[English] SECOND CHANCE SUMMER

Second Chance Summer
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I looked back toward the concession stand, then over to my crookedly parked car. There was a piece of me, a big one, that just wanted to get in and drive, not stopping until I was miles and states away from here. But there was something about quitting twenty minutes into your first day that just seemed pathetic. And I knew that if I left now, it would confirm everything that Lucy already thought about me. So I made myself walk toward the concession stand, suddenly with a lot more sympathy for my sister and what she’d had to face this morning. I took a deep breath before I pulled open the employee door, feeling a little bit like I was going to face a firing squad myself.

The rest of the workday did not exactly go well. Lucy barely spoke to me. She either spoke to me through Elliot, when he was around between lessons, or simply ignored me, leaving several times to make calls on her cell. After the lunch rush, she’d sent me to organize the equipment and supply rooms. It was mind-numbing work—counting and straightening the piles of life jackets, then doing inventory of the supply closet—but at least I was alone, with no uncomfortable pauses or waves of irritation being sent my way. I’d spent my lunch hour sitting on the beach alone, off to the side, in the shade of one of the pine trees. There were groups of kids playing in the water, having the kind of raft-tipping fights that I remembered well. I could see Elliot, out on the lake in a kayak, directing a sailing class around a buoy course, and retrieving one boat when it seemed in danger of floating out toward Delaware. When I returned to the supply room after my break and began counting the cups again, time seemed to crawl, the hours passing with excruciating slowness. When five o’clock finally arrived and I closed up the supply closet, I was exhausted. I smelled like fryer grease and the mayonnaise I’d accidentally spilled on myself, my feet were killing me, and all I wanted was to crawl into bed and not have to go back to this job ever again.

I met Lucy and Elliot outside, as Lucy pulled a metal gate down over the front of the concession stand and locked it. I saw Leland striding up from the beach, guitar over his shoulder, and was surprised to see that there were still some swimmers in the water, a few lone people still bobbing in their rafts. “So,” I said, as Elliot approached me and Lucy yanked on the lock twice, testing it, “what happens if there’s no lifeguard?”

“A sign goes up,” Elliot said. He nodded at Leland, who was loping over to us. “Lifeguard’s only on duty from nine to five. There’s a sign on the chair the rest of the time that it’s swim at your own risk.”

I nodded as Lucy came over, her phone clutched in her hand. She smiled at Leland, then dropped the friendly expression as soon as she saw me. “So we should figure out schedules,” she said, her voice cold and clipped. “I’ll talk to Fred and then call you. What’s your cell?” I told her, and she punched it into her phone, pressing each button a little harder than necessary. “Okay,” she said, when she’d saved it. She gave me a long look, and as I took in the rest of the three of them standing closer together, I realized that they were probably going to be making plans to hang out. Plans that I, without question, wasn’t a part of.

“Oh,” I said, feeling my face get hot. “Right. Great. So just… call me about the schedule, and I’ll… be here then.” I could hear that I sounded like an idiot, but the words were out before I could stop them. I gave everyone a nod, and power-walked to my car as fast as possible.

As I opened the door, before I got inside, I looked back and saw Lucy watching me. She didn’t look away immediately, like she had all day, and her expression seemed more sad than angry. But then she turned away again, and I was reminded of what Elliot had said. He was right—I couldn’t blame her. Because it was exactly what I deserved.

Chapter eleven

five summers earlier

I STARED ACROSS THE DOCK GLUMLY AT LUCY. “THIS STINKS.” I separated out the purple Skittles from the pile in front of me, and pushed them toward my best friend. Lucy frowned down at her own pile, then selected all the greens and pushed them to me. We divided all our candy this way, our color preferences so ingrained that we never had to ask. When it came to things like Snickers or Milky Ways, we preferred them from the beach snack bar, frozen. We would get one, along with a plastic knife, and Lucy would divide the candy bar with a surgeon’s precision. We shared everything, fifty-fifty.

“I know,” Lucy agreed. “It sucks.” I nodded, secretly impressed and a little jealous. My mother yelled at me whenever I said that word, and Lucy’s mother had as well, until recently. But, as Lucy was always pointing out, divorce meant that you could get away with tons of things that used to be off-limits.

Unfortunately, divorce also meant that Lucy wasn’t going to be here for most of the summer, a fact that I was still having trouble getting my head around. Summers in Lake Phoenix meant Lucy, and I had no idea what I was supposed to do without her. We had even gone before my parents, sitting them down on the screened-in porch one night to make our case: Lucy could just live with us this summer while her parents were in New Jersey, dealing with lawyers and meetings and “mediation,” whatever that was. This way, Lucy would be able to take advantage of the Lake Phoenix fresh air, and not be in her parents’ way. She could share my room—we’d even worked out a system where we’d alternate who would get the real bed, and who would get the trundle bed.

But my parents hadn’t agreed, and now, after only two weeks here, Lucy was leaving. I was supposed to be saying good-bye, and even though I said good-bye to Lucy at the end of every summer, this was different.

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“Look,” Lucy said, carefully smoothing her bangs down. I loved Lucy’s bangs and was incredibly jealous of them. But when I’d gotten my own cut the fall before, they hadn’t hung even, straight, and thick, like Lucy’s did. They had been wispy and flyaway, always parting in a cowlick in the center and causing my mother to have to buy me a lot of headbands. My hair had grown out by the time summer came, and I never had to tell Lucy that I’d copied her. “My mom said if she gets the house and things work out, I’ll be able to come up here soon. Maybe even in a month.” She tried to put a positive spin on the last word, but I could hear how hollow it sounded. What was I supposed to do for a month without Lucy?

“Right,” I said, trying to be cheerful too, even though I didn’t mean it at all. “It’ll be great.” I gave her a big, fake smile, but Lucy just stared at me for a moment, and we both started cracking up.

“T,” she said, shaking her head. “You are the worst liar ever.”

“I know,” I said, even though I couldn’t remember a time when I’d ever needed or wanted to lie to Lucy.

“But at least you aren’t going to be all alone in New Jersey, like I am,” Lucy said with a dramatic sigh. “I’m going to be so bored.”

