Fifteenth Summer

by Dalton, Michelle

  “Nothing!” Emma replied quickly. “Tell me about Josh.”

  “Well—”

  “It’s just that— Oh, Chelsea! I’m totally wrecking things!”

  “With Ethan?” I said. I pulled out a pair of red-and-white pedal pushers and tossed those onto the bed too. “What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t know!” she said. “I just love him so much. And I don’t have a lot of time, what with the intensive and rehearsals for Don Q on top of that.”

  “So, you’re dying because you don’t have time to see him?” I said.

  “When I have the time, he doesn’t,” Emma said. “And when I don’t have the time, he does! Supposedly. I’m starting to think he’s just making that up. I think I’m getting on his nerves. But I can’t help it. I think about him all the time. I can’t sleep! I almost want to quit the Intensive so I can have time for him. Maybe that would help?”

  “Emma, no!” I gasped, dropping the tank top I was holding. “What are you talking about? That’s crazy!”

  “I know, but love makes you do crazy things,” Emma said. “You know.”

  “I guess?” I said, even though I wasn’t sure I did know what she was talking about.

  “Okay, like, how do you handle it when you want to call Josh for the third time that day?” Emma asked.

  “Um, I don’t think that’s happened,” I said. I sat on the edge of the bed and frowned in thought. “But I guess I would just . . . call him?”

  “And what would he do?”

  “Well, if he was working, he’d probably let it go and call me back later?” I said. I wasn’t really sure what she was driving at.

  “See?” Emma said. “Ethan, too! Doesn’t that make you crazy?”

  “No,” I said. I was starting to feel weird. Was it supposed to make me crazy? “Listen, Josh and I talk every night before we go to bed. So, I know I’ll talk to him then.”

  “You dooooo?” Emma said yearningly. “That’s soooo romantic.”

  And she was right. It was. But it was also what Josh and I had done since the day after our first kiss. We’d just fallen into that sweet pattern, and I’d already gotten used to it. I hadn’t known it was so revolutionary. To me—to us, I was pretty sure—it was just the natural thing to do.

  I wondered if I was truly crazy about Josh if I wasn’t feeling crazy about Josh. Being with him made me feel kind of floaty and giddy. And I had noticed that everything seemed a little more intense since I’d started dating him. Like my dad’s bad jokes started to seem funny, and kittens or cute commercials on TV made me go all crumple-faced and sappy. And food tasted really delicious.

  But did I feel crazy or desperate the way Emma did? I didn’t think so.

  I guess it helped that when I called Josh after hanging up with Emma, he sounded so happy to hear my voice. And when I invited him to go berry picking, he dropped what he was doing to say yes. (He literally did! I heard a big stack of books hit the counter with a thud!)

  I couldn’t stop smiling as I hung up the phone and plucked the 1940s frock off the pile on the bed.

  If Emma had it right, being with Josh was supposed to make me act either cagey or crazy. And falling for Josh was supposed to make me feel lost.

  But instead I felt found. And if that meant I was doing this relationship thing wrong, I decided not to care.

  Not surprisingly, my family always went to the same blueberry farm: Chloe and Ken’s U-Pick Farm and Art Gallery.

  “Oh, yeah,” Josh said when we told him where we were going. “I know them. Did you know they’re selling free-range eggs now?”

  My dad clapped his hands and laughed.

  “Of course they are!” he said. “And I bet they’re miserable about it.”

  “Totally miserable!” Josh said with a grin.

  Ken and Chloe desperately wanted to be brilliant starving artists who made a meager living with their blueberry farm. Instead they were wildly successful blueberry farmers who made really bad art. Chloe worked with clay—wobbly vases that looked like she’d caught them in midair just as they’d careened off her potter’s wheel, or little animals with drunken, hooded eyes and buck teeth. Ken was always carving up wood. He made sculptures and woodcuts, all of them splintery and angry.

  It seemed like the more frustrated Chloe and Ken got as artists, the more their farm thrived, just to spite them.

