The Last Boy and Girl in the World Read online

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  For Vivi

  INSPIRED

  BY

  TRUE

  EVENTS

  It’s impossible to tell what’s underneath me, exactly which part of Aberdeen I’m floating over right now, but I still lean over the side of the boat and try to see something down there. Maybe the white gazebo across from City Hall where my parents were married. Or the seesaw Morgan and I sat on for hours at a time during the summer after eighth grade, dreaming about what high school would be like, the board steady as a park bench because we both weighed exactly one hundred and two pounds. One of the mangy tinsel snowflakes that hung on the Main Street light posts year-round but somehow still managed to sparkle when lit up for the holidays. I’d even be happy with a freaking parking meter. I’m that desperate for something real, one last concrete thing from my hometown where I can project the good-bye-forever feelings clogging up my arteries. But I have no idea where I’m at exactly. I can’t see deeper than my own reflection in the murky water.

  “Congratulations, Keeley.”

  The man driving the rescue boat, Sheriff Hamrick—I forgot he was here.

  He has one hand on the tiller of the trolling motor and tosses me a windbreaker with the other. I’m shivering pretty bad, so I put it on. There’s a big National Guard emblem stitched on the chest, because, right, he’s not sheriff anymore.

  I guess because I don’t say anything back, he snaps, “You’re officially the last girl in Aberdeen.”

  I twist around and look for the rescue boat that was ahead of ours, the one carrying the last boy, but it’s disappeared into the fog.

  When I turn back, Sheriff Hamrick is staring at me. “Was it worth it?” It’s clear, by the earnest way he asks, that he truly wants to know. He doesn’t understand.

  Before I can answer, his CB radio crackles with stern conversation. Officers talking to each other in police code. I can’t make out much beyond that there are two cruisers waiting to take us away. Sheriff Hamrick turns down the volume. I watch him try to release some of what has him so tight. He rolls his neck, cracks his knuckles. “It doesn’t matter. Aberdeen’s officially gone now. Everyone can move on with their lives.”

  My shivers change into something different, something harder than when I was just cold. “Some of us don’t want to move on.”

  Earlier this week, I typed in my address and nothing came up. Nothing for the zip code, either. I had to go to the next town over, Hillsdale, and drag my cursor to where our town should have been. The roads where my friends lived, the baseball field, the movie theater. Even the stuff that wasn’t underwater yet was colored blue.

  “You’ll think differently when you’re older,” he says, defensive and so sure of himself. Then a grinding noise steals his attention. He cuts the power to the motor and lifts the propeller out of the water. Someone’s discarded T-shirt has gotten twisted up in the blades, a cotton jellyfish.

  While he untangles it, I stare into the distance, hoping he’ll take the hint and stop talking already. A breeze blows away some of the mist and I’m able to see a few triangles spiking out of the water, the roofs of the tallest houses in the valley. They won’t be there for much longer now that the dam is finished. I focus on the house that’s closest to us. Scalloped white shingles, shimmery slate roof. Something about it is familiar. And then, as we putter past, the puzzle piece suddenly clicks into place with the part I can’t see, what is sunken.

  I’m not too late.

  I stand up quickly. The boat rocks and the sheriff nearly tumbles out the back. “I need to go over there! To that house!”

  “Sit down!” He barks it so sternly that I immediately obey. “You’re in enough trouble, don’t you think?” He takes off his cap and, exhaling, wipes his sleeve across his brow. “Look, I don’t have the pull I once did, Keeley. I’m in a new position now. If anyone asks me, and they very well might, I’ll tell them that you’re a nice girl, that you just got caught up—”

  My heart speeds up so fast that the individual beats blur into a hum. “Sheriff, please. Please. They’ll never let me back here. And even if they did, it’d be gone.” I plaster on a jokey grin, hoping to charm him. “Doesn’t the last girl in Aberdeen deserve one last favor?” I used to be good at this. But it doesn’t take long for my smile to slip. One crack and the whole thing gives way. My bottom lip trembles. My eyes fill with tears. “Someone very important to me lived in that house, and this the last time I’m ever going to see it.” I force a swallow. “I know I have to let go. I know it’s over. It’s just so impossibly hard.” I wipe my eyes. “You, more than anyone, have to understand that.”

  The sheriff suddenly can’t look at me. He lets out a deep sigh. After glancing over both of his shoulders to make sure we’re alone, he turns his CB radio completely off. “Not a word to anyone about this, you hear? I mean it.”

  I rub my eyes with the back of my hand and nod hard and fast.

  He changes our course, angling the boat toward where I’m pointing, carefully steering us around random floating crap. Couch cushions, sealed Tupperware bubbles, dining room chairs, mailboxes. The flotsam and jetsam of abandoned lives.

  When we get close enough to the house, I press my hand to the round window and look into Morgan’s attic bedroom for the very last time. Where we used to sleep in every Saturday morning is a glass half full of dark water.

  Sheriff Hamrick clicks on a flashlight and hands it to me. “You after something in particular?”

