0 9

at ease

adverb. marching command; stand relaxed, with the right foot in place.

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

I LOVE SUMMERS IN CARSONVILLE.

I didn't always, but I do now. By the time I graduated high school, I was so eager to get out of my hometown. I thought it was too quiet and too repressive.

After sophomore year of college, the more I settled into adulthood and studying, the more I appreciated the little things; all the familiar faces running the main street stores, the way I'm not worried about petty crime in such a suburban locale, the unhurried pace in our family home, the way Haywood Park always looks the same.

Absence, fond hearts, et cetera.

Mom and Dad are a very conventional married couple. They're not super in love anymore but I know they still love each other. Sometimes Dad will try to hug Mom and kiss her but she'll shoo him away and scold, "Not in front of the boys." Other times he'll succeed and, even if we're all eating breakfast in the kitchen, she'll turn her back to us, grab his cheeks, and give him a quick peck. I think their romance takes a back seat to the realities of raising a family.

Both my parents are anxious types. I have two theories: either their anxiety comes from their work, which necessitates paying attention to current events and wider society, which as of this century is majorly depressing and anxiety-inducing; or they've always been perceptive, anxious, detail-oriented overthinkers and ended up predisposed to succeed in the jobs they currently hold.

Dad, a bank manager, worries about the economy and inflation and school shootings; Mom, a middle-ranking executive for local radio, worries about Christian, my thirteen-year-old brother, mainly. As someone needing to track the media preferences of the general public, Mom's picked up an alarming amount of youth vernacular. She now asks for a 'vibe check' by way of requesting a mother-son one-on-one. Despite fervently begging her to abandon trying to sound like TikTokker, she won't stop.

It's a month into summer when I take Christian to the beach.

He loves to swim, and he can hold his own in the water, but for a range of health reasons I need to accompany him all the time. Today's summer sky is so blue it nearly hurts to stare up at it, with no clouds. Despite the brightness, the water is still cold—a staple of our stretch of Massachusetts coast.

Christian and I stay in the shallows, splashing, star-fishing, soaking in the salt. He's just graduated from middle school, the same one I went to, and is in line to start at the public Carsonville High School in September. I went to the Academy, a private boarding school, headhunted when I was his age for musical and academic talent. But the public system will give Christian an Individualized Education Program and transition support after he graduates. Also, people are assholes at the Academy. Decision made.

"Will you miss middle school?" I ask him, bobbing upright, my legs cold and my neck scalded by sun.

"No," he surfaces to say, flipping to float on his back. "But— I'll miss some of my friends."

"You can always message them," I point out. I touch my feet to the soft sand and watch my little brother kicking around in the water.

"I will," he says, his pale portly arms stroking like butterfly wings. "But I want to be friends with them forever."

I slow down my swimming to listen to him speak, his words soft gasps against the lapping waves. I credit my little brother with a lot of things, probably too many to name.

When I was eight he came into our lives, a pale writhing baby, and everything changed. He taught me empathy, showed me an alternative way of looking at the world. He was born with a ventricular septal defect and had open heart surgery; now he can't play contact sports. He still struggles with low muscle tone and hypothyroidism. Christian didn't learn to speak until much later than his peers; didn't learn to regulate his bladder until he was ten; isn't that strong of a swimmer, though swimming is one of the few pastimes he can pursue without risking his health. I practiced speaking with him, changed his sheets, still drive him to swimming lessons and the beach when I can.

I don't want to paint too rosy a picture. It wouldn't be accurate, but painting a picture of doom and gloom is even more misleading. He's happy, he's funny, he's intelligent. Because of Christian, I know how to problem-solve and shrug setbacks off. Because of him I can communicate better, watching for eye contact and body language before words even form. Because of him I learned to be patient and forgiving. The best parts of me were gifted by my little brother.

"You aren't friends with..." he trails off, breath heavy as he moves through the water.

I finish for him, "I'm not friends with my middle school friends anymore?"

He nods, droplets of seawater hanging like pearls from the ends of his light brown hair. "Yeah."