“I’m going to be bored too,” I assured her. “Who am I going to hang out with?”

Lucy shrugged, and for some reason didn’t meet my eye when she said, “Your friend Henry, maybe?”

Even though I knew it wasn’t fair to Henry, I groaned in response. “It’s not the same,” I said. “All he wants to do is go into the woods and look at rocks. He’s a huge dork.” This wasn’t exactly true, and I felt bad after I said it, but I was trying to make Lucy feel better.

“Lucy!” Mrs. Marino yelled from the house, and as I turned to look, I could see her standing in the driveway, where the car was packed up and ready to go.

Lucy let out a long sigh, but both of us seemed to realize it was time to leave. We scooped up our Skittles and walked toward the house. In her driveway, we did the hand-slap pattern we spent most of last summer working out (it involved a double spin) and then said good-bye and hugged quickly when Lucy’s mom started complaining about how if they didn’t get started soon, they weren’t going to beat the traffic.

I stood with my bike at the side of Lucy’s driveway and watched the car pull away, Lucy leaning out the window, waving until I couldn’t see her any longer. Then I got on my bike and started to pedal slowly in the direction of home. I didn’t necessarily want to be there—it was hours until dinnertime—but I didn’t know what else to do. It seemed incredibly lame to go to the beach or the pool by myself.

“Hey, Edwards!” I looked over, but I knew it was Henry, skidding to a stop next to me. He’d been going through a phase recently where he was calling everyone by their last names. And even though I knew he wanted me to, I refused to call him “Crosby.”

“Hey, Henry.” I stepped down to the ground and kicked at my pedal, setting it spinning. Henry, on the other hand, kept riding, looping in circles around my bike.

“Where’s Marino?” he asked, as he circled me. I kept having to turn my head to look at him, and I was starting to get dizzy.

“Lucy’s gone for the summer,” I said, feeling the impact of the words. “Most of it, anyway.”

Henry stopped circling me and dropped one bare foot to the ground. “That’s a bummer,” he said. “Sorry to hear that.”

I nodded, even though I wasn’t sure Henry meant it. He and Lucy had never gotten along that great. I knew he thought she was too girly, and she thought he was a know-it-all. The few times the three of us had tried to hang out together, I’d felt like I was a referee, constantly trying to make sure everyone was getting along, and it had been exhausting. So I tended to hang out with them separately, which worked out better for everyone.

“So,” Henry said, getting back up on the bike’s pedals, “I was going to the beach. Want to come?”

I looked at him and thought about it. Hanging out with Henry would definitely be better than going home—even if he did call me Edwards and was always trying to get me to race him or see who could eat more hot dogs. “Okay,” I said, spinning my pedal back and standing on it. “Sounds fun.”

“Awesome.” Henry smiled at me, and I noticed that his teeth were no longer crooked in front, like they’d been when I first met him. And his smile was really nice. Why hadn’t I ever noticed that before?

“Race you to the beach?” he asked, already ready to ride, his hands gripping the handlebars.

“I don’t know,” I said, as I pretended to fuss with my gears, all the while getting into position. “I’m not sure if I—Go!” I yelled the last word and started pedaling as fast as I could, leaving Henry to catch up. I laughed out loud as I started to fly down the street, the wind lifting my ponytail. “Loser buys the Cokes!”

Lost Found

Chapter twelve

THE WAITING ROOM IN THE ONCOLOGY DEPARTMENT OF THE Stroudsburg hospital seemed like it had given up on any attempts to be cheerful. The walls were painted a dull peach, and there weren’t any encouraging posters about managing your cold or proper hand-washing techniques, like I’d been used to seeing in my doctor’s office. Instead, there was only a single badly painted landscape of a hill dotted with either sheep or clouds, I wasn’t sure which. The chairs were overstuffed, making me feel like I was slowly sinking down into them, and all the magazines were months out of date. Two of the celebrity marriages trumpeted on the glossy covers had since imploded in messy divorces. I flipped through the closest magazine at hand anyway, realizing how different these happily-ever-after stories seemed when you were aware of what the outcome was going to be. After a few minutes, I tossed it aside. I glanced down at my watch, and then at the door my father had gone through to meet with his doctor. This was not exactly how I’d imagined spending my day off.

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I had planned on quitting the snack bar after the first disastrous day, seeing no reason to spend the summer with people who disliked me and made no secret of it. But at dinner that night, as we’d feasted on corn on the cob, French fries, and hamburgers cooked on the grill—what felt like our first real summer meal—my plan hit a snag.

Gelsey, it seemed, hated tennis. While she complained about how stupid the sport was, and how all the people in her tennis class were equally stupid, and Warren was simultaneously attempting to tell us that tennis had been invented in twelfth-century France and popularized in the court of Henry the Eighth, I’d just sat there, enjoying my corn, waiting for the moment that I could jump in and explain that while I was sure that there were merits to working at the snack bar, I felt that my time might be better utilized this summer by doing something else. Anything else. I was working out my explanation in my head, and so wasn’t really paying attention to the conversation around the table. It was only when I heard my name that I snapped back to attention.

“What?” I asked, looking at my father. “What was that, Dad?”

“I was just saying,” my dad said, mostly to my sister, who was glowering down at her plate, “that you also had a new, challenging experience today. But unlike your sister, you are taking it in stride.”

Crap. “Um,” I said, glancing at Warren, trying to see if I could silently communicate with him, and get him to distract everyone, or tell us how something else was invented. But Warren just yawned and helped himself to more fries. “Right. About that…”

“Taylor’s not quitting,” my father said. I cleared my throat, hoping that I could get him to stop somehow without looking like the flakiest person on earth. “And I’m sure her day wasn’t easy. Was it?”

He turned back my way, and everyone in my family looked at me, Warren’s fry raised halfway to his mouth. “No,” I said honestly.

“There you go,” my dad said, giving me a small wink, making me feel terrible about what I was about to do. But then I thought of Lucy’s face when she’d realized I was working there, and how lonely it had been, eating lunch by myself.

