Sixteenth Summer (10 page)

“Because that’s the whole point,” Caroline said. She was sitting cross-legged on her wrap, picking at one of its many loose threads. “You don’t know Will at all and
that’s
the appeal. He’s a mystery. He’s nothing but possibility.”

“Or
im
possibility.” I sighed. “That’s what’s killing me. If this were Sam, I would
know
what was going on at his end. I’d know that he was working a double shift at the bike shop or having an emergency band practice for a gig. Or I’d know that the more caffeine he drinks at night, the later he sleeps the next day.”

“Yeah, well, you never know
everything
about a boy,” Caroline said before lying down herself.

I lifted my head and squinted over at her.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Is everything okay with Sam? Where
is
he, anyway?”

“What? Sam? Oh, everything’s fine,” Caroline said with a brusque wave of her hand. “He’s just where you said. Double shift at the bike shop.”

I plopped my head back down, then laid a hand on my stomach, which was feeling a little queasy.

“Uch,” I said. “I think I sucked in too much salt water. Let’s go to Angelo’s for some sour candy.”

“I’m way ahead of you,” Caroline said. She pulled out a white paper sack filled with unnatural colors and flavors.

Angelo’s was the closest beachmart to both Dune Island schools, so naturally, it was the island’s best candy source. In fact, its bulk candy bins were legendary. During the school year, Angelo’s was like a stock market floor every afternoon, complete with jostling, negotiating, and trading.

But in the summertime Angelo’s was sleepier, so he was lazier with his stock. You might end up with nothing in your candy bag but popcorn-flavored jelly beans or Bit-O-Honeys.

“The pickings weren’t that bad today,” Caroline said. “I got a ton of sour straws. All the apple, cherry, and watermelons were gone, though. We have to make do with blue raspberry.”

“Too bad Benjie’s not here, he’d love that,” I joked, fishing a long, cobalt-blue gummy straw out of the bag. The sour sugar made my mouth smart for a moment before the man-made deliciousness of the gummy took over. I took another bite before musing, “Remember when all it took to make us happy was mermaid kicking and some blue candy?”

“Um, no!” Caroline said. She stared at me and gave her head a frustrated little shake. “Anna, that stuff has
never
made you happy. You’ve always been waiting for something better to come along.”

“I have?” I said. Now I sat up, feeling little rivulets of sand slide off my limbs. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know,” Caroline said. “I mean, it’s not extreme. You don’t do that whole ‘I hate my small-town life so I’m going to dye my hair matte black and start piercing myself’ thing.”

“So cliché,” we said at the exact same time.

After we stopped laughing, Caroline got serious again.

“Sometimes it just feels like you’re not completely here,” she tried to explain. She pointed at the water. “When you swim laps out there, like you were just doing, sometimes I wonder if you want to just keep going. Like you wish you could swim all the way across the ocean or something. I mean, Anna … did
you
really
think Dune Islanders were going to go for Cardamom Hibiscus ice cream?”

I laughed again.

“Holy non sequitur,” I said. But Caroline only half smiled.

Of course, she was right about the ice cream. That lurid orange stuff had sat almost untouched in the ice cream case for two weeks before my dad had hauled the poor freezer-burned tub out and tossed it.

But just because I made some exotic ice cream didn’t mean I wanted to run away to India tomorrow.

Right?

“Maybe that’s why none of the Dune Island boys are good enough for you,” Caroline went on. She looked down in her lap and fiddled with her gummy straw. “And why you were so instantly into this guy from New York.”

“
Good
enough for me?” I said. “That’s
so
not it. Especially since Will isn’t even like that. He’s way more like us than a shoobee. I
told
you what we talked about the other night.”

“I’m just saying,” Caroline said, looking away from my confused face and gazing out at the water, “it
is
possible to go out with someone you know. Someone who
would
call the next day.”

My mouth dropped open. I had a million retorts to this, but also—none.

I’d never really thought about why the Landon Smiths of my world held no interest for me.

It also hadn’t occurred to me that I might like Will simply because he was different; because he was from someplace else.

