Meet Me at the Lake

Will and I stood in the narrow mouth of a lane, rainbow brick walls stretching before us. Graffiti Alley was the city’s most famous display of legally sanctioned street art.

“Have you ever been here?” he asked.

“No.” I’d heard about it, but I didn’t know the exact location. “It’s basically Frosh Week 101: Don’t leave your drink unattended; don’t pet the raccoons; don’t traipse through alleys, even beautiful graffiti-covered ones.”

“You think it’s beautiful?”

I nodded as I looked at the bright orange lettering next to us. I reached into my tote and pulled out my Ziggy Stardust coin purse, jiggling it in the air. “I know what would make it even more beautiful.”

Will grinned. “Oh yeah?”

We walked deeper into the lane to where we were wedged between two buildings. Even in the shade, it was hot. Everything around us was coated in spray paint—walls, grates, garage doors, dumpsters. There was a rickety wooden bench that looked as though it were fashioned out of oversized Popsicle sticks covered in swirls of blue and yellow. It was also covered in a crust of dried bird droppings, so we tucked into a corner beside a dumpster, and I lit the joint, inhaling deeply before passing it to Will. He took a long pull, eyes half-closed, hand wrapped over the top of the joint, and I thought it was probably the sexiest thing I’d witnessed.

“So what’s so great about Toronto?” he asked when he came up for air.

“What do you mean?” I took a hit before passing it back.

“I get the impression you’re not exactly pleased to be leaving.”

I leaned my head against the wall and stared up at the runway of clear sky above the alley. I could already feel the pot moseying through my bloodstream, a loosening lull. I was an easy high. I snuck a peek at Will as he inhaled, then I gazed back at the sky, thinking about his question. There was so much I liked about living here, but there was one big reason.

“Back home, everyone knows everything about me,” I said, tilting my head toward Will. “In the city, I can disappear.”

Will’s eyes flickered over me, and my skin went tight. “I find that hard to believe.”

I took one last puff and stubbed the joint out on the wall. “There’s a freedom that comes with being in the city. I’m no one here.”

“And that’s a good thing?”

We started walking slowly, the sun in our eyes.

“Yeah. At home, I’m Fern Brookbanks.”

Will smirked. “Aren’t you Fern Brookbanks here, too?”

“I am, but it doesn’t mean anything. Back home, I’m Margaret Brookbanks’s daughter.” Resort brat. Screwup. Reformed business grad. “I’m making it sound like I’m important, and I’m not. It’s more like who I am is already determined—small communities are kind of like that, and the resort is its own tiny empire.”

“Got it. You’re Princess Fern.”

“Ha.” I cupped my hand around my forehead, blocking out the glare. “I went through a bit of a . . .” I faltered. I hadn’t talked about what happened when I was in high school with anyone other than Jamie in years, not even Whitney.

When I’d read Mom’s diary, I’d called her the worst names imaginable. I threw the book across the room at her. I lashed out in the most irresponsible ways for months until I finally ended up in the hospital. An image of Mom sitting beside my cot, her face red from crying, sprang into my mind. I squeezed my eyes shut, willing it away. Things were much better now.

“You all right?” Will asked.

“Yeah. Just lost my train of thought.”

“You were saying you went through something.”

“I went through a bit of a rebellious phase when I was younger, and none of that stayed secret. There’s no privacy up there. I know living at a resort seems like it would be amazing, and sometimes it was. But you try being flagged down to unclog a toilet or give directions to the tennis courts every time you step outside your front door. There are guests everywhere.”

I was on a roll now, my hands conducting my list of grievances. “When you’re the owner’s daughter, you’re also staff, whether you like it or not. I’ve worked there every summer since I was fourteen, plus shifts during the school year. I was cooking dinner for myself by age ten because my mom was hardly ever home. I mean, I guess technically the resort is home, but she worked so much, she was never at the house.”

I heard the tone of my voice and grabbed the hem of Will’s sweater. “I’m sorry. I’m being a whiny teenager right now. I thought I was over my angsty stage.”

“Angst away,” Will said. “I think that’s the most you’ve spoken all day.” He spun so he was facing me and started walking backward, opening his arms. “Paint me a picture of tortured teenage Fern.”

I shoved his shoulder. “It wasn’t all bad. The lake is stunning. If you’re outdoorsy, there’s tons of stuff to do—canoes, kayaks, hiking trails. The lodge was built more than a hundred years ago, so the whole place feels like it’s from another era, which is pretty cool.”

“I’d love to see it,” Will said. “I’ve never been anywhere like that. I’ve gone to friends’ cottages, but when my family traveled, it was usually outside of Ontario.”

