ocean, and he wraps both of his arms around me, chin on my shoulder. I have this feeling that if we fell forward into the water, hanging on to Jonah would buoy me, drag me back up to the surface.
We are together for now, above the choppy black water and the flicking white waves, and it is enough.
This is where I am, somewhere between the night’s total darkness and the light’s utter brilliance, and I grin as I dance and the night wind kicks up Jonah’s hair. The glow of my birthday candles and the fairy lights would have been more than enough. But Jonah Daniels? He lit up my whole world. Even the constellations can see us now: we are seventeen and shattered and still dancing. We have messy, throbbing hearts, and we are stronger than anyone could ever know.
We stand there pressed together for a while until it is no longer my birthday. I think about boats, how they’re powerful but so delicate compared to the fickle sea. I think about lighthouses, about safe mooring and how easy it is to crash. I think about love and what I deserve and how I’m trying to accept everything the universe is giving me.
“I really do,” she agrees. “And I love math because there’s always a right answer. It’s not interpretive; it’s not subjective. There is a correct destination, even if you have to hack through confusing parts to get there. That’s not always true in life.”
I have much bigger concerns floating all around me like the clouds in the sky down the coastline and we’re drifting, drifting.
I know this feeling. I also know that emotions come from the brain. So why do people feel real aches in their chests? Why does it feel like we carry every feeling in our cores?
The heart is such a strange little beast—a lump of thick muscle with pipes sticking out. Sometimes I think my heart is made of rubber, and the world stretches it and twists so that it writhes in my chest and aches. This is why I have spent most of my time on this planet here but hurting. Sometimes I think a heart of porcelain would be easier. Let it drop out of my rib cage and break on the floor, no heartbeat, the end. Instead, I get a bouncy heart that bleeds when the world claws at it but keeps beating through the pain.
He says these words even in his sleep, like he has said them so often that it’s his mouth’s default sentiment. All this pain in his life, all this care he doles out to everyone else. And yet he still cracks his broken heart open even wider—wide enough to fit me, too. I wonder how much this must hurt him, the toll it must take to give more of himself to me when he already has so little left to give.
This thought is enough to swell my heart—to swell, and to break.
Some days I wish I could fall asleep and wake up in two or three years. Maybe I’ll be in culinary school. Maybe I won’t have to push our broken-down family along the road. Maybe, years from now, we’ll be fixed enough to move forward.
It pissed me off—that she can’t pretend for us, but she can pretend for someone else. So I can’t pretend anymore either. I can’t pretend like it’s okay anymore.”
My grip loosens and my legs compress for a moment, like springs of a coil pressed down. When they release, the tension pushes me up, and I’ve done it. I’m airborne and weightless and soaring and free.
The last thing I remember is the sound of beating wings.
I want to thrash. I want to break loose like an outtake from One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. They can’t take me in against my will. But the truth is, I’m so worn down. I’ve got no fight left. In fact, once I lie back in surrender, something occurs to me: it’s kind of nice to have someone else wheeling me forward for once.
Over my mom’s shoulder, I see the red neon sign through tear-blurred eyes: EXIT. It’s what I want. This is the place where my father died, and all I want is to start moving away from the darkness it left in our lives. “Let’s go home, okay?” I point my mom toward the exit, and I guide us out. It’s what I’ve been trying to do all along.
Everything is dark and rattled. My brain is an empty cavern, dank and full of nothing but echoes. I scream inside my head, and it goes from the back of my skull to the front, then bounces side to side until I’m exhausted from hearing it over and over, and I sleep.
That scar is now covered by a cast, the scar that runs down my left wrist like a scarlet S. But I was not trying to kill myself—I really hadn’t thought that far ahead—and I don’t know how many goddamn times I have to explain this. I didn’t want to die. I was just trying to feel something. It turns out feeling a cold blade slice into your flesh and then warm blood slopping onto the floor is actually infinitely worse than feeling nothing.
Her words make me want to cry but only out of relief to have someone get me—without pity. Everyone else seems to feel so sorry for me, and also like they’re so glad that they’re not me. No one settles inside my shoes—inside my towering, beautiful shoes—and dances around, not even for a minute. No one else looks me right in the eyes and says it like the simple fact it is, depression fucking sucks.
But the point is that trying to make things better sometimes makes us better, too. The point is I’m trying to create good things in the midst of the bad. Grief or no grief.
That if she’s the tornado, it’s not because she’s cut terror through a tiny town. It’s because she’s swept us all up into a place where there’s color everywhere. But she starts up again.
The moon glows overhead, the way it did the night we ran into the ocean. It feels like a lifetime ago. A lifetime but not enough.
“I want to tell you something,” I say. I wish I could explain everything to Jonah. But bipolar disorder is an untranslatable term. I could tell him that sometimes it feels like being on a carnival ride, so fast and dizzying and fun at first. Then it goes on for too long, and you can’t stop. I could tell him how I hurt friends without meaning to. I could tell him that depression made me feel like a husk, empty and lifeless. Those comparisons might help, but bipolar disorder is so complex, and it’s mine. My feelings have back rooms and trapdoors, and I’m still learning them. I can’t quite articulate what bipolar disorder is for me, exactly, but I can articulate who he is to me, and so I take a deep breath.