How to Meet Boys (4 page)

“Everything except tennis. I mean, I can play, but I’m more of a runner,” I said.

“Yeah, I can sort of see that in you. So no worries, you’ll do great here,” Sarah said.

“You weren’t actually worried, were you?” asked Henry.

I shook my head. I didn’t worry about things like jobs, or sports, or how I’d do at something like this. I was good at lots of things and confident about that. There was just one thing that made me feel completely inept, and that was talking to guys.

Lucy and I were planning to be more outgoing this summer, hoping that it might be easier for us here because we’d have no choice but to get out of our comfort zones. Sure, I could have stayed home in Minneapolis, teaching middle school volleyball and basketball camps during the day and working at the neighborhood Dairy Queen every night I could get a shift. But that was the same old routine.

Plus, we got an entire house to ourselves. Having two younger stepbrothers and one two-year-old half sister, I was used to a more crowded house, and I loved it, in some ways. But I was looking forward to the downtime.

“Okay, back to the tour. And then we’ll get your keycard ready and take your photo for the employee list,” said Sarah.

“And your fingerprints. She’ll need those,” Henry said. “Your DNA, your passport . . . they take it all at the BBC.” He said
BBC
with an English accent, like he was suddenly covering the royal wedding.

“Come on, let’s go outside,” said Sarah. “Maybe the fresh air will make Henry stop being so insane.”

“Hopeless. I’ve been trying that for years,” Henry said. “Don’t you want to show her the secret entrance to the underground bowling alley?”

I stared at him. “Seriously?”

“Ignore him,” Sarah said, as Henry disappeared down the hallway with a wave over his shoulder. “Actually, before we head outside, let’s pop by the supply room. We still need to get you a couple of uniforms.”

The supply “room” was more like a gigantic closet. Shirts and shorts folded neatly on shelves, below shelves of ball caps, above shelves of sweatshirts and sweatpants. Everything was folded just so. Nothing was out of place.

It kind of reminded me of my dad’s closet. He’s the most organized person I’ve ever met. Of course, he kind of has to be, with the amount of space he has and the number of people in our house.

Sarah quickly grabbed a few shirts from each stack and handed them to me. “Take a couple different sizes and try them on later. You never know with this stuff. You can bring back whatever doesn’t work.”

“Okay,” I said slowly, wondering how I was going to carry all of this on my bike as my arms filled with folded shirts, a wind jacket, and a baseball cap. “I know it’s a lot, but trust me,” she said. “You’ll need multiples. Do you want to wash this stuff every night?”

I shook my head rapidly. Definitely not. “I don’t even know if our place has a washer and dryer,” I said. “I didn’t even look yet! Wow, I really hope so.”

“Why? Where are you staying?” Sarah asked.

“I’m living with a friend from home,” I said. “We have this kind of rustic cabin—”

“A guy? Are you living with your boyfriend?” she asked excitedly.

“Hardly!” I laughed. “No, it’s one of my best friends, Lucy.”

“You guys have your own place? Like, totally to yourselves?” Sarah asked.

I nodded. “But it’s not in great shape. I mean, it’s got some chipped paint, missing shingles, and barely a stick of furniture. You should see the place.”

“Who cares what condition it’s in?” Sarah said. “You can fix it up, right? I’m so jealous that you’re living on your own. You could be living under a tent and I’d be jealous. I’ll have to come by and check it out sometime.”

“Oh, definitely,” I said. “But don’t expect much.”

Sarah laughed. “So you guys planning some parties, or what? I know that’s what I would do if I had my own house this summer. I’d invite half the town.”

“Maybe you could help us plan it, then?” I smiled, picturing the event Sarah might have in mind versus our ramshackle cabin, which would probably only hold about twenty or twenty-five people comfortably—and that was with everyone standing. Then again, it was summer; no need to stay indoors. And Lucy and I were committed to breaking out of our shells this summer. Not that many people knew us here; we could be whoever and whatever we wanted to be. That was the whole point of going somewhere new for a while: to start over, to reboot.

I pictured our living room, kitchen, and deck crowded with people on a Saturday night. It could actually happen.

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“Where is this yard sale? Shouldn’t
we be there by now?” I asked.

