Second Chance Summer (5 page)

Warren began unpacking his box, lining up row after row of plastic ketchup squeeze bottles on the counter in perfectly straight lines, as though there might be some sort of epic condiment battle looming on the horizon.

I stared at them. “Is Pennsylvania having some sort of ketchup shortage that I’m not aware of?”

Warren shook his head without looking up from his unpacking. “I’m just taking precautions,” he said. “You remember what happened last time.”

In fact, I did. My brother wasn’t at all picky about food, unlike Gelsey, who seemed to live on pasta and pizza and refused to eat anything moderately spicy—but his one exception was ketchup. Warren put it on almost everything, would eat only Heinz, and preferred it chilled, not room temperature. He claimed he could tell the difference between the brands, something that he’d proved once at a mall food court when we were younger and extremely bored. So he had been traumatized five years ago, when we first arrived in Lake
Phoenix and the store had had a run on Heinz and was down to the generic brand. Warren had refused to even try it and had used my father’s corporate card to have a case of Heinz shipped overnight to him, something my father—not to mention the company accountant—had not been too happy to find out about.

Now, fortified against such tragedy, Warren placed two bottles in the nearly-empty fridge and started transferring the rest into the cupboard. “Do you want me to tell you how ketchup was invented?” he asked, with an expression that I, unfortunately, knew all too well. Warren was very into facts, and had been since he was little and some probably well-meaning, but now much-despised, relative gave him
Discovered by Accident!
—a book on famous inventions that had been discovered by accident. After that, you couldn’t have a conversation with Warren without him dropping some fact or another into it. This quest for useless knowledge (thanks to his equally fun obscure-vocabulary-word kick, I knew this was also called “arcana”) had only grown with time. Finally, we’d complained so much that Warren no longer told us the facts, but now just told us he
could
tell us the facts, which wasn’t, in my opinion, all that much better.

“Maybe later,” I said, even though I was admittedly slightly curious as to the accidental origin of ketchup, and hoping it wasn’t something terribly disgusting or disturbing—like Coca-Cola, which, it turned out, had been the result of a failed attempt to make aspirin. I looked around for an escape and saw the lake through the
kitchen window. And, suddenly, I knew that it was the only place I wanted to be.

I pushed through to our screened-in porch, then out the side door, heading for our dock. As I stepped outside, I turned my face up to the sun. Five wooden steps led down to a small grassy hill, and below that, the dock. Even though it was directly behind our house, we had always shared it with the houses on either side of us. The dock wasn’t particularly long or impressive, but had always seemed to me to be the perfect length for getting a running start to cannonball into the lake, and the water was deep enough that you didn’t have to worry about hitting the bottom.

There were some kayaks and a canoe stacked on the grass by the side of the dock, but I barely noticed them as I got closer. You weren’t allowed to have any motorized watercraft on the lake, so there was no roar of engines disturbing the late afternoon quiet, just a lone kayaker paddling past in the distance. Lake Phoenix was big, with three small islands scattered across it, and surrounded on all sides by pine trees. Despite the size of the rest of the lake, our dock occupied one side of a narrow passage, the other side close enough that you could see the docks across the water and the people on them.

I looked across the lake to the dock opposite ours, which had always been the Marino family’s. Lucy Marino had been my best friend in Lake Phoenix for twelve summers, and there had been a
time when I’d known her house as well as my own. We’d slept over at each other’s houses almost every night, alternating, our families so used to it that my mother started stocking Lucy’s favorite cereal. I usually tried not to think about Lucy, but it hadn’t escaped my notice, especially recently, that she had been my last tell-everything-to friend. Nobody at school seemed to know how to react to the news about my father, and overnight, it was like I didn’t know how to talk to anyone about it. And since I’d been thoroughly cast out of my old group of friends, I found myself, as the school year ended and preparations for our summer up here began, pretty much alone, without anyone to talk to. But at one time, I had told everything to Lucy, until we, like everything else, had fallen apart that last summer.

Out of habit, I found myself looking to the leg of her dock. Over the years, Lucy and I had developed a very intricate system of communication from our respective docks that involved flashlights and our own version of Morse code if it was dark, and a very imprecise semaphore flag system if it was light. And if one of us needed to talk to the other desperately, we would tie one of the pair of pink bandannas we both had to the leg of our docks. Admittedly, this had not been the most efficient method of communication, and we’d usually end up talking on the phone before we happened to see the lights, or flags, or bandannas. But, of course, the leg of her dock was now bandanna-free.

I kicked off my flip-flops and walked across the sun-warmed
planks of our dock barefoot. The dock had been walked on so much over the years that you never had to worry about splinters, like you sometimes did on our front porch. I started walking faster, almost running, wanting to get to the end, to breathe in the scent of water and pine trees, and curl my toes around the edge.

But when I was almost to the end, I stopped short. There was movement at the base of the dock. The kayak I had seen earlier was now tied up and bobbing in the water, and I could see the person who’d been in it—a guy—climbing up the ladder using one hand, holding the kayak paddle in the other. The sun was glancing off the water so that the glare was blocking his face as he stepped on to the dock, but I figured this was probably just a neighbor. He walked forward, out of the glare, then stopped abruptly, staring at me. I blinked in surprise, and found myself staring back.

Standing across from me, five years older, all grown up, and much cuter than I remembered him being, was Henry Crosby.

chapter three

I
FELT MY JAW DROP, WHICH
I
HADN’T REALIZED UNTIL THAT
moment was something that actually happened in real life. I closed it quickly, then blinked at him again, trying to regroup as my brain struggled to comprehend what all-grown-up Henry was doing standing in front of me.

