Page 10 of One Last Summer
It was my own.
6
THE LETTER HAD finally found me, and the sight of it sent my heart pounding, the rush of once-foggy memories suddenly clear in my head.
“Did what?” Lydia asked, puzzled. “Did you guys all secretly bury a body somewhere decades ago but the person survived and is now writing you all letters?”
“The wine is in the cabinet next to the fridge,” I said, smacking at her with the envelope. “And no, I’m not a murderer, yet, unless you wanna try me.”
“I’ve seen you attempt to kill a cockroach,” she said with a snort. “I’m not too worried.”
I turned the envelope over in my hands, studying its slightly worn shape with awe. “We wrote these letters to our future selves on our last night of camp. Sam said she’d mail them to us twenty years later, because that seemed so ancient and grown up to us then. I had no idea she actually kept them.”
Glasses clinked behind me as Lydia made her way around my kitchen. “How teen movie of you guys,” she cooed. “I love it. By the way, I’m adding bananas to your grocery list. Because I’m eating this one sad banana you have in here.”
“What should I do?” I asked, flipping the unassuming envelope over in my shaky hands. It felt like a brick in my palms, even though it probably weighed as much as a feather.
“What do you mean, ‘what should you do’?” Lydia said through a mouthful of banana, placing a tumbler of red wine down in front of me. “Open it!”
“Fine.” Squeezing my eyes closed for a quick second, I caught a glimmer of the carefree girl I’d been at the start of that summer. Fifteen and fearless, until the grim realities of adulthood arrived in the form of that letter from my mom.
“Wait! Wait. I need to use the bathroom,” Lydia said. I waved her toward the door next to my bedroom.
“I’ll be quick!” she said as she scurried across the room.
I’d then thrown myself into everything I did during those last few weeks of camp; as if I could somehow change what awaited me at home by being the strongest swimmer, the best Color Week captain, the most perfect, put-together version of myself. By kissing Mack, the boy I’d adored for years.
And god, how it had hurt—an acute pain so sharp I could still feel it in my heart—to realize how naive I’d been. My dad had already moved out of our house by the time I got home that summer. My mom started dating my stepdad months later. They finalized the divorce just before my high school graduation, where they sat rows apart, not speaking.
By then my dad had transferred to Hartford for work, which meant I only saw him on the weekends, and Mom had sold the house and moved us into an apartment in Providence. I spent my last summers of high school scooping ice cream at White Mountain Creamery and saving for college.
My entire world—and everyone in it—had completely turned upside down in just under one calendar year. I’d made a promise to myself back then to never let anything catch me off guard like that again. And now here I was, blindsided by a micro-sabbatical and this unexpected piece of mail sitting in front of me, waiting to be torn open.
Inside was a piece of lined notebook paper, folded precisely in thirds. I held it gingerly in my hands, a priceless heirloom, before pressing it flat against the table, carefully smoothing out the twenty-year-old creases with my fingertips. A portrait of my teenage life unfolded in front of me, painted in thick, blue ballpoint-pen ink. I fluttered a huge sigh through my lips, my shoulders tense with suspense.
“I am dying to know what this thing says,” Lydia said, plopping back down across from me. “If you feel like sharing, of course.”
I gave a quick nod and then shifted my eyes downward, facing my past.
“‘Dear thirty-five-year-old Clara, Hello from your younger self,’” I read, a shiver of nerves tiptoeing up my back. “Wait, hold on. I need a drink before I do this.”
I paused and took a giant, needy gulp of wine.
“Okay, here goes.” A tremor pulsed through me, my hands shaking ever so slightly. “‘It’s finally here: the last night of your last summer at Pine Lake, your absolute favorite place in the world. It’s 10:38 p.m. and we’ve snuck out to write these letters to ourselves here at the Water Front. Tomorrow you head back to Providence, which is the last place I—we?—feel like being. The thought of going home makes me want to barf.’”
I paused and looked up at Lydia. “This was the summer my folks split up.”
“Oh god, Clara.” She winced, her eyes sympathetic. “That must have been so hard.”
I let out a shaky breath, the memory rushing through me like a heat wave, clammy and hot. I’d cried so hard the day they picked me up from camp that my eyes were practically swollen after.
“‘But tonight,’” I continued, “‘for one last night, I’m here, at camp, writing these letters with the people who mean the most to me in the world. Eloise has gone off to write alone in our bunk, but Nick is here next to me on the dock, crying of course, and Sam is scribbling something in her notebook that is surely profound because you know how Sam is. Our little poet.’”
I looked up at Lydia, who was still watching me with kind eyes. “This was my group of best friends,” I explained. “Eloise was, like, ultra-serious and intense about everything, and Nick was the funniest person alive and the best actor at camp. And Sam was, well. The same. She hasn’t changed much. The smartest one. Wiser than the rest of us. An old soul.”
“When was the last time you saw them all?” she asked.
“It’s been a while,” I said, my eyes circling back to the printed names. “Five years-ish.”
