Fifteenth Summer (27 page)

Now I felt like I was hovering outside a magical bubble—a shiny, blissed-out world that I just didn’t get. Sam and Caroline were inside the bubble. Together.

Soon after they’d first kissed, both of them had assured me that nothing would change in our friendship, which, of course, had changed everything.

Still, Sam and Caroline were sweetly worried about my third-wheel self. And they were clearly giddy over their fresh-hatched
love. So I was trying to be supportive. Which meant quickly hoisting my smile back up at the sight of them looking all cute and coupley on the boardwalk.

I eyed their empty hands (the ones that weren’t clasped tightly together, that was) and raised one eyebrow.

“Don’t tell me you didn’t bring firewood,” I complained. “I hate being the only one who did her homework.”

“Naw,” Sam said in his slow surfer-boy drawl. “We already piled it on the beach. The fire’s going to be huge this year!”

“We were collecting wood all afternoon,” Caroline said sunnily.

I couldn’t help it, my smile faded a bit.

I guess this is how it’s going to be
, I thought. Sam and Caroline collecting firewood is now Sam and Caroline On a Date—third wheel not invited.

Caroline caught my disappointment. Of course she did. Ever since The Kiss, she’d been giving me lots of long, searching looks to make sure I was okay with everything. I was starting to feel like a fish in a bowl.

“We would have called you,” she stammered, “but didn’t you have sib duty today?”

She was right. I did have to go to my little sister’s end-of-the-year ballet recital.

So why did I feel this little twinge of hurt? I’d had countless sleepovers with Caroline that didn’t, obviously, include Sam. And Sam and I had a regular ritual of going to The Swamp for giant buckets of crawfish that were strictly boycotted by Caroline. The girl pretty much lived on fruit, nuts and seeds, and supersweet iced tea.

But ever since Sam and Caroline had gotten together, a kernel of insecurity had been burrowing into the back of my head. All I wanted to do was shake it off. But like an especially stubborn sandbur, it wasn’t budging.

This is stupid,
I scolded myself.
All that matters is that Sam and Caroline still love me and I love them.

Just not,
the whiny voice in my head couldn’t help adding,
the mysterious way they love each other.

I sighed the tiniest of sighs. But then my friends released each other’s hands and Sam plucked the firewood bundle out of my arms. He hopped lightly from the boardwalk onto the sand and headed south. Caroline hooked her arm through mine and we followed him. I ordered myself to stop obsessing and just be normal; just be with my friends.

“Cyrus is already
so
drunk,” Caroline said with a hearty laugh and an eye roll. “We have a pool going on how early he’s going to pass out in the dune grass.”

I pulled back in alarm.

“There’s beer here?” I asked. “That’s, um, not good.”

The bonfire was not more than a quarter mile down the beach from The Scoop, where my mom was working the post-dinner rush. And when you make the most to-die-for ice cream on a small island, everybody’s your best friend. Which meant, if there was a keg at this party, it would take approximately seventeen seconds for the information to get to my mom.

Luckily, Caroline shook her head.

“No, the party’s dry,” she assured me. “Cyrus raided his dad’s beer cooler before he got here. What an idiot.”

Down the beach, just about everybody from our tiny high school was tossing sticks and bits of driftwood onto a steadily growing pyramid. By now, the sun had been swallowed up by the horizon, leaving an indigo sky with brushstrokes of fire around its edges. Against the deep blue glow, my friends looked like Chinese shadow puppets. All I could see were the shapes of skinny, shirtless boys loping about and girls with long hair fanning out as they spun to music that played, distant and tinny, from a small speaker.

But even in silhouette I could recognize many of the people. I spotted Eve Sachman’s sproingy halo of curls and Jackson Tate’s hammy football player’s arms. It was easy to spot impossibly tall Sam. He tossed my firewood on top of the pyre, then waved off the laughter that erupted when most of the sticks tumbled right back down into the sand.

I laughed too, and expected the same from Caroline. She was one of those girls who laughed—no,
guffawed
—constantly.

