“I promised Annie I’d make sure you wore sunscreen,” she reminds me in a soft voice.
I start to answer when Brynn groans loudly. “Come on, you two! We get it, you’re into each other. Put on the dang sunscreen, and let’s get in the water.”
Olivia blinks, her cheeks turning red. “Sorry, not sorry,” she teases, smirking in Brynn’s direction.
She passes the sunscreen back to me. “I think you can take it from here.”
I chuckle and finish applying the lotion, though I notice Olivia watching longingly as I spread it over my chest and ab muscles. When she meets my eye, I wink at her.
“Let’s hit the Raging River first,” Brynn suggests.
“What’s that?” asks Matt, the only one in our group who hasn’t been to Schlitterbahn before.
I slap him on the shoulder. “Come on, my friend. Let me introduce you.”
Chapter twenty-one
Olivia
Fromthelockers,wego straight to the Raging River, which is one of Schlitterbahn’s classic rides—a whitewater rapids–style adventure that’s a mix between a waterslide and a lazy river. It takes thirty minutes from start to finish, alternating between fast-moving rapids and more leisurely floating. It’s fun, for sure, but part of my enjoyment of it is the nostalgia factor.
Summers coming here with my sisters or with Annie and Gage are in the front of my memories as we float along. When we pass underneath the entrance building, we reach our hands up and pull ourselves forward on the low-lying ceiling of the tunnel, laughing when Matt calls this part of the ride a “claustrophobic person's nightmare.”
The park is busy, so we get jammed up a few times in the slower moving parts of the river. At the end of the tube chute, we’re emptied into the Comal River—a real river that borders the park.
Next, we ride a couple of the water coasters before moving on to tube slides. The lines throughout the park are long, and we’re all too broke to buy Fast Lane wristbands to skip the waits.
Gage is at peak flirty at the water park today, and I am here for it. His hand is always on my arm or my shoulder or wrapped around my waist. He holds my hand as we walk around. He keeps sneaking looks at me in my swimsuit and winking at me when he catches me checking him out.
The energy must be contagious, because as the day progresses, I notice Matt and Brynn flirting more and more, too. They’re not together, as far as I know, and I try to keep a pretty close eye on the Camp Prairie Star gossip.
Maybe once Brynn realized that Gage is, in fact, off-limits, she set her sights on Matt. He’s a nice guy, maybe a couple of years younger than me, and he’s definitely attractive. He’s no Gage, of course, but Brynn could do much worse.
For lunch, we eat barbecue inside the park and then hang out in the Lagoon pool for a while as we digest.
Resting my head back against the pool’s edge, I close my eyes. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about what Gage shared about his adoption last weekend. Gage always seemed so happy growing up, so carefree. And I guess nothing he said last weekend indicates that wasn’t the case, but I didn’t know about everything else going on under the surface.
When he was talking about his adoption, his voice sounded so sad, and I’ve never heard Annie talk about it that way. As far as I can tell, Annie loves her parents, she loves Maggie and Maggie’s family, and she’s a little self-conscious about having such a complicated family, but she’s never hinted that she felt disconnected or unattached from either side.
Though of course Gage and Annie are different people, even if they’re twins. They don’t need to feel the same way about their adoption. It’s ironic that Gage, with his go-with-the-flow attitude, is the one hung up on it instead of Annie, who overthinks everything.
I told Gage that I wish I could have been there for him while he was sifting through all these feelings in college, and it’s true. I know it’s my fault that I wasn’t there for him. I know that I not only rejected him as my boyfriend but also ghosted him as a friend.
I spent so much time worrying about protecting myself, that I didn’t fully consider how much I was hurting Gage. I figured I’d be easy for him to get over, that I wasn’t especially important to him to begin with.
This summer, I’m beginning to see how wrong that assumption was.
I’m also wondering if I’m making the same incorrect assumption now, and if so, where does that leave Gage when camp ends?
Someone presses into my side, and I open my eyes to see Gage sidled up next to me in the pool.
He points a finger at me. “You have a tattoo!” he accuses.
I lift my foot out of the water, the monogram-style tattoo inked there clearly visible. “What tipped you off?”
“I just … how didn’t I notice it before now? When did you get it?” He looks flustered, like he doesn’t like that there are things about me he doesn’t know. I can relate.
“My sisters took me to get it after I turned 18.” That would have been a couple of months after graduation, after I started avoiding Gage. “We all got them to match.”