  I’m shaking so hard now that the flashlight beam touches everywhere in the room except the one spot I want it to land. I don’t answer him, but I am. I’m looking for a letter that was left for me, sealed carefully inside a Ziploc bag and duct-taped to a blade of my best friend’s ceiling fan.

  • • •

  Senior year was supposed to be when I said good-bye to Aberdeen, but it wouldn’t have been forever. I had my heart set on Baird, the least expensive in-state college option, barely thirty miles away. I’d come home for holidays and semester breaks, and probably a random weekend here and there to do laundry and see Morgan and whoever else was around. Of course, that was only if I got a scholarship to cover my dorm expenses. If not, I’d be commuting there, sleeping in my old bedroom every night.

  So maybe I shouldn’t be surprised how bad I miss it. Even the things that drove me crazy. Like the flashing red light that went up on Main Street, our first and only traffic signal. It seemed so completely unnecessary. Most people in town ran it. But I bet if I end up living on the other side of the earth one day, that traffic light will blink red behind my eyes when I close them and make me warm.

  Although that spring was the end of Aberdeen, I’ll always remember it as full of beginnings. And not just for me. For all of us. Things around us were changing, sure, but we were changing too, and we couldn’t pretend we weren’t any longer. Maybe that’s what happens when you’re suddenly living your life on a warp speed setting, trying to make the most of it before everything you know slides underneath the water.

  But when the rain first began to fall, we didn’t see the bigger picture. We didn’t even want to. The bigger picture was for our parents to worry about. We were sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and focused on more exciting things, like how many days were left before school let out. And
Spring Formal and our dresses.

  When it started, the only thing I cared about was kissing Jesse Ford.

  1

  * * *

  Sunday, May 8

  Mostly cloudy, with steady afternoon showers, 49°F

  * * *

  I used to love rainy days. The coziness of hiding inside a baggy sweater. Of thick socks and galoshes. Curling up against your best friend to share her too-small umbrella. The drowsy, dreamy way a day can pass when there’s not a single ray of sunshine.

  That was before Aberdeen had its wettest spring ever recorded. After three weeks straight of precipitation, I was ready to blow off finals and move to the Sahara. The weather hadn’t reached biblical levels. We’d had a couple of big storms, not one long and endless monsoon. Some days it just sprinkled, some days it only misted. But the air always felt damp and unseasonably chilly. I was sick of layering. Thermals under jeans, T-shirts under button-ups under hoodies, tights or leggings under dresses under cardigans. All of it thickening me like a full-body callus, while my dresser drawers were full of neatly folded spring clothes that I was dying to wear. In fact, most kids still wore winter coats to school even though it was the beginning of May. In those early days, I remember that, more than anything else, feeling wrong.

  So it was really nice to wake up to the sun the morning our high school’s Key Club went to help shore up the riverbank with sandbags. Especially since the forecasters were already predicting a band of severe storms later in the week, supposedly the worst to hit us yet.

  Actually, the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was a rainbow. Not a real one, but a rainbow sticker I had put on the underside of Morgan’s bedside lampshade a million years ago. Everything in Morgan’s room used to be covered in stickers—her walls, her mirror, her closet door. Over time, she’d peeled them away, though their sticky gum outlines were left behind, like permanent shadows. But she never found this one, and I liked that it was still there.

  I lifted my head off the pillow. Morgan was already in the shower. I waited until I heard the water shut off before climbing out of her bed. It was too cold and too early to bother changing clothes, so I threaded my bra back through the armholes of the T-shirt I’d slept in and checked to make sure my leggings weren’t too baggy in the butt to wear in public. Then I reached across Morgan’s side of the bed, picked one of my socks off her radiator, and squeezed it. It still wasn’t completely dry, not even after a night spent baking on the coils.

  Morgan hurried into her bedroom in her bra and underwear, a towel twisted around her hair. Ever since her parents divorced and her dad moved out, she’d quit wearing her bathrobe. Or maybe it was ever since she’d started hooking up with guys. I wasn’t sure.

  “I’m borrowing dry socks, okay?” I knelt in front of her laundry basket.

  She shivered as she pulled on her jeans. “You want an extra shirt, too?” she asked, pulling a white thermal with a tiny yellow rosebud print out of her dresser and offering it to me.

  I shook my head. “I have my hoodie. And once we start working, I bet we get sweaty.” I looked forward to that, to being outside and not feeling cold.

  Morgan put on the thermal and plopped down at her desk, a place more for makeup and hair stuff than for studying or homework. She unwrapped the towel. Her hair was such a dark shade of brown, it looked black when it was wet, and she barely ran her comb through it before twisting it up in a topknot. It was so thick that she used three hairbands to hold it, and I knew the center of that knot wouldn’t ever dry, not even by the next morning. Then Morgan sat back in her chair and stared at her reflection for a few quiet seconds. When she noticed me noticing, she said with a chuckle, “I guess one good thing about having a long-distance ex is that I don’t have to worry about randomly running into him in Aberdeen.”

  I crawled over to her on my knees and put my head in her lap. Sweetly, I said, “Hopefully he’ll die soon, and then you’ll never have to worry about seeing him at all! You should try praying for that the next time you go to church.”

