Second Chance Summer (25 page)

“Thanks for tonight, Taylor,” Lucy said around a huge yawn. I peered over the edge of my bed to see that her eyes were drifting closed, her dark hair fanned out across the white pillowcase. “You saved my butt.”

“Sure,” I said. I waited a second longer, to see if she wanted to talk—about the disappointing Stephen, or the circumstances of the night. But then I heard her breathing grow slow and even, and I remembered that Lucy had usually fallen asleep before me. I’d always envied the way she could fall asleep at the drop of a hat, while it sometimes took me what felt like hours to drift off. I lay back down on my pillow and closed my eyes, even though I had a suspicion that I wouldn’t be falling asleep anytime soon.

But the next thing I knew, light was streaming in through my windows, and when I sat up, I saw that the clothes I’d lent Lucy were neatly folded on the trundle bed. On top of them was the bag of Skittles, the top rolled over. And when I opened it, I saw that it contained only the flavors that had always been mine.

chapter twenty-one

Five summers earlier

I
WOKE UP WITH MY ARMS AROUND THE STUFFED PENGUIN, WHO
still smelled slightly of funnel cakes and cotton candy. I smoothed his scarf down, running the soft felt across my fingers, feeling myself smile as I opened my eyes, replaying the scenes from last night in my head. It had been a perfect night, and I didn’t want to forget a single moment of it.

I’d been going to the Lake Phoenix carnival since I could remember. It lasted the entire weekend, and Henry and I had gone to the first night of it. That was the night I’d always liked best. Before the grass became muddy and trampled, before you got queasy at the sight of the Slurpee booths, before you saw how few people actually won at the carnival games. When everything was still shiny and magical, the way it had been last night.

Since our movie date, Henry and I had continued to spend our days together, but things had definitely changed from the easy, race-you-to-the-snack-bar friendship we’d had before. Things were more complicated now, but also infinitely more exciting, and I’d
return home every night, barely even paying attention to my dinner, instead turning over in my mind a thousand little moments with Henry—the dimple in his cheek when he smiled, the way he’d brushed my hand when he handed me my ice-cream sandwich. He hadn’t made any move to kiss me yet, but the possibility seemed to infuse every day, and I found myself wondering when it would be—when he took my hand to pull me up to the raft, and I yanked him into the water instead, and we surfaced at the same time, so close that I could see the water droplets on his eyelashes? When he biked me home, and then paused, clearing his throat and looking at the ground, like he was trying to gather the courage? Neither of these had been the moment, but that didn’t stop them from being that much more exciting, and making me feel like after spending my whole life reading about things happening to people in
Seventeen
, things were finally happening to
me
.

The only thing that dimmed the perfection of it was Lucy, who was insistent on knowing if I’d asked Henry about her. I was vague whenever she asked me about this, and found myself trying to get off the phone with her as soon as possible, once she brought it up.

But I tried to push Lucy out of my thoughts as I sat up in bed and propped the penguin on my knees. Henry and I had spent the carnival together, just the two of us. This hadn’t been easy to arrange, especially with Gelsey trying to follow me wherever I went, but I was able to bribe Warren into looking after her for the night with
five dollars of the ride money my dad had given me, as well as promising to buy him ice cream the next time we went to Jane’s.

After finishing the protracted negotiations with Warren, I’d headed across the carnival in search of Henry, feeling my heart pound hard with excitement. It was early yet—the sun hadn’t totally set, and the neon on the rides and along the sides of the booths was just starting to glow. The
clank
of the machinery mixed with the shrieks from the people on the rides, and the yells of the workers in the booths, calling for people to step right up, test their luck, take a chance.

The funnel cake stand was almost at the opposite end from the entrance, and as soon as you got close, you could smell the scent of fried dough and powdered sugar, a combination that always made my mouth water. The sign that advertised
FUNNEL CAKES/SOFT DRINKS/LEMONADE
was in spelled out in pink and yellow neon, and standing under it, the glow from the sign reflecting on his dark hair, was Henry.

“You look really nice,” he said when I finally reached him.

“Thanks,” I said, smiling wide at him. Even without Lucy’s help in the getting-ready department, I felt like I had been able to do an okay job with my hair and was wearing my new T-shirt. “You too.” I noticed that his normally shaggy hair had somehow gotten much neater, and I could see the comb tracks through it.

The air all around us smelled sweet, and Henry reached over
and took my hand, threading his fingers through mine, and smiled at me. “Where do you want to start?” he asked.

We started with the Scrambler, then went to the Round-Up, then the Ferris wheel (we rocked the car as much as we could before the attendant yelled at us to settle down up there). Then, after we’d gotten most of the stomach-churning out of the way, we split funnel cakes and popcorn, and then shared a bright-blue cotton candy that stained our teeth and made our fingers sticky.

I’d gotten the penguin when we passed one of the game booths, and the attendant of the watergun-horse-race game had yelled out, “Hey, kid! Win a prize for your girlfriend!”

He’d said this last word with a smirk, and had probably intended to embarrass us, but Henry had just walked over to the booth, plunked down a dollar, and won (not the top prize level, but the one just underneath it) on his first try.

