#langonmel

He tends to follow other people’s lead. His mom has always been pretty effusive in her love for her kids—hugs to greet them and say goodbye, squeezes to the shoulder when she walks by them in the kitchen, gentle pats on the back when they’re under the weather or feeling down—so he initiates hugs and swings his arm around her shoulders when he sees her. Frank can genuinely not remember a single time he and his dad have touched. He must have clapped him on the shoulder, right? At graduation or his wedding or something? Whatever. He’s not going to rock that boat. His siblings aren’t particularly touchy: maybe a hug when they see each other at the holidays, but probably not even that.

He can’t remember having many friendships that featured much touching. His track and cross country teams had none of the homoerotic butt slapping or locker room horseplay he saw from the football or baseball or hockey teams, which he was grateful for. He probably knocked knees on the couch during COD marathons with his high school friends, but they tended to do the bro hug or clap or whatever when they saw each other.

He had one girlfriend in high school who was always touching him, wanting to hold hands in the cafeteria and sit in his lap when they studied in the library and make out behind the PE building. He went along with it, because he really wanted to get laid and it didn’t seem like that big a deal, but he definitely wouldn’t have started any of that without her encouragement. Same with his first girlfriend in college, who really liked going to parties and then ostentatiously making out with him on the dance floor or against the wall or in the line for the bathroom. If he had been more in charge, less of a pushover, he probably would have shut that down, but she was super hot and he had no idea why she was even looking at him, let alone regularly having sex with him, so he pushed his discomfort down instead of her away.

It was kind of a relief to start dating Abby, who’s not big on PDA or maybe any displays of affection towards him. He got to do what felt a little more natural to him, an arm around her shoulder or a hand to her back or a kiss on the cheek, and Abby didn’t like even that much attention, most of the time. Low maintenance, she said in the beginning, which. A lot to unpack, there, in the end.

It’s completely different with Tanner and Penny, of course, because hugging them and smoothing their hair back and feeling the weight of them against his chest is the best feeling in the world, probably. It’s so easy, too, to know that they want some kind of affection, to meet that need, and to watch their little bodies relax and lean into him, feeling safer and regulated by something so simple.

He never really knew just how much little kids like to touch other people—he was the first in his family or friend group to have kids and he’d never spent that much time with them before becoming a dad, which is kind of crazy in retrospect, just like so most of what happened around Tanner’s conception and birth and early childhood—but he loves being their jungle gym, pudgy hands grabbing whatever part of him is available for better leverage, or mattress, chests rising and falling against him in that twitchy sleep of a kid napping when they didn’t want to, or canvas, little fingers painting his face or tying his hair into crazy ponytails.

He ignores the way Abby’s parents stiffen and frown when the kids throw their arms around their shins or tug on their hands. He loves how open Tanner and Penny are in their love and doesn’t want their WASP bullshit interfering with that. Luckily, it’s something he and Abby actually agree on, so at least that is one thing they don’t argue about or have to hash out in front of lawyers or therapists or extended family.

He only realized when he saw his mom for the first time after his second stint in rehab and she gave him an enormous hug that he probably hadn’t really touched anyone in months, not since he last saw Tanner and Penny, and it settled something, feeling her arms wrap around his shoulders and smelling the hint of perfume she’s worn his whole life.

Anyway, if asked, which he hasn’t been, Frank would probably say that he didn’t care all that much about touch, one way or another, which is why it’s weirding him out that he keeps noticing and cataloguing how Mel seems to react to touch.

Looking back, he can say it started his first day back on the Fourth, when he was the one trusted to look her over after that asshole knocked her to the ground. It wasn’t when he ignored how soft her hair was, how fragile her head felt in his hand, as he examined her, barely knowing what he was looking for, but when he went to lay a hand on her leg before thinking better of it, drawing his hand back at the last second. As he left the room, lights turned off behind him, he wondered why he had the instinct to touch his colleague’s thigh and also what stopped him, hand flexed an inch away from her scrubs.

Mel probably doesn’t like people touching her, he thought, which seemed to vibe with everything he’d learned about her up to that point. That seemed like a normal, perhaps even thoughtful or useful, thing to observe about somebody he was hoping would become, at the very least, a work friend, maybe even a real friend.

But he just kept noticing more about Mel’s reactions to touch, little interactions and microexpressions. More than that, he was inexplicably holding onto them. Her enthusiastic high fives after close saves. The awkward pat she bestowed to Jesse when he returned to work, followed immediately by a wince and a hasty retreat from the interaction. Her flinch when Dana clapped a hand on her shoulder at the end of a shift; her smile when Perlah did the same. Her nonreaction when somebody brushed their hand against hers in a trauma bay. The competent, steady exams she performed on patients, palpating tender injuries or rubbing sternums hard, usually accompanied by an explanation of what she was about to do in her calm, reassuring voice. The six inches or more she seemed to leave between herself and Santos during rounds or when they leaned against the counter under the board. The two inches she left between herself and Samira on the break room couch or during huddles. (The half an inch or less she left between herself and Frank in the ambulance bay.)

And sure, he knew he was collecting little facts about her in general, anecdotes tossed aside casually while charting—she once started what was meant to be a two-sentence memory by saying, “Back when my parents were alive—” which was an insane way for him to learn about her family, Jesus—and rambling stories shared on break. Like: She’s an Aquarius. She took Latin as her foreign language in high school, but wishes she’d taken Spanish (“It would be so much more helpful with patients!”) or French (“I could read the actual primary sources about 17th-century fashion in France, instead of relying on translations of variable quality”). She hates eggs. She’s been on-and-off anemic since high school, so she’s always trying to add more iron to her diet. She wishes she could have a dog, but she wouldn’t feel right about leaving them alone so often. She looks cute in a braid and devastatingly hot in a ponytail.

Just, you know, normal friend stuff to notice about your favorite coworker.

Anyway, he tries to be a little more careful, a little more thoughtful, with how he touches her, outside of the rush of a trauma or when they spend time together (thrillingly) outside the hospital. He stops himself from actually touching her when his hand automatically goes to her lower back as they’re leaving somewhere, wondering why he has some bizarre urge to escort or guide her. He asks if she wants a hug when he tracks her down in the stairwell and holds her gently, loosely, when she nods and collapses against his chest. He leaves his hand a careful distance from her head when he finds himself stretching an arm along the back of the couch as they watch something, even though his fingers itch to reach out and play with her hair.

He’s surprised when she brings it up, a few months after his return. He probably shouldn’t be, though, since she’s always honest and direct, two qualities he both admires and appreciates about her.

“Frank, we’re friends, right?” she asks, a night that he’s moping on her couch, not wanting to return to his depressingly quiet apartment quite yet. (The dog travels with the kids, something they’d landed on after a fair amount of trial and error and, helpfully, an article from Mel about co-regulation and pets. It’s definitely for the best, but it means that Frank alternates between having a full house and a completely empty one. It sucks.) He doesn’t have to think about his response.

“Of course.”

“I’m sorry if this is too forward,” she says, which she continues to use as a preface to almost every question she asks him, for topics that are both completely normal (what’s the custody arrangement between him and Abby?) and completely unexpected (how and when did he lose his virginity?). “But do you dislike physical touch in your friendships?”

Frank frowns.

“Uh.” He’s not entirely sure how to answer, particularly since his “friendship” with her exists somewhere outside all the other relationships in his life, somehow both more terrifying and more precious. “No?”

Mel nods, like she has a hypothesis or research question and is simply collecting data before she can arrive at a conclusion.

“Are you uncomfortable touching or being touched by me?”

He stares blankly at her for a minute. The combination of hearing the phrase being touched by me in her low voice while she stares at him expectantly, glasses reflecting the warm fairy lights in her living room and hair hanging loose around her shoulders, sends his brain straight to some places it should not go. He swallows and tries to remember how talking works.

“Uh, no?” he says, then feels stupid when he realizes it’s the exact same thing he just said.

“Is there a reason that you avoid touching me directly?”

“I just thought it seemed like you probably don’t like other people touching you?” he hazards, wincing. He should have known that she would be tracking him the way he notices him, and he hadn’t thought what she might think about how he gives Dana a quick hug at the end of a hard shift or knocks shoulders with Donnie when they’re messing around while trying to keep himself outside the bubble he imagines around her. “Especially since you have to do it so much and it’s usually outside your control.”

Mel looks pleased, not offended, and Frank feels his shoulders relax.

“That’s very thoughtful, Frank.” He clenches his jaw, trying, as always, to ignore how much he likes how his name sounds when she’s the one saying it. “And you’re right, I usually don’t like people touching me, especially strangers or people I’m not comfortable with. But you’re not people.”

Frank nods, a little light headed, and sees how this distinction aligns with his observations. He’s a little curious what it is about Dana that makes Mel feel uncomfortable, where Jesse lands on that spectrum. He doesn’t want to touch the Santos of it all with a hundred-foot pole.

“Do you, um, want me to...touch you more?” Frank asks, mostly because he always wants to make her feel comfortable, but also because he’s an idiot.

Mel bites her lip and studies him for a moment, her forehead and nose scrunching up thoughtfully (and adorably).

