All the Summer Girls

by Meg Donohue

  She sets her wineglass down beside her computer and logs in to Facebook. She joined the site only recently, much later than most of her peers. She is now “Friends” with many of her old PFS classmates and finds herself continually amazed by the things they share—especially the men. All of those jocks who had been so cocky and obtuse—Dani had dubbed them the Rock Eaters—now post about runs they are doing to raise money for breast cancer research and bid one another exclamation-point–ridden birthday wishes. Some even post pictures of their babies. They are fathers! The whole thing makes her inexplicably sad.

  Now, she does what she’s known all along she would do that night: she pulls up Jeremy Caldwell’s profile picture again. Jeremy. They’d met in Avalon eight years earlier when she and Kate and Dani had rented a bungalow on the island for the entire summer before their senior year of college; a couple of weeks into that summer, they’d wound up at a party at the house Jeremy was renting. Vanessa still remembers how his white T-shirt had made his tan skin look almost bronzed. She’d felt his eyes on her throughout the party, and her face had flushed with anticipation. Later that night, Jeremy walked her out to the house’s small, stone-filled yard; the slight breeze was a relief after the densely packed party. When he told her that he was a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and that he worked at a graphic design firm in Philadelphia, she felt their six-year age difference crackling between them like a loose, charged current. As they talked, he pulled a wire hanger from a trash can and manipulated it into the shape of a long-stemmed rose. Vanessa thought she’d been in love before, but when she held that rose, the metal still warm from Jeremy’s hands, she felt sure she’d never felt like this. This was something new, entirely.

  As she looks at Jeremy’s photograph and thinks of that metal rose, her mind turns, as it always does, to Colin. In her memory, she was still a kid on the morning two police officers knocked on the bungalow’s door. After the officers told them that Colin’s lifeless body had been found in the bay, she was an adult. Maybe if she’d grown up sooner, none of it would have happened. Colin would be alive and she and Jeremy would be—what? She never had the chance to find out.

  Vanessa lets the laptop cursor hover over the “Add Friend” button. She tells herself that she’s just saying hello. It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that. She clicks the button, finishes her wine, and waits.

  3

  Dani

  In San Francisco, Danielle Lowenstein is hungover at work. Again.

  Her manager looks at her as he straightens the rows of books on the New in Paperback table. She picks up the phone and presses it to her ear.

  “Booksmith on Haight,” she says, even though no one is calling. She pauses, types gibberish into the search database and then says, “We don’t have that in stock right now, but I can order you a copy.” She looks over at Roger and mouths Patricia Cornwell. Roger grimaces and then turns back to the book display. Unlike Dani, who is an equal-opportunity reader, Roger both literally and figuratively holds mass-market fiction between two fingers with the same mix of disgust and shame on his face that Dani imagines he wears when he carries a cup of piss out of the bathroom at his doctor’s office.

  When Roger leads a woman toward the self-help section in the back of the store, Dani lowers her forehead to the counter. She is trying so hard to ignore the taste of bile in the back of her throat that she doesn’t remember to hang up the phone until it begins to bleat in her ear.

  The night before, when she should have been writing her novel, she’d been lured out of her room by the cloying smell of pot that drifted under her door from the living room. Her roommates are a motley crew—Bruce is a predictably awkward programmer at an online gaming company; Rachel is a twenty-two-year-old SAT tutor and a guitarist in all-female folk-rock band; and Rachel’s girlfriend, Macy, is a sociology graduate student and Latin dance instructor with a penchant for wearing sparkly tube tops under extralong old-man cardigans. The four of them share a two-bedroom apartment in the Haight, an enjoyment of pot, an intrepid attitude toward Craigslist roommate ads, and not much else. Bruce sleeps on the couch in the living room. Macy and Rachel share the apartment’s larger bedroom (except when they’re in one of their frequent fights, in which case Rachel sleeps propped up and open-mouthed in a sleeping bag in the rusting claw-foot bathtub). And Dani pays eight hundred dollars each month for the privilege of a private bedroom just large enough for a twin bed and a small desk.

  “Finally!” Rachel said when Dani opened her door and stepped into the living room.