“Look,” I said, realizing that this might be my best chance to extricate myself from a situation that, I was sure, was only going to get exponentially worse as the summer went on. “It’s not that I don’t want to work. It’s just that the snack bar wasn’t… um… exactly what I expected.” My mother glanced over at me, her expression indicating she knew exactly what I was about to say. I looked away from her as I continued. “And, given my academic workload next year, I think I should use this summer to—”

“I don’t care!” Gelsey wailed, sounding on the verge of tears. “I don’t want to play tennis and I shouldn’t have to. It’s… not… fair!”

Warren rolled his eyes at me across the table, and I shook my head. This was what came of being the baby of the family. You got to throw tantrums years after you were officially much too old to do so. Gelsey started to sob into her dinner napkin, and I realized that the moment to announce that I was quitting my job had probably passed.

So I’d suffered through two more shifts at the snack bar, mostly just so that I could quit and still save a little bit of face with my dad. They were pretty much the same as my first day—Lucy barely spoke to me, and I spent the entire workday counting down the minutes until I could go home, more convinced with each passing hour that this was not worth the minimum wage. I’d planned on taking my day off to go down to the clubhouse, tell Jillian, leave a message for Fred (who would undoubtedly be fishing), and then tell my family once it was a done deal. But that afternoon, as my dad set aside his work and prepared to go to Stroudsburg for his doctor’s appointment, my mom called me out to the porch.

She was sitting on the top step, combing my sister’s hair. Gelsey was one step below her, a towel around her shoulders, her head tilted back slightly as my mother pulled a wide-tooth comb through her damp auburn curls. This was a ritual the two of them had. They didn’t do it all the time, just when my sister had a bad day or was upset about something. As I watched her getting her hair combed now, I wondered if this was because of the trauma she’d suffered at her tennis lessons (which she hadn’t been allowed to quit) or something else. Years ago, I’d wanted my mother to do this for me, when I was much younger. I’d eventually realized, though, there was probably no point to it. My mother and Gelsey had the same reddish-brown hair—long, thick, and curly. And I had fine, pin-straight hair that never got tangled and that I barely needed to comb myself. But still.

“What?” I asked. Gelsey made a face at me, but before I could respond in kind, my mother turned her head back so I could only see her profile.

“Would you go to Stroudsburg with your dad today?” my mom asked.

“Oh,” I said. This was not what I had been expecting. “Is he okay?”

“He just has his doctor’s appointment, and I was hoping you could go with him,” my mother said, her tone even, as she drew the comb from the crown all the way down to the ends that were already starting to curl into ringlets. I looked at my mother closely, trying to see what she meant by this, if there was anything truly wrong, but my mother could be inscrutable when she wanted to be, and I couldn’t tell anything. “You’re all set,” she said, smoothing her hand down Gelsey’s hair, then whisking the towel off her shoulders.

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Gelsey stood and headed inside, crossing to the door in a series of fast twirls. I stepped aside to let her pass, totally used to this, since for several years now, when she was in the mood, Gelsey would seldom walk when she could dance.

“So?” my mother asked, and I turned back to see her plucking the loose hairs from the comb. “Will you go with your dad?”

“Sure,” I said, but still felt like there was more to this than she was telling me. I took a breath to ask when I noticed that my mother was tossing the stray hairs into the air, where they were lifted by the faint breeze that had been ruffling the trees all afternoon. “What are you doing?”

“It’s why you should always comb your hair outside,” she said. “This way, mother birds can weave the strands into their nests.” She looked down at the comb, then started to head inside, folding the towel as she went.

“Mom,” I said, before she reached the door. She looked at me, eyebrows raised, waiting, and I suddenly wanted nothing more than to be able to talk to her like Gelsey could, and tell her what I was really afraid of. “Is Dad okay?”

My mom gave me a sad smile. “I just want him to have some company. Okay?”

And of course I had agreed, and my dad and I drove the hour into Stroudsburg together, my father behind the wheel—I felt like I’d learned my lesson as far as questioning him about that. My dad seemed to be treating this excursion, brief as it was, like a real road trip. He stopped at PocoMart for honey-roasted peanuts and sodas for us, and put me in charge of radio duties as we headed out of town. This was perhaps the most unexpected part of the afternoon, since whenever we’d been in the car together before, he was always either on the Bluetooth talking to his office, or listening to the financial report.

When we’d arrived at the hospital, my dad led the way up to the oncology wing, and as he headed into his appointment, he promised me it wouldn’t be too long. But it had been twenty minutes now, and I was starting to get restless.

I bypassed the elevator and took the stairs down to the lobby, feeling the need to move. The lobby didn’t offer all that much distraction—just oil paintings of the founders and plaques commemorating big donations. There were also a surprisingly large number of people smoking outside the building’s entrance, considering that this was a hospital. I ended up in the gift shop, walking around the aisles, taking in the bouquets of flowers for purchase, the cheerful, bright-colored teddy bears emblazoned with GET WELL SOON! across their stomachs. I wandered into the card aisle, looking through the racks of Thinking of You and Get Well Soon options. I moved past the sympathy section, not even wanting to know what was inside the somber-looking cards that mostly seemed to feature a single flower, a bird in flight, or a sunset.

Since there was nothing I wanted, I just bought a pack of gum, tossing it onto the counter as I dug in my purse for change. As I did, I noticed a large flower arrangement on the counter, made up of summer flowers, all bright purples and oranges. It looked vibrant and healthy, and seemed to smell like sunshine even in the sterile, fluorescently lit gift shop. Looking at it, I got, for the first time, why people would bring flowers to sick people, stuck inside the hospital with no way to get outside. It was like bringing them a little bit of the world that was going on without them.

“That it?” the woman behind the counter asked.

I started to reply, but my eye was caught by the preprinted card in the arrangement, displayed on a long plastic holder that poked out of the flowers. JUST TO SAY I LOVE YOU, it read.

“Did you want something else?” she asked.

I looked away from the card, embarrassed, and handed her a dollar. “That’s it,” I said, as I pocketed the gum and then dropped my few cents change into the penny cup.

“Have a good day,” she said, then cleared her throat. “I hope everything… turns out all right.”