Mikayla scanned her phone with her pinky finger. “According to this . . . we should be turning right up here.”

I came to a stop sign. We could either go straight, or turn left. “There’s no right. Should I go left?” I asked.

“Maybe I have this upside down,” Mikayla wondered out loud. She stared at her phone, then rotated it a hundred and eighty degrees.

I pulled over to the side of the road so I could look at the map. Not that I had a great, or even all that good, sense of direction, but couldn’t a map app help us with that? I studied the pin that showed our location.

“We’ve gone too far,” I said. “We need to turn around.”

“Us, going too far? That’s a first,” Mikayla joked.

“Ha ha,” I said in a monotone. Then I cracked up laughing, because it was all too true.

We’d been in our little cabin for one night and were already out the next morning looking for things to add to it. We needed groceries for the fridge, some more towels, curtains, a bathmat, a rug for the entryway—in fact, we were going to go into debt before we both started working on Thursday and got our first paychecks a week later.

I’d scanned a local website looking for garage sales and yard sales: most were on the weekend, but a few started today.

“I wish we were at home, I’d know exactly where to go thrifting for furniture,” Mikayla said. “Do you think it’s too late to make a quick road trip?”

“It might be quicker than us trying to find Sandstone Road,” I muttered, staring at the map. Suddenly I noticed a landmark I recognized. “Now I know where we are. We have to turn around.”

We drove back toward town and made a few turns, before ending up at the house having a yard sale. It looked a little run-down, but then again, so did our summerhouse. “This looks like one of those reality shows my mom loves, where we’re going to find some incredibly valuable item for a dollar. Then we sell it at auction and become filthy rich.”

“I wish,” said Mikayla as we climbed out of the car. “Then we could use the money to pay for college.”

“Or a trip around the world,” I said. “I mean, come on. Let’s think of something more exciting.”

“Hey, funding college might not be thrilling, but it’s practical. If Ava got that kind of money, she’d probably blow it all on shoes,” Mikayla said, laughing. “Like last fall when she spent three hundred dollars on that pair she wore to homecoming—one night. Three hundred dollars.”

“Yeah, and remember how her mom forced her to take them back the next day, after she’d danced in them all night?” I said.

But somehow she got away with it. Ava had a knack for pulling off things that nobody else would be able to.

I’d only been friends with Ava and Mikayla since ninth grade, when my parents decided to send me to a private high school. Oak Hills Academy (we called it OH! for short) had an insane dose of math, science, and classics, and a killer arts program. The three of us met during freshman orientation, a daylong event where we were broken into small groups called “pods” to get to know each other. Our group was called the Turtle Pod. We totally resented that. We’re not slow. We wanted to be in the Fox Pod, the Tiger Pod . . . something a little more sexy. “Turtles,” Ava had said at the time. “We’re the only ones named after reptiles. What, were snakes already taken?”

We bonded when we had to carry an egg in a spoon across the football field. “We should be good at this,” Mikayla said. “Turtles carry eggs all the time.”

We were doing okay until Mikayla tried to go too fast, and the egg went flying, hit me on the ear, and smashed. We couldn’t stop laughing. As disgusting as it felt to have egg white dripping down my face, it was funny. Ava came to the rescue with Kleenex to clean me up, and she’s kind of been coming to our rescue ever since.

When school started, the three of us didn’t have many activities in common: Mikayla played fall volleyball while I was on the soccer team, and Ava tried one thing, then another. But the three of us had some classes together, and that was enough to keep forming a bond. I helped Mikayla and Ava get through biology, geometry, and pre-chemistry; Mikayla helped me and Ava get through US history and world history; and Ava helped us loosen up and have fun when we got too serious and studied too much. She was also a good writer, and had published poems in our school literary magazine.

We never had to go through orientation again, but we still teamed up for other major school events. Sophomore year we’d raised hundreds of dollars for the school travel club by selling concessions in the hallways at lunch—Ava would walk around yelling “Everything’s a dollar!” into a bullhorn while Mikayla and I carried the cookies, trail mix, fruit, and other items Ava got her mom to buy in bulk. “We’re like a walking Costco. You guys realize that,” Mikayla had said at one point. “And, like Costco, we have tons of returning customers,” Ava would say. Basically, she did all the talking and selling. Mikayla and I just handed stuff over and took the money.