  Sure enough, when we pulled off the flat, dusty dirt highway, their rows of bushes were fluffy and heavy with berries. Cute little white hens clucked and pecked around the bushes. Up on a hill just behind the rows of blueberry bushes, several rows of boxy hives were swarming with so many honeybees, you could see the clouds of them from the driveway.

  When we got out of the car, we were met by Ken, looking long-faced in paint-smeared overalls.

  “The place looks good, Ken,” my dad said. “Won’t you please take my card. You need an accountant to manage all this money you’re making!”

  Ken winced. My dad had said that as if it were a good thing.

  “We started raising these chickens,” he said morosely. “People really like the eggs. And, well, the chickens fertilize the berries, so they’re doing really well. And the bees are making so much honey, we had to add fifteen more hives.”

  Ken hung his head and sighed.

  “Oh!” Mom said. She had her perky voice on, and she was pointing at a tall, crooked log planted vertically in the ground. “Ken, I see you’re doing something new. Um, is that a totem pole?”

  “Chainsaw carving!” Ken said, perking up. “Let me tell you about it . . . .”

  My sisters and I looked at each other in alarm.

  Run away! Abbie mouthed.

  I grabbed Josh by one hand and a stack of buckets in another, and the four of us dashed into the nearest thicket of bushes, all of us snorting with laughter.

  “Quick,” I whispered, “before we get sucked into the vortex of bad art.”

  We headed for the back of the orchard, twice almost tripping over lazy chickens.

  “I think we’re safe,” Hannah said with a laugh. She plucked a few berries from a bush and dropped them into her pail.

  “Kerplink, kerplank, kerplunk,” she said.

  “Ah, Blueberries for Sal!” Josh said. “That’s a big favorite at the kids’ story hours at Dog Ear.”

  Of course, thinking about the children’s story hour at Dog Ear made me remember our weird, wonderful first kiss. And that made me want to kiss him right then.

  I gave Josh a shy glance and caught him giving me a shy glance. His Adam’s apple was bobbing up and down, and I could tell he was thinking the same thing.

  “You know,” I said to my sisters, “these berries look too big and squishy. I think Josh and I are going to try a couple rows over.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Abbie said, nodding vigorously. “The kissing will be much better over there.”

  “Abbie!” I squawked.

  “Oh, did I say ‘kissing’?” she said with a mock gasp. “I meant ‘berries.’ The berries will be much better over there.”

  “You’re awful,” I told her before ducking through a couple of bushes with Josh to get to the next row. We kept pushing through until we couldn’t hear Abbie giggling anymore.

  Josh grinned at me when we emerged from the last row of bushes.

  “She’s awful,” I repeated.

  “Oh, yeah, awful,” Josh said, smiling as he bent over to kiss me.

  And kiss me and kiss me until—clang—I dropped my bucket into the dirt and we broke apart, laughing.

  “Your sister’s right, though,” Josh said. “The kissing is much better over here.”

  “I hate it when she’s right,” I said with a grin.

  I scooped up my bucket and added, “Come on. We have to pick a lot or they’ll know what we were up to.”

  “They know anyway,” Josh said. He snaked his arm around my waist and kissed the top of my head, which for some reason made me feel just as melty as when he kissed m
e on the lips.

  “Kerplink, kerplank, kerplunk,” I reminded him, twisting away so I could start picking berries.

  “All right, all right,” he murmured.

  But he still stood so close to me that every time he reached for a branch, his arm brushed mine.

  Or he would bend for some low-hanging berries, and his fingertips would graze my leg.

  Or he would find my version of the perfect blueberry—just tender enough that it wasn’t lip-puckeringly sour, but nowhere near as ripe as many people like them—and pop it into my mouth.

  It took a while for our berries to stop kerplinking against the bottoms of our buckets. And when we’d finally filled them and headed back to the car, my family had been waiting so long that they’d actually gotten roped into buying some of Chloe’s bad pottery.

  “Look, Chelsea,” Mom said, her voice so perky that it had gone up a whole octave. Chloe was there too, wearing overalls that exactly matched Ken’s. Chloe was beaming proudly. “Aren’t they, uh, cute?” Mom said.