By the end of the evening, the neon was glowing brightly against the dark. My mom had arranged to meet me and my siblings at the entrance at nine thirty—my dad, who usually never missed coming to the carnival with us, had been working the whole weekend on some case. Henry was meeting his mom around the same time, and so we walked over together to the entrance. Just before we left, however, he took my hand and pulled me a few steps away, separate from the crowds, into the shadow of the ticket booth. And as I realized what was happening, Henry tilted his
head and closed his eyes, and I closed mine just in time, and then he kissed me.

After all the articles I’d read that detailed how to kiss, I’d been worried that I wouldn’t know what to do. But the second his lips touched mine, I realized I hadn’t needed those articles. It had been easy.

I hugged the penguin tight, remembering. I’d been kissed. I was now a person who had been
kissed
. I rolled out of bed and practically danced out to the kitchen, though I quieted down when I saw my dad at the dining room table, on the phone, frowning at his laptop, piles of paper in front of him.

Feeling like I was full of more joy than the house could contain, I slipped out through the screened-in porch and ran down to the dock. I just wanted to lie in the sun and turn it all over in my mind, every moment of the night before. When I reached the end of the dock, though, I stopped short.

Across the water, I could see a pink bandanna tied to the leg of the dock opposite ours. Lucy was back.

chapter twenty-two

“A
ND DID YOU KNOW THAT THEY THINK THE FIRST VETERINARY
records they can find date back to 9000
B.C
.? And that the first veterinary school was founded in France in 1761?” I looked over at my brother and wished that I’d had the foresight to bring my iPod out to the dock with me. “Did you?” Warren persisted.

I just shook my head. I’d given up asking him not to tell me facts about vets twenty minutes before. “I know!” Warren enthused, looking down at the book on his lap. “It’s fascinating!”

It was my day off again, and I’d finally made it down to the dock, where I’d had plans to sunbathe the afternoon away. I hadn’t planned on the company of my brother, who had shown up not long after I’d arrived with my towel and cracked open my magazine. Now he was sitting on the edge of the dock with his feet dangling in the water, while I stretched out on my towel in my bikini, hoping I could pull a Lucy and just drop off to sleep. Ever since we’d gone into Doggone It!—four days ago—my brother hadn’t been able to
stop talking about veterinarians, and what a fascinating field veterinary medicine was.

It became clear after only a day or two—despite my mother’s attempts to track down last year’s feckless, dog-abandoning renters—that we now had a dog. Murphy had settled in, to the delight of my sister. Surprisingly, though, it was my father that the dog really seemed to connect with. When I left for work—always biking now, unless it looked like rain—he was usually on my dad’s lap, looking at his computer screen as though he understood what was happening, and he usually reclaimed his spot after dinner as well. I’d even caught my mother patting Murphy’s head the other day when she thought that nobody was watching. And to an outside observer, Warren would appear to be the dog’s biggest fan—nearly every day he bought Murphy more treats, another squeaky toy, extra rawhide bones. But I knew that this, like his sudden love for the veterinary sciences, had nothing to do with affection for the dog and everything to do with Wendy, the girl who worked at Doggone It!.

“And—” Warren started, as I pushed myself up on my elbows and shook my head at him.

“No,” I said firmly, pushing my sunglasses up on top of my head. “No more vet facts. I’ve reached my limit. Go torment Gelsey.”

Warren looked offended for a second, but then just sighed and shook his head. “I can’t,” he said, kicking at the water’s surface. “She’s off with her other half.”

I smiled as I lay back down on my towel. Gelsey and Nora had become a unit quickly, which seemed to make her parents very happy. They’d explained, one night as they came over to say hello and collect her, that they’d been working toward a script deadline and hadn’t been able to spend much time entertaining her. But this was no longer an issue. Gelsey and Nora had become pretty much inseparable after that first day. They’d arranged to be in the same tennis group, and when they weren’t tormenting their tennis instructors, they were riding their bikes in tandem, heading out in the morning, to the pool or the beach. Every night, Gelsey was burbling over with things that Nora had said, facts about Nora’s life in Los Angeles, reports of their adventures. As I listened at dinner, I realized that Gelsey finally had her first best friend. “Then go tell Mom or Dad,” I said to Warren, as I turned my head to the side and closed my eyes. “Because I’m done.”

The
beep-beep-beep
of a truck backing up sounded, and I sat up straight and looked back toward the driveway, even though not much of it could be seen through the screened-in porch. “FedEx?” I asked, as Warren turned and squinted.

“UPS,” he said, shaking his head. “FedEx was here this morning.”

In addition to his work packages, my father had started ordering things like crazy, and was getting a lot of deliveries. It seemed like every day, multiple packages arrived—books, DVDs, chocolates
from Belgium, steaks from Omaha packed in dry ice. He’d continued to get up early, and we’d had two more diner breakfasts, complete with our question quiz. (I’d learned that he had dreamed of being an astronaut when he was little, that the food he hated most in the world was lima beans, and that he’d gone to a ballet every night for a month after meeting my mother, to catch up.) Every night after dinner, we all gathered in the family room and watched a movie, and he was usually still up by the time I went to bed, reading a book, surrounded by an ever-growing stack of them.

I’d been unable to fall asleep a few nights before, and had gone out to the kitchen to get a drink of water, more because I was bored than thirsty, and had found my dad stretched out on one of the couches, the embers of a dying fire still crackling a little in the fireplace. The dog was sleeping on his feet, and he had his reading glasses on and a thick book propped up against his chest.