Second Chance Summer (18 page)

The thought was so unexpected that I immediately moved away from him on the raft, and we started talking—both of us a little too loudly—about other things. But something had shifted, and I think we both felt it, because a few days later, walking our bikes home, he’d asked me if I wanted to see a movie, just me and him.

Now, sitting in the darkness of the theater, I concentrated on facing forward, trying to take deep breaths and calm my racing heart. Even though I hadn’t been following the story in the least, I could tell that things were beginning to wind down. Just when I could feel my disappointment start to take hold, the stomach-plunging
sadness that I’d gotten so excited for nothing, Henry reached across the armrest and held my hand, intertwining his fingers with mine.

In that moment, I knew that things had changed. Henry and I were, in fact, on my very first date. And we were no longer just simply friends.

chapter fourteen

“I’
LL HAVE
…” T
HE WOMAN IN THE BRIGHT PINK VELOUR HOODIE
paused, squinting up at the snack bar menu. She drummed her fingers on the counter, deliberating. Even though it was cloudy and overcast and had been all morning, she had a bright white line of sunblock covering her nose. “A Diet Pepsi, small fries, and a cup of ice,” she finally said.

I turned back to where Elliot was standing by the grill, the spatula hanging slack by his side, all his attention focused on a thick paperback in his hands. “Fries!” I yelled back at him, and he nodded, setting the book aside. As I punched the woman’s order into the register, I explained, “We only have Diet Coke. And there’s a fifteen-cent cup charge for ice.”

She shrugged. “Fine.”

I glanced down at the register for a second, making sure I’d remembered to add the tax, which I hadn’t done for the first three days on the job. When Fred found out, he’d turned even redder than normal, and had to spend a day away from the fish, going over the
receipts in the office and muttering. “Five ninety-five.” The woman handed me six, and I placed it in the register and slid a nickel across the counter to her, which she dropped in our nearly empty tip jar. “Thanks,” I said. “Should be ready in five.”

I turned to the soda jets behind me and started filling her cup, waiting until the foam died down before hitting the button again. I’d only been at the job about a week, but I seemed to have gotten the basics down.

I had decided that I would rather suffer Lucy’s wrath than disappoint my father, and was trying to make the best of the job. I got the hang of the scary industrial coffeemaker, essential for the senior-citizen power walkers who stopped by the beach at nine thirty sharp for decaf after their “workout.” Through trial and error, I figured out the fryer—and, as a result, now had a series of small burns on my arm, from where the grease splattered until I learned to avoid it. I learned the basics of the grill, but hadn’t had much chance to test them out yet.

“It’s the beach,” Elliot told me on my third day, when there was a lull in customers and he was showing me how the grill worked. “And the thing about food at the beach is that sand gets everywhere. And who wants sand in their cheeseburger?”

I thought about it, and made a face. “Not me.”

“Not anybody,” he said. “Trust me.” After working with Elliot for a few days I’d found, to my surprise, that I liked him. I’d been
worried that he would side with Lucy, shunning me out of loyalty to her. But he wasn’t taking sides, which I was grateful for. He was patient with me when showing me the ropes, and was easy to talk to, even if he could be a little intense, especially about what he called “hard sci-fi.” Already I’d heard far more than I ever wanted to know about some show that seemed to feature an evil Muppet as the villain.

“See that?” he asked, flipping a burger with a large metal spatula, then twirling it in a way that made me think he may have watched
Cocktail
recently. I tried to give him what I hoped was an impressed smile. “People will get fries, because they’re protected in their little fry container. But we serve the burgers on plates. And if you’re going to set your plate down on your towel, you’re going to get sand in your burger. It’s a given.”

So I learned how to make burgers, even though I probably wouldn’t need to do it that often. I learned how much ice to put in the fountain sodas, and how to work the register, and how to open the snack bar in the morning and close it at night. But the biggest thing I learned was that Lucy could still hold a grudge.

I’d known this about her back when we were friends, of course. She had famously been on the outs with Michele Hoffman for years before someone asked them point-blank what they were fighting about and neither one had been able to remember. Lucy had always had a very distinct sense of right and wrong, but for the first time,
I was on the “wrong” side of things. She pretty much ignored me, giving me instructions, when she had to, through Elliot.

It also became clear after a few shifts that she had gone a little boy-crazy. She flirted outrageously with every passably cute male customer, and had collected more guys’ numbers than I would have believed possible, had I not been a silent witness to it. Back when we’d been friends, Lucy and I had both been tongue-tied and awkward around boys. And despite the few relationships I’d had, I still sometimes felt that way. But Lucy had clearly gotten over any hint of shyness sometime in the last five years. Her camaraderie with Elliot and her friendliness toward the (particularly male) customers made our silent standoff all the more apparent. When it was just the two of us working, there was total silence, as she didn’t speak to me unless absolutely necessary. She either busied herself with her phone or read magazines, angling them away from me so that I couldn’t read over her shoulder or see what she put down as her answers on the
Cosmo
quiz.

And I’d just wipe down the already-clean counters and look up at the clock, trying to calculate how much time was left before I could go home. But there was something sad about the silence that was between us whenever we worked together, especially considering that when we were younger, when she’d been my friend, we had never run out of things to say to each other. If my mother would comment on how chatty we were, Lucy would always say
the same thing—that we didn’t see each other for most of the year, and that we had nine months’ of stuff to catch up on. And now, in contrast, there was silence. Silence so palpable, it was like you could feel it in the air. When I worked with Lucy, I’d find myself so desperate for conversation that I’d go down to the lifeguard chair on my breaks to try to talk to Leland. And Leland wasn’t exactly the world’s finest conversationalist, as most of his responses—no matter what you said—usually consisted of some variation of “totally,” “no way,” and “I hear that noise.”

