Sixteenth Summer (11 page)

“I can’t even remember not being able to ride a bike,” I said. “I don’t know what I’d do without Allison.”

I pointed over in the direction of Angelo’s.

“Oh, is that who taught you to ride?” Will asked, following my gaze.

“Um, no, that’s my bike, Allison Porchnik,” I stammered, suddenly realizing how dumb that sounded. “You know, from
Annie Hall
, the Woody Allen movie?”

I’d always named my bikes, from my first trike (Lulu) to my old green Schwinn (Kermit) to my current gold cruiser with the white seat and the super-wide handlebars. The bike was so seventies fabulous that I’d
had
to give her a name from that era. After watching every movie in my parents’ Woody Allen collection one rainy weekend, I’d come up with a perfect one: Allison Porchnik, one of Woody’s dry-witted, golden-haired ex-wives.

Will was giving me a funny look.

And suddenly I realized something else.

“Oh my God,” I said, covering my mouth with my hand. “My mouth is bright blue, isn’t it? Caroline got us these horrible gummy straws and—”

“No, no.” Will waved me off. “It’s just … Woody Allen. The guy from New York?”

“Um, he’s kind of more than ‘the guy from New York’!” I said. “He’s like the best filmmaker ever. Or he was, anyway …”

“Yeah, decades ago.” Will shrugged.

“Yeah, that’s when he was at his best!” I insisted. “You know, ‘especially the early, funny ones’?”

Will looked at me blankly, and I smiled and rolled my eyes. So much for us having an instant private joke.

“That was a line from
Stardust Memories
,” I told Will. “You
have
to rent it sometime.”

“Well, if I
have
to,” Will said, teasing me. Then he glanced over his shoulder at his bike.

“So,” he added casually, “do you and Allison Porchnik want to go for a ride?”

I looked down at my toes so he wouldn’t see how hard I was beaming. Who cared about private jokes? I was about to go on my second date with Will Cooper.

I
t had been a long time since I’d ridden the entire nine miles of Highway 80. I usually was too busy getting from point A to point B to just tool around for the pleasure of it.

But it was fun listening to Will’s amazed exclamations as we skimmed down the endless stretch of asphalt. On our right was a prairie of swamp grass, emerald green and practically vibrating with cicadas, frogs, and dragonflies. On our left was the ocean, shooting flashes of gold at us every time the sun hit a wave.

With Will beside me, I slowed down, and not just because his red bike was a heavy clunker. The traffic was sleepy and we rode side by side, with me playing tour guide.

“We could go to the lighthouse at the south end of the island,” I said. “That’s what the chamber of commerce would have us do.”

“Ah yes, the lighthouse from all the T-shirts and mugs and mouse pads?” Will said. “I’ve been there already with my mom and her
Let’s Go
book.”

“Dune Island’s got a travel book?” I gasped.

“Um, no,” Will said with a laugh. “It’s more like three pages
in
a travel book. But they’re a really packed three pages!”

I laughed.

“Well, does the travel book mention our water tower on the west side?” I asked. “Because I think it’s a much better view than the lighthouse. If you ask me, the swamp is a little more interesting from that high up. Every time you go up there, the tidal pools are in different places. They make a picture.”

“Of what?” Will asked, lazily looping his bike back and forth across the highway.

“I usually see Van Gogh,” I said. “You know, all those swirls and swoops like in
Starry Night
? Most people just see Jesus.”

“Seriously? Like the people who see him in cinnamon buns and water stains on the wall?”

“Will,” I said gently, “Remember, you’re in the South now. There’s a
lot
of Jesus down here.”

“Believe me,” Will said. “I can tell just by talking to you.”

“What?!” I sputtered. “I don’t have a Southern accent. My family is from up North.”

“Um, I hate to break it you …”

Will lifted one hand off his handlebars to give me a helpless shrug.

“Okay!” I admitted. “So I say ‘y’all.’ I suppose that sounds pretty Southern. But come on. ‘You guys’?! That just sounds so … wrong.”

“Yeah,” Will agreed, “if you have a Southern accent.”

I coasted for a moment, staring at the glinty ocean.

“Well, that’s kind of a big bummer.” I sighed.