  “What do you mean, ‘finally?’ ” Dani asked. “I just went into my room five minutes ago.”

  “Did you write about me?” Macy asked.

  People always want to know if she is writing about them. As if she doesn’t have enough of her own shit to write about and needs to steal some of theirs.

  “I started to,” Dani said, taking the joint from Bruce. “I wrote, ‘Macy’s such a . . .’ ” They all looked at her expectantly. She took a long drag, feeling a cloud billow up behind her eyes and down her throat, into her chest, making her lighter and heavier all at once. “That’s as far as I got.”

  “Macy’s such a knockout,” Rachel said.

  “Macy’s such a smart cookie,” Macy said, her accent rolling the “R” in “smart.”

  “Macy’s such a . . .” Bruce began and then trailed off, reddening, while the women all looked at him. “Such a . . .” he tried again, and trailed off again.

  “Not so easy, is it?” Dani said. She sat down on the floor with her back against the couch and took a swig of the beer that Rachel handed to her.

  And the whole time she sat there on the floor, she felt guilty that she wasn’t writing. She’d been on her feet all day at the bookstore, hand-selling strangers’ books to other strangers, thinking about how she’d rather be home working on her own novel. But now that she was home, with a long day’s work under her belt, she wanted to have a few drinks with her equally underwhelmed-by-life roommates before facing the stern, unhealthy hum of her five-year-old laptop. The guilt didn’t fade until beer number four, and by then it seemed like a fine idea to head down to the bar on the first floor of their building. So, yes, if moving in with pothead roommates from Craigslist was her first mistake, then moving into a building with its own bar was her second. One might consider sleeping with said bar’s bartender her third mistake, but this act did result in numerous free drinks, which meant less of her paycheck was spent on alcohol, which meant she could work a few less hours and still pay her rent, which meant she had a little more time to write. So. Silver lining.

  At two in the morning, Dani declined Brett the bartender’s offer to walk her up to her apartment. He was cute, but her guilt had started gnawing at her again by then so she told him she was going home to write. Brett gave an ambivalent shrug and walked away, but then he came back and started scrubbing the bar so aggressively that Dani and her roommates took the hint and lifted and drained their beers before he snapped them over with his dishtowel.

  “You know we can’t stop going to that bar, right? I mean, it’s downstairs,” Rachel slurred as their little posse trooped back up to the apartment. Then, petulantly, as though Dani had responded, “You should have thought of that before shitting where you sleep.”

  Macy shot her an apologetic glance as she unlocked the door. Dani shrugged. The difference between real friends and people who are just acquaintances is that real friends will always choose loyalty over convenience. Or maybe, Dani thought, her mouth suddenly dry, that’s the difference between old friends and new friends. Bruce lurched into the bathroom where they could all hear him puking, as he always forced himself to do when he drank too much on a weeknight.

  Dani poured a glass of tap water and sat down heavily at her desk. She read the last couple of pages she’d written. She’d felt elated after writing those pages, but now, rereading them, her heart sank. Her phone buzzed beside her computer and she picked it up. It was a text
message from her friend Kate.

  Happy birthday, Danigirl! I miss you! Call me back already!

  Well, there you had it. It was the seventh of June, and she was officially twenty-nine years old. Dani envisioned Kate, who had become an early riser in law school, texting her as she leaned against the kitchen counter in her apartment in Philadelphia, waiting for the coffee to drip at five thirty in the morning. She knew that in a few hours, well before she heard a peep from her father, she’d have a text from Vanessa, who, despite everything that had happened between them, always reached out on her birthday. Dani’s dad, with whom she’d lived after her parents divorced when she was four, is always either scrubbed in at Children’s Hospital or with his latest girlfriend, and wouldn’t remember her birthday unless Dani herself reminded him. Still, she adores the man, a feeling that was sealed during her us-against-the-world childhood with him. Even when he forgets her, she never doubts that she is the most important person in his life; she clings to this belief more than she likes to admit to herself. Her mother had moved to Denver and remarried soon after the divorce and had appeased her new husband by essentially cutting Dani out of her life; Dani has two half brothers she has never met. Her mother calls on the morning of January first every year, as if speaking to her daughter is an annual obligation she wants to get out of the way as quickly as possible. She does not call on her birthday. Dani wonders if she even remembers when it is.