“Do you want to touch me more?”

Frank’s mouth is drier than the Sahara, probably. He nods, not trusting his voice, and continues watching her as she scrutinizes him, wondering what she’s looking for and what he should be doing to help.

“Do you want to touch me in...ways that a friend doesn’t usually touch someone?” Mel asks, starting out strong but rushing by the end, bravery spent. Frank isn’t sure what answer she’s looking for, but he never wants to lie to her, so he nods, still not confident he can actually form words, and braces himself for whatever will come next.

“Thank goodness,” Mel sighs, launching herself at him. Between one blink and the next, she goes from sitting calmly on her side of the couch to straddling his lap, arms hooked around his neck, face expectant. “Can I kiss you, then?”

It’s never been a question of whether he wants to touch Mel, of course, but whether she wants him to touch her, so he’s not surprised that kissing her is his new favorite pastime, a better rush than the adrenaline after a perfect STEMI. (And then, of course, he keeps discovering new favorite pastimes: biting her neck, thumbing her nipple, making her come on his fingers and mouth and dick, hearing her moan his name, leaving hickeys where nobody but him will see.)

Frank was wrong, as he so often is. Mel really likes physical touch, when it’s coming from him.

She tucks herself into his back, forehead against his scapula, while he brushes his teeth in the morning or cooks. She plops down in his lap and wraps her legs around him like a koala when she finds him on the couch after a shower, hair tucked in her little microfiber hair towel. All the tension in her body bleeds away when he hugs her against him at the end of a long day, one hand rubbing up and down her back while the other cradles the back of her head. She loves absent-mindedly rubbing her feet against his shins (which he learns is called “cricketing,” and which she prefers to do against his legs than her own).

(All of this is only at home, of course. They touch at home or in the park or at a restaurant, but never at PTMC.)

(Ok, sometimes in the back staircase, only if nobody else is around.)

(Maybe in the ambulance bay, if it’s a really bad day. But only if nobody’s around.)

(...They get caught their second week together.)

It’s like she sees Frank as a human extension of her fidgets and lava lamp app and white noise machine with the bonus that he can apply pressure. She likes to stretch out on the couch and stick her feet underneath him, rubbing her toes together and erratically pressing against him, or bring his hands to the sides of her head so he can squeeze, first on the sides and then front-to-back, or drag him on top of her, telling him to let all his weight go even though he feels like he’ll crush her.

It’s a heady power, the ability to relax Mel with a single, well-placed touch, but it’s not one he takes lightly. It’s a lot more physical contact than he’s used to from another adult, but he feels himself settling, his own body and brain going quiet, each time her shoulders sink lower and her forehead smooths out and she smiles, that soft, secret smile just for him.

What Frank failed to take into account, though, is that Mel is one of the strangest people he’s ever had the honor to know. Which, to be clear, he loves. (How soon is too soon to say that?) He alternates between feeling like he understands her on a deep level and being completely baffled by her behavior, in the best way, and some of her most surprising behavior centers around touch. Or, more broadly, how she interacts with his body.

Sometimes she just sits right next to him and stares at the side of his face, whether he’s reading or scrolling on his phone or watching something. When he looks back, she smiles, unabashed, and continues her study.

She does things he doesn’t think are weird so much as not something he would ever think to do. She rubs her hand along his jaw in the evening, when his cheeks are a little stubbled from a five o’clock shadow, completely lost in the texture. She separates each of the toes on their right feet from their neighbors, ignoring his squirming because he’s more ticklish than he wants to admit, and hooks their toes around each other, beaming at him and explaining that she’s always wanted to hold feet with someone. She likes how soft his ears are, which isn’t feedback he’s ever received before, and reaches out to just hold on to an ear sometimes, softly rubbing his earlobe between her thumb and the knuckle of her index finger.

She’s doing her staring thing one day, but instead of smiling when he looks at her, she slowly inches closer and closer to his face. (He’s reminded of the knock knock joke she recently showed Tanner about the interrupting sloth.) She stops an inch or so away from his face, her sweet breath fanning against his lips when she exhales, so he leans forward to meet her. She draws back, then ducks back to rub their noses together, mouths almost touching but not quite. He has no idea what’s going on.

“What’re you doing?” he asks, when it’s been at least a minute of extreme proximity but no kissing.

Mel’s eyes start to crinkle and he braces himself for something absurd to happen.

“I’m edging you,” she whispers before falling back against the couch, laughing.

And that’s the thing he keeps finding about it: he has so much fun with Mel. He’s never laughed so much in bed—when he slips out of her or they’re switching positions and their elbows knock into each other or she starts nibbling on his bicep, but also when they’re whispering before bed or she leans over to show him something absurd in the romantasy she’s reading or she scrunches up her nose at his morning breath. He feels like everything is just a little looser, like he lets go of some of the tension and guilt and uncertainty he’s been carrying for the past couple years each day he gets with.

His favorite is probably the way she sometimes completely lets go, like her brain has finally shut off because she knows she’s safe and in good hands. It’s the most obvious right after she comes, eyes closed and chest heaving, completely limp and boneless, but he sees it other places: the shower, when she tilts her head back for him to brush her hair or lather shampoo or wash it out; in bed, when she reaches her hands or legs out so he can rub lotion into her outrageously soft skin; on the couch, when he hugs her with the right amount of pressure for the day and all the stress in her body ebbs away.

As they spend more time together, falling asleep and waking up side by side, clothes migrating between their apartments, sharing grocery lists and Google Calendars, Mel becomes more and more comfortable just being her unmasked self, with a corresponding rise in what Frank starts thinking of as silly Mel.

She starts a game with herself to surprise him by suddenly sticking her tongue into his mouth, a quick peck on the cheek turning into a shock of there-and-gone-again tongue. It’s not kissing. He’s not sure what it is. The spiritual cousin of a wet willy but wildly more intimate?

She hates it when he does the same back.

“How is it a game, if it’s just you doing that and then giggling about it?” Frank asks, a little perplexed but mostly, as always, charmed, the fifth or sixth time he’s been blindsided by her tongue and then sudden absence. “Is there a points system? A winner?”

Mel shrugs. She’s wearing the smirk that only comes out when she thinks she’s being very sneaky and mischievous. It makes Frank worry that his heart will burst straight out of his chest from the force of his affection for her.

“I can stop if you want,” she says, her smirk dimming. “I know it’s not fair to do something to you that I don’t want you to do to me.”

Frank huffs, sure he’s still smiling like an idiot. She’s just so cute.

“Honey, that’s not how it works. We’re different people who have different preferences. It’s not about fairness. I love when you’re happy, even if I don’t always understand it, so please, continue your game-that’s-not-a-game.”

Mel’s smirk melts into a real smile and she tugs him closer by the shirt.

“I love you,” she says, and Frank wonders for a second if he’s actually going to cry, what the fuck. It’s so much more than he thought he’d get, just a year and a half ago, staring at the walls of his detox room for the second time and convinced that he’d be alone and depressed forever because that’s what he deserved.

(Also, he can’t believe she said it first. And not even in the middle of sex or something! He’s been stopping himself from saying it since, like, day four of them dating.)

“I love you, too.”

He leans down to close the distance between them, heart still feeling too big for his body. He should expect it, he really should, but somehow he doesn’t: she sticks her tongue directly in his mouth and runs away, cackling, leaving him spluttering in surprise.

But he knows she’ll come back, probably to stick her feet under him or cricket against his legs or just stare at the side of his face, and his whole being feels impossibly calm and settled and present.

It all starts with KiKi Perkins

"Mel, you want to tag team this infected bug bite case? Could be gnarly.” He makes the sign of the cross in a way that was probably offensive to practicing Catholics. "Here's hoping for cellulitis. Maybe abscesses if the patient broke skin.”

She nods, already pulling two pairs of plastic blue gloves from the dispenser, passing it over to him, and attempting for their hands to brush just the tiniest bit as he led the charge into room eight.

All his surefire gusto, however, completely transforms into shocked surprise when he spots the patient.

“Oh, this better not be who I think this is.”

KiKi Perkins, forty-one. Shaved head, snake bite and eye brow piercings, and a patchwork tattoo sleeve down their right arm. Pants rolled up at the knee. Worn in Doc Martens. Legs dangling from the examination table, the dozens of keys attached to the carabiner ring on their hip glinting under the fluorescents.

“Present, unfortunately. Nice to see you, Frank. Wish it was under better circumstances,” KiKi says, with such a thick New Jersey accent that Mel tunes into the sound of each syllable. “Came back with a souvenir from hiking through Allegheny. I wanted to get it checked out before heading back home.”

“You were smart to stop in. Now let’s see the damage,” Langdon says.

They show him the red, pulsing skin rash, spread from the infected bug bite like the eye of a category-five hurricane. “Having any trouble breathing? Mobility issues?” 

“Nope, just some leg soreness and trouble sleeping through the night. Still cracks me up that you’re actually a real MD. Real fuckin’ trip. I wish you could have seen everyone’s faces at Vultures when I told them.”

“Vultures?” Mel asks.

