Almost Impossible Page 4

  Since I was more tired than normal tonight, I went with the reading option.

  I’d just finished Wuthering Heights on the flight here, so I debated which one to start next. Or, more accurately, which one to reread next for the one thousandth time. My fingers made the decision before my mind did.

  No sooner had I opened up to the first worn page of Jane Eyre when an envelope came spilling out. I recognized the handwriting right away. As I opened it, I checked my phone to see if Mom had texted me back after I sent her one earlier. Still nothing.

  I was so used to my mom getting back to me a second after I needed her, but I knew I’d have to adjust to this thousands-of-miles-of-separation thing. She wasn’t the only one who’d have to adapt to me going away to college in a year.

  A shiny plastic card fell from the letter when I opened it. A credit card. With my name on it and everything.

  Tucking the card into the middle of the book, I read the letter.

  The card’s for emergencies. Not for you to max out at the mall. That was followed by a funny face with its tongue sticking out, because Mom was as avid a mall hater as I was. This summer, I want you to put down those books and journals and go live your life. I want them to collect dust, you’re so busy living. You’ve always put others first, and I adore you for that, but for once I want you to put you first. Do something you never dreamed you would. Befriend someone wholly unlike you. Go so far out of your comfort zone you start to squirm. Because, Jade, the only things we’re going to one day regret are the things we never did. Do everything. Do anything. Just do. It’s a verb, baby, which means action. I promise the books will be waiting for you at the end of summer. I love you no matter what. Even if you really do max this card out at the mall. Kick Summer’s Ass. Love, Mom.

  I started crying pretty much right from the start. The kind of sobbing that rocked your body and made you gasp in tiny, shallow breaths. Maybe it was because I missed Mom like crazy and it hadn’t even been twenty-four hours since we’d said good-bye. Maybe it was because of what happened earlier at the pool, compounded by the other stresses of the day. Or maybe I was crying because I needed a good cry.

  My whole life I’d dreamed of experiencing a summer just like this one, and now that I was, the responsibility of making it count felt crippling. I was holding my wish in the palm of my hand, and suddenly I felt terrified I was going to ruin it.

  I was always an early riser, one of the few in my age group. I liked sunrises and how quiet and still everything was. Like anything was possible. I was a night owl, though, too. Sunsets came with their own stillness. The result of being both a morning and a night person meant I lived in a constant state of sleep deprivation, but it didn’t bother me.

  So by the time I was departing on the new and improved Lemon a little before nine-thirty a.m. the next day, I’d already had a full morning: an early walk, a little more reading, some writing, breakfast, and a solid hour of online reconnaissance.

  No, I wasn’t training to become a spy or considering a bounty-hunting career. I was scouring the Internet for something far more dangerous—my biological father.

  Not that he was a dangerous person, at least that I knew of, but it was a hazardous topic where Mom was concerned. She didn’t know I’d spent half of the past year cyberstalking him. Or that he was a big reason I’d suggested spending the summer here in California. And she definitely didn’t know I was planning to come face to face with him before the summer ended.

  If she did, there was no way she’d have let me stay. My mom and dad weren’t on speaking terms. For the past eighteen years almost, or whatever the day was when she’d approached him to let him know she was pregnant with his child. I guess that was all it took for him to turn and run. From what I’d gathered over the past few months, he’d never stopped running.

  Like Mom, he was in a band. Lead singer and guitarist, like her as well. His band didn’t have the same kind of following or radio time as Mom’s, but that might have had to do with him joining or starting a new band every few years. Kind of hard to build up a hard-core following when you kept changing your band’s name and the style of music you rocked.

  Robbie Devine, that was my dad’s name. Unfortunately, not just his stage name. His real one. It was like he’d been born for rock ’n’ roll. Mom hadn’t said one thing to me about him willingly, but she always answered my questions when they came up.