  In the midst of these thoughts, the heat turned on, rumbling and whooshing out of the floor vent below her desk, adding insult to injury. She would never get used to the heat turning on in June. Dani ached for summer, feeling for it and being struck by the loss of it over and over. Summer is Avalon, New Jersey: thick, humid air cut with the salty funk of low tide and flip-flops smacking against hardened soles and hair drifting around you like seaweed as the ocean lifts you up toward a cloudless sky and the feeling that you will never be anything but young.

  Instead, San Francisco’s June fog gave Dani a bone chill, and she couldn’t remember the last time she had heard her best friends’ voices, and it was now abundantly clear that there is no way she will have published a novel by the time she is thirty.

  In the back room of the bookstore, Dani’s head is still pounding. She pours coffee into a mug and stretches out on the couch, Amanda Eyre Ward’s How to Be Lost in her hand. She’d picked up a couple of Valium at a party earlier in the week; they’re in her bag now and she knows taking one would make her feel better but she thinks that if she just rests, she won’t need it. Twenty pages later, she places the book on her chest and closes her eyes. When she opens them, her manager is standing above her.

  “You’re sleeping,” Roger says, running a hand over his face. “You’re supposed to be unpacking the new shipment.”

  Dani sits up and knocks the mug of coffee over with her foot. She gasps as the dark puddle travels speedily toward a box of new hardcovers. Roger grabs a fistful of paper towels from beside the coffeepot and throws them down on the floor. Dani drops to her knees and mops up the coffee. The scent of pot still clings to the blond hair that falls around her shoulders.

  “I’m sorry,” she says when the books are safe. “I was reading. Amanda Eyre Ward. It’s really good.”

  Roger’s hands are now folded across his chest. He is small with bright eyes and thick muttonchop sideburns that Dani guesses are meant to make him look older or bulkier or maybe simply cooler. It’s the first time she’s had a manager who is younger than her, and this feels more like a monumental life shift than she cares to think about.

  “You were late today,” he says.

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not finished,” he says. But then he doesn’t continue.

  Dani stands and tosses the soaked paper towels into the compost bin. The dull thud of their landing is loud in the room. She waits, looking at him.

  “You’re good with the customers,” Roger says finally. “But, Dani, how long have you worked here now?”

  “Three months.”

  “And you’ve been late fifteen times. Sixteen, counting today. What did I say after the last time?”

  Since graduating from Brown, Dani has moved steadily west, leaving a stream of bosses in her wake. She’s gone as far from home as the country will allow, and this will be the twelfth job she’s been fired from in seven years. Her mind is doing familiar calculations—her rent is paid through the end of the month, but she won’t have enough in her bank account to cover July. She’s long since worn out her welcome on friends’ couches; if she doesn’t find another job immediately, her only option will be to go home. For a brief moment she considers telling Roger this, but she can’t bring herself to grovel—she’s not there yet. But she is, she finds, disturbingly close.

  “It’s okay,” she says. She clears her throat and speaks loudly and calmly like someone whose spirit is far from broken. “I get it.” She walks over to the hook on the wall where her bag hangs.

  Roger looks relieved. He has no idea how easy it is by now for her to hide her humiliation—she lied about her job history on her application. “We’ll send your last paycheck to the address on file,” he says. “Unless you want to swing by for it?”

  “Mail it.” She retrieves the book from the couch and dog-ears the page she’d been reading when she fell asleep. “Deduct this,” she says, holding it up for a moment before dropping it into her bag.

  He shrugs, scratching at one of his muttonchops. “Forget about it,” he says. Dani has already passed Roger and opened the door from the back room to the store when he adds, magnanimously, “Happy birthday.”

  On the sidewalk, she blinks up at the bright, foggy sky. She digs both pills out of her bag and swallows them. What does it matter now? she asks herself. She doesn’t really want to know the answer.