“It’s a punk bar in Philly. KiKi’s their sound tech for whenever bands stop in.”

“Yeah, and Frank here was always a real diva every time he did sound check.”

“Personally, I prefer particular.”

Mel’s pretty sure KiKi has cellulitis and mentally calculates the necessary next steps in diagnostics and treatment: blood test panel to rule out a serious infection like MRSA, order a prescription of cephalexin. “You were in a band?”

KiKi snorts. “Honey, he drummed in the band. Fuckin’ packed house every time they toured.” They lean down to where Langdon sits on a stool, lowering their voice while motioning to Mel.

“Do you think your partner here’s ever heard of Crux Inversa?”

Oh.

Oh. 

Oh no. 

This can not be happening. 

Is she caught on camera? Is she being Punk’d?

Did Gloria implement a new workplace provision that suddenly made sure every patient room’s thermostat was set at a hundred degrees?

Is that why her face flushed? 

“KiKi, that was so long ago, I don’t think I even remember,” Langdon snaps off his gloves as he swivels to get up from the stool. “I’m going to have Dr. King set up a ten-day script of cephalexin. She’s the best doctor here, by far. Would trust her with my life. You’ll want to take it for the full ten, even if the infection looks like it’s cleared. Hey, Dr. King—”

But she’s already out the door, footsteps squeaking over linoleum. 

Dr. Langdon—her mentor, kind-of-maybe friend, work crush, etc.—was the drummer of the now defunct punk band Crux Inversa. 

Mel could pinpoint the exact moment she first stumbled across their music: a link on a now 404’d Tumblr post on punkrockmusicshare. Captioned with Appalachanian punk makes my brain go brrrrrrr, it sent her to a YouTube music video of four musicians in black ski-masks playing at a basement party in Morgantown.

They didn’t list any of their names, totally anonymous.  

It was two months after her mom died and after she dropped out of Mizzou. Mel needed a connection to other people in the aftermath of combing through Miranda King’s belongings—all the flea market costume jewelry, heavy coffee table books full of picturesque photographs of places she’d never see. The music. So many CDs, vinyls, and homemade mix-tapes featuring bands with names Mel loved reading aloud: Bikini Kill, Lunachicks, Veruca Salt, Poison Girls, Strawberry Switchblade. Posters from when Miranda got to see the bands as they toured through—from St. Louis, Kansas City to Springfield and Columbia.

Finding punkrockmusicshare was akin to being thrown a lifeline, a space to digitally archive all of her mother’s memories and scroll scroll scroll ‘til her thoughts stopped and the pain in her chest evaporated.

She watched the linked Crux Inversa video and then another posted to their YouTube channel (a very respectable 15k subscribers). Their sound maneuvered through a storm of heavy distorted guitar rifts and disorienting baselines and screamed, raspy lyrics about dismantling the system.

But…the drums? Yeah. A drummer with an inclination towards fast combinations of quick doubles, hard pounds of the bass snare, and thunderous rim shots that reverberated through her wired headphones. Her ear drums thumped and she blushed into her open palm as he twirled his drumstick during a key break the middle of the song.

By the end, Mel desperately wanted to lick the beads of sweat that dripped down his neck.

Take those same deft fingers into her mouth, choke on them.

Kiss him through the hole in his ski mask—with tongue.

Bite his lip, his earlobes.

Leave tiny teeth mark scars behind.

Have him pull her hair. Hard.

Bend her over his drum kit and spank her.

What transpired over the next couple of months was something Mel was not proud of. She could, if she wanted, blame the entire episode on grief so raw that it drove her to recklessness; to the overwhelmed responsibility of being the sole caretaker of her sister and a drop-out microbiology student. To the estate sale, where Miranda’s treasures were picked through and purchased, leaving their old house stark, left bare.

But that’s not entirely it.

The whole truth, however, left her feeling much more embarrassed and exposed: it was a full blown crush.

So she liked Crux Inversa’s Facebook page, stalked their website, pirated their discography and used a cassette recorder to make her own tapes. She learned the exact combination of words to type into the YouTube search bar to find videos of their latest basement show. Her focus was solely on the drummer. No one else. Scoured obscure subreddits for any information about their identities until her phone’s blue light burned her eyes. 

Absolutely nothing. Snake eyes every time. 

At night, after making sure both her and Becca took their nighttime medications and her sister fast asleep, Mel would dance around her room in her underwear. Crux Inversa’s Mottled Mountainsounds LP blasted through her mom’s old walkman. She let the rhythm of the drums be the metronome for the figure-8 motion of her hips until she toppled over in her bed, chest heaving. Grabbing the polaroid camera from her nightstand, she pulled up her t-shirt to right below her chin. Angled it just right to capture her from right above her belly button all the way to her bare breasts; doubly careful her face was nowhere in the picture. 

Every day she looked at her naked body in the mirror, she saw another responsibility to take care of.: to feed and water. But when she observed the printed picture, she looked hot. Sexy in a way she rarely felt because she was too tired to feel anything but residual numbness. Mel took another picture, flipped over on her stomach, awkwardly angling and contorting the camera over her head, so her lace-and-cotton-covered ass popped in the background.

There was a P.O. Box address on the band’s website. She spent the entire next week working up the courage to post the pictures with the short letter inside.

I think about you all the time. Now you have something to remember me. No return address on the envelope or signed name at the bottom of her note. Anonymous, just like him.

If she included the pair of panties—white cotton patterned with tiny, purple and yellow pansies—she wore or the pillowcase from the pillow she dry humped to completion after…well, that was nobodies business.

The bathroom sink facet turned on. Mel didn’t hear anyone come inside, still hidden in the stall, trying to work through her mortification and not go down the shame spiral. How am I bringing this up to Langdon?

Hey! You know that band you were in? Do you remember being sent highly illicit and inappropriate pictures and paraphernalia in the mail about eight years ago? Well…that was me! So crazy, right? 

Did she need to report this to HR? Would he report her to HR? It would be in his right to. The image of them, Robby, Abbot, Gloria in a sterile conference room, discussing her past harassment of her current co-worker was not great. The fear of them sliding an inconspicuous envelope across the table, surveying her nudes like evidence left at a crime scene. Can you explain these photos, Dr. King. 

(It’s deeply messed up, if this scenario played out, how Robby would still find a way to twist it back around on Langdon, make it his fault, and that hypothetical sat like a stone in the pit of her stomach.)

Was he dating his ex-wife when he received her mail? Had she inadvertently cast herself as the other woman in his relationship without realizing? Did Abby hate her? Did he think about her photos while he was with his wife? Maybe she needed to transfer out of PTMC and start looking into another residency placement?

She needs to get out of this stall fast. Mel tries her best to get her body to move, but it’s like a puppeteer untangling the fragile strings of a marionette, clumsy and disjointed. Walking across the small space to the door, she flings it open only to collide head first with Langdon’s solid chest. 

“Mel, are you okay? You were in there for almost an hour.”

Mel King doesn’t lie. Always clocked in five minutes early. Didn’t complain when assigned to chairs or when the case isn’t flashy. She does her job well, knew what their co-workers thought about her—innocent, sweet, enthusiastic. Overheard Trinity gossiping to Whitaker that Mel had former church girl vibes to which her roommate definitively agreed. He grew up in rural Nebraska in a large mennonite family; pretty much had a metaphorical PhD in church girl-ology.

Instead of laying the full truth down at Langdon’s feet, a lie bubbles up from her mouth: 

“There’s been an accident at Becca’s facility,” and because she is a novice at this whole lying thing, she overplays her hand by blurting out “a fire.”

“What?”

Okay, she can walk this back. She can save this. “A totally small one…a bag of popcorn caught fire in the community kitchen microwave and smoked up the entire first floor. A whole mess! Becca called because she’s very sensitive to smells and needs to go home.”

Not true—if Becca could move full-time into a LUSH to spend the rest of her days testing out fragrant body washes and bath bombs, she would leave their house in the dust.

“Do you need a ride?”

Being stuck in a small space with the guy she mentally—at multiple points in her life—called both her work husband and her music boyfriend? No. Absolutely not. Maybe never again.

“I already have one,” Mel responds too quickly. 

“Who”

“Just a guy.”

“You have a guy? Since when?”

“Um…about three months ago,” a totally fake, arbitrary amount of time. “We matched on Hinge.”

Langdon crosses his arms across his chest, stares down at her with those blue eyes that always freeze her in place.

“Mel, what’s going on?” 

“I told you what’s happening. I just need to leave and pick Becca up. Family emergency.”

He’s silent for a while…assessing, making a diagnosis, putting together a mental plan for patient care.

“Okay, well, text me when you get home.” If she looked too close, she fears she would crumble the second she clocked his hands clench. 

Do you know how many times I’ve masturbated to your music? Do you know, that when I lost my virginity, it was to your drumbeats? Your songs? That when it happened, I imagined it was you.

After she repeats her fabricated excuse to Robby and gets the clear to go home, she walks out the sliding glass doors of the ambulance bay, following the familiar route to her bus stop. 