Especially since right then he couldn’t have felt
farther
away
and I definitely
didn’t
like that. Already our date was starting to feel hazy to me and I wondered if I hadn’t invented some of its swooniest parts. Maybe I’d been the only one who’d felt like the night had flown by in about five minutes—and left me wanting more.

I didn’t know which was a more depressing thought. That I liked Will only because I was a pathetic small towner and he was a glamorous city boy.

Or that this boy I liked so much seemed to have forgotten about
me
entirely.

I crammed the last of my gummy straw into my mouth, then said, “It’s hot. You want to swim?”

Caroline peered at me, one eye squinted shut against the sun.

“I promise not to make a break for England,” I said with a forced laugh.

“Your lips are bright blue,” Caroline said as we got to our feet.

I laughed, feeling a little bit better.

I mean, other than the black hole of rejection that was eating up my insides.

Perhaps to fill that hole, I reached into the candy bag for one more mouthful of sugar therapy before we headed into the water. Since the gummy straws were all gone, I popped three sticky Swedish fish into my mouth.

When I straightened up, I almost choked on them. Because walking toward me, with a bright red rental bike kickstanded in the parking lot way behind him, was Will. He was still far away, waving as if we were in a crowd on Fifth Avenue and not all by ourselves on this empty stretch of sand.

I grabbed Caroline’s arm with one hand and waved weakly at
Will with the other. Then I began chewing like my life depended on it. It pretty much did. If Will walked over to find me—encrusted with sand, red-eyed from my salty swim—
and
with a mouth glued together with candy, I might have literally died.

Luckily, Caroline was my lifeguard. As Will approached,
she
spoke in my place.

“Well, hello, Will!” she called with a little too much joviality.

Then she crossed her arms over her chest, and my sigh of relief got caught in my throat. Because Caroline’s stance was the same one she takes before a varsity volleyball game or a debate over fossil fuels with her dad—or before putting annoying shoobees in their place.

The annoying shoobee of the moment was clearly Will.

I started chewing much faster, hoping I didn’t look like a rabbit.

“Hey!” Will said. He was trying to be polite and look at Caroline, but he kept peeking at me. I tried to chew between glances, promising myself that if I was
ever
able to swallow these ridiculous gummy fish, I’d never eat candy again.

Well … not in front of boys at least.

“That bike looks familiar,” Caroline said, pointing at Will’s shiny red beach cruiser. She wasn’t smiling.

“Yeah!” Will said. It looked like the blue laser beams Caroline was shooting him with her eyes were making him a little sweaty. “I went to rent it and there was Sam!”

“And he told you where we hung out,” Caroline provided for him.

“Uh-huh,” Will said. He turned to check out our almost-empty beach (while I
finally
swallowed). There was nothing there but Angelo’s and its cracked parking lot, a spindly looking fishing pier, and a big, sloping dune that hid all of it from Highway 80. “This is amazing. So this is why I don’t ever see you at the south beach.”

Caroline shrugged.

“Sam and I sometimes hang down there,” she said, “but Anna’s a loner.”

“No, I’m not!” I protested. “I’m a … reader.”

I pointed wanly at my novel, which was tossed into the sand next to my wrap.

“
Beloved
?” Will said. “Kind of heavy for the beginning of the summer, isn’t it?”

“Have you read it?” I asked. “I love it. When it’s not, you know, tearing out my soul and stomping on it.”

“I had to read it for school,” Will said. “I go to this kind of intense private school because my mom teaches there. They’re always making us read books that feel like they’re in a foreign language, even though they’re in English. But
Beloved
was one of the ones I actually really dug by the time I finished it. Writing a term paper on it? Not so much.”

I felt a pang. So Will dug impossible books like
Beloved
? Even if he’d read it reluctantly, that was definitely another checkmark on his growing list of pros.

Caroline rolled her eyes at my lit-geekery and stepped in again.

“I’m just curious,” she said to Will, “what brought you to the bike shop?”

Will shrugged.

“Just wanted to do some exploring, I guess,” Will said. “I still have a lot of the island to see. I didn’t even
know
about this peninsula. It’s awesome.”

“I know somebody who could have given you a tour,” Caroline said. Her folded arms tightened. She was practically a pretzel. “But you’d have to have, you know,
called
her.”