I looked up at her then, and saw that she was older, closer to my grandmother’s age, wearing a name tag and a sympathetic expression. It was different from the expressions of pity and premature sympathy that I’d hated so much in Connecticut, and I realized I didn’t mind. It struck me that she must see, all day long, people coming through the shop who also didn’t want to be in the hospital, who were looking for something they could buy, some cheap teddy bear or arrangement of flowers, that would seem to make things better.

“Thanks,” I said. I let my eyes linger on the card for a moment longer before I headed out to the lobby. I skipped the stairs and took the elevator to the oncology wing. The card had made me uncomfortably aware of something—I couldn’t remember the last time I’d told my father I loved him. I searched my memory as the elevator rose silently through the floors. I knew I’d said it a lot when I was younger, as our home-movie collection attested to. And I’d sign his birthday and Father’s Day card every year with a scrawled love, Taylor. But had I ever said it to him? Out loud, and in recent memory?

I couldn’t remember, which made me pretty sure that the answer was no. This fact weighed heavy in my thoughts, to the point where once I got back to the waiting room, I didn’t even bother picking up one of the outdated magazines. And when my father finally appeared, and asked me if I was ready to go home, I agreed without a second’s hesitation.

In contrast to the trip there, our ride home was pretty silent. My dad looked so worn-out after his appointment, he hadn’t even tried to drive; instead he just tossed me the keys once we made it to the parking lot. We had kept up a conversation for the first few miles, but then I noticed the pauses in my dad’s responses getting longer and longer. I’d look over and see that his head was resting against the seat, his eyelids fluttering closed before opening once again. By the time we got on the highway that would take us back to Lake Phoenix, I glanced over to change lanes and noticed that my dad was fully asleep, his eyes closed and head tipped back, mouth slightly open. This was unusual to the point of being shocking, because my father wasn’t a napper. Though I knew he’d been sleeping more than normal lately, I couldn’t remember a time when I’d seen him nap—especially not like this, not in the afternoon. It made me feel panicky, somehow, even though I couldn’t have said why, and I wanted more than anything to put on some music, drown this feeling out a little. But, not wanting to wake my dad, I hadn’t turned on the radio, and had just driven in silence, punctuated only by my father’s low, even breathing.

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As we crossed into Lake Phoenix, my dad’s cell phone rang, startling both of us, the sound of his ringtone suddenly very loud in the quiet car. My dad jerked awake, his head snapping forward. “What?” he asked, and I hated to hear the confusion in his voice, the vulnerability in it. “What’s that?”

I reached down for the phone in the cupholder, but he got there first, answering the call and smoothing his hand over his always-neat hair, as though trying to make sure he hadn’t gotten too unkempt while he’d been sleeping. I could tell in a second that it was my mother, and after their brief conversation, my dad seemed more composed, and much more himself, his voice no longer thick with sleep when he hung up and turned to me.

“Your mother requested we pick up a few things for dinner tonight,” he said, “and I just realized that we haven’t been to Jane’s this year. I for one feel like we’ve been skimping on the dessert this summer.” There were still eleven oatmeal cookies in the fridge, but I didn’t mention those. The one chocolate chip had been divided into five equal pieces among us, and the rest had sat untouched.

I glanced at the clock and saw that it was almost four, definitely verging into what my mother would consider the dinner-spoiling hour. But my dad and I had a tra***ion of getting ice cream and keeping it a secret—like when I was younger and he would pick me up from wherever I’d tried to run away to. “Really?” I asked, and my dad nodded.

“Just don’t tell your mom,” he said. “Otherwise, I’ll be facing a rocky road.”

I couldn’t help laughing at that. “I don’t know,” I replied, as I pulled into a spot along Main Street. “She might be in a good humor about it.”

My dad smiled in appreciation. “Nice,” he said.

We parted ways as he headed to PocoMart and Henson’s Produce, and I walked toward Sweet Baby Jane’s. It was a tiny shop with a sky-blue awning, the name printed across it in curly white type. There were two benches on either side of the entrance, a necessity because the space had only room for the counter and a single table. Maybe because of the in-betweenness of the hour, Jane’s didn’t look very busy. There were just two boys who appeared to be around Gelsey’s age, eating cones on one of the benches, their bikes tossed in a heap to the left of them. It was rare to see Jane’s this deserted—at night, after dinner, the benches would be packed, the crowd spilling out along Main Street.

As I pulled open the door and stepped inside, a blast of air-con***ioning and nostalgia hit me. The store hadn’t changed much from what I remembered; same single table, same painted signs listing the flavors and toppings. But apparently time hadn’t totally passed Jane’s by, as there was now a list of frozen yogurts, and many more sugar-free options than I had remembered before.

I didn’t need to ask what my father wanted. His ice cream order had never changed—a cup with one scoop of pralines cream and one scoop of rum raisin. I got one scoop coconut and one scoop raspberry in a waffle cone, which had been my ice cream of choice the last time I’d been there. I paid and, finding my hands full with the cup and cone, was pushing open the door with my back. I was about to take my first bite when I heard someone say, “Hold on, I’ve got it.” The door was held open for me, and I turned and suddenly found myself looking right into the green eyes of Henry Crosby.

By this point, I should have just been expecting it. It probably would have been more surprising if I hadn’t bumped into him. I smiled and, before I could stop myself, I was quoting something I’d heard my father say, a line from his favorite movie. “Of all the gin joints, in the all the world,” I said. “You walk into mine.” Henry frowned, and I realized in that moment that of course he didn’t know what I was talking about. I barely knew what I was talking about. “Sorry,” I explained hurriedly. “It’s a quote. From a movie. And I guess I should have said ice-cream parlors….” I heard my voice trail off. I wasn’t entirely sure what a gin joint even was. Why had I felt the need to say anything at all?

“It’s okay,” Henry said. “I got what you were going for.” His dark hair was sticking up in the back, and he was wearing a faded blue T-shirt that looked so soft I had a sudden impulse to reach out and rub the cotton between my fingers. I didn’t do this, of course, and took a small step back, just to remove the temptation.

“So,” I said, grasping for something to say, but not coming up with much. “Ice cream, huh?” I felt my cheeks get hot as soon as I said it, and I glanced toward the car, wondering if my dad was finished at Henson’s and I’d be able to use this as an excuse to leave.