For one thing, Lake Michigan often felt to Mel like a force of its own: less a body of water, more a living being with its own moods and needs and whims. On some days, tall waves crashing against each other felt angry; on others, overwhelmed and emotional. Choppy days with high winds could mean excitement or anxiety. Days where the water looked so quiet it was almost a mirror often felt calm, but sometimes it seemed tired or sad.

The moods weren’t just about the waves, but some combination of the waves and the everchanging colors of the water.

She remembers how Becca tried to catalogue the different colors of the lake during their visits to Shady Bluffs, switching between her pastels and colored pencils and watercolors with an edge of frustration. She had pages and pages of swatches she made: dull grays and steel blues of cloudy days, when the lake didn’t find any color to reflect back to them; deep azures and cheerful cornflowers that only happened on the brightest days, no clouds in the sky; teals and turquoises and baby blues of the shallowest water on sunny days.

When she sat by the lake—on the big boulders along the pier or on the small pebbles of the rocky beach or with a towel separating her from sand or even on the grass that blanketed the bluffs for which Shady Bluffs was named—Mel sometimes felt like her problems were actually disappearing in real time, like staring at the ebb and flow of the waves made her life get smaller and smaller and smaller as the inexorable movement of the lake bore ever onwards. It was liberating to feel so tiny, to sit in awe of something so much bigger and more powerful than her, to know that this would outlast her, especially since Mel had a habit of making things seem so much bigger than they actually were. Who cared about homework or the embarrassing thing she said last week or why her parents weren’t letting her stay longer, next to something so beautiful and terrifying?

When she was older, Mel read more about the history of the Great Lakes, a little embarrassed that she hadn’t learned about some of it earlier. She had spent so much time on land that had been stewarded by the Odawa and Anishinaabe people for thousands of years—until the American government took it in 1836—without even knowing the names of those nations. She’d never heard anyone mention the Holy Childhood School of Jesus, a boarding school just across the bay in Harbor Springs that operated for over a hundred years, and only closed down in the 1980s. Like so many other forced boarding schools, students were punished for speaking their languages and forced to assimilate to white culture. That happened just across the bay during her parents’ lifetimes.

She didn’t know any of that when she was thirteen, though. She didn’t know so many things then: what grief really meant. How it was possible to feel regret so viscerally in her throat that she felt like she was choking. The different ways to lose somebody, suddenly and slowly and irreversibly. How terrible alcohol tastes. That it wasn’t healthy to make herself smaller and smaller and smaller, always making room for everyone else.

No, she wasn’t worried about any of that when she was thirteen.

When she was thirteen, standing on the edge of a breakwall and looking into the fathomless depth of the water before her, Mel was worried about (in no particular order):

Whether or not she had put enough sunscreen on her shoulders before she left

How her butt looked in her new bathing suit, particularly since she worried about wedgies

If she had accidentally given Frank false information—was it supposed to be 10 or 11 feet deep?

What Frank might be thinking about

What Frank might think she’s thinking about, especially when she was staring at his chest after he took his shirt off

Whether or not Frank had noticed how cute the girls in group down the pier were, especially since they were all wearing bikinis while Mel stuck to her one piece

How much time they had before they should head back

Whether or not jumping into the lake would hurt

But as she got ready to jump, those worries suddenly seemed unimportant. Without thinking too hard about it, she reached out to grab his hand. It was bigger than hers, a little sweaty, but firm. Like something she could trust.

As for the day itself, it was one of those days that she’s only ever experienced in Michigan, where the morning was cool enough for most people to wear a sweatshirt over shorts—not something she could ever fathom wearing in Virginia, where it went from sweatshirt weather to shorts and short sleeves weather immediately—and the afternoon had a creeping heat, especially in the sun. She knew that she’d be shivering again once the sun started to set. Standing on the pier, surveying the water, she realized that the air was the perfect temperature to make her completely unaware of its presence, particularly as the sun hid behind a cloud.

She doesn’t remember what day it was—probably the weekend, though, right? Because they would have had Sailing class during the week?—or why they’d picked that day of all days to go, but the stars aligned for her to have her perfect moment.

A reassuring squeeze of her hand. A grounding breath. A brief moment of weightlessness, not even her short hair annoying her as it floated up around her.

And then: the frigid hug of the lake, like a punch to the sternum but also a hug around her waist. She let herself go deeper, deeper, deeper, until she opened her eyes and could see the frantic kicking of Frank’s lower half that meant he was probably trying to find her.

She felt like a whale or a dolphin as she breached the water, the air that had felt so perfect against her skin a moment before now almost oppressively warm after the shocking cold of the water, and she felt herself start laughing for no reason other than it was how she knew best to express that she was truly happy, an uncomplicated type of joy that she wasn’t familiar with.

Her happiness only expanded when Frank joined in, their laughter pushing each other on, until they settled into a contented silence. Mel tipped herself onto her back and let herself float on top of the water. She could feel her hair around her as the waves rocked her ever so slightly. The sun decided to say hi, and the rays landing across her face felt like a warm caress, a perfect counter to the chill of the water.

It was almost absurd just how idyllic that moment felt, even at the time. It seemed like something out of a YA book, not a real moment that Mel King would experience, but she went home that night and wrote all about it in the little journal she mostly ignored.

The following month, once they were back home in Virginia, Becca came home from summer school with a new trick: going to your “happy place.”

“I got really upset today when John got to use the bean bag chair during choice reading and I wanted it,” Becca told Mel as she picked some supplies out of her art corner, clearly preparing to start a new project. “And Ms. Austin told me to picture a place where I feel happy, and go there in my brain, and let go of being angry.”

“Did it work?” Mel asked, a little skeptical.

“Kinda,” Becca shrugged. “I tried to picture myself sitting next to Troy Bolton at the pool.”

She wandered off to start her project, leaving an intrigued Mel behind.

That advice ended up coming in handy the following month, when Mel started wondering how she—or Becca, or her mom, or cousin James—could ever feel happy again.

Some of the other things that happened when Mel was thirteen, after she had jumped into a lake while holding hands with a boy and then kissed that boy (twice):

She set a record for the library summer reading challenge by reading 82 books.

She chose to stay back in Virginia with Becca and her mom instead of accompanying her dad to the conference that he had right before her school year started, which was conveniently happening in the town where Aunt Susie and Carly and James lived. (Only after he promised three times to bring back the paper that Carly should have from Frank, of course.)

She used her time with Mom and Becca to go back-to-school shopping, which included her and Becca finally getting a cell phone. (To share between them, but still!)

She watched her mom answer the phone, expecting to hear her dad’s voice, but instead having to listen as a stranger told her that her husband and his sister and his niece had all been killed in a car accident that evening.

She perfected the art of crying in bed too quietly for Becca to hear her.

She attended a triple funeral for her dad and her aunt and her cousin, where she did not cry until after she had helped her mom get through her eulogy (even reading part of it into the microphone herself, when her mom started crying too hard to speak) and read the poem with Becca and shaken about fifty million peoples’ hands.

She packed up Aunt Susie’s house with her mom while James hung out with Becca at the hotel pool. James was going to stay with his dad’s parents, and it somehow fell to Mom (and therefore Mel) to help get Susie’s estate sorted and sell the house and cottage and put everything they could into a trust for James. (Mel didn’t know this at the time, but it turned out to be very helpful practice for when she had to go through the same process seven years later, that time without her mom’s help.)

She got straight As in her classes for the fall semester, even Geometry.

She realized, approximately three months too late, that she never even looked for Frank’s number in Carly’s room, that new people were living there now, that she would never get a chance to tell him that she wouldn’t be coming up next summer.

Somehow, though, that memory of her jump into the lake became central to her coping, such as it was. She figured out how to stare straight ahead in a way that looked close enough to listening that most people wouldn’t call her out while her mind traveled back to the breakwall, her weight supported by the water’s gentle embrace, her face warm from sun and laughter.

Mel picked up one more habit when she was thirteen: looking Frank up on the internet.

She did it out of idle curiosity the first time. She was sitting in the school library during the second half of her lunch period, as she preferred to do once she was done eating in the cafeteria.

(She didn’t mind taking advantage of some of the sympathy her father’s death garnered from adults. Nobody really questioned her when she was walking around the halls. Other kids would probably abuse that power to skip out on class or something, but Mel mostly used it to move between classes just before the bell rang, so she could skip the press of bodies and echoing conversation of passing periods.)

Two girls Mel didn’t recognize were at another computer, further down the row, giggling to each other.

“Now look up Ms. Anderson. I think her first name is, like, Nancy or something.”

Mel looked over at that, curiosity piqued by the mention of her seventh grade math teacher.

“Oh my God, look at her hair!”

Mel looked back at the library computer in front of her, mind racing. Somehow, it had never occurred to her that she could look up people she knew, not just famous people or historical figures. She quickly opened a new Yahoo search page.

She started with her dad, wondering what kind of imprint he had left on the digital world, and was pleasantly surprised to find a couple of his academic publications once she added his middle name. There was a link to his obituary, which Mel didn’t click. She found an old newspaper article about some prize he won when he was doing his PhD.