We were hoping we’d make enough to go to France, but instead we ended up on buses to Washington, DC, which was one of the most fun trips I’ve ever taken. The three of us shared a room and stayed up later and later every night until we collapsed on the charter bus five days later and slept almost all the way back to Minnesota.

Now, Mikayla and I kept wandering around the yard sale, examining china, candlesticks, a couple of dated avocado-colored chairs with cigarette burns—and matching avocado ashtrays. Then we saw exactly what we were looking for: a retro kitchen table with four chairs. Unfortunately, it was $300.

We ended up finding a folding table and chairs for fifty dollars.

We were trying to fit everything into the back of the car when I heard a loud honk. The car honked again. I looked behind me and saw Claire parking right in back of us. I’d texted her that morning, asking for clues on where to find something.

“You guys need help?” she asked, coming up to the car. “What did you buy, anyway?”

“It’s the chairs. They don’t fold down small enough,” I said, laughing. “Claire, this is Mikayla, and vice versa.”

“Hey, Claire. I’ve heard so much about you. I think the one time I came to visit, you were gone,” Mikayla said.

“Really? But I feel like I never leave.” Claire laughed.

She helped us get the furniture squarely into the car. On the edge of the parking lot, a few younger kids had set up a lemonade and cookie stand. We walked over to buy a few cups.

“To summer!” I said, tapping my cup against Mikayla’s.

“To summer!” she agreed.

“Ditto,” said Claire, hoisting her plastic cup in the air.

I took a gulp of the cold lemonade.

It tasted like sour lemon meringue pie—it was too thick, and seemed to have no sugar. We all spit it out onto the blacktop, laughing. “So much for toasts,” I said.

Mikayla crumpled her cup. “We should have known better. We should have toasted with a cookie.”

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HarperCollins Publishers

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“Have you heard from Ava yet?” I
asked, as Lucy and I walked past Walleye Mafia on Wednesday night. The name was written on a large fish-shaped wooden sign hanging over the front door. The fish had a spaghetti pattern carved on its side and pepperoni-like red circles for eyes.

“No. I keep checking, but there’s nothing. Instead, I have about eighty-seven texts from my mom,” Lucy said. “And I’ve only been gone for two days.”

“Did you expect anything different?” I asked. Lucy’s mom was notorious for being in touch with her—or trying to be—at all times of the day and night. She even texted her at home, when they were in the same house. I skimmed my messages again. “I haven’t heard from Ava either. That’s weird, don’t you think? I wonder if she’s okay.”

“She’s probably so busy—she’s forgotten us already. Living the high life in Chicago,” said Lucy.

“What’s the high life?”

“I don’t know, it’s something my mom always says. Help me. I’m quoting my mom.” Lucy laughed. “Maybe Ava burned through her phone plan. Ever since the famous Sophomore Year Overage Incident she’s been paying for it herself and—” Suddenly Lucy grabbed my arm. “Wait. What if we run into Jackson here?” Lucy was scoping out Earl Grey’s from the entrance. She looked nervous.

We were poised on the doorstep, halfway in and halfway out. I felt really self-conscious standing there. A couple had to squeeze to get past us. “I don’t know. What are the odds he’d walk in right now? Pretty slim, right?” I asked. I had to flatten my back against the community bulletin board to make room for some other people leaving. I felt like I was being tortured by pins. And ads for rooms to rent.

“I’m trying to think. I guess I came here last summer and I don’t remember seeing him here, so maybe he doesn’t hang out, or maybe he doesn’t like tea. Or maybe I’ve just been incredibly lucky so far . . ” She was standing on her tiptoes peering around the coffee shop.

“Um, Luce? You can’t spend the whole summer trying to avoid him,” I said. “It’s going to be impossible. You’ll waste way too much time and energy trying.”

“Good point,” Lucy said. “But I still want to.”

“Besides, you can’t avoid him at work, so you’re going to have to get used to seeing him and talking to him, like it or not. I wouldn’t spend your time worrying about it.” I pushed her forward into the shop, toward the line, so we could actually order.