He gives Gavin the evil eye, looking him up and down, the same way he has every time he’s seen him in the two years we’ve been together. But this time, it’s all in good fun. For the most part, anyway. It took my dad a year to cut Gavin some slack and trust him enough to let me go out on a date with him without him or Mom going with us. So embarrassing. But the overprotectiveness never managed to run Gavin off, and I think that alone gave my parents more reason to respect him.
He is really a great guy, and deep down I think my parents know that.
“Congratulations, Gavin,” my dad says and shakes his hand.
“Thanks.” Gavin is still kind of terrified of my dad. I think it’s cute.
My parents throw a huge graduation party for me at home and everybody shows up. I mean everybody. There are people here I haven’t seen in a few years: Uncle Asher and Aunt Lea came all the way from Spain! Uncle Aidan is here, too, with my cousins Avery and Molly, and his new wife, Alice. My grams, Marna and Nana Nancy (she doesn’t ever want to be called anything with a GR in it) are here, too. Nana isn’t doing so well. She has multiple sclerosis.
“Oh my God, girl, you’re going to leave me!” my best friend, Zoey, says as she comes up to me. We grew up together, just like her mom, Natalie, did with my mom here in Raleigh.
“I know! I hate it, but you know I’ll visit!” I hug her tight.
“Yeah,” she says, “but I’m going to miss the hell out of you.”
“I told you,” I say, “you could always move to Boston to be closer.”
She rolls her eyes, her dark-colored hair falling about her shoulders as she steps away and hops up onto the kitchen bar stool. “Well, not only will I not be moving to Boston with you, looks like I won’t be staying in North Carolina much longer, either.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, surprised.
I sit down on the bar stool next to her. My uncle Cole walks into the kitchen with a few empty beer bottles in his hands. He chucks them in the trash.
Zoey sighs, props her elbow on the bar, and starts twirling a few strands of hair between her fingers. “My mom and dad are moving to San Francisco.”
“What? Seriously?” I can hardly believe it.
“Yeah.”
I can’t tell if she’s disappointed or just doesn’t know how to feel about it yet. “Well that sounds awesome,” I say, hoping to encourage her. “You don’t want to move?”
Zoey pulls her arm from the bar and crosses her legs. “I don’t know what to think, Lil. That’s a long way from home. Not like it’s just up the street.”
“True,” I say, “but it’s San Francisco! I would love to go there.”
She smiles a little.
Uncle Cole, in his tall, brooding glory, takes three more bottles of beer from the fridge and wedges them by the necks between his fingers. He smiles at me as he passes and slips into the living room with the house full of people.
He’s awesome. When he arrived, he slipped me a congratulations card with two hundred bucks in it.
“Zoey, I think it’s great. And honestly, I can’t wait to visit my best friend in California. Yeah. That even sounds good when I say it. California.” I gesture both hands dramatically.
She laughs. “I really am going to miss you, Lil.”
“Me too.”
Her mom comes into the kitchen behind her with her dad, Blake, not far behind. “Did you tell Lily the news?” her mom asks as she reaches inside the fridge.
“Yeah, I told her just now.”
“What do you think, Lily?” her mom asks.
Her dad kisses Zoey on the head, takes the beer from her mom, and heads outside, probably to smoke a cigarette.
“I’m excited for her,” I answer. “I’m moving to Boston for college. She’s moving to California. We may not be together like we have been growing up anymore, but there’s something about not staying stationary in the same place forever that makes it all feel right.”
“You are definitely the daughter of Andrew and Camryn Parrish, that’s for sure,” her mom says, grinning.
I smile proudly and hop down from the bar stool to follow her and Zoey back into the living room.
“A toast!” my dad says in the middle of the room, holding up his beer. He looks across the room at me. We have the same green eyes. “To our little girl, Lily. May you show everybody at college how it’s done!”
Everybody takes a drink. “To Lily!”
I spend the entire day, all the way until nightfall with my friends and family and, of course, Gavin, whom I love so much. We are so much alike. We met shortly after he moved here from Arizona. His locker was on the same wall as mine, and he ended up in almost all of the same classes as me. Zoey honed in on him first, which isn’t a surprise given her flirty personality. I remember her telling me on his first day of school, “That one will be mine. You watch and see.” And I never had any intention of interfering, but apparently Zoey was too much for someone like Gavin. I think maybe I can give Zoey the credit for Gavin and me ending up together, though. If it wasn’t for her, he might never have had an excuse to force himself to talk to me instead.
Zoey was over him as fast as he made it obvious I was the one he was interested in.
It’s really weird, too, because Gavin and I are so eerily alike that it almost feels like fate brought us together. We both had our sights set on the same college. We love the same music and movies and books and television shows. We both love art and history and have, during different points in our lives, thought about what it would be like to travel through Africa. Gavin is interested in archeology. I’m interested in archeological conservation.