It was the first time thinking about her dad had made her smile in far too long, seeing his ideas on the screen in front of her, ripples from his scholarship into other publications.

She looked up Becca next, but it turned out that “Rebecca King” was a pretty common name, and she clicked through art from a woman in Nebraska, work by a journalist in Maine, and recipes posted by a (home?) chef in Massachusetts before abandoning that search.

She didn’t think she or her mom would yield anything interesting, either, so she stared at the search bar for a moment, wondering who else she could look up. (After how nice it was to see her dad scattered across the internet, she didn’t want to risk disappointment from looking up Aunt Susie or Carly.)

You could look up Frank, a voice in Mel’s brain whispered. There probably aren’t that many Frank Langdons.

Mel glanced around, as though anybody would be paying attention to what she was doing, before she typed his name in. She watched the search load, telling herself that it would be silly for there to even be something about him, when he was only in 9th grade.

Her throat went dry when the search loaded and the top result was his school district’s athletics site, where a record of all the races from the season so far were posted. She scrolled through it, stopping at each appearance of his name. She learned that he had broken 19 minutes on the 3 mile the week before.

After that, Mel started to look him up regularly. She set a boundary for herself: she would only look him up once every twelve weeks. Otherwise, she risked entering stalker territory. It gave her a little thrill to see this proof of his life outside of Shady Bluffs, especially once his track season started posting and the time they should be seeing each other approached.

Mel was fourteen by then. She was down to visiting her happy place once every week, maybe less. She was excited about graduating middle school and looking forward to high school.

At least, she had been, until her mom sat her down the week before graduation to drop an emotional bomb: they would be moving. Mom couldn’t afford the house anymore, not on her own, and she had an opportunity for a better job in Philadelphia, where she’d lived before moving for Dad’s job at VCU.

Everything felt a little like a blur from there, like the last memory Mel had that was in high definition was when she and Frank said goodbye.

If there was one thing that the deaths of Richard King, Susanne Newport, and Carly Newport taught Mel, it was that she was stronger than she thought, which meant that she could rise to the occasion if needed.

She clung to those ideas—that she could do it, that she was strong, that she needed to rise to whatever was expected of her—as she navigated high school: as she joined the swim team, as though floating on her back at the end of practice in a painfully chlorinated indoor pool could replicate any part of drifting in Lake Michigan; as she quit the swim team halfway through her junior year, when the scheduling of practice and meets and care for Becca grew too complicated; as she took as many AP classes as she could, which both strengthened her college applications and could (hopefully) help her graduate college early; as she watched her peers grow closer, laughing and hanging out together outside of school, while she raced home to beat Becca’s bus; as she searched Frank Langdon on the school computer, once every eight weeks, and watched from afar as he became a bona fide track star with an announcement on the OSU Track website when he committed there and everything.

There was good in there, too. The joy of exploring Philadelphia, a city that Mel grew to love, from its history to its abrasive sports fans. The laughter she and Becca shared when they should’ve been sleeping, really, but kept talking and talking into the night instead. The comfort she felt when her mom smoothed back her hair and hugged her tight.

But it mostly felt like her life came to some fork in the road when she wasn’t paying attention and she’s been on the wrong path ever since.

The summer after she graduated high school—just hers, for once, since Becca would be continuing on in the life skills program until she was 22—they took a family vacation to the Poconos, renting a nice little cabin on a lake. It was their first vacation in five years, which really just meant it was their first vacation without Dad.

It was lovely to swim in the lake, which was quiet and mostly empty of other people, and go on little hikes around the woods, looking for deer scat and using the field guide that Mel checked out of the library to identify flowers.

On their third day there, Mel swam out to the middle of the lake, took a deep breath, and flipped herself over, allowing herself to float on her back. She closed her eyes and tried to take it all in: the cool water lapping against her skin, the weak sunlight slanting onto her face, the feeling of weightlessness beneath her.

She swam back to shore, trying not to feel too disappointed. It could be several things—the water was so much warmer, and she didn’t jump in beforehand, and the sun was out the whole time, instead of coming out from behind the clouds—but she knew, in her heart or gut or brain, that it was because she was doing it alone, without him by her side.

Because, as much as she tried to ignore it, she knew that the boy whose hand she held was just as important to her happy place as the lake or the sun was.

Mel had trouble putting it into words, even in her journal, the way that Frank Langdon was embedded in her heart. She knew, at age eighteen, that it was kind of pathetic to still be thinking about somebody she knew for four years but hadn’t seen in five years. But there was something so special about not just Frank as a person (or who he was when she knew him), but her relationship with him.

Mel felt on some level like Frank was the only person who had ever seen her just for herself, not who she was in relation to others—Becca’s sister, National Honors Society secretary, dead dad girl—and the only person who she had only ever had all to herself. He’d met Becca and her parents, but the vast majority of their time together was just them, wandering around or hunting for bugs or picking through rocks. Shady Bluffs was the only place her parents gave her so much freedom and the only time she didn’t feel responsible for Becca, and it meant something special to her that she chose to use that autonomy to get to know Frank.

And getting to know Frank was something she would always treasure. He was a peculiar mix of chaos and intense focus, forgetfulness and thoughtfulness, impulsivity and patience. She usually hated when she didn’t know what to expect from someone, but the kindness and curiosity that stitched together all of their interactions put her at ease in a way she’s yet to find with somebody else.

Part of her was content keeping him like an insect trapped in amber, eternally preserved in her memory as the cutest boy she’d ever met. There was no way he was actually as kind and considerate and funny as she remembered. His eyes couldn’t possibly be the clear, stunning blue that they seemed in her mind’s eye. Perhaps it was a kindness to her that she was separated from him before he could let her down, before they arrived at the messy end that would have inevitably come for two kids who grew close so young.

The other part of her—the part that could still feel his sweaty palm squeezing her hand, his chapped lips pressed against her own, the jolt down her spine that accompanied his intent gaze on her—felt endlessly curious about what Frank Langdon, age eighteen, was like.

(And maybe that part was a little louder the longer she went without developing feelings for anyone else and the less satisfying she found her hurried kisses with other boys to be. How could her first kiss at age thirteen possibly be better than kisses at age eighteen?)

All of her, though, felt like an idiot, when she looked Frank Langdon up on the (refurbished) laptop she got for college midway through her first semester and realized that the only reason no social media sites had ever popped up when she searched before was because of school computers and WiFi blocking those results. Sitting in the corner of Van Pelt Library, the brightness of her screen turned all the way down, Mel stared at the first three results of her search with her mouth hanging open: Frank Langdon’s Facebook profile, frank.langdon’s Instagram page, and frank_langdon’s Twitter account.

Mel slammed her laptop shut and ignored the judgmental look she received from the girl sitting across from her.

It hadn’t even occurred to her to look separately for his social media accounts, confident that they would have come up from her previous searches, and she felt like she might melt straight through her fancy wooden chair from the strength of her embarrassment.

Oh gosh. She finally had a way to actually reach out to him, didn’t she?

Should she?

The question knocked around in her head for a week. She was just on the cusp of maybe clicking his Facebook, just to see what he looked like—there were headshots on the OSU Track website, but she tended to avoid photos of people running out of respect for how terrible everyone looks mid-run—when she received a call from her mom that drove it straight out of her mind.

And then:

Tests. Calm, steady doctors delivering devastating news with sympathetic smiles. Somehow finishing out the semester before taking a leave of absence and moving back home. Meds. Surgery. False hope. Chemo. Promising scans. More chemo. Promising scans. Sudden downturn. A new gaping hole in her heart, a mirror image of the scarred wound left by the death of her father years earlier.

Mel managed to make a few appointments at Student Health and Counseling, once she returned to being a full-time student, but she felt like her sessions were perfunctory at best. The therapist tried to get her to talk, but she didn’t have the right words to capture the turmoil that churned in her stomach, the feelings of inadequacy and panic that plagued her as she tried to keep her and Becca’s lives together.

She did learn a few more techniques for how to stave off the panic, though, when things felt like too much, and she found the 5-4-3-2-1 grounding method particularly effective.

On one of the nights that she was losing another staring match with her ceiling, Mel returned to her happy place and accidentally found herself doing it there.

5 things she could see: the clouds, the sun, Frank’s boyish smile. the light reflecting off the water, the breakwall behind them

4 things she could touch: the water, Frank’s hand, her swimsuit, her hair

3 things she could hear: her breathing, laughter from the other group of teens, Frank’s voice

2 things she could smell: the sunscreen she applied before leaving the house, the crisp air that was so far removed from the city smells of Philly

1 thing she could taste: the water in her mouth

And maybe that was what she really meant, when she reflected that things had felt blurry for so long: that perhaps that summer was the last time she felt like all of her senses worked, that she could take information in and just feel without worrying about something else.

She decided to let go of feeling weird about the fact that she revisited a memory from so long ago with such fondness. No, not fondness. Desperation?

It sometimes felt like everything had been taken away from her: her dad and her aunt and cousin, killed in one single, devastating moment; her home, when her mom couldn’t afford it anymore; her mom, in a drawn-out process that was somehow still dizzying in its speed.