“Don’t tell me,” Henry said, nodding at my rapidly melting cone. “Raspberry and coconut? Still?”

I stared at him. “I can’t believe you remember that.”

“Elephant,” he said. “I told you.”

“Ah,” I said. I felt the first cold drip hit my fingers clutching the cone. My ice cream was melting fast, and since I was holding my dad’s ice cream in my other hand, I couldn’t do anything to stop it. But somehow, I felt weird about licking my cone in front of Henry, especially since he didn’t have any ice cream himself. “So,” I said, trying to ignore the second, then third drips, “how did that even start? Who first thought that elephants would be good at remembering things?”

“I don’t know,” Henry said with a shrug and a small smile. “Who decided owls were wise?”

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“My brother could probably tell you that,” I said. “I’ll ask him.”

“Great,” Henry said with a small laugh. “Sounds like a plan.” He stuck his hands in his pockets, and I felt my eyes drawn to his arm, and sure enough, I could see it—the faint white scar by his wrist. I knew it well—he’d scraped it against the daggerboard when he’d swum under my boat, in the boys vs. girls tipping war that had raged the summer we were eleven. I’d touched it the first time he held my hand, in the darkness of the Outpost’s movie theater.

With this memory flooding through me, I looked at him, and took a breath to say what I should have said right away. That I was sorry, that I had never meant to hurt him, that I shouldn’t have left with no explanation. “So,” I said, as my heart started to beat a little harder and my sticky hand gripped my cone, “Henry. I—”

“Sorry about that! Parking took forever.” A very pretty blond girl, about my age, was walking up to Henry. Her hair was up in one of those perfectly messy knots, and she was already deeply tan. I suddenly realized that this must have been the blond girl my mother was talking about. Henry’s girlfriend. I knew that there was absolutely no logic in me feeling proprietary toward someone who I had dated when I was twelve. But even so, I felt a hot stab of jealousy in my chest as I watched her hand the car keys to him, their fingers brushing briefly.

“I want moose tracks!” Davy Crosby was running up, wearing the same moccasins I’d noticed in the woods. He spotted me and his exuberant expression turned sullen. Clearly, he was still holding a grudge about the bird-scaring.

The girl smiled at Davy and rested her hand on his shoulder before he wriggled away. I watched this interaction, trying to keep my expression neutral. So she was close with Henry’s brother, too. Not that I cared. Why should I?

“Did you know your ice cream’s melting?” Davy asked me. I looked down at my cone and saw that, in fact, things were getting a little dire, and melted raspberry—of course, it really couldn’t have been the coconut—was covering my hand.

“Right,” I said, lifting up the cone, which actually just let the ice cream run down my wrist. “I caught that, actually.”

“Sorry, Taylor—were you saying something?” Henry asked.

I looked at him and just thought about doing it now, saying I was sorry and getting it over with. Since we’d come back, I was feeling guilty about that summer in a way I’d never really had to face when we were in Connecticut. I’d even had to turn the stuffed penguin around in my closet, since it always seemed to be looking at me accusingly. “I was just going to say that… that I was really…” I trailed off, well aware that I had two extra audience members. I tried to go on, but found that I’d lost my nerve. “Nothing,” I finally said. “Never mind.” I felt the girl’s eyes on me, and I saw her gaze travel to my arm, where the drips had gotten even worse, forming a small puddle next to my feet where they were landing on the ground. “I should go,” I said, not waiting—or wanting—to be introduced to this girl who was clearly with Henry, and who was probably wondering why I was intruding on their time.

Henry took a breath, like he was about to say something, but then just glanced at the girl and remained silent.

“I’ll see you,” I said quickly, and to nobody in particular. I walked away from Jane’s fast, not meeting Henry’s eye, and headed down the street toward the car. I hadn’t made it very far when my dad came out of Henson’s and started down the street toward me, a paper sack under one arm.

“Hey,” he said when we got within earshot of each other. “I thought I was meeting you there.”

“No,” I said quickly, since the last thing I wanted to do was eat ice cream on the Jane’s benches next to Henry and his girlfriend and his brother, especially after I’d so thoroughly embarrassed myself. “Why don’t we eat it in the car? Jane’s is pretty busy right now.”

My dad glanced over at Jane’s—which couldn’t have been more obviously empty—and then at me, where I saw him taking in the dripping mess I had turned into. “I’ve got a better idea,” he said.

We ended up at the beach, which was only a few minutes’ drive from Main Street, sitting at one of the picnic tables, and looking out at the water. I’d cleaned myself up with the paper towels in the backseat of the car, and some hand sanitizer I found in the glove compartment, and now I no longer looked like I was going to pose an ice-cream hazard to everything I came in contact with. Despite the fact it was getting late, the beach was crowded, a line forming at the snack bar.

As I looked over, I found myself wondering if it was just Lucy working, or if Elliot was on duty as well. As though sensing this, my dad rotated his cup, searching for the ideal bite, as he asked me, “How are you liking it, working here?”

I realized this was my opening, the moment to tell him that while I’d really given it a shot, it just wasn’t going to be a great fit. And maybe after I mentioned it to him, I could go over to the administrative offices, quit, and have this whole thing resolved before dinner. “So here’s the thing,” I said. My dad raised his eyebrows and took a bite of his (nearly finished) ice cream. “I’m sure that working at the beach is a great experience. But I just don’t think it’s necessarily the right fit for me now. And maybe, like Warren, I should really be focusing on academics….” I trailed off as I ran out of excuses and realized that I didn’t have any siblings or distractions to interrupt me—just my dad, looking at me with a level gaze, like he was seeing right through me.

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“Tell me, kid,” he said after finishing his last bite and setting his cup aside, “did I ever tell you how much I hated law school when I first started?”

“No,” I said, not even having to think about it. My dad rarely talked about himself, so most of the personal stories I’d heard either came from my mom, or my grandfather, when he was visiting.

“I did,” he said. He reached across with his spoon for what was left of my ice cream, and I tilted my cone toward him. “I’m not like your brother. Things didn’t come so easily to me in school. I had to work like hell just to get in to law school. And once I was there, I thought I’d made the biggest mistake of my life. Wanted to get out of there as soon as possible.”