  When I started asking her for details about what happened, she just kind of shut down. She wasn’t the one who informed me he’d run away when she told him she was pregnant; she gave me the softer version of it being a case of young love not panning out, the way most didn’t. Aunt Julie told me the truth. We’d never had contact with him, and I knew that if it was up to Mom, we never would.

  But how could I know who I was or who I wanted to be if I didn’t know who I’d come from? Sure, I knew my mom as well as I knew myself, but I didn’t know jack about the person who’d given me the other half of my DNA. I knew what he looked like now and basic facts, but I didn’t know him. Until I did, I wasn’t sure if I could really know who I was, either.

  So that was the plan for the summer. One of them, at least. The big one. Operation Get to Know My Dad. Like with all monumental things in life, I was equal parts excited and terrified, but he was the guy who’d helped create me. He might have run, back when he was a scared seventeen-year-old, but that was almost two decades ago. A person could change.

  His band would be playing at some venue in L.A. in August, so that gave me a little more time to put together a plan for how to walk up to some stranger, shake hands, and drop the Hey, I’m your daughter line on him.

  I also needed to drop the bomb without Aunt Julie or Mom finding out, because she and my mom might have been on opposite sides of the court on everything else but the one thing these two seemed to agree on was my dad, both favoring the Harry Potter policy of not talking about He Who Must Not Be Named.

  By the time I pedaled up to the pool, I was ready for my mind to be distracted by something other than my parents. Hopefully it would be as busy today as it had looked yesterday.

  The pool wasn’t open yet, but I could see a few employees moving around inside to get ready for the morning rush, so after settling Lemon into the bike rack, I made my way to the front gate.

  “You showed up. Thank God.” Janet heaved a relieved sigh when she saw me coming, already opening the gate for me.

  “Did you think I wouldn’t?” I asked.

  “With the way my luck’s been lately, no, not really. Plus, the concession positions are always the hardest to fill.” She didn’t say this until I’d walked in and she’d already locked the gate behind me.

  “Why’s that?” I asked, instantly wishing I’d brought my sunglasses. The glare on the pool deck was so bright I felt my corneas burning.

  “Oh, you know.” Janet flailed her hand as she powered toward the concession stand. I had to jog to keep up with her. “It’s a busy job, and it doesn’t come with all the fame and glory of the lifeguarding positions.”

  My shoulder lifted. “Yeah, but there’s constant shade, a fan”—I motioned at the small fan attached to the lip of the counter when we stepped inside—“and I don’t have to blow my whistle and yell at people to walk and not run. Sounds like a solid position to me.”

  Janet patted me on the back like I was the cutest little thing. “Do me a favor and hang on to that optimistic spark, kid.” As she started to go through the stand door, she paused to pull an old yellowed binder from a drawer. “Here’s the training manual. Feel free to go through this if you have a few minutes. Everything’s in here.” She tossed it onto the counter in front of me. It landed with a loud clomp. “Zoey will be in at twelve to help with the lunch rush, so she can answer your questions, too. Anything you need in the meanwhile is in the training binder.” When Janet checked her watch, her eyes went Frisbee-wide
. “If I were you, I’d spend the next nine minutes studying that first section before those gates open and the minivans start rolling up. You don’t want to mistake the mustard for cheese sauce when you make a plate of nachos. Trust me.”

  “I will. Thanks,” I said, already tearing open the binder, trying to separate the first and second pages, which seemed to be glued together by a sauce of questionable origin. “If I have any questions before Zoey gets in, who should I ask?”

  Janet was already gone, powering across the pool deck. “The manual!” she hollered back. “Any questions, check the training manual.”

  Before I could panic, I reminded myself I was dishing up ice cream and making hot dogs. I’d managed all aspects of stage setup and teardown from the age of thirteen for the Shrinking Violets—this wasn’t reinventing the wheel.

  “Well, at least you can’t laugh at me for asking a dumb question,” I muttered to the training manual as I continued to work at the stuck-together pages. They came apart a moment later. Well, they tore apart a moment later.

