“I was, wasn’t I?” I took Spencer’s hand and we edged toward the steps down to the beach.
“Come on, Adam!” Heather whispered, dragging him away from the Linden-fest.
We all ran down to the beach. As soon as we hit the hard sand, Heather turned and started doing back flips, springing down the beach doing one after another, just like she used to.
“Look out for the sand crabs!” Spencer called after her.
Heather stopped, waved at him, caught her breath, and then kept going, laughing and flying through the air. Dean followed along beside her, trying to walk on his hands, tipping over every other step.
“Hold on—wait for me!” I cried. I wasn’t any good at back flips, but I knew how to do handsprings.
“Great. The tumbling twins are back,” Spencer complained.
“I don’t think they ever left. They were just in hiding,” Adam said.
When I caught up with Heather, we hugged, laughing and out of breath. It was a nice feeling. So many things had changed, but so many hadn’t, too.
I couldn’t wait to head off to college with this group of friends.
And Spencer. Especially Spencer, I thought as he ran up to me and picked me up in an awkward hug, trying to twirl me over his head.
“What do you think? Is this ballet-like?” he asked.
“Not even close!” I shrieked as we both fell to the beach, arms and legs tangled.
“Sorry,” he said, cleaning sand off of my arms, then my face. “You okay? Sorry.” He brushed sand off of my mouth, his fingers lingering on my lips.
“Just kiss me already,” I said, “and we’ll call it good.”
Chapter One
I’m on my bike, bringing my semi-new, semi-boyfriend, Dylan, a bag of Skittles, and the candies are rattling in my backpack like those little fake rocks my mother has in her miniature Zen serenity desk fountain.
I picture getting to Dylan’s house and spelling out his name, or my name, with the Skittles, or encircling our initials in a heart shape with a giant + in the middle. Then we’ll frolic on his bedroom floor in the Skittles as part of our long, romantic good-bye.
I have a very active fantasy life. Dylan’s not the frolic-in-Skittles type of person, and probably neither am I.
I am, however, addicted to eating Skittles, so I can’t really see why I’m giving away an entire bag. Maybe it’s because now I’m addicted to Dylan instead, or maybe it’s because I had six bags stashed in my desk drawer, so it was very handy and didn’t require another trip to Target, where I’ve already been five times in the last two days getting stuff for our summer trip.
“Ariel, this isn’t the only Target in the world,” my mother keeps saying. “You realize there will be stores where we’re going.” But I don’t trust her, because she won’t even tell us where it is we’re going. And besides, what does she know about being addicted to Skittles?
When I get to his house, Dylan opens the front door. He has sandy cinnamon-colored hair that’s cut short, and he has sideburns that make him look older than seventeen.
His face lights up when he sees me, like it always used to when I walked into Spanish when we were in the ninth grade, back when we were friends, before we were whatever we are now. His light blue eyes have brown flecks, which makes them hard not to gaze into. I’ve tried. Like, all through ninth grade I tried.
I worry that he’s only smiling because he sees me holding the Skittles, so I hand the bag to him, but he doesn’t seem overly excited by them, and he keeps looking happy to see me. Which is sweet. Like Skittles-candy-sweet. Addictive, for sure.
“Hey, you,” he says. “What’s up?”
“Not much. Just packing. For the tenth time.”
“Right. Me too,” he says. “You want to come in? Come on in.” He opens the door wide. When I walk past him, he does this cute little thing where he pinches my waist, only I don’t have much waist, so he pinches hip bone instead. I still can’t believe he actually does things like this to me.
I’m not saying that I’m an ultra-thin girl. I just don’t seem to keep much weight on these days. I think partly it’s because I’m a runner, and because my parents just had this ugly breakup, and because my mother plans to drag me all over the country this summer, and I’m worried how that’s going to turn out. I mean, there are the normal worries, on that front, and then there are the new worries: like, what if Dylan has this amazingly exciting summer in Wyoming and meets someone new and falls in love with her? While I’m stuck on a road trip with my mom and sister? And did I mention that after our road trip, we’re spending two weeks at my grandparents’ house?
