Summer locked her eyes on me.
“That pang. I look at kids, and I don’t feel any ache in my chest. I don’t feel like there’s a missing piece inside of me, waiting to be filled with ten little fingers and toes. I actually—I feel the opposite. I’m so goddamn happy. I love my life, just the way it is. I don’t want children. Valeria, she needs and she wants a child to feel whole—she wants one badly. And I’m going to lose her because of it. I’m going to lose my person over this. And I know I have to tell her, but…fuck, I don’t want to.”
Tears hit Summer’s eyes, and shockingly, she did nothing to temper her pain. I had only seen Summer cry once, and my heart did flips as she let tears fall without a fight. I scooted my chair closer to her and folded one of her hands into mine, and just like a grief time machine, I was brought back into my seventeen-year-old body, to the day I lost a father who was barely mine to lose, and gained a best friend.
* * *
SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD SUMMER AGGRESSIVELY SPRAYED ANGEL perfume in the middle of our tiny dorm room and stormed through the wet air with her platform sandals, just as I fell to my knees below her, tears breaking across my face. She stared at me blankly, not saying a word—as I sobbed into my cell phone while my mother all too calmly told me my dad had died of a heart attack. I theorized my mother was remaining stoic so she wouldn’t break down. But her delivery made me feel like I’d been punched in the gut and left on the curb with no one there to mourn alongside me. I was glued to the floor for hours, frozen in unimaginable grief. Summer left my side only once, to go to the vending machine in the lobby. She brought me back a vanilla Coke and peanut M&M’s. I was embarrassingly touched that Summer knew what my favorite snack was, even if she’d never cared to know one thing about me up until this point—and we had been freshman-year roommates for three months.
“I thought you hated me,” I said, blubbering, my face turned upward to Summer.
She looked dismissively out the window, sucking in red cheeks.
“I could still hate you and know your vending machine order. I mean, we’re roommates. I have eyes,” she said, biting her bottom lip in flimsy deflection.
Along with emotional intimacy, Summer was not a fan of receiving praise.
I cracked a peanut M&M between my teeth. The candy was bitter against my tongue, and the chocolate shell moved down my throat like a chain saw. I remember wondering if all the things my dad and I loved together would become a casualty of his death.
“I have to go to Boston tonight,” I said to no one. I didn’t know how to move my legs. How was I going to board a train to face my father’s side of the family?
Summer shrugged. “I’ll come with you. I like Boston.”
Years later, I learned that Summer actually hated Boston. She held a sizable grudge toward the entire state of Massachusetts, because she didn’t get into Harvard. Summer Groves was not someone who lost gracefully.
Later that afternoon, Summer and I shared a train car to the city she secretly hated. I cried the entire time, while Summer stared wide-eyed at every other passenger but me, searching for an eject button like a frat bro in the same room as a screaming infant. Finally, thirty minutes away from our Back Bay Station destination, Summer decided to throw me a bone.
“My mom died three years ago,” she said. Summer’s eyes stayed on the moving trees out the train’s window, refusing to look at me, refusing to hold up a mirror to her own grief. She continued, “You’ll be okay. But…it’s going to be shitty for a while.”
I was desperate for a grief timeline, but I was too new to grief to recognize that no such thing existed. I wrongly assumed that my mysterious roommate was a professional.
“For how long?” I asked.
Summer shrugged her shoulders to the train car ceiling. My stomach flipped as I watched tears fill her eyes to the brim. If you’d told me Summer Groves had never cried, even as an infant, I would have believed you. More accurately, no one had seen Summer Groves cry since she was a little kid. She hadn’t even cried at her mother’s funeral.
I grabbed Summer’s hand from her lap, and I squeezed hard. I was less surprised by the fact that Summer let me hold her hand, and more surprised that when I unclenched my fingers around hers, she pulled my hand back and gripped tighter. Misery loves company, but even more so, misery loves understanding.
She understood.
Instead of pretending that I never snuck a glimpse past her armor, Summer kept me on the inside. From that moment forward, I was in on a secret: Summer Groves was terribly human.
* * *
HERE WE SAT, EIGHTEEN YEARS later, navigating heartbreak, but a different kind. I squeezed Summer’s hand tighter as she wiped away falling tears.
“You don’t know that you’re going to lose her,” I said. “Love is about compromise, right? And sacrifice?”
“Says the woman who kept expecting Garrett to pursue her? You’re mad at him because of shitty circumstances. You’re blaming him for something that’s not entirely his fault. Bad timing and holding back on true feelings goes both ways. Where’s the compromise there?”
I pulled my head back, stung by Summer’s words.
“I thought you said he was a giant coward.”
“He is. And there’s been a couple times where, when it comes to Garrett, I could have said the same thing about you.”
“Ouch.”
“Sorry,” she said quietly.
“No, you’re not.”
She was never sorry about being brutally honest.
“No, I’m not. Mags, when one person has an idea of what their dining room table looks like ten years from now, and the other person’s vision looks a lot different—that’s a hard one to meet in the middle on. Valeria wants a loud, messy future full of sticky jam hands. She wants to sit at a full table. I love being the irresponsible one on a school night. I want to travel, and I want to build a career without the guilt. I want to sit at a hundred different tables all over the world with the same woman pulling up a chair beside me.”
Summer started to choke on her words. I got up from my chair and crouched down next to her, holding her hand.
“I’m not who she thought I was, Maggie. And I’m not who I thought I would become. This is my fault, not hers. And it’s going to break both our hearts. This is the first time—Mags, the first time in my marriage—that I haven’t been able to say exactly what’s in here,” Summer said, gripping the cotton shirt around her chest, tears effortlessly falling down her neck.
Summer was blunt. Her offhand candor was often mistaken for cruelty, even though she was not cruel. Through the years, she’d learned to soften her delivery—but she rarely had enough forethought to bite her tongue completely. It crushed me that Summer couldn’t uncage this truth—one that her partner deserved to know. For the first time, Summer’s entire heart was wrapped up in one of her beliefs. No matter the delivery, the truth would leave her heartbroken.
She stared at me, words falling out of her with tears. “No one tells women this when they get married in their twenties, you know? What we think we want at twenty-eight, it’s not always what we want at thirty-five. The things that make you feel safe and the things that set your heart on fire aren’t set in stone. I love my wife more than the day I married her, but, our ideal futures look very different.”