  On the upside, at least when it came time to patch the page back together, I could use the sauce of questionable substance (mustard, it turned out!) to fix it.

  It felt like Janet had just left me alone when a herd of kids in bathing suits and goggles started charging into the pool. They slowed to a fast walk only after the lifeguards on duty blew a collective whistle to get them to stop running.

  Haha. They were the whistle blowers. I was the one serving the kids ice cream. Who won at the end of the day?

  Plus, I remembered, I had a fan. Except when I spun around to turn it on, I soon discovered it wasn’t, in fact, a functioning fan.

  As kids started to cannonball into the pool while moms claimed loungers, I tore through as many pages of the training manual as I could. Lucky for me I was a fast reader, because by the time my first customer padded up to the stand, I’d made it through a third of the material. I guessed the cleanup instructions could wait. The proper temperature for a hot dog to reach and how to handle the money could not.

  I smiled down at my first customer, a cute little boy with hammerhead swim trunks and angelic blue eyes. This job was going to be a piece of cake.

  “What can I get you, little man?”

  His nostrils flared. Like literally flared. “I’m. Not. Little.”

  I leaned away from the counter. His voice made it clear I’d hit a sore spot.

  “I didn’t mean little as in short. Or small,” I added, when the word short made his nostrils flare again. “I meant little as in young. That’s all.”

  Now his eyes were narrowing. What was wrong with this kid?

  “I’m. Not. Young.”

  I painted on a smile. It was met by the frown to rule all frowns. “What can I get you?” I repeated, making a mental note not to add any more commentary at the end of my questions. Or statements. Or anything. Not if I didn’t want to be dropkicked by an army of little kids.

  “Ice cream,” he demanded, slamming down a twenty-dollar bill.

  If this was one of the many kids I’d babysat while on tour with the Shrinking Violets, I would have waited until he remembered to tack on a please to that request, but I guessed my job had more to do with keeping the customers happy than teaching them manners.

  “What flavor?”

  The kid huffed, like that was a stupid question. “Chocolate.”

  Apparently that should have been obvious.

  “Kid cone?” I guessed as I took the twenty and moved behind the till to ring up the order, realizing my mistake a second too late.

  “No. Triple scoop.” He practically barked at me.

  No wonder the kid was such a turd. His blood sugar was all over the place, swimming in a vat of ice cream.

  Ringing up the order, I took the money, gave him his change, and stacked three scoops of ice cream on a waffle cone as quickly as I could. Which wasn’t quick at all, since the ice cream was as hard as a rock. At the end of the scooping session, my wrist felt like it was going to snap. Shark Boy took the cone and his change without so much as a look back.

  I had one second to take a breather and roll my wrist a few times before I turned around to discover a line had formed stretching from the counter to almost the edge of the pool.

  Swallowing, I scanned for help, but every other pool employee was putting out a fire of their own. The lifeguards were busy blowing whistles and waving their arms at kids doing something they weren’t supposed to, and the front desk staff were tending to their own line at the front.

  Giving myself an internal pep talk, I shielded my eyes—I was going to be blind by the end of the day—and leaned over the counter.

  “What can I get you?” I kept the smile this time but ditched the add-on tag.

  The girl, who was maybe a year or two older than the first boy, slapped down another twenty. “A triple-scoop cone.”

  This was going to be a long summer.

  My wrists weren’t going to survive. I was going to have to check into voice dictation software to continue writing because the use of my hands was going to be over when my shift was.

  Ice cream. And more ice cream. A couple of hot dogs and a few bags of chips. Ice cream. Ice cream. Ice. Cream.

  I was convinced I could have filled the pool in front of me with the amount of ice cream I’d scooped to masses of bossy, manner-deficient little kids today.