But that was dramatic and untrue. She still had so many things she was thankful for: Becca. Her scholarship, the opportunity to pursue her studies. Her parents’ life insurance policies and their careful planning for what she would have considered unimaginable.

Even so, as she watched the people around her grow and change and reach milestone after milestone—new relationships, breakups, moving in together, engagements, weddings she wasn’t invited to, pregnancy announcements—Mel sometimes felt like there was just one normal part of her life, tucked away in her memory and free of all the bad things that followed: she had her first kiss at age thirteen with a boy who made her palms sweat.

Mel mostly got through the following years because she had to. Becca needed her. Her mom would have wanted her to keep going.

Mel stopped looking Frank up without even noticing, and she’d mostly opted to hold onto her version of him in amber, confident that there could be little good in finding out what wonderful things he’s experienced in his normal life, presumably untouched by loss the way she’s been.

She made two exceptions, when her curiosity itched too strongly in the back of her head, and she regretted it both times.

The first time, she was killing half an hour in the library. She hated it when she had short breaks between classes, too short to get much work done but long enough that she felt guilty not getting something done. She was checking the discussion board for her Bioethics class, even though she’d already done her assigned number of posts and responses, when she noticed a group entering the library decked out in matching shirts and jackets, talking a little too loudly but settling into their work soon enough. The guy closest to her turned as he set his bag down and Mel’s eyes caught on his shirt: Penn Track & Field.

What better way to waste a few minutes?

She wasn’t sure what she expected when she typed his name into Google, but she certainly didn’t expect the top result to be an article from The Lantern—The independent student voice of Ohio State, apparently—about “Track star Frank Langdon’s early retirement following back surgery.”

Oh no. Somewhere in Ohio, Frank was probably in pain, reeling from a huge change in his life and trying to figure out where to go, while Mel had frozen him in time, as though she was the only person who ever experienced hard things.

She skimmed the article—distantly noting that Frank had also ended up a Bio major, what a funny coincidence—before going back to the results page and scrolling to the link that had thrown her off the last time she looked him up.

As his Facebook profile loaded slowly, Mel was vaguely aware that her heart rate seemed elevated, but that thought was replaced by a hollow disappointment when she saw the pictures he had been recently tagged in: Frank, now tall and muscular, Zac Efron hair gone in favor of a shorter cut, standing by a game of beer pong, his arm slung around the shoulder of a beautiful girl; Frank, head thrown back in laughter in a group of people; Frank, flipping off the camera beside a coffee table that held a bong and some scattered beer cans; Frank, kissing a blonde girl, the cut of his jaw from the side insane.

Mel exited out of the page immediately and told herself that it was unreasonable to feel this disappointed when it looked, for all intents and purposes, like Frank was a happy, normal college student, doing happy, normal college student things. She hadn’t seen him in seven years. She had no right to be jealous that he was going to parties and engaging in illegal substances and kissing girls.

She tried to block that out of her mind, clinging to the version of Frank that she had known as best she could. She dug out the old photo album where she knew her mom had put the only pictures she even had of them together, staring at the bright smile on his teenaged face and willing her brain to hold onto that.

The second time she looked him up was at the end of her MS1 year. Mel had, for the first time in as long as she could remember, an actual, honest-to-goodness break. Becca’s best friend from her high school independent living program was going on a family vacation to Maine, and they had invited Becca to join. Becca was over the moon about it, excited for a chance to go somewhere new and be independent and spend time with Sara, who she hadn’t seen as much since they both graduated.

The trip coincided with the couple of weeks that she had off between her MS1 and MS2 year, and Mel spent the first few days knocking out her to-do list with a vengeance: deep cleaning the kitchen, washing the couch cover, scrubbing down the baseboards.

On day three, when her to-do list was running low on tasks, Mel found herself staring at the photos Becca sent of her trip and wondering when the last time she did something as fun as that was. Probably their trip to the Poconos, back before Mom’s diagnosis?

Her brain followed that path to its natural conclusion—Poconos meant lake meant Lake Michigan meant Shady Bluffs meant Frank—and Mel typed his name into Google before she could talk herself out of it. It had been half her life since she’d seen him at that point, but if the songs and books and movies were anything to go by, it seemed like society accepted adults continuing to hold a special fondness for childhood memories and friends. Right?

She hesitated for a moment before clicking on the first link. She only saw two things before she slammed her laptop closed and threw it across the couch.

She immediately chastised herself for being so dramatic, but the feeling clawing at the back of her throat felt like a cousin of the grief that had become her companion. Which was absurd, of course. She pressed her fingers into her eyes as hard as she could, but the little status updates remained imprinted in her brain: Frank Langdon was married. Frank Langdon’s wife was pregnant.

Mel pushed that information aside and decided that this week would be the perfect time to do something fun and spontaneous, two words that had never previously described a single one of her actions.

She just needed to get outside, probably. She needed to connect with nature, to stare at something beautiful, to remember how small she and her problems really were. She started by looking into places to hike or camp in the Poconos—ignoring, for the moment, that she had only gone camping a couple times in her life, that she had certainly never gone camping alone, and that she had absolutely no camping gear—but the pictures made her too sad, memories of her mom and their trip there threatening to overwhelm her. She poked around forums with advice about day trips from Philly, clicking through Reddit threads and Google Maps reviews.

She stared at a picture of the Atlantic Ocean, a beach in Delaware that somebody on Reddit recommended, and it somehow filled her with dread, not the awe she remembered from Lake Michigan.

It would be nice to go swimming, though, she reflected. She hadn’t been swimming since before Covid, when she used to take advantage of the campus gym to swim a few laps when she needed to blow off steam. The thought of finding a pool was overwhelming, though.

She was struck by a burst of sudden inspiration: a waterfall! She had never hiked to a waterfall and then swam at its base, but it sounded like a great way to connect to nature and get outside her head.

She Googled “east coast waterfall hike swim,” because why shouldn’t she make a trip of it and go somewhere farther away? She had time, if not much money, for something like this. She clicked through a thread of people sharing their favorite waterfall hikes, pulling up pictures and trail maps. They all looked amazing, and Mel felt excitement building under her skin as she started taking notes. Sliding Rock in North Carolina - a natural slide, 8 foot deep pool, 10 hour drive. Bingham Falls in Vermont - accessible, multiple hikes, 7 hour drive. Madison Blue Spring - the most beautiful water Mel could imagine, 15 hour drive. Cascade Falls in Virginia - a moderate-to-strenuous 4 mile hike, 7 hours drive.

She got as far as looking at the price of motels in Pembroke before she realized that what she was doing was insane. Why would she drive 14 hours (roundtrip) to hike (something she’d almost never done) and swim in dangerous conditions? What if something happened to her on the drive? What if something happened to her on the hike? What would Becca do without her?

Mel shut her laptop and settled instead for heading down to the Schuylkill River Trail. She found a bench as close to the water as possible and sat down, staring into the water and hoping that she could slough some of her anxieties off into the current. But instead she watched as debris kept floating by—not just trash, but normal river things, like branches and leaves and rocks—and shuddered to think about swimming in it, even though people did every year during the Triathlon.

The sticky humidity of the summer heat pressed down on her skin, and she abandoned her attempted communion with the water quickly. She stopped by the library instead and checked out a random fantasy series, deciding that that would be a much better way to take a mental break.

She tried to let go of Frank Langdon after that, though she didn’t beat herself up when certain things brought him to mind: removing a tick from a kid’s leg during one of her Pedes rotations. Hearing “I Miss You” by Blink-182 at the grocery store. Packing up her rock collection to bring with her to Pittsburgh.

She never thought she would regret any of that: freezing him in amber, looking him up, ultimately trying to move on from him or news about him. It seemed like the right thing to do, to give herself something nice to keep while she tried to release any hold she felt like she had over a man she only knew as a boy.

But she’s been wrong so many times—when she thought she would see him the following summer, when she thought she’d have more time with her dad, when she thought she would be able to handle losing her mom, when she thought she could be Becca’s sister and caretaker and best friend, all rolled into one—so it makes sense that she’s wrong about this, too. It seems like she never can get the things that matter the most right, no matter how much she studies.

And that’s what she realizes on her first day at PTMC—after she figures out her new locker and tightens her braid and introduces herself to her new attendings, excitement warring with nerves in her chest—when she hears an incredulous, “Mel?” behind her and turns around to find the blue eyes and swoopy hair and soft lips that have plagued her thoughts for the past seventeen years.

With Frank Langdon standing in front of her, live and in-person, Mel has never felt less prepared in her life.

He almost swerves his bike straight into a parked car while he’s rubbernecking, but he slams on his brakes just short of the shiny red bumper. He throws his bike onto the grass and starts to sprint up the steps to the bulletin board, but stops halfway up when he realizes he’s still wearing his helmet, which probably isn’t a good look. He turns back and tosses it with his bike.

“Mel?” he wheezes, once he’s finally made it up the stairs, and winces immediately. He’s breathless from the running and the doubling back and also from biking in the first place, and he’s definitely not coming off as a cool person to hang out with.