  She was holding two little ceramic chickens, made of rough-looking red clay with plenty of visible fingerprints. They had bulgy eyes with big, bluish lids half-closed over them. Their beaks looked sort of smushed-in. One was a rooster, the other a hen.

  “We’re calling them Josh and Chelsea,” Hannah said with a glare.

  I turned to Josh.

  “You know we’re totally getting sterilizing duty for this.”

  Sterilizing the jars is the worst part of making jam. You have to hand wash every jar in steaming hot water, then submerge them in boiling water for at least twenty minutes. We always used Granly’s roasting pan, balanced over the stove’s two back burners, to boil the jars, while two pots of sugared blueberries frothed away on the front two. You had to plunge your arm through the sticky blueberry steam to fish out the clean jars with a pair of wobbly metal tongs, timing it so they were still freshly scalded when the blueberries reached the right temperature and you could pour them into the jars—bubbling and spitting and flecking your clothes with tiny purple dots.

  Sure enough, when we got home with our buckets of berries, my mom pointed Josh and me to the sink, where two dozen Ball mason jars were waiting to be scrubbed.

  “Here,” Hannah said, placing Chloe’s clay chickens on the windowsill above the sink. “They can keep you company.”

  She placed them beak to beak so it looked like they were kissing.

  “Now you’re awful,” I said, rolling my eyes at her. I gave Josh a sheepish glance. His face was definitely a little pink, but maybe that was just from the sun and the steam, because he refused to inch away from his spot right next to me at the double sink. He stood so close that my hip nestled comfortably against his leg, and every time he handed me a soapy jar to rinse, our forearms brushed against each other. I noticed the downy hair on his arm had gone blond, and his skin was a bit more golden than it had been when we’d first met. That was back when he’d spent most of his time at Dog Ear, back before he’d had a reason to escape to berry patches and Wex Pond.

  Just when the kitchen started to feel oppressive, with the windows steamed up and the air smelling syrupy, my mom put one of Granly’s Beatles CDs into the little countertop stereo. Abbie and Hannah started dancing each other around the kitchen, dripping blueberry syrup onto the floor and laughing hysterically. Josh and I bumped hips (or my hip and his leg) and clinked jars together like they were cymbals.

  I thought of those stacks of paper that Abbie had made on our bedroom floor, and I knew—this was one of those days that I needed to write down. Maybe on a scrap of paper that nobody ever saw. Maybe in a letter to Josh. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that my pen on paper preserve this moment, so I could know it had really happened when I was back in LA.

  That it hadn’t been a dream.

  The dreamy feeling didn’t go away after Josh headed home for dinner—a jar of still-warm blueberry preserves in each hand. Hannah and I crawled around the kitchen with hot soapy rags, scrubbing at the worst of the jam drips, while my mom got ready to go over the whole floor with Granly’s old string mop.

  Meanwhile Abbie scrubbed pots in the sink. She kept making new sticky splashes on the floor, and we laughed and screeched at her.

  Finally cleanup was done, and the only sounds we heard were the jars of jam settling on the kitchen table. The cooling, and some law of physics that Hannah could probably teach us, sucked the mason jar caps downward. Eventually they would all have slight scoops to them, which meant they were safely sealed. As this happened, the jar tops made little pings and pops and squeaks. It gave the strangely cozy illusion that the jam jars were alive. Which I guess was why I winced a little bit when my dad arrived home from a long walk and excitedly popped open one of the jars so he could spread some of the new jam on toast.

  While my dad munched and he and my mom chatted, the rest of us drifted away from the kitchen. I went to get my book off my nightstand, and Hannah headed out to the screened porch, dialing her phone. Abbie flopped onto the living room couch and clicked on the TV.

  That’s when we were all summoned to the living room by a loud whoop.

  “What is it?” I yelled, dashing in, my book still open in my hand.

  “Look!” Abbie said, grinning and pointing at the TV screen. “Next up: Till Death Do Us Part?”

  “No. Way!” I screamed.

  “What happened?” Hannah said, her hand pressed to her phone to block out our noise.