  Of course Zoey had called in saying she was running late, so I’d had to wing it on my own even longer than I expected. It wasn’t even one and I already felt like I’d spent a fortnight stuffed in this hot tin can, baking in my supposed “shade.” Sure, there was no direct sun hitting me, but it was easily fifteen degrees hotter in this thing, plus, out there on the pool deck, there was this nifty thing known as airflow. Something I’d left behind a few hours ago when I stepped into this inferno on wheels.

  Sometime between when I was spooning my millionth triple scoop of the day and handing it off before taking the next order, something appeared on the counter next to the till. Something I would have auctioned off a foot of my long hair for right then.

  A pair of dark sunglasses; tucked beneath them was a piece of paper. On it, one word had been scribbled: Sorry.

  That was all. Clearly it wasn’t the ankle-biters standing in line. And what was my benefactor sorry for? That my eyes were permanently damaged, probably, and they hadn’t dropped the glasses off sooner?

  Whatever it was, I could think about later, because the hot dogs weren’t going to make themselves. Slipping the sunglasses on, I could practically feel my corneas exhaling in relief.

  It was amazing how much better my day became from that one small act of thoughtfulness. The heat felt less sweltering; the orders were less snotty-sounding; the ice cream felt almost softer to scoop.

  Only, the line had gone from long to longer as the day progressed—it didn’t seem to matter how fast I moved.

  “What can I get you?” I asked the next kid in line.

  The young girl lifted up onto her tiptoes and set a few dollars on the counter. “A hot dog with ketchup, please.”

  My shoulders sagged with relief as I rang her up, my faith in humanity restored.

  “Coming right up,” I half-sang as I started whipping together a hot dog, swirling on a pretty ribbon of ketchup.

  That was when I noticed someone standing in line, one of the few “big” people I’d seen brave the never-ending stream of kids. But this one was extra-big. And shirtless.

  Hold up. I recognized those abs.

  Holy crap.

  Thanks to the sunglasses, I pretended not to see him, and since he’d been gazing over at the pool, I knew he hadn’t caught me looking. Yet. It wouldn’t be long before he’d make it through the line to the counter and start giving me a hard time for ogling the heck out of him again becaus
e, you know, I had to make general eye contact to take his order.

  And here I’d been convinced that yesterday was the first and last I’d ever see of that egomaniac. What had I even been thinking when I’d had the briefest inkling that he was hot? He wasn’t even. Not a little bit.

  That’s what I kept telling myself as I tried not to cast sideways looks at him, hovering there in line, arms crossed over his chest, jaw extra pronounced thanks to the way his head was turned, his hair falling in all the right directions, catching the sunshine.

  I handed the hot dog I’d gone a little ketchup-happy on to the little girl before taking the next order. He was only a few more back and still hadn’t noticed me as he shuffled a couple steps closer, his swim shorts sliding a little lower—just low enough for me to catch a glimpse of a ridge of muscle I should not have been noticing given my feelings for the pompous Neanderthal. Smug, arrogant, bigheaded, I sang to myself, starting to hum my insane melody out loud.

  Trouble. Trouble. Trouble.

  As I finished the next order, I noticed something I probably should have registered the moment I saw him—he was wearing a whistle.

  The next trio of words my mind rattled off wasn’t so PG-rated.

  However, I didn’t miss that he was in navy-colored shorts—not that I was hyperfocused on his shorts or anything—while the other guards were in red shorts or suits. Maybe he worked at a different pool and was filling in for the day. Maybe he was one of those on-call types, if there even was a thing like that. There was no way he could actually work here. Irony wasn’t that mean—I hoped.

  That was when I noticed Janet bustling up to the stand, a clipboard in one hand, her phone in the other, looking every bit as flustered and red-faced as I did.

  She broke to a stop beside Trouble. “I just had to take Zach off the rotation and lay him down in the office. Heat stroke or not enough water or something,” she said to him. The boy exchanged a look with Janet, like they both had an idea of what the “or something” might be. “I know you just started a fifteen, but do you think you could take it later and fill in his spot until Ava comes in at two?”