This close, he can see that Mel’s shirt has turtles on it. God, she’s so cool.

She turns around and Frank finds himself immediately comparing her now to what he remembers from when he first met her two years ago. She has new glasses—thick, plastic rectangular frames that are either a very dark blue or black—and she seems taller, her face a little longer, but she mostly looks the same.

He wipes his sweaty palms on his shorts, heart sinking the longer she stares at him without actually saying anything.

Oh God. What if she forgot who he is?

His sister already makes fun of him for being “a little weirdo,” just because he changed the route he bikes to camp so that he goes by her aunt’s cottage every morning. It’s not that weird, he doesn’t think, to just check if there’s a new car outside the cottage.

Maybe it is weird that he can still picture her parents’ car—a gray Mazda 5 with Virginia plates and no bumper stickers—but Frank’s science teacher told him that his “exceptional memory” will get him far, so he’s going to blame it on that.

(Sure, it was said during a parent-teacher conference that she requested to discuss Frank’s “habit of failing to complete assignments during class or at home,” and Ms. Hutchins maybe actually said that his “exceptional memory” will only get him so far without the work to back it up, but whatever. He ended the year with an A, didn’t he?)

It’s just that those two days with Mel two summers ago were probably the most fun that Frank has ever had in his life, and he’s been dying to see her ever since.

He knew that Mel was totally different from anyone he’d ever met the second she glared at him for interrupting her attempted rebellion. He’d only gone over because Carrie told him to, sure, but everything else was all him: getting her to talk to him, showing her his bugs and admiring hers, even splitting their ice cream so they each got to try vanilla and chocolate.

(The ice cream was actually a little disappointing, after all the build up. They just shook bags up for, like, an hour, and it didn’t even taste that much like ice cream. The best part was probably swapping with Mel and watching how her face went through about twenty expressions in the second that she first tried it.)

She ended her day with the Racoons by expertly removing a tick from Tommy’s leg. She used a special spoon that she whipped out of her backpack before Matt and Connor could even take a step towards the first aid kit.

Frank thought he might be in love.

That was a crazy thing to think, though, since he only just finished fourth grade, and none of the other boys in his class even talked to girls, let alone asked them to be boyfriend/girlfriend. (Or to get married, which sounded even better than being girlfriend/boyfriend. You’d get to live together!)

He saw her at camp the next few days, but she was back with the Chipmunks and he was still with the Racoons, so he didn’t get to talk to her.

He finally got his chance when he saw her by the lake that Saturday afternoon. She was walking along the rocky beach, wearing water shoes and shorts and a pretty purple one-piece bathing suit. Frank ditched Joey and Tommy and Kyle by the concession stand and beelined to her. As he approached, he could see that she was crouching down every few feet to peer at the rocks, picking out a couple to study in her hand, and then returning all but one of them to the ground. She tucked the one into a bag she was holding, a small cloth sack that was bulging with odd lumps.

“Hey, Mel,” he’d greeted, tucking his hands into the pockets of his swim trunks and trying not to squint too badly in the sun.

When she turned to him, he saw that her glasses were actually transition lenses. She was the coolest.

“Hi, Frank,” she said, not sounding particularly excited. Frank tried not to visibly deflate as she crouched back down and started poking through the little rocks and pebbles underfoot.

“Whatcha doing?” he asked, rocking a little on the balls of his feet. Something about her—maybe how smart she was, or how she seemed to care more about honesty than looking a certain way to other people, or how much Frank wanted to tug on her pigtail braids—made him feel awkward in a way he wasn’t used to.

“I’m picking out the rocks I’ll bring home to my rock tumbler.”

She didn’t look up as she answered, like she wasn’t really thinking much about him or his presence. Frank didn’t understand why he wanted her to look up at him so badly.

“You have a rock tumbler?” Frank asked, excitement bleeding into his voice.

How was every new thing he learned about her cooler than the last?

“Yes, back in Virginia. It’s from National Geographic and it was a Christmas present three years ago. I always try to get new rocks when I go somewhere so I can keep growing my rock collection.”

This was all said very matter-of-factly, like she didn’t care what he might think about it one way or the other. Frank wished that he could be like that; he always felt so aware of what other people wanted him to do or expected from him. It made it hard to know what he actually wanted and what he did because of other people.

Mel made it feel like he could just be himself, though, without worrying about it too much, since she was so obviously being herself all the time.

“Can I help?”

Mel looked up (finally) and squinted at him like she was trying to decide whether or not he was a worthy rock finder. He straightened up, trying to look as observant as possible, and grinned in relief when she nodded.

She patiently explained to him what she was looking for in rocks—not too small, since they went through multiple rounds in the tumbler, and rocks that started out small ended up tiny—and then they picked through the rock beach side-by-side. Frank kept asking her questions, eager to learn anything he could about her, and she slowly looked more and more comfortable, less like she expected Frank to laugh at her. He wondered what it was like for her at school, whether the other kids found her honesty and brilliance off-putting, and wished that he could bring her back home with him instead.

They kept going until they’d covered the entire rocky beach. It was easy to ignore the sounds coming from the sandy beach on the other side of the pier, the splashing and laughing and voices that meant his friends were having fun, since he would much rather be by Mel’s side, learning to see the rocks through her eyes.

Their little rock bubble was only interrupted once.

“Frankie!”

Frank looked up and saw that Joey, Tommy, and Kyle were standing at the bottom of the hill looking ready to go.

“We’re going to the tennis courts in the woods, wanna come?”

The tennis courts in the woods were secluded, far away from everyone else, so they could do whatever they wanted as long as nobody was actually playing tennis on the courts. They usually ended up hitting each other with sticks, and it definitely wasn’t Frank’s favorite.

“Nah, I’ll see you later!” he yelled, waving them on. He looked back down, trying to judge whether the red-ish or blue-ish rock was cooler, but he could feel Mel’s eyes on him. He caught her eye and raised his eyebrows.

“You ok?”

“You don’t need to pity me,” she told him, frowning.

Frank had no idea what she was talking about.

“What?”

Her eyebrows drew together.

“You already have lots of friends who you know better than me, and you don’t have to pity me. You can go play tennis or whatever.”

“I don’t pity you,” he said, confused. “Why would I pity you?”

“Because I don’t know anyone or because the camp thing was dumb or because I’m a girl.”

Her words came out in a rush, like she’d been mulling them over for a while and was finally letting them loose. Frank frowned.

“I still don’t know what you mean.” His heart sank and he shot to his feet in alarm. “But if I’m bugging you, I can leave. I’m sorry if you wanted to be alone or something.”

“I didn’t say that,” Mel said, still watching him suspiciously. “I just don’t get why you’re here.”

Frank stared at her. What?

“I’m here because I want to be?” he tried. Her expression remained wary. “Because I want to be your friend?”

Mel scrunched up her nose.

“But why?”

Frank wished even harder that he could bring her back to Ohio with him so he could show her how many people wanted to be her friend. He knew his best friend Phil would like her, and she’d probably get along with Willa, too.

“Because you’re cool?”

She narrowed her eyes, like she knew he was about to make fun of her, so he kept talking, almost faster than he could even think.

“Because you like science and I like science and I like hearing the facts you know about bugs and rocks and stuff, especially since the guys up here don’t care about that stuff very much. They’re kind of boring, actually. They just play dumb games and run around and stuff, and I like talking to you more than any of that. And I thought it was really cool that you stood up for yourself at camp, and then it was even cooler that you knew how to do that thing with the tick, and I think you’re funny and nice and yeah.”

She kept watching him for another moment and he felt his heart beating too fast in his chest, like whatever she decided next would somehow decide his whole future.

She shrugged.

“Ok.”

She went back to looking through the rocks, as though his whole speech didn’t matter that much to her, and he wanted to do whatever it took for her to look at him like she did care, like his words meant something to her, like she would keep thinking about him the way he thought about her.

That’s how he felt the rest of their afternoon together, doubling back across the beach and then sorting through the rocks to get rid of the duds. (He was proud that almost all of his made the final cut.) He tried not to show how excited he was when she let him bike her back to her aunt’s cottage, where he got to meet her parents and wave at her sister through the window.

His excitement came crashing down when she went inside for dinner and he didn’t know when he’d ever see her again, and he felt like he was in a fog the rest of that summer.

That had been almost two whole years ago, back when he had a blue bike instead of his cool new black one and he had a bad hair cut and he didn’t even play any sports. He thinks that he has a lot more going for him now: he just finished sixth grade and got a new haircut and actually joined the cross country and track teams at his middle school.

(Ok, they were really just clubs that ran in the park a couple times a week, but he’ll be able to compete in the meets this year, when he’s in seventh grade, so it basically counts as being on the team, right?)

“I guess maybe you don’t remember me,” he says, awkwardly running a hand through his hair and trying to suppress his crushing disappointment. “I’m—”

“Frank Langdon,” Mel finishes. She bites her lip. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have interrupted you, but I didn’t want you to think I forgot. It’s nice to see you again, Frank.”

Frank feels like he could lift a car or zoom around the earth super fast like Superman. No, he doesn’t want to go back in time, not when Mel is standing right in front of him.