“Caroline,” I whisper-shrieked.

“Oh yeah?” Will said. “Dune Island does seem to have a lot of, like,
really
passionate volunteer types. Especially those people who camp out to protect the sea turtle nests? I met one the other night. She was a little scary, I’ve got to admit …”

“Not as scary as
some
people I could name,” I said, glaring at Caroline.

“You know what’s scary?” Caroline said, glaring back at me, then shifting her laser beams to Will. “Being caught in a new place without a
phone
. I mean, you’re practically paralyzed if you lose your cell phone. That ever happen to you, Will?”

“Um, no …” Will was looking at Caroline in confusion. Then suddenly his eyes went wide. He’d realized what she was
really
talking about.

He looked at me in alarm.

“Wait a minute,” he blurted. “My brother told me not to call you for thirty-six hours.”

“Thirty-six hours?” I said. Now I was confused. “Is that like not swimming for a half hour after you eat? Because you know that’s a myth, right?”

My voice was as flat as my feelings. I wondered if Will’s
thirty-six-hour spiel was going to be more or less lame than a couldn’t-find-your-number one.

“It just seemed like … what you’re supposed to do,” Will said.

“Why?” I blurted. Just as I had with Sophie.

“Because …” Will shook his head as if he had a sudden case of fuzzbrain. “You know, it seemed like a good idea at the time. But now …”

Will looked at me. And his expression was something I’d never quite seen before. Call it a meeting of delight and nausea.

Which was pretty much exactly how I’d been feeling ever since our date.

Could that be what smitten looked like?

I glanced at Caroline. Her blue laser beams had softened and her mouth was slowly widening into a big grin of recognition.

The next thing I knew, she was scooping up her wrap. She whipped it around her waist so fast that she covered both me and Will with a spray of sand.

“I just remembered,” she said, “I told Sam I’d meet him for coffee on his break.”

Sam didn’t drink coffee. I was about to point this out when I stopped myself—and smiled slyly.

Caroline, of course,
knew
that Sam didn’t drink coffee. She was speaking in code, which seemed almost as silly as Owen’s thirty-six-hour rule. It also felt, somehow, very sophisticated. If the language of love was French, the language of dating seemed to be some sort of spy code. Like being in the CIA, boy-girl relations were all about intrigue and subterfuge and wearing cute outfits.

“Well, tell Sam thanks,” Will said as Caroline began to walk away. “I never would have found this beach if he hadn’t pointed me in the right direction.”

“You should really call that tour guide,” Caroline said, grinning at Will. She gave the knotted waist of her wrap one more tug, then strode over to her bike, which was propped next to mine in front of Angelo’s.

After Caroline left, Will and I stood in uncomfortable silence for a moment. And suddenly I became painfully aware of what I was wearing.

A bathing suit.

A bikini, to be specific. And nothing else, unless you counted a whole lot of sand. When Will had arrived, I’d been so focused on my mouthful of candy that I hadn’t even thought to consider the rest of my body and every curve, freckle, and scar on it—all just laid out there for Will to size up.

Now it was my turn to whip my wrap off the ground. I quickly sausaged myself within it while simultaneously dusting sand off my arms and legs.

“My brother …,” Will began.

“Oh, say no more,” I said, holding up my hand.

Which was sort of a mistake, because he
did
say no more. At least for a minute.

But when Will finally found his voice again, what he said made my jaw drop.

“Nobody’s ever made me a picnic before,” he said.

He paused to look even more queasy/delighted—and I gaped at him. He hadn’t
really
just said that, had he?

It sounded much less cheesy than it had in my daydream. It was just straightforward and sweet. I was starting to think that Will would make a terrible spy.

I pointed at his bike.

“So are you renting that by the hour?”

“Sam actually gave me a deal on it for the summer,” Will said. “Even if I knew how to drive, we don’t have a car here, so …”

“You don’t know how to drive?” I said.

“I know, it’s embarrassing,” Will said. “But, listen, it’s impressive that I can even ride a bike! A lot of people I grew up with can’t even do that because their parents never lugged them over to Central Park to teach them.”