“But you stuck it out,” I said, feeling like I knew where the story was going.

“I stuck it out,” he confirmed. “And it turned out I really loved the law, once I stopped being scared I was going to make a mistake. And if I hadn’t stayed with it, I never would have met your mom.”

That was one story I did know—how my parents had met at a diner on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, my dad a third-year student at Columbia Law, my mom having just finished a performance of The Nutcracker.

“Right,” I said, feeling like my window to get out of the job was rapidly closing. “But in this case…”

“Is there something wrong with the job? A real problem you have with it?” My dad reached toward the cone with his spoon again, and I just handed it to him to finish, having lost my appetite for ice cream. It wasn’t like I could really tell my dad that it was because my former BFF was being mean to me.

“No,” I finally said.

My dad smiled at me, his blue eyes—the ones I’d gotten from him, the ones nobody else in our family had—crinkling at the corners. “In that case,” he said, like the matter had been decided, “you’ll stick it out. And maybe something good will come of it.”

I doubted that entirely, but I also knew when I’d been beat. I looked at the snack bar for a moment, dreading the fact that I’d now have to return there tomorrow. “Maybe so,” I said trying to sound as enthusiastic as possible—which, even I could hear, wasn’t all that enthusiastic.

My dad laughed and ruffled my hair with his hand, the way he always used to do when I was little. “Come on,” he said. He stood up, wincing slightly, and tossed away the ice-cream cup. “Let’s go home.”

After dinner, out of nowhere, it started to rain. It caught me off guard, and seeing the world that had only been sunny and warm transformed by a sudden thunderstorm was jarring, a reminder of just how quickly things could change.

I ducked under the screened-in porch gratefully, wiping the droplets from my face and kicking off my flip-flops in the pile of sandals that inevitably accumulated by the door. I had taken the trash out to the bearbox, thinking that with an umbrella I wouldn’t get too wet, only to have the rain pick up in intensity and the wind pick up in speed the second I stepped outside.

“You okay?” Warren asked from his seat at the table, looking up from his book at me.

“Just half-drowned,” I said, taking the seat across from him. It was the two of us on the porch. My parents were inside reading, and Gelsey, who always denied emphatically that she was afraid of thunderstorms, had nevertheless left for her bedroom at the first crack of thunder and was apparently in for the night, wearing my dad’s noise-canceling headphones that were much too big for her.

Warren went back to his book and I pulled my knees up, hugging them as I looked at the rain coming down in sheets. I’d never minded thunderstorms, and had always liked watching them from the screened-in porch—you were inside but also outside, able to see each flash of lightning and hear each crack of thunder, but were also dry and covered. As I listened to the rain on the roof, I suddenly worried about the dog, who I hadn’t seen in a few days. I hoped that he was back where he belonged, and if not, that he’d had the sense to take shelter from the rain. Somehow I doubted it. I’d gotten used to the little dog, and I didn’t like to think about him caught out in a storm.

“Mom said that the Crosbys are living next door,” Warren said, carefully highlighting a passage and looking up at me. “Henry and Derek.”

“Davy,” I corrected automatically.

“You didn’t mention that,” Warren said, his tone of voice singsong, designed, I knew, to bait me. I was suddenly very envious of Gelsey and her noise-canceling headphones.

“So?” I said, as I crossed and then uncrossed my legs, wondering why we were even talking about this.

“Have you seen him yet?” Warren was continuing to highlight, and if you didn’t know him, you’d think he had no idea that he was torturing me, and enjoying it, which he absolutely was.

“A couple times,” I said, raking my fingers through my wet hair. “I don’t know. It’s been weird,” I said, thinking of all our encounters, not one of them suited for a real conversation or an apology.

“Weird?” Warren repeated. “Because you two dated when you were… twelve?” He smirked, shaking his head.

“Because—” I started. A huge crash of thunder sounded, making both of us jump. Warren dropped his highlighter, and as it rolled across the table, I reached out and grabbed it, twirling it between my fingers.

“Because?” Warren prompted, glancing over at me. He motioned for me to give him his highlighter back, and I pretended not to see.

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“I don’t know,” I said, a little irritably. I didn’t want to talk about this. And I certainly didn’t want to talk about it with my brother. “Why do you even care?” I finally asked. “And since when do we talk about stuff like this?”

“We don’t,” Warren said. He shrugged, and in a patronizing voice, he continued, “It’s just obviously an issue for you, so I was giving you an opening. That’s all.”

I knew that there was probably no point to this. I should just walk away and let it go. But there was something in my brother’s expression that seemed to indicate that he knew so much more than me. And about some—if not most—things, this was true. But not everything. Warren had never had much of a social life, preferring to spend weekends studying and working on his various projects. He’d never had a girlfriend, that I had been aware of. He had gone to his senior prom, but with his study partner, who was pretty much the female version of Warren. They’d said they wanted to examine the ritual as a cultural experiment. After the prom, they had had cowritten a paper on it for their A.P. Psychology class that had won a national award.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. My brother’s head swiveled over to me, probably because this was a sentence he was so unused to hearing. I knew I should stop, but even as I recognized this, I heard myself keep going, my voice with a snide edge to it that I hated. “You have to have been in a relationship to have a breakup.”

Even in the dim lighting of the screened-in porch, I could see my brother’s face flush a little, and, like I knew I would, I regretted saying it.

“I’ll have you know,” Warren said stiffly, flipping the pages in his textbook much faster than he could read them, “that I have been putting most of my focus into my academics.”

“I know,” I said quickly, trying to smooth this over, wishing I hadn’t said anything.

“There’s no need to get involved with people who aren’t going to turn out to matter,” he continued in the same tone of voice.

I had been about to agree and head inside, but something that Warren had just said was bothering me. “But how do you know?” I asked.

He looked up at me and frowned. “Know what?”

“You said you didn’t want to waste your time on people who aren’t going to matter,” I said, and he nodded. “But how do you know they’re not going to matter? Unless you give it a shot?”