“Why?” Will asked.

“Because everyone thinks that people with Southern accents are dumb,” I complained. “Even
presidents
are totally mocked for their Southern accents.”

“Well, you’re not dumb,” Will said. “Anybody who talked to you for more than two minutes would know that.”

It took my breath away, it really did. Will said these things to me so matter-of-factly, as if he wasn’t giving me the most lovely compliment but simply stating the obvious that anybody could see.

He didn’t know that, up until then, nobody else had.

“And besides,” Will added, “I like your accent.”

See what I mean?

“My second favorite view,” I said, pedaling harder so I could get a bit of breeze on my now flaming face, “is from the biggest dune on the island. It’s way south, past the boardwalk. But you can’t go there at this time of year. The panic grass is just sprouting, so it’s too delicate to even
look
at.”

“Maybe
I’m
dumb because I didn’t understand a word you just said,” Will said. “You call that dune grass ‘panic grass’? Why?”

“That’s just what it’s called,” I said. “I don’t even know why, actually. All I know is, as soon as you learn to walk on this island, all you hear from your parents is, ‘Watch out for the sea oats! Mind the panic grass!’ Maybe that’s why. They sound so
panicky
about it. I mean, if you thought the turtle nest sitters were scary, wait until you meet a dune grass guard. They’re very, very passionate about erosion.”

“Well, after Toni Morrison books, erosion is my favorite subject,” Will cracked, with that half smile that was already starting to feel sweetly familiar. “I mean, I could go on and on and on.”

I threw back my head and laughed.

And then we did talk on and on and on. Not about erosion, of course. Mostly Will asked me questions about Dune Island. Like why the gas station at the south end of the island is called Psycho Sisters. (It’s a long story involving the Robinson twins, a sweet sixteen party, and a way-too-red red velvet cake.)

“Okay, and why, when I went to the library,” Will asked, “was there an entire shelf with nothing but copies of
Love Story
on it? There were fifteen! I had to count them. I mean, that many
Love Story
s in a one-room library is pretty weird.”

“Oh, yeah, the
Love Story
s.” I sighed. “There’s an island-wide book club, and someone had the fabulous idea of having
that
be the selection a couple of summers ago. Everywhere you went, women were reading this cheesy book and just
crying
.”

Will had started laughing halfway through my explanation and I had to laugh too. It was kind of fun recounting these random little Dune Island details that I’d always just known and never thought twice about.

Before I knew it, we were at the southern tip of the island, which was as different from the North Peninsula as could be. The north juts out into the Atlantic with absolutely nothing to shelter it. It’s craggy and lunar and feels as deserted as, well, a desert if you turn your back to the beachmart and the pier.

But the southern end of the island hugs the coast of Georgia like a baby curling against its mother. There’s a sandy path there that leads into a giant tangle that my friends and I have always called the jungle. It’s lush with out-of-control ivy, dinosaur-size shrubs, and big, gnarled magnolias, palms, and live oaks. The sun shoots through breaks in the greenery like spotlights, and the sounds of bugs and frogs and lizards spin a constant drone. In the middle of the jungle is a clearing, and in the middle of that are some half-decayed tree trunks arranged into a sort of lounge.

Without even discussing it, Will and I got off our bikes and walked down the path toward it.

For the first time in a while, Will didn’t ask me any questions. I was quiet too. This cranny of the island suddenly felt special. Not just someplace to go with my friends to break the monotony
of our beach/Swamp/Angelo’s loop, but like something out of a fairy tale—my very own Secret Garden.

I hadn’t done anything to make all this teeming life happen, of course. Still, showing the jungle to Will, like the rest of the island, made it somehow feel like mine. So instead of rustling quickly over the path, just trying to jet to the clearing, I found myself lingering over things. I stroked feathery ferns with my finger, enjoyed the dry, green scent of an elephant ear plant brushing my cheek, and pulled a dangling swatch of palm bark free from the trunk that was still clinging to it.

It was all very romantic, until Will started cursing under his breath and slapping at his calves.

“Oh, the mosquitoes,” I said. “I can help with that. Come on.”