  “Lifetime movie!” Abbie and I shouted at her.

  “It’s one we’ve never seen, and it’s just starting,” I said, flopping down onto the couch with Abbie. I crossed my fingers, closed my eyes, and chanted, “Please let it star Jennifer Love Hewitt!”

  “Either her or Valerie Bertinelli,” my mom chimed in, flopping down next to me.

  Hannah murmured into her phone, “I’ll have to call you back, okay? It’s kind of important.” Then she sank onto the floor in front of the couch and said, “I want Meredith Baxter. She does crazy really well. I think her eyes are a little off their track.”

  We watched hungrily as the movie started, with melodramatic swells of violins. As the opening credits flashed past in a blocky font that screamed “low-budget” we realized there were no famous B-list actors in the cast. Or even C- or D-list actors. They were total unknowns.

  Or maybe Canadians.

  That meant the production values were going to be wretched, the acting awful, and the screenplay riddled with melodrama and awkward catchphrases.

  “Ooh, it’s going to be so bad!” I squealed, clapping my hands.

  “Honey,” my mom called to the kitchen. “Could you make us some popcorn? And is there any wine left from last night?”

  “And please tell me we have marshmallows,” Abbie called.

  The marshmallows weren’t for eating, of course. They were for tossing at the TV screen during bad lines.

  It turned out Till Death Do Us Part? was about bigamy, true love, murder, and reconstructive surgery, not necessarily in that order. I knew we had a winner when wife number one raged at her husband, “John, I supported you through law school so you could study jurisprudence, not mess around with some woman named Prudence!”

  When wife number two started lacing John’s scrambled eggs with arsenic, Hannah and I screamed, “Flowers in the Attic!” at the exact same time. We high-fived each other before throwing our last marshmallows at the screen.

  We lost Mom when wife number one got killed off. She left with Dad to pick up a pizza for dinner. But my sisters and I stayed until the bitter end, when—duh duh DUH—there was a shocking appearance from wife number THREE.

  We turned down the volume during the final credits but couldn’t bear to turn it off.

  “Best bad movie ever,” I said, collapsing into the couch cushions and hugging myself. “When are they gonna be back with that pizza? I’m starving! I hope Dad got extra mushrooms.”

  Abbie and Hannah glanced at each other over
my head and exchanged some secret signals.

  “What?” I said. “What have you guys been saying about me now?”

  “She’s showing all the signs,” Hannah said to Abbie.

  “Of what?” I said, alarmed.

  “ ‘Of a force stronger than the law, and more brutal than the laws of nature,’ ” Abbie cried, quoting the movie while shaking her fists at the heavens.

  I laughed—until I realized what she meant. Then I swallowed my laughter with a quick gulp.

  Hannah gave me a smile that was a little wistful as she said, “Does all food taste incredibly delicious? And does all music seem like it’s really about you?”

  “Do you suddenly think Josh is a completely unique name,” Abbie asked, “even though it’s really just another one of those blend-together J-boy names?”

  “No it’s not!” I said automatically. “It’s so much better than John or Jim or Jason.”

  “See!” Abbie said, pointing at me.

  I sank back into the couch, feeling floaty and on the verge of elated. Were my sisters right? Was I in love with Josh? How could I know for sure? It wasn’t like there was some lever inside you that switched from like to love one day with an audible click.

  It made me feel a little feverish to think about it, so of course I lobbed the issue back to Hannah.

  “Well, what about you?” I said. “What’s going on with Liam?”

  “Liam?” Hannah said, blinking rapidly as if she didn’t know who I was talking about.

  “Yes, Liam, the boy who likes to give you hickeys?” I demanded.

  “Oh my God,” Hannah groaned. “It was one hickey, you guys! Grow up!”

  “We will if you will,” Abbie said with a little glower.

  “What do you mean by that?” Hannah said.

  “I mean, are you really finding it fun to hang out with someone who’s so . . . blond?”

  “Whoa,” I said, swinging around to look at Abbie. I was always sensitive to hair-color pigeonholing. “Stereotype much?”