Same Time Next Summer

1

You can't turn around once you're in the tunnel. There's no U-turn, no off-ramp. You're literally stuck under the East River. This fact exhilarated me as a kid. Next stop, Long Island. At the first sight of sunlight at the end of the tunnel, I felt the city melt away. I cracked the window, popped a juice box, kicked off my shoes, and stretched my legs across the backseat. As an adult, entering the Midtown Tunnel makes me feel sort of trapped.

The traffic slows to a standstill as we merge onto the Long Island Expressway. "And this is why we don't come to Long Island," I say, swatting the steering wheel like it's responsible. I'm not sure what I was expecting on a Friday afternoon in August.

"We both know that's not why," says Jack, scrolling through his phone.

I can handle Long Island once a summer for a long weekend, never a week. Three days at the beach is enough to warm you up but not enough to turn you into mush. For three days in a row, my sister, Gracie, drags me into the ocean, and for three days in a row, I swim. I count my strokes as I cut through the water and long for the constraints of the YMCA pool, where you can track how far you've gone based on how many times you've turned around. The ocean is a full mile long on the stretch of beach between the jetty and the wooded cove in front of our house. There's just too much room for error.

It's been fourteen years since I've spent a whole summer at the beach-since Wyatt and I broke up, and I broke apart. Putting a person back together isn't easy, but if you're smart about it you can reassemble yourself in a totally different, better way. Turn carefree into careful; bandage up your heart and double-check the adhesive. Bit by bit, I have left my childhood behind, replacing my impulsiveness with deliberate decisions and plans. Jack calls it being buttoned up, and I don't know why anyone would want to walk around unbuttoned. I know what each day is going to look like even before I open my eyes, and there's so much strength in that knowing. If I stay at the beach for too long, I get pulled back. My old self is there and she wants to drag me out through the rusty chinks in my armor. I blame the salt air.

This is the first time I've brought Jack with me in the entire four years we've been together. Travis likes to say that I've been protecting him from our parents, which is ridiculous because we see them in Manhattan all the time. Part of me has wanted to show Jack the front-yard hydrangea explosion and the delicate way the dunes blow in parallel to the ocean. To show him where the sand and the salt and the sun conspired to make me into a strong swimmer and a happy teenager. I just don't know if he can handle the summer version of my parents.

Traffic picks up when we're on Sunrise Highway, and Jack puts down his phone. "It's pretty here," he says as if looking out the window for the first time. "I found a gym ten minutes from your parents' house and got a week's membership."

"There's no way we're staying a whole week." I've packed exactly three pairs of underwear to make sure of it.

"Well you told your mom a week. Anyway, I took next week off, just in case. It's going to be a hundred degrees in the city by Thursday." He takes my hand, and I feel myself settle. Jack is the opposite of the ocean. He's more like a lake, one that's crystal clear and protected by a mountain range. With Jack, I am in no danger of being washed away. "This might be really fun."

He's scrolling through his phone again. "Oh, here's a good one. A listing for an in-house HR associate at an accounting firm in midtown."

"They're not going to fire me," I say. They're probably going to fire me. I'm in the firing business, and I can't imagine how this ends any other way. Frankly, I'd fire me, but I'm so sick of talking about this and the tight, defensive way it makes my body feel.

"They might, Sam." He puts his hand on my shoulder. "Eleanor's way of doing things is tried and true."

"I said what I said, and I apologized. It's out of my hands."

"If you're going to go off the rails, you kind of need a backup plan," Jack says.

"I'll remember that for next time. So are you ready for what you're walking into? Hippies gone wild?" My smile is a question mark. "There's no Wi-Fi or air-conditioning, but if you're looking to see a statue of David made out of pipe cleaners, this is the place for you."

Jack laughs, presumably because he thinks I'm exaggerating. "I've been wanting to see this for years, I'm ready as hell."

Jack knows my parents in the city, between the months of September and May, where they live in the same Lower East Side two-bedroom, rent-controlled apartment th...