Ann Brashares - The Last Summer (of You and Me) (4 page)

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them. They would lash themselves to the mast of prehormonal bliss and sail through the storm that way. They'd had the prestige at that time to say, This we know is true. And if ever anyone said it was untrue, they would know that evil was whispered in their ears and the enemy was at hand. They would not talk. They would not give in. They'd carry the poison pill and use it if they had to.

But what would happen when they came out on the other side of the storm? They hadn't thought it through that far. They hadn't quite considered that by trusting one part of your life, you could undermine all the others. By siding with an early version of your self, preemptively, you would doubt all future selves that conflicted with it.

Alice had been easy to enlist at the age of ten. Alice, who would grow breasts at thirteen and attune herself to the broader and sub tler frequencies of human interaction. She hadn't known what she'd be giving up.

The rest had been looking backward. Trying to remember what was true rather than seeking it. They were holy men divining the ancient book, judges interpreting their constitution. They heark ened back to a calmer, more just time.

But time went on, as it will, and the seasons changed. What did not accord with the covenant Paul did not tell Riley and Alice. The ambitions, the petty preoccupations, the sex he'd finally had with the laughing girl in his history class junior year. He went ahead and lived those seasons, all the while feeling that his real life lay here, on this beach in the summer, with Riley and Alice.

What was powerful at thirteen and even seventeen should have grown quaint by twenty-four, and yet the covenant, by its nature,

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had durability. It still existed between them. He could feel it even now. You could go away for months or years, but it was still here, bound to what you loved, binding you to it.

Alice kept it out of loyalty, he suspected. For Riley, it wasn't so much like a choice. And for him?

For him, what he'd had here on this island with Riley and Alice was the best and most lasting thing in his life.

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Bottles and Stones

F or nine years Paul had not called her by her name. She had

been "Shorty" or "Kid" or "You" to him since she was twelve. It wasn't until her first night working as a waitress at the yacht club that Alice realized this.

It was a Friday night, so she was not stunned to see her parents turn up. Since the end of high school, Ethan and Judy had left the girls at the beach on the weekdays and come out on Friday's noisy and social sunset ferry. Ethan was a history teacher and coach at a private school in Manhattan during the school year and taught summer-school courses and tutored through July and most of August to boost his income. Her mother copyedited and proofread textbooks and pitched articles on child-rearing and related subjects to a handful of editors she knew. Judy talked about her articles a lot

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during the conceiving and pitching stage, but after that they often disappeared, uncommissioned and unwritten.

"I'll take the bacon burger. And what have you got on tap?"

Alice had her arms crossed, pen in her teeth, pad tucked into her armpit. It seemed typical of her life experience that her sole table on her first shift was taken by her parents.

"Dad, you know what they have," she said in an undertone. Within moments of being near them, she felt her eyeballs rolling skyward. Even if she kept her eyeballs still, she could hear the tone in her voice.

"Okay, make it a Bass."

Her father's hair was a mix of black and gray, and as full as a soap opera star's. Most people tread lightly over what they have and dwell heavily on what they have not, but in that sense her father was original. He thought as often about keeping his hair as balding people thought about losing theirs, and the extent of his pleasure easily matched the extent of their distress.

Her mother was blond. Though it was dyed blond, she felt as though she had a right to the color because she had once been blond. She spoke out against blondes who had no natural claim to it. "It really doesn't look right," she'd say.

Alice had inherited this blond hair, though a rustier, wavier ver sion, and the color was holding steady, though Alice suspected it would turn dark when she had to stop spending summers at the beach. Next summer, for example, when she'd be working at a law firm. And all the seasons after, when Riley would keep teaching her outdoor leadership courses during the year and lifeguarding

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through the summers, and Alice would be working endlessly at a law firm. Alice had begun to picture herself in the future with dark hair.

Though Riley spent most of her life outside, she had never been blond. She had dark hair that tangled easily, as Alice knew from her attempts to trim it. Even when she was little, she never let Judy brush it. It was always cut straight around to a length somewhere between her chin and her shoulders, often tucked behind her ears. Her hair made her look younger than she was, and her freckles made her look even younger than that.

Since about the age of thirteen, Alice had grown used to being mistaken for the older sister. That was fine. What got tiresome were the protests of disbelief when Alice corrected the mistake. She felt awkward about it sometimes--more for Riley's sake than for her own, she thought. But in truth, she wasn't sure if Riley cared.

"You sure there are no specials?" Her mother smiled mischie vously.

"Mom," Alice snapped. Her mother was asking only because she wanted to make Alice recite them, not because she cared what they were. Year after year, the food at the yacht club was bad. Only first-time customers ever ordered anything more ambitious than a hamburger. Alice walked back to the kitchen. If she got the order in fast, she could get them out faster.

From the back, she saw the second of her four tables fill. It was the Kimballs and some friends of theirs she didn't know. They watched her expectantly, beaming like parents as she came over.

"Can I get anyone a drink?" she asked self-consciously.

It was strange the things you knew about people here. She knew, for instance, that the Kimballs had lost a child when it was

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still a baby. For everything Mrs. Kimball did or said or wore, even the way she served a tennis ball or ordered a glass of wine, Alice felt her loss.

She knew that Mr. Barger, who settled in at table four, had left his wife the very day their youngest kid, Ellie, went to college. Now he had a new house right on the beach and a new wife who had fake-looking teeth, and every hostess knew the perils of seat ing the old Mrs. Barger too close to the new one. Alice resisted the urge to return the new wife's friendliness in deference to Ellie, who really hated her.

"Don't you look cute!" the new Mrs. Barger erupted.

Alice knew, upon taking the job, that she'd have to wear the royal-blue polo and the jaunty sailor's cap, but she didn't realize how much they would mortify her.

