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The cool, rough stone scratched at Kiara’s skin, snagging on the fabric of her cropped tank top. She held herself up by her trembling arms, her head just hovering over the wall surrounding the Cameron residence as she spied on the scene in front of her.
When Sarah said she didn’t have plans to celebrate her birthday, Kiara began devising plans immediately. She bought boxed brownie mix, dug up every separating bottle of nail polish she had and every old DVD copy she’d once scratched up of Sleepover, A Cinderella Story, and other staples from their childhoods they’d once laughed about. They now weighed heavy in her bag as Kiara watched as virtually every student at Kook Academy walked up to the house, each donning semi-formal cocktail dresses and suits.
The walkway was lined with multi-colored stringed lanterns and twinkling lights seemingly embedded in the cement. Caterers handed out hors d‘oeuvres and champagne flutes on silver plates, and a live cover band crooned classic Beyoncé hits. Sarah stood beneath a silver and lilac balloon arch with Topper on her arm, greeting the people she typically barely spoke to with a wide grin.
Kiara’s arms gave out, and she fell back into the grass, the brownie mix and her tattered copy of The Princess Bride tumbling from her bag. Her tears flowed freely, falling onto her jeans in dark blue spots. She knew she should be concerned about trespassing charges, but her fear of getting caught hadn’t yet broken through her fury.
Fuck her parents for making her go to Kook Academy.
After elementary and middle school happily skipping alongside the John B. JJ, and Pope, her parents had insisted on her moving to a superior, private education. Grades didn’t matter in middle school, but they did in high school, and becoming a freshman meant her marks were finally going to carry weight in college admissions. The time fucking around with the Pogues was over. It was time to get serious. Her refusals fell on deaf ears, and she’d spent her first year of high school trudging through the halls in a depressive haze in uncomfortable khaki skirts. It was misery. Misery until Sarah. Their friendship felt closer than anything she’d ever experienced before, and as Sarah’s birthday marked the beginning of the new school year, the second year at Kook Academy seemed far more bearable an idea than the first had. Maybe she could do it after all.
The guys tried at first, and Kiara could admit her fault; friendships don’t dissipate on their own. Their bonds were more or less surviving until she befriended Sarah and practically moved into the Cameron house for the better part of a year. The guys found this disappearance deeper into Figure Eight a betrayal, and this only gave Kiara further license to sink deeper into the new friendship, swapping clothes and falling asleep to CW dramas and saving turtles together.
Sarah’s house became a warm escape. She was so angry with her parents for twisting her arm about private school that her own home had become unbearable. The Camerons weren’t perfect, but it was still better than home, and she was able to overlook their passive aggressive moments and Rose’s rigid and frequent sipping on wine if it meant a little escapism.
She’d only suffered one unfortunate episode there, late one night when Sarah was passed out and Kiara went downstairs for water. She’d found her older brother swallowing some late-night munchies. Rafe had been a senior during her first year at Kook Academy, and from what she’d seen both from the Pogue side and in the Kook Academy walls, his his reputation for cruelty preceded him. Since her friendship with Sarah began, he’d taken to ignoring her. He never engaged in small talk with her across the table or glanced at her in the hallways; nobody would know they slept under the same roof more nights than not. That late night, however, feeling emboldened by his stoned, red eyes and the eerie difference of being alone with him, Kiara demanded he acknowledge her when she entered a room.
“Why are you even here?” he’d asked. “Don’t you miss your boys?”
“You don’t know anything about it,” she’d said.
Rafe shrugged, rinsed his plate, and nearly left the room before he called back to her over his shoulder. “Just a friendly warning from me to you. All this friendship bracelets and hot chocolate stuff isn’t gonna go like you think it will. My sister’s got one loyalty, and that’s to herself.”
She had disregarded the warning. Sarah had talked often about how strained their relationship was, and Rafe didn’t scream reliability. In a world where her parents wanted her to be different, and her friends didn’t understand the line she had to toe, and she hated school, Sarah made her feel special and understood. It was a priceless asset she couldn’t give up for anything. For that year, Sarah and Kiara cleaned up beaches and played in the water. They talked about inequality and astrology and everything they couldn’t wait for: graduation and college and real choices.