There were two other lifeguards, Rachel and Ivy, who rotated shifts with him. But they were both in college, and tended to hang out mostly with each other, stopping by the snack bar only when they wanted a bottle of water or a Diet Coke. Even though they weren’t overly friendly, their presence was reassuring, because I was still not convinced that someone as spacey as Leland ever should have been put in charge of guarding people’s lives.

I placed the woman’s diet soda, still fizzing, on the counter in front of me, and snapped on the plastic lid. I put the cup of ice next to it and slid them both across the counter from her just as Elliot dinged the bell to let me know the fries were ready. I picked up the container, warm, with that hot-fry smell that made my stomach rumble, even though it was only eleven in the morning, salted them generously, and placed them next to the woman’s drink. She was talking on her cell as she picked them up, but she
nodded and mouthed
Thanks
as she headed back to her towel.

I looked out at the mostly empty beach and shifted from foot to foot, trying to get some warmth back into my extremities. It was a cloudy, overcast day, and we’d had only about three customers so far. Lucy was working as well, but had left to make a phone call about half an hour before and hadn’t come back yet. I ran my hands up and down my arms, wishing that I’d worn a sweatshirt over my uniform T-shirt that morning, like Elliot, Lucy, and even Leland had been smart enough to do.

If I’d been biking to work, like Elliot and Lucy did, I undoubtedly would have worn a sweatshirt. But I was still coming to work by car, despite the fact that my mother had told me repeatedly that it was inconvenient to have one car stranded at the beach parking lot all day long. And even though my dad had gotten my mother’s old bike ready for me to ride it, I’d left it so far to sit in the garage. I wasn’t sure if it was possible to forget entirely how to ride a bike, but I was in no hurry to find out.

“Cold?” I looked over and saw Elliot pushing himself up to sit on the counter next to me.

“Just a little,” I said. I took a sip of the hot chocolate I’d made for myself that morning, but found it was no longer warm enough to really help.

“There’s probably something in there,” Elliot said as he pointed under the counter.

“I don’t know,” I said doubtfully as I pulled out the lost and found box. I’d become quite familiar with the box in the week I’d been working there. Even though it was still early in the summer, the cardboard box was already full to the gills. I looked through it, a little amazed at the things that people left behind. I mean, how could you leave the beach and not realize you were no longer in possession of your bathing suit top? Or your left, men’s size eleven, flip-flop? The only warm thing I found in the bin was a hideous white sweatshirt that read,
Teachers Do It With Class!
across the front in green script.

Elliot nodded approvingly. “Nice,” he said.

It was the opposite of nice, but at that moment the wind picked up, and two of the remaining beach stragglers got to their feet and started folding up their blanket. I shivered again, then pulled the sweatshirt over my head.

“So I heard you saw Henry,” Elliot said.

I froze, wondering if it would be possible to just stay like that, until I figured out what to say. I didn’t think I could hide inside a sweatshirt, though, without appearing totally crazy. I pulled my head through the neck hole and smoothed my hair down, willing myself not to blush but feeling that I nevertheless was. I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me that Elliot and Henry would still be friends. I wondered which of the embarrassing encounters he’d told Elliot about—or if he’d given him the complete rundown. “Um, yeah,” I
said, busying myself with putting the lost and found box back under the counter. “A couple times.”

I looked at Elliot, willing him to tell me what Henry had said about these meetings without having to ask him. “So…” I started, then stopped when I realized I had no idea how to ask this without sounding needy or pathetic—and with the added knowledge that this conversation might make its way right back to Henry. “Never mind,” I muttered, leaning back against the counter and taking a big sip of my now-cold chocolate.

“I think you’ve thrown him for a loop,” Elliot said, shaking his head. “And that is a guy who does
not
do well when thrown for a loop.”

I nodded as though this was perfectly understandable, all the while wondering what, exactly, this meant, and wishing I could ask Elliot more directly. Before I could say anything, though, two things happened almost at the same time—Lucy breezed in through the employee door, and Fred’s red face appeared at the window.

“My God,” Lucy said. “I’m
freezing
!” She glanced at me, then looked at my sweatshirt and raised her eyebrows just as Fred dropped his tackle box on the counter, loud enough to make us all jump.

“Hi, Fred,” Elliot said, as he scrambled off the counter (where we weren’t supposed to sit) and, maybe in an attempt to look busy, started straightening the display of chips.

“Hi,” Lucy said, sliding her phone into the back pocket of her jeans and leaning casually against the counter, as though she’d been there all along. “How’s the fishing?”

“Not so good,” Fred said with a sigh. “I think they’re onto me.” He pointed at me. “Are you ready for Friday?”

I just stared at him, waiting for these words to make sense. “Friday?” I finally asked.

“Movies Under the Stars,” Fred said, and I could hear the capital letters in his voice as he said it. “I told you on your first day. You’ll be running it. First one’s this Friday.” He dropped a stack of posters on the counter. Movies Under the Stars were movies shown on the beach once a month, with a large screen set up at the water’s edge on the sand. People brought blankets and chairs and, like the name suggested, watched movies under the stars. I’d gone a few times when I was younger, but usually they were old movies that I’d had very little interest in.

I looked down at the poster for longer than it took for me to read the title of the movie—
What About Bob?
—and the date and time. Fred had mentioned that I’d be doing something with this, but I had expected that I’d have more of a heads-up than three days. “Okay,” I said slowly. “So, what exactly do I have to do?”