"Well, life happens," I shrug. When I start kicking again, swimming parallel to the shoreline where I've deposited our towels and sunscreen, Christian follows, arms pulling water underneath him. "Even though we're not close, I still remember them fondly and wish them well. And you'll make new friends wherever you go. People can't resist you."

Christian spent all of his middle school years in an IEP class and really bonded with the other students there. I know the idea of leaving them (because they're not all attending the same high schools) and growing apart is distressing.

"I like my friends now," he repeats. Chris is an overthinker, too.

Mom and Dad make concerted efforts to keep their anxieties hidden from Chris. The beauty of raising a child with Down syndrome far outweighs the burden, but my parents have always been burden-oriented individuals. I'm the family optimist, the lighthouse, casting light in the dark again and again and again. I'll do it as long as I need to.

"Don't focus on the negatives," I console him. "Look at the sky. Look at this beautiful weather. Your friends aren't going anywhere, Chris. Trust."

I swim until I can wrap my arms around him, making myself dead weight and dragging us under. When we resurface, he's gasping, laughing and splashing wave after wave of stinging water up my nose.

"Asshole," he pouts.

"Hey," I snap sternly, skimming my hands across the surface of the water and drenching his freckled face again. "You're not allowed to swear until you're sixteen, asshole."

When we pull ourselves out of the ocean and run back to our beach towels, I send a blurry selfie to the family group chat. In my car—a white Civic—I roll all the windows down and let Christian flick through my phone to put music on. The Vierras have an inside joke about always listening to the radio channel that employs Mom to be patriotic, but honestly its music, segments and advertising programming are not great. Hanging from the rearview mirror is a miniature snare drum-shaped scented oil diffuser, Dad's seventeenth birthday gift to me (as well as, you know, his old car).

Christian asks me if we can swing by the ice cream store on our way home, and I hold out for five minutes just to fuck with him, knowing, the whole time, I was going to do it anyway.

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

Middle school friends I've drifted away from, but I'm still close with my high school friends.

There's five of us who together did marching band, concert band, all the theory and composition classes, and AP Music Theory in our senior year. The expectation at the Carsonville Academy was that if you aren't taking an AP course, then you are taking one of the extension classes in a subject. Being average was being sub-par. Then again, this was the stance of a school that ranked all its students on a numbered list according to academic, extracurricular, and social merit.

Leah lives in New York—studying violin at Julliard—and unlike me, she doesn't like to come back during the summers. We had to entice her back to Carsonville with the promise of a four-day, three-night trip on Ashley's, a guitarist, family yacht. (This sounds very wealthy, but Ashley's oil baron great-uncle died two years ago and distributed all his belongings among his progeny. A yacht is nothing compared to being bequeathed actual land. Land. In this real estate market? Imagine that.)

Ashley's head is freshly shaved and I ask to touch it when we first meet at the docks. "Your scalp is so muscled," I observe. "Do you chew really hard to work out or what?"

Ashley punches me in the gut, and I cough in agony. But she's laughing, the elegant studs in her ears twinkling in the dusky afternoon sun. "You never change, Vierra. I love it."

"Love is abuse?"

"Duh," she quips, reaching out to hug me. "So says the Republicans."

When Leah arrives, her hair colored a completely different hue from the last summer, Ashley and I run to hug her. Leah and I are both queer, but her relationship with her parents is not like mine. Since coming out, their relationship has been strained, which makes Leah feel like Carsonville holds even less good memories for her.

Over the next twenty minutes, the remaining two musicians (of course Quentin, my boy; and Sophie, who played piano in high school but has become less musically active since starting college) rock up to the marina where the yacht is kept. Since Sophie and Quentin both attend Halston University with me, my excitement at seeing them again is not as keen and overwhelming. I mean, I see Quentin nearly every day when school is in session, and Sophie comes to most of the parties I host, including the most recent end-of-finals-week rager at my house in Halston.

"Section leader Vierra," Sophie says by way of greeting. "Why didn't you tell me? I saw you at the end of semester and you said nothing."

"Oh, it's not a big deal," I say, noncommittal.

Quentin snorts, eyebrows raised. "Not a big deal. Sure."