We hiked back to the head of the path, and because we were hurrying against the drone of the bugs, we got there in only a few minutes. I pulled a little plastic box out from beneath my bike seat. In it I had an emergency stash of sunscreen, bug spray, and sno-cone money.

I held out the spray bottle, but instead of taking it, Will cocked his leg in my direction.

I hesitated for a moment, then dropped to one knee to spritz the fumy stuff on Will’s ankles and calves. I tried not to fixate on Will’s muscles, the hair on his legs that was somewhere between light brown and sun-bleached gold, or the way his frayed khaki cutoffs grazed the top of my hand when I stood up to mist his arms.

I guess I held the bottle a little too close when I sprayed the
back of Will’s neck, because the repellant pooled up in a little froth just below his hairline.

“Man, that’s cold!” Will said.

“Sorry!” I giggled, then used my fingertips to rub the stuff in.

Touching Will’s neck seemed shockingly intimate. Part of me wanted to jerk my hand away. Another wanted to put my other hand on his neck too, and maybe give him a little massage.

But instead I just swiped the bug spray away quickly and said, “You know, my shift at The Scoop starts kind of soon. I should probably …”

Will nodded, smiled, and walked toward his bike.

I had no idea if he’d thought of that moment as A Moment—or if he’d just been grateful for the bug repellant.

Either way, I felt calmer as we walked our bikes back to the highway and headed to town.

Because whatever that moment had been, I now felt pretty certain that it wouldn’t be our last.

O
ver the next couple of weeks, Will and I fell into such a comfortable groove, it was almost hard to remember that day and a half of
will he call or won’t he?
Because Will did call, whenever he felt like it.

Or I called
him
.

One morning he wandered over to the North Peninsula with a beach towel, a paperback book, and a giant iced coffee, just because he knew I’d be there.

And one evening I stashed some ice cream in a cooler and
drifted over to the crooked little boardwalk that connected his rental cottage to the beach, because he’d told me that he liked to sit there at night, dangling his legs over the tall grass and listening to music.

We covered every corner of Dune Island, me on Allison Porchnik and Will on Zelig. That’s the name, from another Woody Allen movie, I’d come up with for his chunky red bike.

But with each day that went by, I realized we hadn’t given our bikes the right names at all.

Unlike Zelig, the character who traveled the world pretending to be all sorts of people he wasn’t, Will was incredibly honest—but sweet about it. (For instance, he eventually told me that he
had
noticed my blue lips that morning on the beach. But he also told me he’d thought they were cute.)

And after Will chucked Owen’s thirty-six-hour rule, I never felt like jilted Allison Porchnik again.

It was thrillingly comfortable being with Will.

But also uncomfortably thrilling.

Every time I saw him, I felt like my eyes opened a little wider and my breath got just little quicker. I felt
intense
, like I was getting more oxygen than usual. And even though this was preferable to the way I’d felt when I’d first met Will—and couldn’t get enough air
in
—it still made me a little self-conscious.

I worried that I looked like a chipmunk in a Disney cartoon, all fluttery lashes and big, goofy smiles—basically, the worst incarnation of cute.

But I couldn’t stop the swooning. Every day I discovered
another little bit of Will. One afternoon he told me he’d been the resident haunter in his old apartment building. Every year on Halloween, he’d dressed up in a different creepy costume to scare the sour candy out of the kids trick-or-treating in the hallways.

Another time he reminisced about spotting his dad one day eating alone at a diner. He said he’d almost burst into tears, right there at 66th and Lex.

All these layers made me like Will more and more.

But was I
falling
for him?

That was the big question—that I had no idea how to answer.

“How did you know?” I asked Caroline one day. It was the third week in June and the heat had gotten to that point where you could see it waving at you as it shimmied off the hot asphalt. We were sitting on a shaded bench at the far end of the boardwalk, eating coconut sno-cones. We shoveled the crushed ice into our mouths, trying to eat it before it melted into syrupy puddles.

“How did I know what?” Caroline slurred. Her tongue was ice-paralyzed.

“That Sam was
it
,” I said.

Caroline looked down into her Styrofoam cup, then smiled a private smile, remembering.

“You’re gonna think it’s dumb,” she said.