Ha ha ha ha ha ha.
I usually visited every summer for a week or two, came on long weekends occasionally, and spent a few Christmas vacations here, when the bay would freeze and you could actually drive on it. But this summer, for the first time ever, I was moving here for two and a half months.
Mikayla and I were living completely on our own, but of course we’d had to swear on our lives to be responsible in every way, as if we weren’t all the time anyway. We were practically saints, if you want to know the truth.
Of course, there was no rule that we had to behave exactly the same here as we did at home.
“Which is going to be my room?” asked Mikayla.
“I don’t know.” We stood in the doorways of each bedroom, surveying the spaces. “Do you want the bigger bed?” I asked.
“No, you take it,” Mikayla said. She flopped onto one of the single beds. “Hey, this is pretty comfy.”
I walked through the living room and onto the small deck off the back of the house. The view from there was incredible and explained why my grandparents had bought this place. You could see down to the harbor below. “Mikayla, come out here!” I called.
She hurried out the sliding door from the living room. “Now this is what I’m talking about.”
“No, it’s what I was talking about on the way up.” I laughed. “My nana said, ‘It’s not much, but there’s a view.’ She was right on both counts.”
We went back outside to start unpacking the car. The first thing we had to do was remove our bicycles from the car rack, and then take off the rack so we could open the back of my small SUV. Once we got that done, we hauled the boxes out of the back, along with a couple of suitcases of clothes and a few duffel bags.
“You want a ride to the beach club in a while?” I asked, as I carried a desk lamp in one hand and a blow-dryer in the other. “I want to go see my grandparents.” Neither of us would start work for a few days—we’d wanted to get to town early and spend a few days settling into the place.
Mikayla set down a bag of oranges on the kitchen counter. “I think I’m going to go for a bike ride, visit the Club, and meet Sarah. I told her we were getting to town today and she said I could drop by for a tour. I could use the exercise after being in the car for so long. Plus, I need to make sure I can find the place, right?”
“You remember where it is, though,” I said.
“Pretty much,” she said. “It’s the getting back here part I’m not sure about. Is this technically the woods, or the forest?”
I laughed. “You’re such a city kid. It’s Hemlock Hill Road. If you remember that, you can find your way back here. Look at the lake, and then head, you know, up the hill.”
She squinted at me. “Are you making fun of me?”
“Maybe,” I said.
“You’re the one who almost got back on the highway heading the wrong direction,” Mikayla said as she sorted things in the kitchen, putting away the small sets of plates and glasses she’d picked up at a Goodwill: some matched and some didn’t, but they all looked really cool together. “Not me.”
We both started laughing and she handed me a filtered pitcher to fill with water. “Can I help it if I get confused by lunch?” I said, running the cold water a bit. Suddenly the faucet made a loud clanking noise and went from running, to spraying randomly, and back to running smoothly again.
“This place is going to be interesting, isn’t it?” Mikayla asked, eyeing the sink.
“Let’s hope so,” I said, wiping water off my forehead with my sleeve. “We didn’t drive two hundred miles to be bored.”
I was heading to the Apple Store later that afternoon when it happened.
Not that Apple Store, where customers line up outside whenever a new iPhone, iPad, or other cool iProduct is released. No, this was The Original Apple Store, which was owned by my grandparents and sold real apples. Crunchy ones. Tart ones. Sweet ones. McIntosh, Cortland, Haralson, Honeycrisp, Northern Spy, Prairie Spy, Rome, and so on.
My job wasn’t to know the apples in stock. That was for whoever worked at the Apple Genius Bar. (My grandparents were hoping to get sued by Apple, for the free publicity. They even had a bumper sticker that said iApple—Do You? with their store logo on it. They’re begging to be caught, and when they go to jail, I’ll visit them. Hopefully the trial will be in California, where Apple is based, because I’ve always wanted to go there.)
Anyway, it’s apples versus oranges.
Literally.
My grandparents go a little crazy with the decorations. One is an apple and an orange on different sides of a scale and the headline You can’t compare them—don’t even try!
My grandparents had hired me because they said they needed “reliable” help. Last summer’s teen hires had been a disaster, so they’d started begging me as far back as last Christmas. When I resisted, they’d thrown in a house. (And by house, I mean that rundown cabin we’d just seen for the first time.)
My parents wouldn’t let me live up here on my own, so I’d invited my friends Mikayla and Ava to come with me. Unfortunately, Ava’s mother thought it was time for her to have a “serious” job that might help her get into college, so Ava had pursued a few internships and ended up with one at a fashion and arts magazine based in Chicago. I was happy for her, because she really wanted to be in a city—but I was disappointed she couldn’t come up here to stay with me and Mikayla.