But now she was silent. So silent, I could swear she was holding her breath. And even in the dusky light, I could see that her heart-shaped face was lit up. Her eyes literally danced and her lips seemed to be wavering between a pucker and a secret smile.

I looked away quickly and gazed at the waves. The moon was getting brighter now, its reflection shimmering in each wave as it curled and crashed. I zoned out for a moment on the sizzle of the surf and the ocean’s calming inhale and exhale.

But before I could get really zen, I felt an
umph
in my middle, and then I was airborne.

Landon Smith had thrown his arms around my waist, scooped me up, and was now running toward the waves.

If I hadn’t been so busy kicking and screaming, I would have shaken my head and sighed.

This is what happens when you’re five feet one inch with, as my grandma puts it, “the bones of a sparrow.” People are always patting you on the head, marveling at your size 5 feet, and hoisting you up in the air. My mom, who is all of five feet two and a half, says I might grow a little more, but I’m not betting on it.

Landon stopped short of tossing me full-on into the surf. He just plunked me knee-deep into the waves. Since I was wearing short denim cutoffs and (of course) no shoes, this was a bit of an anticlimax. I looked around awkwardly. Was I supposed to shriek and slap at Landon in that cute, flirty way that so many girls do? I hoped not, because that wasn’t going to happen. After a lifetime of tininess, I was allergic to being cute.

I’m not saying I cut my hair with a bowl or anything. I’d actually taken a little extra care with my look for the bonfire. Over my favorite dark cutoffs, I was wearing a white camisole with a spray of fluttery gauze flowers at the neckline. I’d blown out my long, blond-streaked brown hair instead of letting it go wavy and wild the way I usually did. I’d put dark brown mascara on my sun-bleached lashes. And instead of my plain old gold hoop earrings, I was wearing delicate aqua glass dangles that brightened up my slate-blue eyes. (Or so my sister Sophie had told me. She’s fourteen and reads fashion sites like some people read the Bible, searching for the answers to all of life’s problems.)

While Landon laughed and galloped doggily back onto the dry sand, I said, “Har, har.”

But instead of sounding light and breezy, as I’d intended, it came out hard and humorless. Maybe because I was just realizing that Landon’s shoulder had gouged me beneath the ribs, leaving a throbbing, bruised feeling. And because everyone was staring at me, their smiles fading just a bit.

I felt heat rush to my face. I wanted to turn back toward the ocean, to breathe in the cloudy, dark blue scent of it and let salt mist my cheeks.

But that would only make everyone think I was
really
annoyed, or worse, fighting back tears.

Which I
wasn’t
.

What I was feeling was tired. Not literally. That afternoon I’d downed half a pint of my latest invention, dark chocolate ice cream with espresso beans and creamless Oreo cookies. (I
might
have eaten the cream from the cookies as well.) My brain was buzzing with caffeine and sugar.

But my soul? It was sighing at the prospect of another familiar bonfire. Another same old summer. A whole new round of nothing new.

Except for this restlessness,
I thought with a frown.

That
was
new. I was almost sure I hadn’t felt this way the previous summer. I remembered being giddy about getting my learner’s permit. I dreamed up my very first ice cream flavors, and some of them were even pretty tasty. I graduated from an A cup to a B cup. (I’m pretty sure all growth in that area has halted as well.) And I was thrilled to have three months to bum around with Sam and Caroline. The things we’d always done—hunting for ghost crabs and digging up clams with our toes, eating shaved
ice until our lips turned blue, seeing how many people could nap in one hammock at once—had still felt fresh.

But this summer already felt like day-old bread.

I shook my head again and remembered one of those first ice cream flavors: Rummy Bread Pudding.

If I’d turned stale bread into magic once, I could do it again, right?

It was this bit of inner chipperness that finally made me laugh out loud.

Because me channeling Mary Poppins was about as realistic as Caroline singing opera. And life was not ice cream.

Who was I kidding? Nothing was going to change. Not for the next three months, anyway. On Dune Island, summer was the only season that mattered, and this summer, just like all the others, I wasn’t going anywhere.