Now, Kiara rested her head back against the wall, the Betty Crocker logo looking up at her from the ground. Every detail of the moment felt mocking: the music echoing into the street, the wet green grass stains sinking into her butt, the passing valet’d cars.
Fuck Sarah Cameron.
She pulled her phone out of her back pocket and picked a piece of damp grass from the case.
The ringing echoed faintly in her ears. She felt out of her body, without much sense or consideration.
“There’s a party going on at the Cameron house. 1812 Robin Drive. They’re serving minors. I’m afraid somebody’s going to get hurt.”
She hung up before they could ask more.
“You say you’re not a Kook, but that’s a pretty Kook move right there.”
Kiara jumped in her skin, finding Rafe standing over her, dressed in a suit without a tie. She groaned, letting her eyes squeeze shut.
“Did you come to say, ‘I told you so’?” she asked.
“What are you talking about?”
“You told me this would happen, remember?”
He thought about it for a moment.
“Oh, yeah, I did, huh? I was right. You were wrong.”
“Fuck off,” she said, pushing herself off the ground with her palm. She grabbed the brownie mix in a hand and chucked it over the wall.
“I hope Tommy likes brownies,” he said.
Kiara zipped up her bag, brushed the dirt from her knees, and wiped a new round of tears.
“Come on, don’t do that,” Rafe said uncomfortably. “Crying over Sarah betraying you is like crying over the sun going down or- or crying cause it’s Tuesday. Why cry over something that was always gonna happen?”
“Crying isn’t really a ‘why’ thing, Rafe,” she said. He tilted his head at her.
“What do you mean?”
“God, are you even human?”
“Don’t act like Sarah,” he snapped. “I’m just a proactive person, Kie. You-,”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Fine, Kiara. You’re too reactive. That’s why you’re so pissed all the time. Like, everything’s an injustice against you, and you’re always pissed off or upset and you never feel anything halfway, you know? You never- you’ve got this like, I don’t know, this thing inside you,” he said.
“I have a thing inside of me.”
“You get thrown into Kook Academy, right, and you make everyone’s life hell over it. Sarah is Sarah, you call the cops. I mean- when was the last time you did anything that wasn’t in response to something somebody else did to you first? Nothing that I can remember.”
Kiara crossed her arms.
“Wow, Rafe. I didn’t know you had thought of me so. I’m honored,” she deadpanned.
He shook his head, messing up his hair as he ran his hand down the back of his head.
“Don’t get flattered. You’re just loud. You walk around with all your fucking anger all over you, like you’re always- and- and anyway, you’ve been at my dinner table for like 9 months, so- you know what, whatever, alright? Whatever. Just go,” he said, waving her off.
She shook her head and turned down the road.
“Wait, where are you going?” he asked.
“Away from your psychoanalysis.”
“You’re not gonna watch?”
She stopped and turned back to him.
“Watch what?”
“Watch- watch what? You could see her party get busted; you could see the look on her face. Isn’t that why you called them?”
“What? No. You want me to relish in hurting her?”
“Don’t be so dramatic. You’re the one who did the hurting.”
“Excuse me?” she asked, stepping toward him. “She’s the one who--,” she stopped at Rafe’s smug smile.
“Reactive,” he said.
“Leave me alone, Rafe. I just want to go--,” she hesitated. Where did she want to go? Not home. What space existed for her? Not with John B. Not with JJ. Not with Pope. Not with her parents. No, for months it had been Sarah’s. Sarah, who had no idea her party was about to get shut down by Peterkin’s lackeys.
“The beach,” she finished. “I’m going to the beach. How’s that for proactive, douchebag?”
“Cool, I’ll take you,” he said, gesturing to his car.
“What? No.”
“You want the whole town to see you leaving here when Shoop shows up? He’s slow but he ain’t that slow,” he climbed in the front seat.
“Aren’t you going to the party?” she shouted after him.
“Whatever I do, they’ll think I’m a fuck-up, so...” Rafe shrugged and rolled his neck. “The beach it is.”
Kiara followed slowly, making a grand show of her hesitation.
They spent the car ride exchanging their least favorite things about Sarah, validating each other’s anger.
Kiara’s fury dissipated when she found she didn’t have a long list (“She’s selfish”, “You can’t trust her,” “She pronounces ‘empanada weird”), and Rafe’s list was just a transparent and sad display of daddy issues.