My grandmother had helped Mikayla find a job at the Bridgeport Beach Club. (When I asked why we couldn’t work together at the Apple Store, Nana had said, “The two of you would have too much fun—you wouldn’t get anything done.”)
Mikayla definitely got the better deal. Not only did the Bridgeport Beach Club= pay more, but it was also a very cool place to work because of the big group of people our age working at the Club. I was probably crazy for not trying to get a job there. When I started smelling like apples, no doubt I’d regret the decision.
Still, the Apple Store was a lot better than what I did the summer before. I worked at the Mall of America in a coffee chain that had four locations inside the mall. The managers rotated us from store to store, like we were car tires that needed to be switched every ten thousand coffees.
You couldn’t have a sharper contrast. I was going from listening to shrieking people on roller coasters and other neon-colored rides twisting upside down above my head—and I can’t stand rides—and parking ramps as big as an entire city and endless levels of food courts . . . to this peaceful summer resort town perched on a bay beside one of the Great Lakes. I took a deep breath of the fresh northern air.
Yes, I was going to enjoy this, I thought as I turned to enter the store.
As my foot hit the first step, someone walked out.
I looked up—and up and up, he was tall—and nearly tripped on the second step. It wasn’t just any guy. It was Jackson Rolfsmeier. Sure, his hair was a little longer than the last time I’d seen him, and he was about six inches taller, but he was still the same boy I’d kissed, or tried to kiss, back in eighth grade, only to have him say, “Um, no,” and run away. It felt like a century ago, but at the same time it could have been a couple of weeks, considering how nervous and embarrassed I felt even now, three years later.
Jackson was holding the door open for me, waiting for me to come in.
My pulse immediately doubled. Then tripled.
I hadn’t seen Jackson up close in about three years, since the kiss incident and the rumors that floated around after it. Once or twice the summer before this one, I’d seen him in town, but I crossed to the other side of the street to avoid him. I was mature like that. But it just didn’t make sense to make small talk.
We didn’t hate each other. We just . . . well, it was awkward. The way it can be when you go through something really, really embarrassing with a person.
“Hi,” he sort of grunted out of the side of his mouth. “Lucy.”
It came out as two different thoughts, like he couldn’t co
mbine the two. He could say “Hi” and he could say “Lucy,” but not together. That might break some unwritten law boys had about acknowledging girls.
I looked up at him. Since when did he have a low voice like that? He sounded like he could do voiceovers for a movie trailer.
He had the same brown hair but it was longer, reminding me of a scruffy Liam Hemsworth. As I stepped up, I realized he had a good half foot on me, height-wise. When did he get so tall? I wished I weren’t at such a height disadvantage for such an awkward conversation.
“Oh, hey,” I said, pushing my hair back with my hand, the way my mom is always saying I shouldn’t do because it’s “a tic.” Tic, schmick. My hair gets in my eyes sometimes. I didn’t have anything else to say, really. My brain was too busy trying to figure out why this had to be the first thing that happened this summer. It felt like a bad omen. Um, you haven’t talked to me in three years. And I haven’t talked to you, either. Why are you even saying hi? Did something fall on your head?
So I just walked into the store and Jackson let the door close behind me, and he went on his way, and I was in the store and that was that.
Except . . . there was something I realized as the door closed.
Jackson was wearing an Original Apple Store staff T-shirt, which could mean only one thing. We were going to be working together.
We’re going to be working together. This was the other so-called responsible teen my grandmother had found? Him?
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo credit www.chelseypaul.com
CATHERINE CLARK is the author of Maine Squeeze, Love and Other Things I’m Bad At, The Summer of Everything, The Alison Rules, Unforgettable Summer, Eleven Things I Promised, and many others. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. For more about Catherine and her books, and the occasional milk shake recipe, visit www.catherineclark.org.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
BOOKS BY CATHERINE CLARK
How to Meet Boys
Unforgettable Summer
Picture Perfect
Banana Splitsville
Rocky Road Trip
Wish You Were Here
Icing on the Lake
The Alison Rules
Maine Squeeze
Love and Other Things I’m Bad At
So Inn Love
The Summer of Everything
CREDITS
Cover photograph © 2016 by Victor Jori Ramirez / ImageBrief.com
Cover design by Steve Scott
COPYRIGHT
HarperTeen is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
ELEVEN THINGS I PROMISED. Copyright © 2016 by Catherine Clark. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
www.epicreads.com
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2014959383
ISBN 978-0-06-226453-4
EPub Edition © March 2016 ISBN 9780062264541
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