  Morgan gasped and pushed me on the shoulders, sending me backward onto the carpet. “Oh my God, Keeley! That’s so wrong! How could you even say that?” But she was laughing, because she knew I was joking. I was always saying crazy stuff like that, taking it too far. Too far was my default setting.

  I flailed my arms and legs like a turtle stuck on her back. “Because that’s what best friends are for!”

  Morgan wore the tiniest hint of a smile as she reached to pull me up. “I’ll text Elise and tell her we’ll be over soon.”

  While she did, I pulled a peach sock with lavender stripes from her laundry basket but couldn’t find its match. I went over to her dresser and opened the top drawer.

  I had to dig a little to find it. It was underneath a plush stuffed chick with his wings glued around a plastic egg. There’d been a chocolate heart inside that egg. Morgan had given me half on our drive home from hanging out with Wes during Easter weekend. It was milk chocolate with Rice Krispies, my favorite. We ate the chocolate and drove home with the chick propped up on her dashboard, its googly eyes googling with every bump in the road.

  Wes gave Morgan tons of little presents like that all the time—cheesy greeting cards, silk roses, key chains, perfume, candy. Elise said that showed what good boyfriend material he was, though I doubt he paid for any of it since his parents owned a drugstore. Before their breakup, Morgan prominently displayed the gifts around her room. When they disappeared, I assumed she’d thrown them away. But they were all there, crammed in the drawer. I lingered over them until Morgan chucked her phone aside. Then I quickly pushed the drawer shut.

  “Don’t you think this is a huge overreaction?” Morgan said, half underneath her bed, reaching for her galoshes. I wasn’t sure if she knew what I’d seen or not. I certainly wasn’t going to say anything about it. “I mean . . . I get that it’s supposed to be a crazy storm, but Levi asking Key Club to come out on a Sunday morning to stack sandbags seems crazy.”

  I’d had the same thought myself. The river flooded at least a few times each spring, and even with the rain that had already fallen, it hadn’t added up to anything disastrous. The people in town who lived closest to it knew to take certain precautions when it was supposed to storm, like parking their cars on higher ground and moving their patio furniture indoors. It was more annoying than dangerous.

  “Yup,” I said. “And also, Levi didn’t ask. He basically demanded. I would have told him to screw off if I wasn’t sure he’d kick me out for insubordination or whatever.”

  Our high school didn’t have a ton of clubs, and so I needed to list Key Club on my college apps. I was even considering running for president next year, because my guidance counselor said admissions tended to favor candidates who held leadership positions over kids who just listed a bunch of activities.

  “I wouldn’t put it past him,” Morgan said, her lip curling. “He’s the total worst.”

  “Well, I’m choosing to think of it this way. If the river does flood, we’ll have done our part to protect our soon-to-be-inherited beachfront property.”

  Morgan grinned at that, spinning around to face me. “Thirty-two more days until we’re officially seniors.”

  “Thirty-two more days,” I echoed, just as excited. At that moment, Wes was the only obstacle I saw between me and Morgan having another terrific summer together. And whether or not she kept his crappy trinkets hidden away in her drawer, he was still, thankfully, her ex.

  • • •

  Back in the old days, Aberdeen was primarily a countryside vacation destination for the rich residents of Waterford City, thirty miles downriver. It was cabins and summer cottages and pine groves. People swam in the summer, skied and ice-skated in the winter. My dad even has a vintage postcard showing people in old-fashioned bathing suits, striped umbrellas, and canvas beach chairs, enjoying our beautiful riverfront.

  A hundred years later, the seniors of Aberdeen High School still swam in the ex
act spot the tourists once flocked to, where the bank stretched as wide and flat as an ocean beach, complete with sand that glittered in the sunshine. This wasn’t the only swim spot in Aberdeen, but it was the best. Except it wasn’t as perfect as the old postcard because of the long-abandoned lumber mill that anchored the end of the beach.

  The spot designated for juniors, where I spent nearly every day last summer, was a quarter mile upstream from the senior spot. The beach there wasn’t pure sand like the seniors had, more a mixture of sand and dirt and pine needles. You always had to have a blanket down, but it was still nice. A rope swing looped around a fat branch of a tree that grew sideways out over the water. I’m not sure who put it up. It had been around forever.

  Last summer, hardly any of the other girls tried it. They were scared the rope would break or their bikini tops would fly off when they hit the water. But after a couple of swings on the first sunny day, I had it down. Which knot to anchor my hands on, exactly when to let go so I’d hit the deepest part of the river, where the water was the coolest. I even took to screaming out something dumb to make everyone laugh whenever I’d make the plunge. Like this one time, I shouted “Super-absorbency!” because Elise had just admitted that she’d once worn a tampon and a pad while swimming at a church retreat, because she feared leaking in the water. The other girls there that day had no idea what I was talking about, but they laughed just the same. The boys shook their heads or groaned. They never knew what to make of me.

  The sophomores and freshmen were relegated to a swim spot even farther upstream, near the highway overpass. They had to pull weeds to clear a place for their towels and pick up the trash tossed out of passing cars. The location sucked for those reasons, plus there were tons of plants, slimy reeds, and other crap you didn’t want touching you when you swam.