Of course, I could be home all summer, pathetically waiting for Dylan’s return, which would not be any better, let’s face it. If he’s going to be gone for two months, then I might as well ditch too. I just wish we weren’t going to be so far apart, for so long.
I’m barely over the shock of the fact that we hooked up at our school’s Spring Fling. There I was, with two weeks left of school, just getting over the thrill of our track team coming in second in state, me coming in third in the 1600. (It was exciting, at least at the time, because nobody thought I was going to place that high, not even me.) Sarah and I were hanging out, wondering if there was much flinging to be done, really, when she left to talk to her physics teacher and I ran into Dylan, who throws the javelin. So we started talking about track, then about other stuff too, laughing and dancing.
We kept looking at each other and then we started holding hands. We even left the dance together, which was huge, and he was going to drive me home, because we live close to each other, but I had to go back inside because of course I forgot my cute little gold shoulder wrap thingie, and when I left again, there was Dylan, right where I left him, and I thought, What is happening? Is he actually waiting for me? No one ever waits for me.
I’m with Perfect Dylan now. It’s the best thing that’s happened to me during what has been a very imperfect year.
Now, two weeks later, it’s the beginning of summer and he’s leaving and I’m leaving and that is all so imperfect that I would promise to give up Skittles if it would change anything. But it won’t, so what’s the point in suffering? You don’t go on hunger strikes, or Skittles strikes, for just anything.
We walk into Dylan’s room and I flop onto his Green Bay Packers beanbag chair by the door, which nearly swallows me. I struggle to sit up.
“You know what?” I say. “I need your address at camp.”
“I already gave it to you,” Dylan says.
“I know, but I lost it,” I say. Actually I didn’t. In fact I have it, and I’ve also already memorized it. Probably it’s a bad sign to be lying this early in our relationship.
“Oh. Well, okay,” Dylan says, and he writes down the address again on a scrap of paper that turns out to be a receipt from the Hollister store at the mall, which I will cherish even though it’s all inventory numbers except for the words “s/s tee.” I just want more of his handwriting, more things to remind me that he exists when the tires are rolling down the pavement and I’m staring at the back of my little sister’s head, because of course she’ll insist on sitting up front at least some of the time.
“Do you think you’ll come home for a visit?” I ask.
“Nope. Not a chance.” He slides into the beanbag chair beside me and we snuggle, because there’s no other option when two people are in a beanbag chair, which is probably why they were invented.
“Are you sure you’re not going to have email all summer?” I lean against his shoulder, the rock-hard javelin-pitching shoulder.
“Not unless they really changed things from last year,” he says.
“My mom’s insisting that we give up email and cell phones, too. We’re supposed to just enjoy each other.” I laugh.
She says my cell phone has become a “crutch,” and that she wants some time alone for us as a family, so she doesn’t want anyone to be able to reach me. In other words, she doesn’t wan
t Dad to reach me. He’s not included anymore in the “time as a family” time.
It’s ironic because my dad was the one who was into taking summer trips—my mom went along reluctantly, after my dad spent hours planning them. Now we’re going, she has zero planned, and my dad will be at home, living with Grandma and Grandpa Flack, where he had to move after Mom kicked him out. All Grandma Flack could do was joke that at least she’d kept his room the same for the past twenty years.
“My mom wants me to focus on ‘the now,’ to experience the journey,” I tell Dylan.
He raises his eyebrows. He’s met my mom, and knows she’s the type of person who can spend time canvassing the neighborhood to get everyone to vote to legalize hemp.
In other words, crazy, though she says that’s not a nice word, because it’s an illness, which she’d know because she’s a counselor, and I should use the term “mentally ill” instead—but only when I’m talking about other people, and not her.
“So this sucks. You can’t call, and I can’t email you,” Dylan says, as he keeps shooting a Nerf ball into the air and catching it again.
“Sometimes I might be able to, I guess,” I say. “It depends on where we stop, you know?”
“You know what would be cool? If you ended up coming close to camp.”
“That would be cool,” I agree. “Impossible, but cool. It doesn’t sound like we’re going west, but you never know. Maybe I’ll take over the driving. Carjack the Jetta.”