Her anger turned to sorrow in her stomach as the reality of her companion beside her and the loss of Sarah began to hit her. Where would she go tomorrow? Who would she eat lunch with?
Rafe backed right onto the sand of an empty beach. The air was still and warm, the stars looking down on them through the cloudless sky. As Kiara hopped out of the car, the smell of the water soothed the turning in her gut and the anxious tingles in her limbs.
Growing up on an island often felt small and suffocating, the people inescapable, the routines monotonous. Other times, however, looking out over an endless ocean, she felt she lived in the most expansive place that existed. The water shrank her troubles in its waves. It was violent, calming, and humbling. Sometimes when she battled sleepless nights, overcome with guilt over the boys, or resentment toward her parents, she remembered that at that very moment, waves were soaking grains of sand all over the world.
She heard Rafe’s car door close behind her and the flick of a lighter. He stuck a joint out in front of her, framed in her eyeline by the black water.
She hadn’t smoked in over a year. It felt like her thing with JJ, only indulged in while happy and loved. Now, she was lonely, but she took a long hit anyway. Weed wasn’t like alcohol. It didn’t compound sadness; it warmed her from the inside, not evaporating pain but cloaking it, to be dealt with another day. It was better weed than JJ had ever been able to steal from his dad, anyway, and she felt her high carry her feet toward the foamy waves.
She’d nearly forgotten about him when she threw her jeans back at the car and found him perched up on the hood.
“You’re not getting in?” she asked.
“Pass.”
“You can’t ‘pass’ the ocean.”
“I just did.”
“You don’t like swimming?”
“Not there. It’s all salt and sand and seaweed. I’ll just smoke.”
“But you’re a Pisces.”
“Now who’s thought of who?”
She turned her back to him then, soaking her top as she leapt into the waves. Rafe put the joint out in the sand and pulled off his shirt and shorts, following her into the water because even he couldn’t deceive himself tonight, and he wanted to be next to her.
Rafe found a strange relief overcome him. His father was somewhere, but not in front of him, nothing was, not for miles and miles.
“Why’d you come here?” Kiara asked, sitting back into the sand.
“Well, it was you or that fucking party.”
“That fucking party was about to get fucking cancelled.”
He smiled, and she almost did, too.
“I don’t know; I’m just tired of the same old shit. Topper and Kelce are here, and- everyone else is off, so.”
“Off where?”
“We graduated. Frat parties and econ lectures, Kie-,”
“Don’t call me that.”
“-They’ve moved on to bigger and better things.”
Kiara thought this seemed like the kind of problem that wasn’t really a problem, that only people like Rafe could even believe were problems, but she didn’t say so in the interest of keeping whatever pleasantness had fallen over them.
They were both overcome with a foreboding certainty in the subsequent quiet.
Tomorrow, Kiara would tell her parents she was leaving private school. She would face the long and unavoidably awkward reunion with the Pogues. She would deal with the unmendable rift her choice would create with her parents. Mostly, however, somehow the most daunting part of facing tomorrow and the following days, was that Kiara would now peer around corners at the store and in restaurants, trying to avoid Sarah, and she would skip their favorite songs on the radio until new ones took over, and she would change her phone background, and she would cleanse her Instagram, and she would do a million small things that, combined, felt horribly large, because while songs were written about the loss of romantic love, not nearly as many were written about the feeling of losing a friend, and she thought this had to be much worse.
Tomorrow, Rafe would hang out with friends he didn’t know well, and he would drink, smoke, and do lines, and he would avoid his dad. He would fight the urges to hurt things that threatened to win, and he would lose a little more every day, and he didn’t care much about stopping it anymore, not now that his father seemed to have lost all faith in him and decided instead to place his hope for his kids with Sarah. Tomorrow, Rafe would somehow, inevitably though through no fault of his own, make everything just a little bit worse.
They were faced with the unsettling feeling that accompanied looking into the ocean and knowing there was no way to escape inside of it, only to turn back to their unavoidable lives.
Rafe sank under the surface, soaking his hair. Kiara thought he looked better that way, without the perfectly combed quaff, but matted in water and sand. He looked less Kook this way, like he could be anybody there with her, another Pogue, or someone on the outside altogether. They swam a while to the sound of soft waves hitting their torsos. They stayed in one another’s vision, checking on each other in the dark night without a moon.