I made a face. I used to find it annoying when Mom complained that people didn’t appreciate our own province. But then I moved to Toronto and met so many people like Will, who had the opportunity to travel but went farther afield without exploring home.

The alley had opened to a small parking lot in full sun. Heat wafted off the pavement. Will dropped his backpack on the ground and shrugged off his cardigan.

“I didn’t really get the whole outdoors thing until I moved out West. The level of natural beauty in British Columbia is so absurd,” he said, folding his sweater and putting it into his backpack. I wiped sweat from the back of my neck, unable to look away. “The first time I took my bike to Stanley Park, I rode around the seawall literally laughing out loud. I couldn’t get over all the different shades of green. I’m still not used to it.”

I murmured something to show I was paying attention, but the thing I was paying attention to was Will’s body. He had been completely covered, and now there was skin. Skin that stretched over lean muscle and ran under the sleeve of his T-shirt. There were moles and veins and elbows and creases.

Will closed his backpack and slung it over one shoulder. It caught on the hem of his shirt, flashing a small triangle of flesh at his hip.

The joint had been a bad idea. I should have known that. Pot made me feel like liquefied candle wax, hot and runny. My fingers had already started tingling.

Before Jamie, I’d had sex two times with two different guys. Neither experience had been good. I told Jamie I wanted to take things slow, so we waited until our second summer together, and then spent May to August with our hands all over each other, sneaking quickies between shifts—fooling around in his bunk, darting behind trees, racing up to my bedroom. More than once, we hung a back in five minutes sign on the outfitting hut door. Sex with Jamie was fun and silly, and after we figured each other out, it felt so much better than I thought possible.

Leaving for university in September after four months of nonstop screwing was like being denied fresh water after living beside an Alpine spring. Phone sex was his suggestion. The first time, I lay on my bed, staring at the crack in my apartment ceiling, trying not to laugh. Not surprisingly, Jamie took to dirty talk with gusto. I kept apologizing and he kept telling me to relax. Eventually I did, but not enough to come. “I’ve got an idea,” Jamie said once he’d finished.

Even though joints were as common as cigarettes on any given night out in Toronto, I’d been wary. I was a new Fern—one who made smart choices. But Jamie assured me a little weed wouldn’t cause me to lose control and hooked me up with a buddy who dealt downtown. The next time we tried, I got high first. Pot made it so I could say words like lick and wet and mean them, but it also turned my insides to warm honey. Phone sex became our thing.

Will ran his hand through his hair, and I followed the movement as if it were happening in slow motion. There was a smudge of paint on the inside of his right arm, and beside that a line of black ink. Desire hit me in a rush. Jamie made me feel good, but I’d never felt such a singular bolt of want.

Will gave me a funny look. “What’s up?”

I swallowed. My tongue had turned velvet. “There’s a smudge of paint on your arm.”

He twisted his elbow, revealing more of the tattoo. “So there is. It must have come off my coveralls.” The tingle was spreading, transforming into a low pulse. Will glanced at me, catching my stare.

“Is that a tree?” I asked, pointing to his tattoo. (It was obviously a tree.)

“Yeah.” He hiked up his sleeve. A spindly evergreen grew from elbow to armpit on the underside of his arm. “I got it a couple years ago. I guess it’s kind of a cliché.”

“How so?”

Will gave me a lazy smile. Will, I realized, was high. “Well, I went to Emily Carr.”

“I’ve heard.”

“Emily Carr is an arts school,” he said. “And she was also one of this country’s most important painters, may she rest.”

I laughed. “Tell me more, Dalí.”

“The lone tree was a common motif in Carr’s work, so it’s almost like getting a tattoo of the school logo. But there’s something so majestic about firs. It’s what I love most about Vancouver—how nature and the city collide.”

I leaned in to get a closer look. Most of the tattoos I’d seen were the kind picked out of a binder, but Will’s was unique. It was obviously a custom piece—the shading was so delicate.

“Well, it’s a very nice cliché,” I said, peering up at Will to find him peering down at me. We stared at each other for what was probably a second, but it felt like minutes, until a siren’s wail startled us.

“I guess that means you prefer my illustrations to my murals,” Will said, tugging his sleeve down.

“You drew that?” I dug a bottle of water from my tote bag, draining half, then offered the rest to Will. He tipped his head back and closed his eyes to the sun, his throat moving as he swallowed. A drop of water ran from the corner of his mouth. I was stalking its path down his chin like a leopard when I felt my phone vibrate.

I frowned at the screen. Jamie didn’t call unless we’d planned to “talk” ahead of time.

“Sorry, I’m going to take this,” I told Will, moving a few steps away.

“Hey,” I said to Jamie. “Is everything okay?”

A chuckle filled the other end of the line.