“It’s, uh, nice to see you, too,” he says, clearing his throat. “When did you get in?”

“Friday evening.”

Two days ago! Mel King has been here for two whole days without him knowing! He should have expected that they could arrive over the weekend and added in rides by her cottage on Saturday and Sunday, instead of just going by on the days he had camp. What a waste.

He doesn’t say any of that, though, since he doesn’t want to scare her off.

“Cool. How long are you here this time?”

“Two weeks.”

Frank wants to pump his fist in the air or run in a circle or something else to let out some of this overwhelming excitement. He settles for shifting his weight and cracking his knuckles.

“Will you be at camp?” he asks.

She shakes her head with a grin.

“No, I got my parents to let me skip it this time, especially since I presented my alternative plan.”

He’s almost relieved that she’s just as interesting and unexpected as he remembers, since part of him thought she couldn’t possibly live up to the way he remembers her, but he definitely doesn’t know anyone else who presents plans to their parents to get out of camp.

“What’s your alternative plan?” Frank asks.

“Becca and I are launching a dog walking business!” she says brightly, turning the paper in her hands around so he can see what’s on it.

It’s a hand drawn poster, just black pen or marker on the yellow paper, with meticulous lettering. The top proclaims DOG WALKERS FOR HIRE above a cute drawing of two girls, each walking a dog. There’s a short description below:

Do you have a dog (or two) who needs to get some energy out? The Royal Walkers are here to help! Melissa and Rebecca King are available and eager to walk any neighborhood dogs, day or night, rain or shine. Our services include quick walks around the block, long walks around the neighborhood, playing fetch on the back hill (if the dog has a long leash or is good off leash), and indoor dog sitting for up to two hours at a time. We can provide dog poop bags.

At the bottom of the page, a stick figure has a speech bubble coming out of its mouth saying, “I would trust Becca and Mel with my dog!” The figure is labeled “Richard King, lifelong acquaintance of Rebecca and Melissa,” and contact information for their parents is included in the corner. The edges of the paper have a little repeating border of squiggles and lines.

It’s amazing.

“Did you make this yourself?” Frank asks, awed.

“My sister and I made it together,” she says proudly. “She did the drawings and I did all the writing. I looked at a bunch of posters in the library at home so I could know how to do it. Does it...do you think it’s ok?”

Hesitation creeps into her voice—or maybe she just lets what’s always been there show—and Frank can’t reassure her fast enough.

“This is the coolest thing ever,” Frank tells her, reaching out so he can get his very own copy. She doesn’t stop him from taking the top one off of the stack.

Would it be weird to hang this on the wall of his room, to prove that he didn’t invent her?

“It’s not nice to make fun of something we worked really hard on.”

Frank whips his head up, dismayed to find her frowning severely at him. He frantically shakes his head.

“No, I wasn’t making fun of you! This is seriously cool!”

Mel wrinkles her nose at him.

“It can’t possibly be the coolest thing ever,” she counters. “Like, it’s not cooler than axolotls. They can regrow their legs in just a month.”

“No way,” Frank breathes, eyes wide. “How do they do that?”

“Scientists are studying it,” Mel tells him, her expression settling into something that looks less upset. “They think they might be able to use what they learn to help humans regrow limbs, too.”

“Whoa.” Frank stares at her, wondering what other cool facts she knows.

“I read about it in National Geographic Kids.”

She reaches up to push her glasses up her nose with a finger. He’s not sure why, but he really likes it.

“That’s awesome,” Frank says sincerely. He looks down at the stack of papers in her hands. “Can I help you hang up the rest?”

Mel considers him for a moment and he feels like he’s back on the rock beach, being evaluated for his rock-finding skills. He thinks he passed that test, but he’s not sure what she would be looking for in a flyer-hanging partner.

“Sure. I bet you might have good ideas about where to hang these, too.”

Frank nods eagerly and reaches out to take some of the papers. Even though he kind of wants to know what her hands feel like, he makes sure not to touch her, since he remembers how much she didn’t like other people touching her last time.

He turns to head down the street, but stops when he realizes that she’s not following him. She is, instead, staring at his upturned bike, which is still laying unceremoniously on its side at the bottom of the stairs.

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” he says, waving a hand at the bike and secretly hoping she might be admiring how cool it is.

“You shouldn’t just leave your bike here,” she argues. She sounds unimpressed. “It’s not supposed to be there.”

Frank shrugs to hide his disappointment. She didn’t even say anything about how the handgrips are a bright red!

“It’s not like somebody’s going to take it or something,” he scoffs. “It’s Shady Bluffs.”

She frowns.

“But it’s against the rules,” she tells him. He squints at her, a little confused. What is she talking about? Are there special rules about where to put your bike that he’s been ignoring his whole life?

It’s not a big deal to just listen to her, though, so he hauls it up and wheels it over to the bike rack across the street, just by the highway overpass down to the beach.

“Hey, why don’t we start over there?” Frank asks, nodding his head towards the beach and surrounding buildings. “Like, the boathouse and stuff.”

Mel nods and crosses the street to him. He notices that she stops to look both ways before crossing, even though there haven’t been any cars during their whole conversation, the speed limit is 10 mph, and you can hear a car coming from about three blocks away. It makes him smile.

They wander around for the rest of the afternoon, hanging up Mel’s flyers in the boathouse and outside the bathrooms and by camp and on the church bulletin board. They even hang one outside the community hall, where there isn’t a special place to hang things but there is a blank wall. Mel watches nervously as Frank hangs the flyer there as carefully as he can, confident that the Scotch tape won’t do any damage.

He walks her back to her aunt’s cottage when they use up the flyers (except the one he slipped into his pocket), dreading the time when they’ll have to say goodbye, even though she’s still got twelve days left up here.

They stop on the sidewalk outside her aunt’s cottage. Becca is sitting out on the porch, drawing in a sketchbook with some headphones on. She doesn’t seem to notice them.

“Since you’re not coming to camp, I guess I won’t see you much,” Frank says, kicking at the sidewalk with his New Balance sneakers.

Mel doesn’t say anything for a minute. He looks up, starting to feel embarrassed, and finds her watching him with that evaluating look again. It makes him wonder how she’s been doing at school, whether she’s still surrounded by idiots or if some people have noticed that the coolest person ever is right under their noses.

“You can stop by the cottage to hang out whenever you want,” she finally replies, and Frank feels like his heart is about to beat out of his chest. “I’ll probably be here if I’m not walking some dogs with Becca.”

“Yeah,” Frank agrees, nodding so fast he almost feels dizzy. “That would be great. Or, um.” He’s struck by a burst of nerves. This isn’t weird, right? “There’s going to be a movie night at the community hall tomorrow night? It happens every Monday. They project it on the side of the building so everyone can bring their own chairs and stuff and watch it from the grass. Maybe we can go together?”

“What’s the movie?” Mel asks.

He knows he would say yes to her no matter what the movie is, but it seems very Mel to clarify.

“The Chronicles of Narnia.”

Mel ponders this for a moment before shaking her head.

“No, but thank you for asking.”

Frank hopes it’s not too obvious how disappointed he is. It’s not like he asked her anything that important, but it felt a little bit like practice for something else he might want to ask her someday. Maybe.

“Ok. See ya around, Mel.”

He starts walking back to the mail room, since he needs to collect his bike and helmet before heading home, but she stops him by calling his name when he’s halfway down the block. He turns around to find her running towards him. He watches as she skids to a stop in front of him, panting a little.

“I just don’t like The Chronicles of Narnia,” she tells him, looking very serious. “It’s not that I wouldn’t want to watch a movie with you or something. But my dad explained to me how the story is really Christian propagandized, so I don’t like it.”

Frank nods along, feeling a little better at the explanation. He’ll have to ask Carrie what "propagandized" means. He’s still bummed that he won’t get to sit next to her for a couple of hours, whispering back and forth about the movie.

“But maybe we could do something else, since a lot of people will probably be at the movie night?” she asks, and he perks back up. “Maybe we can go down to the beach and find some more rocks for my collection?”

And that sounds even better: walking around the beach with Mel while the sun sets over the water, poking around the rocks, learning whatever cool facts she knows.

“For sure,” he agrees, nodding eagerly again. “I’ll bike over at 7, since that’s when the movie starts?”

Mel beams at him.

“Sounds good. It’s a—it’s a plan.”

They stand there, smiling at each other, for another minute, until Becca calls for Mel.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Frank says, and it feels like something out of one of his dreams, having Mel in front of him again and actually knowing that he’ll get to see her again tomorrow.

“See you tomorrow!” Mel agrees, backing up a couple of steps before turning around and running down the block, her pigtail braids bouncing along behind her.

Frank continues his journey to the mail room with a grin. He wonders what the movie is for next Monday’s movie night. Maybe he can put in a request for something Mel does like—his mom will probably know. With that thought, he picks up his pace, mind drifting as he tries to guess what movies she prefers. Maybe something about animals?

By the time he gets on his bike, he still feels a buzz under his skin from the knowledge that Mel is here, that Mel remembers him, that Mel invited him to the beach with her.