“Oh, hold up,” he disrupted the stillness, rising to his feet. He pulled a small piece of seaweed from her hair before examining it a short moment and tossing it back into the water.
“See? Seaweed,” he said.
Kiara felt suddenly overcome with the knowledge that she would have Sarah’s birthday memorized for years to come, and she wanted to mark the day differently than the day she felt her heart break. She wanted to have something pretty happen before tomorrow, when she would wake in a world without her best friend and a pile of fresh responsibility to tackle.
She reached out and placed her hand on his chest. It was the only time she’d ever touched him, she realized; no handshakes or polite hugs were in their history.
“What are you doin?” he asked.
“Reacting.”
She hoped he understood that they were just postponing the sunrise.
The single second of Rafe’s hesitation was all the time she had to wonder if he would be gentle with her, and reflec tthat while she never believed in waiting until marriage or even love, she had at least always wanted to be with someone who respected her, and she didn’t know if he even did.
Rafe didn’t let her think long, but he didn’t pull her in. He walked toward her, quickly, thick water compromising any grace he might have had.
It happened quickly from there. He kissed her, neither chaste nor fierce, but open, allowing her to change her mind but discouraging it the same. She brought her arms around his neck in an answer, and he pulled her up by the backs of her thighs, carrying her back to his car. (“This is why I don’t get in the water,” he grumbled as he laid a towel on his back seat, just long enough for Kiara to second guess her choice, but not long enough to make a different one.) She wasn’t sure if it was pride, or ego, or a genuine personal stake in her experience, but he accepted her instructions to her orgasm without impatience, only determination and a hint of pride when it happened. He never asked if she was okay, but he read her face so well that she wondered if he was asking her without words, slowing and quickening from the tiny changes in the way she held her cheeks. Maybe she was giving him too much credit.
“Is this good?” she asked only once, and he said it was, and she thought that, as first times went, there were worse ways to go. He pulled out of her once just to kiss her again, the salt water on her stomach and the tears that had fallen on her neck, and she wondered what interest he had in prolonging sex with her, but he seemed to want to. He seemed to want to commit her to memory, so when he saw her the next time in some restaurant or at some party, and she would inevitably not look at him for long, he’d be able to see her through her clothes in his mind’s eye no matter what she thought of it.
When he rolled off her, and she was only mostly sure the experience had happened at all because that was how surreally spontaneous it was, he fetched the joint from the sand. The weed didn’t help the blurry water-colored tint reality had taken, and somehow smoking naked with somebody changed the experience entirely, but she mirrored his puffs in kind. She didn’t rest her head on his chest, but she did allow his arm beneath her neck, and they looked up at the stars from the parted sunroof.
“Will you take me home?” she asked eventually.
“What, no spooning?”
She looked over at him quickly and found only an amused smile. She let herself smile back without teeth.
“I’m done with this,” she whispered. “Done with Sarah, done with Kook Academy. Done with all of it. I’m not trying anymore.”
“Going back to your boys,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“If they’ll have you.”
“Even if they don’t, I’m going back to my life.”
Rafe turned onto his side, propping himself up on his elbow.
“Not all of you,” he said, running a fingertip over her collar bone. “Part of you is staying right here, isn’t it? To think I was gonna sell this car.”
Kiara sat up, glaring at him.
“If you tell anybody about this--,”
“Come on, Kie, what do you take me for? This one’s for us.”
“There is no us.”
He swallowed, and his smile disappeared with it.
“Well, you won, right?” he asked, grabbing his pants. “Ruined her party and fucked her brother in one night. Carrera by TKO.”
“That’s not-,”
“Don’t worry, Kiara. I won’t cry about it. Why would I?”
He got out of the backseat, buttoning his shirt back up outside. Kiara pulled on her jeans and wet shirt, sand roughly grazing her chest.
“Rafe,” she said as she followed him outside.
“What?” he asked. He ran his hand through his hair and avoided her eyes.
She tried to form her thoughts in words, to say something less awfully pathetic as 'I didn’t think I was gonna get through the night' and something less callous than 'Thanks for going down on me for twenty minutes I was nervous' or 'I’m ashamed of you but not what we did'.
“Thanks,” she said.