“Of course it is. I’m about to take a couple kids on a canoe tour of Smoke.” Jamie dropped his voice. “I missed you, Fernie. I wanted to hear your voice for a sec. It’s been a while.”

My stomach sank. “I know. It was tricky with Whitney here,” I said, though we both knew it had been longer than that. We’d spoken a handful of times since school finished—calls that were little more than sex. I couldn’t let Jamie know how miserable I was about coming home, which made me even more miserable. No matter how I spun it, the underlying message would always be: Hey, babe, I don’t want to come home, even if it means spending the summer with you. No offense! It’s just that the idea of working at the resort for the rest of my life makes me want to tear the skin off my arms. Don’t take it personally, but it’s a little awkward that you love my family business more than I do.

I knew what I really wanted would be a stick of dynamite in our relationship. I hated keeping things from Jamie, so I’d started avoiding him instead.

“Whit told me you seemed off,” Jamie said.

That stung. I thought I’d done a very good job of seeming on. “She did?”

“In a text. You said your visit was weird?”

I watched Will. He was typing something on his phone.

“Yeah, it was weird. I feel like she doesn’t get me sometimes, you know? She thinks I’m going to come home, and everything will be like it was when we were twelve, but we’re different people now.” Whitney never wanted to talk about what happened in high school. She pretended that we never had that massive fight, that we hadn’t begun drifting apart years before that when she started dating Cam. “I feel like she doesn’t trust me.” I saw the way she eyed my drink when I ordered a second at the bar last night, but she didn’t have to worry. I rarely had more than two these days.

“You’re overthinking it, Fernie. Give that brain of yours a rest. Once you get back here, you’ll see—there’s nothing to worry about. You and Whit are going to be buds your whole lives.”

I sighed. “I hope so.”

Will put his phone away and wandered over to a school of fish painted on the side of a three-story building.

“I’ve gotta go,” Jamie said. “Love you.”

“Love you, too.”

I watched Will from a safe distance. His back was turned to me, his hands resting on his head.

Four years had passed without me being interested in anyone but Jamie. I’d flirted a little. I’d danced with guys, but I drew the line at letting them buy me a drink. And I’d withstood constant teasing about being in a long-distance relationship with someone I’d known since childhood.

“You are never going to be hotter,” Ayla lectured me once. We’d met in our first-year macroeconomics class, and she was my closest friend in the city. “You are wasting your prime years.” Then she met Jamie. He won her over within thirty minutes after he suggested a karaoke bar as the evening’s entertainment. When he pulled out his Alanis (a banging “You Oughta Know”), she was a goner. The night ended with Ayla dragging us back to her apartment and the two of them singing Nelly Furtado songs neither could remember the lyrics to.

Jamie was twined around every part of my life. I thought I wanted him to stay that way forever.

“Everything all right?” Will asked when I walked over.

“Fine. It was just a friend.”

I looked at Will’s profile for a long time. I was stoned, I had zero shame, and I had a theory. I let my eyes run across the hard line of his cheek and jaw. I perused his arms and down his torso. When I got back up to his neck, it was pink. This tingly thing I felt for Will, it was purely physical. I was sure of it.

“What’s Fred like?” I asked.

Will’s nose scrunched. “Fred?”

“Yeah.” I moved toward the alley. There was more ground to cover. “Sensitive topic?”

“No,” Will said, following. “Of course not. Fred . . .” He paused. “Fred’s specific. There’s no one like her.” He laughed. “She makes sure of it. If everyone was going through the front door, Fred would be searching for a side entrance. She comes at everything her own way.”

I tipped my head down so I could roll my eyes.

Will told me all about Fred. Fred had a tapestry hanging in a gallery in Gastown. The tapestry was called Curse and wove together the pain, power, and fecundity of menstruation. Fred had committed to an all-red wardrobe while working on the tapestry senior year. Fred’s ideas were bottomless. For example, Fred came up with the theme of “failure” for their newsletter’s graduation issue and helped track down Emily Carr alumni to share their biggest flops.

Fred sounds like she takes herself pretty seriously, I thought. “She sounds fun,” I said. “How long have you been together?”

“About five months.”

That’s it? The words almost left my lips.

“What?” Will said.

“Nothing.”

“No, come on. You’ve got a look on your face.”

“I don’t.”

“You do.” He pointed to my mouth, and we both stopped walking. “You have a smidge of a look.”

“Well, now I do. But only because you said smidge.”

“You weren’t judging the length of my relationship?”

I put my hand on my chest. “Nope, not at all.”

I didn’t love that I was jealous of Fred, but so what if I was? Will was stupid hot. That was it. There wasn’t anything else going on here.

Will arched down to meet my gaze, his eyes shimmering. “Liar.”