Warren opened his mouth to reply, but nothing followed. I could practically see his brain working furiously, his future-lawyer logic churning through answers. He took a breath to say something but then let it out. “I don’t know,” he finally said.

I had planned on going in, but I changed my mind as I looked at my brother, sitting in the semidarkness, reading books he wouldn’t even need for months or years. I slid the highlighter back across the table at him and he gave me a brief smile before picking it up. I settled back into my seat as he started slowly going through the book again, highlighting the relevant passages, making sure that he wasn’t missing anything important, as all around us, the rain continued to fall.

Chapter thirteen

five summers earlier

IT WASN’T A DATE. THAT WAS WHAT I’D BEEN TELLING MYSELF EVER since Henry had asked me, the day we’d walked our bikes home from the pool with our wet towels slung around our shoulders. We were just seeing a movie together. It was not a big deal.

Which didn’t explain why I was so nervous now, sitting next to him in the dark of the Outpost theater. I was barely paying attention to the movie at all, because I was fully aware of his presence next to me, every time he shifted in the red velvet seat, every time he took a breath. I was more conscious than I ever had been in my life of the movie theater armrest between us—wondering if I should rest my arm on it, wondering if he would, wishing that he would reach across it and take my hand.

The summer without Lucy was turning out to be less painful than I’d expected, mostly because of Henry. We’d spent the first few weeks hanging out, long afternoons together at the beach or the pool, or in the woods, when Henry needed to show me some rock or insect that he promised would “blow my mind.” Whenever it rained, and nobody was willing to take us to the Stroud Mall, or bowling at Pocono Lanes, we would hang out in his treehouse. Sometimes Elliott would come, and we’d play the three-person poker game he’d invented. I didn’t do as well at this as with other card games, because Henry, for whatever reason, always seemed to know when I was bluffing, and wouldn’t even reveal to me what my tell was. Unlike with Lucy, being friends with Henry meant that there wasn’t any makeup-swapping, watching of cheerleading movies, or candy-sharing going on. (Henry, I’d discovered, was ruthless, and claimed not to be able to taste the difference among any of the Skittle colors.) I also no longer had anyone to endlessly pore over the library’s back issues of Seventeen magazine with, studying each page carefully. Despite that, Henry and I had been having fun.

But something had started to change last week, on the lake’s wooden float. It was big enough across that almost ten people could be on it at once (although the lifeguards blew their whistles when more than five people were on it at a time, and always if you tried to push people in). We’d been challenging each other to races that had gotten more and more complicated as the afternoon went on. The last one—swim from the raft to shore, run across the beach, around the concession stand, back across the beach, and swim back to the raft—had left us both exhausted. We’d been lying on the raft, getting our breath back, but now I was pretty sure that Henry had fallen asleep.

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To check, I’d been squeezing out the water from the bottom of my braid on him, trying to get him to wake up. And either he really was asleep, or he was really good at pretending, because he wasn’t moving. Since my braid was pretty well wrung out, I dipped my hand into the water and started letting the drops fall from my fingers onto him, but Henry didn’t even flinch. Figuring he must actually be sleeping, and feeling a little bad for tormenting him, I started to brush some of the water droplets off his face. I was brushing one off his forehead, when his eyes opened and he looked at me. We just froze that way for a moment, looking at each other, and I noticed for the first time what nice eyes he had. And suddenly, out of nowhere, I wanted him to kiss me.

The thought was so unexpected that I immediately moved away from him on the raft, and we started talking—both of us a little too loudly—about other things. But something had shifted, and I think we both felt it, because a few days later, walking our bikes home, he’d asked me if I wanted to see a movie, just me and him.

Now, sitting in the darkness of the theater, I concentrated on facing forward, trying to take deep breaths and calm my racing heart. Even though I hadn’t been following the story in the least, I could tell that things were beginning to wind down. Just when I could feel my disappointment start to take hold, the stomach-plunging sadness that I’d gotten so excited for nothing, Henry reached across the armrest and held my hand, intertwining his fingers with mine.

In that moment, I knew that things had changed. Henry and I were, in fact, on my very first date. And we were no longer just simply friends.

Chapter fourteen

“I’LL HAVE…” THE WOMAN IN THE BRIGHT PINK VELOUR HOODIE paused, squinting up at the snack bar menu. She drummed her fingers on the counter, deliberating. Even though it was cloudy and overcast and had been all morning, she had a bright white line of sunblock covering her nose. “A Diet Pepsi, small fries, and a cup of ice,” she finally said.

I turned back to where Elliot was standing by the grill, the spatula hanging slack by his side, all his attention focused on a thick paperback in his hands. “Fries!” I yelled back at him, and he nodded, setting the book aside. As I punched the woman’s order into the register, I explained, “We only have Diet Coke. And there’s a fifteen-cent cup charge for ice.”

She shrugged. “Fine.”

I glanced down at the register for a second, making sure I’d remembered to add the tax, which I hadn’t done for the first three days on the job. When Fred found out, he’d turned even redder than normal, and had to spend a day away from the fish, going over the receipts in the office and muttering. “Five ninety-five.” The woman handed me six, and I placed it in the register and slid a nickel across the counter to her, which she dropped in our nearly empty tip jar. “Thanks,” I said. “Should be ready in five.”

I turned to the soda jets behind me and started filling her cup, waiting until the foam died down before hitting the button again. I’d only been at the job about a week, but I seemed to have gotten the basics down.

I had decided that I would rather suffer Lucy’s wrath than disappoint my father, and was trying to make the best of the job. I got the hang of the scary industrial coffeemaker, essential for the senior-citizen power walkers who stopped by the beach at nine thirty sharp for decaf after their “workout.” Through trial and error, I figured out the fryer—and, as a result, now had a series of small burns on my arm, from where the grease splattered until I learned to avoid it. I learned the basics of the grill, but hadn’t had much chance to test them out yet.

“It’s the beach,” Elliot told me on my third day, when there was a lull in customers and he was showing me how the grill worked. “And the thing about food at the beach is that sand gets everywhere. And who wants sand in their cheeseburger?”

I thought about it, and made a face. “Not me.”