A
fter the bonfire was lit, I rallied, of course. It’s hard to be too moody when people are skewering anything from turkey legs to Twinkies and roasting them on a fire the size of a truck.

I’d already toasted up a large handful of marshmallows and was contemplating the wisdom of a fire-roasted Snickers bar when Caroline trotted up to me. Sam was right behind her, of course. Since Caroline didn’t like anything that tasted of smoke, she was just drinking this year’s Official Bonfire Cocktail: a blueberry-pomegranate slushie garnished with burgundy cherries.

“This was a terrible idea,” Caroline said, taking a giant sip of
her drink. “Everybody’s teeth are turning purple. But
mmmm,
it’s so yummy, I can’t stop.”

She slurped noisily on her straw.

“Real attractive, Caroline,” Sam joked. But from the uncharacteristic lilt in his monotone, I could tell he wasn’t joking. He really
was
swooning.

Caroline responded by taking another slurp of her slushie, this one so loud it almost drowned out the crackling of the fire.

I threw back my head and laughed.

And then—because what did I care if I had purple teeth in this crowd?—I reached for her plastic cup to steal a sip of the slushie.

“Get your own, Anna!” Caroline teased. Holding her cup above her head, she shuffled backward in the sand, then turned and darted into the surf.

Laughing again, I ran after her, kicking a spray of water at her back. Caroline scurried back up to Sam, still cackling. She threw her free arm around Sam’s waist and nestled against him. He slung a long arm around her shoulders. It was such a smooth, natural motion, you’d think they’d been snuggling like that all their lives.

I didn’t want them to know that their PDA was making me regret all those marshmallows, so I grinned, waved—and turned my gaze away.

And that’s when I saw him.

Will.

Of course, I didn’t know his name yet.

At that moment, actually, I didn’t know much of anything.
I suddenly forgot about SamAndCaroline. And the too-sweet marshmallow taste in my mouth. And the fact that you don’t—you just don’t—openly stare at a boy only fifteen yards away, letting long seconds, maybe even minutes, pass while you feast your eyes upon him.

But I couldn’t help it. It was like I forgot I had a body. There was no swiping away the long strands of hair that had blown into my face. I didn’t worry about what to do with my hands. I didn’t cock my hip, scuff my feet in the sand, or make any of my other standard nervous motions.

There were just my eyes and this boy.

His hands were stuffed deep into the pockets of well-worn khakis, which were carelessly rolled up to expose his nicely muscled calves.

His hair—I’m pretty sure it was a chocolaty brown, though it was hard to tell in the shadowy night light—had perfect waves that fluttered in the breeze.

His skin looked a bit pale; hungry for sun. Obviously, he was a summer guy, though (thank God) he wasn’t wearing shoes on the beach. And he didn’t have that “isn’t this all so quaint?” vibe that some vacationers exuded.

Instead, he simply looked comfortable in his skin, washed-out though it might have been. He shot a casual glance at the party milling around the bonfire, then looked down at his feet. He did that thing you do when you’re a summer person getting your first delicious taste of the beach. He dug his toes into the sand, kicked a bit at the surf, then crouched down and let the water fizz through his fingers.

He stared at his glistening hand for a moment, as if he was thinking hard about something. Then he looked up—and straight at me.

I wish I could say that I smiled at him. Or gave him a look that struck the perfect balance between curious and cool.

But since I was still floating somewhere outside my body, it’s entirely possible that my mouth dropped open and I just kept on
staring
at him.

It’s not that he had the face of a god or anything. At first glance, I didn’t even think of him as beautiful.

But the squinty softness of his big, dark eyes, the strong angle of his jaw, a nose that stopped just short of being too thin, that swoop of tousled hair, and the bit of melancholy around his mouth—it all made me feel something like déjà vu.

It was like his was the face I’d always been looking for. It was foreign
and
familiar, both in the best way.

Looking at this boy’s face made me feel, not that famous jolt of electricity, but something more like an expansion. Like this oh-so-finite Dune Island beach, which I knew so well, had suddenly turned huge. Endless. Full of possibility.

ALSO BY MICHELLE DALTON

Sixteenth Summer