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Authors: Jane Harvey-Berrick
Summer of Seventeen
Jane Harvey-Berrick
Summer of Seventeen
SUMMER OF SEVENTEEN
Jane A. C. Harvey-Berrick has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Jane A. C. Harvey-Berrick has asserted her moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in Great Britain in 2014
ISBN 9780992924614
Harvey Berrick Publishing
http://www.janeharveyberrick.com
Copyright © Jane A. C. Harvey-Berrick 2014
Interior Formatting and Design by Christine Borgford /
perfectlypublishable.com
Cover design by Hang Le /
www.byhangle.com
Front cover by Michael Anthony Downs Photography, Back cover by Sophie Callahan Photography
BOOKS BY JANE HARVEY-BERRICK
One Careful Owner (coming soon)
At Your Beck & Call
Dangerous to Know & Love
Dazzled
Exposure
Lifers
Playing in the Rain
The Dark Detective
The Education of Sebastian
The Education of Caroline
The New Samurai
Connect with Jane Harvey-Berrick
To Mark, Steve, Rob, Anoki and Delano—the guys from Stones Reef Surf Shop and really nice people, despite having to beat off women with sticks. And Wanda, their den mother.
To Ana Alfaro from Panama, who would be happy that her name has been taken in vain, but moved on to the next great adventure before this story could be finished. RIP.
“How would you like to stand like a god before the crest of a monster billow, always rushing to the bottom of a hill and never reaching its base, and to come rushing in for a half a mile at express speed, in graceful attitude, of course, until you reach the beach and step easily from the wave to the strand?”
Duke Kahanamoku (1890-1968), Hawaiian surfer
You know that experiment we all have to do in sixth grade? The one where you put a drop of black ink on wet blotting paper and the colors all separate out? What if it’s the other way around, where black soaks up every color and holds them hostage? Like today.
My shoes are black and my pants are black and it’s so weird. But even among the sea of black, there are colors. My hand is golden-brown, tan from the first days of summer. My fingers are white and they’re beginning to tingle. It’s strange. Shouldn’t they be numb? Shouldn’t I be
not
feeling? Then I realize it’s because Yansi is holding my hand so tight she’s cutting off the blood. Her hand is darker than mine: brown, like rain-forest wood. Her palms are soft. Not like mine. Mine are rough, calloused. I don’t know if it’s from the sand, or the elective I did in shop this semester.
The cuffs of my shirt are white.
And then a bald guy I’ve never seen before shakes my hand.
“Sorry for your loss,” he says.
Everything and everyone pissed me off: school, my sister, my friends. Even my mom made me angry, and she was dead.
I was all twisted up inside, like if I had to feel one more emotion or think one more thought, my head would explode.
I was looking for something.
Julia was waiting for me when I got home from school. That’s when she dropped a bomb.
“I’ve put an ad on Craigslist. We’re renting out the den.”
We’d never called it ‘the den’ before. It had been mom’s room.
“We are?”
“Don’t start,” she said.
“Start what? I’m asking: since when are
we
renting out the den.”
“Since
we
need the money.”
I probably sounded like a whiny bitch and looked like a deer caught in headlights, but to say that I was shocked is a huge fucking understatement. I had no clue she was thinking of doing that—the whole idea came out of left field.
She was always moaning about money, how much things cost. Did I know how much a gallon of milk cost? I guess I was supposed to think about things like that now. I guess it meant we were poor.
Maybe my sister figured with people arriving in town looking for summer jobs, she could find someone to rent the den quickly.
I decided I was over this conversation and headed to my bedroom—assuming it was still mine and she wasn’t going to rent that out, too—and I looked up the listing.
S
eeking professional working male or female roommate
$590 a month, utilities included.
Cocoa Beach, FL.
Not $600, but $590. Like it was going to look way cheaper if you shaved off ten bucks. Do people still fall for shit like that? Like you go into a store and see something for five bucks and think,
Oh this is way too much
, but then the clerk says,
Oh that’s not $5.00 it’s only $4.99,
and all of the sudden it’s so much more affordable.
Yeah, I don’t think so.
We could buy three gallons of milk with that ten bucks. I checked.
I wasn’t happy, but it wasn’t like she listened to me anyway.
Julia was probably hoping for a long-term rental but I was pretty sure she’d take what she could get. I didn’t care, I just didn’t want some douche.
That was yesterday. Today, it was officially the start of summer break and vacationers were flooding into town
ready to spend their money. I’d been looking forward to it.
Had been
.
I heard the front door slam and knew that she’d gone out. She hadn’t spoken to me again, although last night I’d heard her yelling about me to her boyfriend Ben. Maybe she went grocery shopping. Maybe she couldn’t stand looking at me anymore. She said that once. Because I had blond hair and blue eyes and I looked like Mom. Julia had brown hair and brown eyes and she looked like her dad. Not my dad. Nobody knew what he looked like. Except Mom, I guess.
Julia had sold a load of our stuff—Mom’s stuff—because she said we needed the money. I hid my iPod just in case she decided to go completely crazy, and I still had my Tony Hawk Huckjam 401 skateboard which was pretty cool and cost nearly a hundred bucks. It was a good one, not great, not like a Plan B for pro skaters, but it wasn’t a twenty dollar piece of shit with Moshi Monsters on it either.
I hadn’t ridden it since Mom was sick in the hospital, and it was wedged under my bed behind a stack of porn mags that Sean had given me. I think he got them from one of his brothers. I felt weird about putting them out for recycling and, you know, I might want to look at them again.
I wasn’t worried about Julia finding them, but I’m glad Mom never did. Anyway, Julia didn’t go in my room because she said it was a health hazard and she didn’t want to catch the Ebola virus. Every now and then she yelled at me to bring down the dirty dishes that seemed to stack up in there. You’d think Armageddon was around the corner if the dishes weren’t washed. But I’d learned to put my laundry in the hamper or I would never have anything clean to wear.