He was witness to the entire application process; he read my personal statement before I emailed it to Keller, and one time we both played our respective our parts in Amoretto to see how the battery parts slotted into the melody parts. When he made flute section leader, I nearly died of excitement. Next marching season is going to be phenomenal.

"Did you bring the whiskey?" I ask him.

"No, I forgot," he deadpans. When I stare him down, he sighs and swings his hefty backpack to the ground. Unzipping the front compartment, he gives me a glimpse of a sleek glass bottle neck.

I grin. "Alright. We're all set. Cast off. Raise the sails. Ocean ahoy."

"You say one more cliche," Ashley says, leaving the threat hanging open in the air. Everyone chuckles as we board the yacht, but I know it's with me instead of at me.

I'm good at making people laugh.

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

On the second night of the trip, I can't sleep.

I roll out of the bunk—Leah and Sophie share the bunk opposite the aisle, Quentin and I share the other, with him snoozing on top—and shrug on a fleece-lined windbreaker. It gets cold out on the open ocean after sundown, no trees or soil to hold heat. I climb up to the main deck and on the smooth wooden planks, sanded and sealed watertight with varnish, stretch myself out.

The stars are brighter than I've ever seen. Where we've dropped anchor, we sway on small waves, liquid sloshing against the flanks of the yacht. Instead of a black sky, the view before me has nuanced and graduated colors. Black, indigo, violet, and even shades of chalky blue where the Milky Way erupts across the canvas. I feel leathered by the sun and crusted with salt. There is fresh water and organic dry shampoo on board, among other sanitary products, but this quality is more emotive than physical; I feel like a child of the ocean, a sea lion turned into a real boy.

Nights like these, where I have too much energy to sleep, happen often enough that I'm not surprised when they swing round.

There is nothing more I hate than having to go to bed. It's boring, especially that stagnant lull when you have to just lie with your own thoughts and your own twitching limbs and try to force your body to stop moving long enough for sleep to come.

I can't believe next year is my senior year of college.

It only feels like six months ago that I was graduating high school, but I know from the shared stories and social media posts that time is slipping through my fingers, the rate exponential, proportional to how much time I've already had. Each year that passes me by seems to go faster than the last. Mostly, I try to live just as quickly so I won't feel like I'm being left behind.

I don't want to graduate with perfect grades and a graduate role in software development lined up—and no memories. No poorly chosen tattoos, old battle scars, and suspicious stains on my clothing. No embarrassing stories, no mutual, mutual acquaintances about whom I can say, "Hey! I went to college with them," when I see them on regional TV one day.

I want to feel full. I want to live.

That's why I can't idle. Why settle into one relationship, one commitment, and lock myself into a one-track pathway when I'm so young? Going all in for one solitary ambition is like putting all your eggs into a burning basket and hoping they survive.

In all my years, I've never gone all in on one basket.

In high school, I wanted AP classes and being the class clown and the marching band and bonfires at the beach. Now I want the Software Developer's Club, Engineering Society, marching band and section leader, sex, drugs, girls and boys and friends on friends on friends. I want my choice of parties, my choice of conversation. I want to skateboard, and jam on a stage in the Foxhole, and absorb the wisdom of my lecturers, and just feel full of it all.

But I don't.

After my fuck buddies leave, after the rehearsals end, after the song fades out, after the audience stops applauding, and after the parties die, I feel restless and empty and dissatisfied.

I lie on the yacht and feel like I'm sinking slowly down into the ocean. I look at something as beautiful as the stars and become terrified that one day, like all my most beautiful experiences, I will eventually blink out, too.

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

a / n :

any TGR readers here? this is a book I'm actually not going to promote because it was my first-ever novel when I was like 14, I cringe so hard at it now, and I keep saying I want to rewrite it but can never bring myself to behold that mess again.

but if you were interested, TGR is the book that spawned Universe 1, which is where all my contemporary fiction stories take place. If you've read other books, you'll know I like crossovers and cameos. Sophie is the U1 heart, she appears nearly everywhere, but Callum is not far behind.

for anyone that wanted to know his narrative origins ;)

aimee x