“Not anybody,” he said. “Trust me.” After working with Elliot for a few days I’d found, to my surprise, that I liked him. I’d been worried that he would side with Lucy, shunning me out of loyalty to her. But he wasn’t taking sides, which I was grateful for. He was patient with me when showing me the ropes, and was easy to talk to, even if he could be a little intense, especially about what he called “hard sci-fi.” Already I’d heard far more than I ever wanted to know about some show that seemed to feature an evil Muppet as the villain.

“See that?” he asked, flipping a burger with a large metal spatula, then twirling it in a way that made me think he may have watched ****tail recently. I tried to give him what I hoped was an impressed smile. “People will get fries, because they’re protected in their little fry container. But we serve the burgers on plates. And if you’re going to set your plate down on your towel, you’re going to get sand in your burger. It’s a given.”

So I learned how to make burgers, even though I probably wouldn’t need to do it that often. I learned how much ice to put in the fountain sodas, and how to work the register, and how to open the snack bar in the morning and close it at night. But the biggest thing I learned was that Lucy could still hold a grudge.

I’d known this about her back when we were friends, of course. She had famously been on the outs with Michele Hoffman for years before someone asked them point-blank what they were fighting about and neither one had been able to remember. Lucy had always had a very distinct sense of right and wrong, but for the first time, I was on the “wrong” side of things. She pretty much ignored me, giving me instructions, when she had to, through Elliot.

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It also became clear after a few shifts that she had gone a little boy-crazy. She flirted outrageously with every passably cute male customer, and had collected more guys’ numbers than I would have believed possible, had I not been a silent witness to it. Back when we’d been friends, Lucy and I had both been tongue-tied and awkward around boys. And despite the few relationships I’d had, I still sometimes felt that way. But Lucy had clearly gotten over any hint of shyness sometime in the last five years. Her camaraderie with Elliot and her friendliness toward the (particularly male) customers made our silent standoff all the more apparent. When it was just the two of us working, there was total silence, as she didn’t speak to me unless absolutely necessary. She either busied herself with her phone or read magazines, angling them away from me so that I couldn’t read over her shoulder or see what she put down as her answers on the Cosmo quiz.

And I’d just wipe down the already-clean counters and look up at the clock, trying to calculate how much time was left before I could go home. But there was something sad about the silence that was between us whenever we worked together, especially considering that when we were younger, when she’d been my friend, we had never run out of things to say to each other. If my mother would comment on how chatty we were, Lucy would always say the same thing—that we didn’t see each other for most of the year, and that we had nine months’ of stuff to catch up on. And now, in contrast, there was silence. Silence so palpable, it was like you could feel it in the air. When I worked with Lucy, I’d find myself so desperate for conversation that I’d go down to the lifeguard chair on my breaks to try to talk to Leland. And Leland wasn’t exactly the world’s finest conversationalist, as most of his responses—no matter what you said—usually consisted of some variation of “totally,” “no way,” and “I hear that noise.”

There were two other lifeguards, Rachel and Ivy, who rotated shifts with him. But they were both in college, and tended to hang out mostly with each other, stopping by the snack bar only when they wanted a bottle of water or a Diet Coke. Even though they weren’t overly friendly, their presence was reassuring, because I was still not convinced that someone as spacey as Leland ever should have been put in charge of guarding people’s lives.

I placed the woman’s diet soda, still fizzing, on the counter in front of me, and snapped on the plastic lid. I put the cup of ice next to it and slid them both across the counter from her just as Elliot dinged the bell to let me know the fries were ready. I picked up the container, warm, with that hot-fry smell that made my stomach rumble, even though it was only eleven in the morning, salted them generously, and placed them next to the woman’s drink. She was talking on her cell as she picked them up, but she nodded and mouthed Thanks as she headed back to her towel.

I looked out at the mostly empty beach and shifted from foot to foot, trying to get some warmth back into my extremities. It was a cloudy, overcast day, and we’d had only about three customers so far. Lucy was working as well, but had left to make a phone call about half an hour before and hadn’t come back yet. I ran my hands up and down my arms, wishing that I’d worn a sweatshirt over my uniform T-shirt that morning, like Elliot, Lucy, and even Leland had been smart enough to do.

If I’d been biking to work, like Elliot and Lucy did, I undoubtedly would have worn a sweatshirt. But I was still coming to work by car, despite the fact that my mother had told me repeatedly that it was inconvenient to have one car stranded at the beach parking lot all day long. And even though my dad had gotten my mother’s old bike ready for me to ride it, I’d left it so far to sit in the garage. I wasn’t sure if it was possible to forget entirely how to ride a bike, but I was in no hurry to find out.

“Cold?” I looked over and saw Elliot pushing himself up to sit on the counter next to me.

“Just a little,” I said. I took a sip of the hot chocolate I’d made for myself that morning, but found it was no longer warm enough to really help.

“There’s probably something in there,” Elliot said as he pointed under the counter.

“I don’t know,” I said doubtfully as I pulled out the lost and found box. I’d become quite familiar with the box in the week I’d been working there. Even though it was still early in the summer, the cardboard box was already full to the gills. I looked through it, a little amazed at the things that people left behind. I mean, how could you leave the beach and not realize you were no longer in possession of your bathing suit top? Or your left, men’s size eleven, flip-flop? The only warm thing I found in the bin was a hideous white sweatshirt that read, Teachers Do It With Class! across the front in green script.

Elliot nodded approvingly. “Nice,” he said.

It was the opposite of nice, but at that moment the wind picked up, and two of the remaining beach stragglers got to their feet and started folding up their blanket. I shivered again, then pulled the sweatshirt over my head.

“So I heard you saw Henry,” Elliot said.

I froze, wondering if it would be possible to just stay like that, until I figured out what to say. I didn’t think I could hide inside a sweatshirt, though, without appearing totally crazy. I pulled my head through the neck hole and smoothed my hair down, willing myself not to blush but feeling that I nevertheless was. I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me that Elliot and Henry would still be friends. I wondered which of the embarrassing encounters he’d told Elliot about—or if he’d given him the complete rundown. “Um, yeah,” I said, busying myself with putting the lost and found box back under the counter. “A couple times.”