He dropped the paddle on the dock, then took a small step forward and folded his arms across his chest. “Taylor Edwards,” he said. He didn’t phrase it as a question.

“Henry?” I asked, a little faintly, even though of course it was him. For one thing, he had known me, which some random kayaker probably wouldn’t have. And for another, he looked the same—except much, much better.

He was tall, and broad-shouldered, with the same brown hair, so dark it almost looked black, and cut short. I could no longer see the freckles he’d had when we were younger, but his eyes were still the same hazel, though they looked more green than brown now. His jaw also somehow seemed more defined, and his arms were muscular.
I couldn’t make this fit with the last time I’d seen him, when he’d been shorter than me, and skinny, with scraped-up elbows and knees. All in all, Henry looked very cute. And very not happy to see me.

“Hi,” I said, just to say something to try and mask the fact that I had been staring.

“Hello,” he said, his voice cold. His voice was also deeper, and no longer cracking every other word, like it had been the last time I’d heard it. His eyes met mine, and I wondered suddenly what changes he could see in me, and what he thought of the way I looked now. Unfortunately, I’d looked pretty much the same since childhood, with blue eyes and straight, fine hair that fell somewhere between blond and brown. I was medium height, with a wiry build, and I certainly hadn’t gained many of the curves I’d been so desperately hoping for when I was twelve. I now wished I’d taken the time to do anything with my appearance that morning, as opposed to just rolling out of bed. Henry’s eyes traveled down to my outfit, and when I realized what I was wearing, I inwardly cursed myself. Not only was I running into someone who clearly hated me, but I was doing in it a T-shirt I’d stolen from him.

“So,” he said, and then a silence fell. My heart was pounding hard, and I suddenly wanted nothing more than to just turn and leave, get in the car and not stop driving until I got back to Connecticut. “What are you doing here?” he finally asked, a hard edge in his voice.

“I could ask you the same question,” I said, thinking back to only a few minutes earlier, when I’d told Warren so confidently that Henry was ancient history, sure that I’d never see him again. “I thought you’d left.”

“You thought
I’d
left?” he asked, with a short, humorless laugh. “Really.”

“Yes,” I said, a little testily. “We passed your house today, and it was all different. And apparently owned by some lush named Maryanne.”

“Well, a lot’s changed in five years, Taylor,” he said, and I realized it was the second time he used my whole name. Before, Henry had only called me Taylor when he was mad at me—most of the time, he had called me Edwards, or Tay. “We’ve moved, for one.” He pointed to the house next to mine, the one so close that I could see a line of pots on the windowsill. “Right there.”

I just stared where he was pointing for a moment. That was the Morrisons’ house, and I’d just assumed they were still there, Mr. and Mrs. Morrison and their mean poodle. “You live next door to me?”

“We have for a few years now,” he said. “But since there were always renters at your place, I didn’t think you were ever coming back.”

“Me neither,” I admitted, “if you want to know the truth.”

“So what happened?” he asked, looking right at me and startling me with the greenness of his eyes. “Why are you back, all of a sudden?”

I felt my breath catch as the reason—never far from my thoughts—crashed into the front of my mind, seeming to dim the
afternoon light a little. “Well,” I said slowly, looking away from him and out to the water, trying to think about how to explain it. It wasn’t even like it was that complicated. All I had to say was something along the lines of
My dad’s sick. So we’re spending the summer together up here.
That wasn’t the hard part. The hard part came with the follow-up questions.
How sick? With what? Is it serious?
And then the inevitable reaction when people realized how serious it actually was. And that what I meant, but hadn’t said, was that we were spending our
last
summer together.

I didn’t have a practiced explanation because I had assiduously avoided having this conversation. Word had spread around school pretty quickly, preventing me from having to explain the situation. And if I was with my mother, and we happened to run into an acquaintance in the grocery store who asked after my father, I left the task of breaking the news to her. I would look pointedly in the other direction, or wander a few steps away, as though yielding to the inexorable pull of the cereal aisle, pretending that the difficult conversation she was having had nothing whatsoever to do with me. I wasn’t entirely sure I could say the words out loud—or handle the follow-up questions—without losing it. I hadn’t really cried yet, and I didn’t want to risk this happening in front of Henry Crosby.

“It’s kind of a long story,” I finally said, keeping my eyes on the calm surface of the lake.

“Yeah,” Henry said, sarcastically. “I’m sure.”

I blinked at his tone. Henry had never talked to me like that before. When we’d fought, it had been the kid version of fighting—arm punches, name calling, pranking—anything to get the fight over with so that we could go back to being friends. Hearing him now—and the way we were sniping at each other—felt like speaking a foreign language with someone you’d only ever spoken English to.

“So why did you move?” I asked, a little more aggressively than I meant to, as I turned to him, folding my arms across my chest. Moves within Lake Phoenix were fairly rare—on the drive up, I’d seen signs I recognized in front of house after house, the same owners still there.

Expecting an immediate answer, I was surprised to see Henry flush slightly and stick his hands in the pockets of his shorts, which had always been his tell when he didn’t know what to say. “It’s a long story,” he echoed, looking down. For a moment, the only sound was the faint
thunk thunk
of the plastic kayak bumping up against the wooden leg of the dock. “Anyway,” he said after a pause, “we live there now.”

“Right,” I said, feeling like we’d already established this. “I got that.”

“I mean, we live there year-round,” he clarified. He looked back at me and I tried to cover my expression of surprise. Though you could live in Lake Phoenix full-time, very few people did—it was
primarily a summer community. And five years ago, Henry had lived in Maryland. His father had done something in finance in D.C., coming up to Lake Phoenix with the rest of the fathers on the weekends, and staying in the city to work the rest of the time.