How else was she going to earn money here? She was taking out massive loans for law-school tuition, and still she needed more for living expenses. You had to work twice as many hours here, because the pay was bad. The pay was bad because most of the families were prosperous and the kids were working for show. By day she had her regular babysitting jobs, but by night . . . what else was there?

It was hard to get hired to wait tables at one of the good restau rants in Fair Harbor or Ocean Beach, because there people actually tipped. You couldn't keep professionals, so the staff was a rotating cast of island kids, playing at working, serving their parents. The two other waitresses on her shift were two of the flakiest girls she knew.

It brought to mind the problem of babysitting for the children of family friends. They underpaid you because they felt they

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bestowed a favor by recognizing you as something other than a child yourself. Friends and favors made a mess of commerce, in Alice's opinion.

When she scuttled to the bar to put the Kimball order in, she realized she'd forgotten about her parents' drinks. Well, there was little tip to be had or lost.

By nine o'clock, her parents had moved on to a friends' get- together and Alice's feet were throbbing. Now the bar area was filling up with her friends, and eventually Paul appeared, as she both hoped and feared he would. It took all of her courage to face him with the sailor hat on.

"Oh, Alice," he said.

Something about it startled her, and she realized, as she fled to the kitchen to catch her breath, what it was: He said her name. In one way, she loved that he had bothered with all the nicknames through the years (though she was sad when she heard him call other kids by the same ones). In another way, she wondered what the problem of saying her name was and whether perhaps he had forgotten it.

She thought of his cheek against her body. How close he came and how far he went while she just waited.

Now he had said her name and she couldn't decide whether it shortened the distance between them or lengthened it.

u

Paul wandered with his beer to the recreation room at the back of the yacht club. He could practically smell his old adolescent sweat.

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The floor had a patina of spilled soda and sticky bare feet. Paul remembered how black his feet were throughout his childhood summers, and the approximate moment when his mother started to notice and care. At Riley's house, nobody made you wash your feet before bed. The filth of the yacht-club floor lived not only atop the thick coat of polyurethane but also inside the layers. The paint on the walls was the same. They didn't sand or clean the surfaces here but simply slopped on another coat.

He loved how dirty and ramshackle their yacht club was. He loved the scummy, giddy air and the cheerful slap of the screen door. He liked the degree of exclusivity: If your check cleared, you were in. He liked that it had no yachts, that in fact the harbor was too shallow to host any.

It was his father in him, he suspected. A rich boy trying to culti vate his liberalism. But his father had lived it deeper and more vividly, hadn't he? He 'd taken the drugs, posed for the mug shots, made the journey to India to bend his mind. Robbie had grown up in a better age for radicalism. And more than that, Paul knew, when it came to unmoored self-destruction, his father hadn't been faking it. After a three-day disappearance when Paul was four years old, Robbie had died alone of a drug overdose in Bellevue Hospital.

The green felt on the pool table by the windows was scratched and hopeless from years of play by small amateurs. The Ping- Pong table on the other side of the room was given its proper use only sporadically, when someone remembered to get balls on the mainland. The balls always got lost, dented, or crumpled in a mat ter of days. Paul remembered playing games with super balls and

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even tennis balls. Summer days stretched out so long you could easily spend a whole rainy afternoon adapting the Ping-Pong table to a game involving tennis balls. Riley was good at inventing games like that. She liked creating the scenario. Some kids got too attached to the rules, even ones that hadn't existed five minutes before. Riley wasn't like that. She liked rules but she always saw the larger promise.

The stage with the tattered blue curtain was the venue for the talent show held at the beginning of each summer and the Labor Day show at the end. Paul and Riley did a magic act one year and a boomerang demonstration the next, but both had ended badly. Later, they scorned the shows. As the years passed, it became a chance for girls to wear makeup and sparkly Lycra outfits and lip synch to bad pop songs. By the time they were fifteen or sixteen, Paul and Riley didn't perform; they didn't even bother to go. They made like they forgot it was even happening. They'd hear the char itable applause or the thank-God-it's-over applause make it all the way to the ocean beach and they'd say, "Oh, yeah."

This room was the home of the kids' movie every Thursday night. The combination of darkness and noise and the crowd of kids, their faces lit up by the film, combined for an almost unbear able excitement. He could never remember the plot of a single movie he watched here, but he remembered the feeling of all of them. When they got older, the kids would gather at movie night but not stay for the movie. It was a big party night for the par ents, so the kids ran wild while they were supposedly watching the movie.

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Paul lived with a housekeeper during those summers, while his mother spent most of the time visiting friends in Europe. He lived with a different housekeeper every summer from age twelve to age eighteen. He suspected that his mother didn't want him to get too close to any one of them for fear it would seem like she was losing her job. Paul spent all his time next door anyhow.

Kids got their independence younger here than in other places. The main predator of children and deer was the automobile, and there weren't any cars on the island, so the children and the deer were mangy, plentiful, and free. "It's the one place in the world where I don't have to worry about abductions," he remembered Judy, the news junkie, saying one time.

"What about alien abductions?" Riley had asked.

There had been alien abductions. Or so it had seemed to them. Rosie Newell, for example. He remembered the fateful night when she'd made a lot of noise about organizing the whole group into a circle. The movie projector was busted for the third week in a row, so most of the little kids had gone home. There were probably fif teen or so kids left between the ages of eleven and fourteen. And then there was Alice, of course, who must have been ten at the time. He remembered sitting on one side of Riley, with Alice on the other. He remembered that Riley was wearing the T-shirt they had tie-dyed for an arts-and-crafts project at camp the year before. They had no idea what was coming until Rosie, surrounded by her gum-chewing, belly-baring posse, produced a bottle from behind her back with a flourish. It was a clear glass beer bottle, Corona, Paul remembered.