  She pulls out her sunglasses and begins to walk. Her first thought is to call Kate, but Kate’s life is too predictable to understand anything Dani is going through—it’s been this way for years now. Kate—who is a little prim—has trouble hiding the fact that she judges Dani’s lifestyle. In high school and college Kate rarely drank, which made the nights she actually did cut loose all the more entertaining for her friends. It’s a neat trick if you can pull it off, if the idea of going out and not drinking doesn’t seem like the worst, least fun idea you’ve ever contemplated.

  She certainly isn’t going to call Vanessa, who she hasn’t seen since her wedding to that television guy three years earlier. The wedding was held on the groom’s parents’ riverfront Connecticut lawn with a tented reception full of massive arrangements of white flowers that must have cost a fortune. Drew was flashy in that way that Vanessa, like a moth, had always been attracted to, but he gave a surprisingly heartfelt toast to Vanessa that made Dani like him despite the fact that he wore loafers with no socks. She gave them a fifty-fifty chance, which, for Dani, was optimistic. Vanessa’s parents seemed happy about the union if a little shell-shocked, and Dani wondered if they were high. An hour into the reception, when she was sufficiently drunk, she decided to ask them, but as she crossed the dance floor, Kate appeared out of nowhere and took hold of her elbow, rerouting her to the bathroom. So Dani had made it through the wedding without causing a scene; she’d even hugged Vanessa at the end of the night. The regret she felt as she hugged her old friend was a dark, trapped, moving thing, water flowing unseen below ice.

  If Kate’s brother, Colin, were alive, he would have made Dani feel better, just by being himself, just by being alive. She isn’t feeling well, and whenever she isn’t feeling well, even when it’s just a hangover, she thinks of Colin. During their junior year at Philadelphia Friends School, Dani had awakened one day with a slight sore throat that grew over the course of the morning to a whole-body ache; by second period she was curled up on a cot in The Mull—the students’ name for the dimly lit, green-carpeted basement domain of Mrs. Muller, the school nurse who was rumored to have worked at PFS since its founding in 1691—with a fever o
f 101 and glands that felt like tennis balls. Muller kept trying to reach Dani’s father but was told he was in surgery each time she called. Dani lay on the cot, shivering, working to keep herself from crying as she listened to the nurse attempt to reach her father over and over again. Muller never once asked if she should call Dani’s mother; there must have been a note in Dani’s file about her absence from Dani’s life. Every so often the nurse would pull back the curtain that surrounded the cot and press her ancient, freezing hand to Dani’s forehead. This seemed both unscientific and invasive. Plus, Muller smelled vinegary, a distinct and familiar scent that for some reason made Dani think of baseball. Maybe she was delirious. She just wanted to go home. She woke up some time later to the phone ringing and the nurse’s hushed, relieved voice. After a moment, Muller scraped back the curtain and announced that Dani’s father was waiting for her in a cab in front of the school.

  Dani staggered outside, her hot, feverish tears threatening to spill from her eyes with every step. She slid into the backseat of the cab and found Colin.

  “Hey,” he said. “Good thing Kate made me watch Ferris Bueller’s Day Off like a billion times.”

  Dani’s laughter pushed the tears up and out of her eyes, and Colin leaned forward to tell the cab driver Dani’s address so she had sufficient time to wipe them away before he leaned back again. At her apartment, she stretched out on the couch in the TV room while Colin rifled through the kitchen cabinets and found a can of tomato soup that he dumped into a big yellow serving bowl and heated in the microwave and presented to Dani with a dish towel wrapped around the too-hot porcelain. He forgot to bring a spoon, and Dani didn’t ask for one because she wasn’t really hungry. Colin might have been a stoner, but she always thought of him as full of thought; now she understood that he was thoughtful as well. She had a few sips of soup straight from the bowl and then set it on the floor. She’d assumed Colin would go back to school, but he didn’t make any move to get up from the spot on the rug where he’d planted himself. It did not escape her that he would take any excuse to skip class. Her mind was too fuzzy to come up with anything to say, and she was relieved that he seemed content to just watch television. When he began to roll a joint, Dani wondered if he planned to smoke it right there in her father’s apartment. She was surprised to find that she didn’t care. The nurse’s vinegary scent, she realized suddenly, was sauerkraut. She drifted into a strangely euphoric sleep, the scent of pot and the sound of cartoons on the television the backdrop for her dreams.