Dylan laughs. “Is that possible when you’re actually in the car already?”
“We’ll see.” I’m a little worried about Mom being able to pull off her so-called itinerary. She doesn’t seem to have much planned at all. I’ve seen no maps, no GPS. She keeps saying how we’ll let the winds take us and the stars can light our way and other feel-good, schmaltzy stuff like that.
I think it’s because secretly she is a horrible navigator, and she’s going to hand me that job—but no map—as soon as we hit the road. I’ll have to look for stars to guide us, and I’ll regret that I never paid attention to that astronomy mini class, and wish that the wind would quickly blow us home Wizard of Oz style.
I look at my watch and see that it’s almost time for me to go home and see Grandma Flack, who’s coming over to pick up my cat, Gloves. She’s taking care of Gloves for the next few weeks while we’re away.
But I don’t want to leave Dylan, not yet. I want to stay here. I want to fold up into a suitcase with a big label that says, “Dylan Meander.” Not as in “Property of,” because that would be tacky and also it would set women’s rights back a thousand years, but just so they know where to deliver me when the suitcase gets to his dude-ranch-style camp, which cabin they should drop me at.
Is that so wrong?
I guess.
I try to get up from the beanbag chair, but I keep slipping. Dylan tries to help me up, but then he sinks down beside me and puts his arms around my waist because I’m starting to sort of cry a little, which I hate.
I loathe saying good-bye at the end of the school year. I just do. Even to people who write in my yearbook when I don’t even really know them all that well and they write really, really stupid things. I still feel myself getting choked up because it’s so nice that they want to write something, and I love them.
Then they hand me their yearbooks and I hate them, because I don’t know them well enough to write anything, and I, unlike them, can’t come up with something on the spot. I’m the worst spontaneous writer in the world. I need Time, capital T, to think of what I want to say and how to say it best.
But then this year, now that I think about it, not as many people asked me to sign their yearbooks, which should have been a relief, but it wasn’t. Because although I used to be fairly popular, ever since the thing with my dad being in trouble, some people dropped me. I’m not on the A list anymore. I’m somewhere between B and C, or maybe C and D. Unlike my bra size.
My mind is wandering. It’s because I don’t want to leave, because leaving is like stepping off a giant precipice into the scary canyon known as Summer. You don’t abandon your first actual sort-of boyfriend. You just don’t. Right? That’s one of the rules. But I think about poor Gloves being taken away, without me there for comfort.
“I have to go,” I say.
“Okay,” Dylan says.
“So, bye.”
“Bye.”
We don’t move.
“You first,” he says.
“No, you,” I say.
We look at each other and smile, and then he kisses me, and I kiss him. This should be such a romantic good-bye that I wait for that melting feeling, but it doesn’t happen.
I tell myself that’s because it’s only June, which is not the melting season, and we’ve been dating only two weeks. In August, when we both get home from our summer thingies and look at each other, we’ll melt like a couple of Skittles left in the car on a hot day with the windows up.
For now, Dylan is snuggling with me and doing these moves that I’m not really sure I understand. But okay, I’m new at this, and maybe he is, too. I don’t feel anything except awkward, and sort of tense, and worried that his mom’s going to walk in on us.
I contemplate fake-melting, until I realize that although I thought he was sort of ravishing me, he was actually trying to get his cell phone off the desk because it’s buzzing to tell him he has a text message. I can’t help feeling that although I kind of love him, right now I kind of hate him.
“Are you really going to read that now?” I ask.
“No, no, I just thought—maybe it was the camp,” he says.
“Right. What’s it called again?” I ask, hating that he’s so excited about leaving for the place.
“Camp Far-a-Way,” he says.
“Ha-ha.”
“No, really. It is.”
On the way home I drop my first perfectly written, preplanned postcard in the mailbox.
The cows are the real stars of the Wisconsin State Fair!
Hey—
I know we only saw each other like 10 minutes ago, but I wanted you to have something to read when you got to camp.
Me: preparing myself for life on the road with Mom and Zena.
You: getting ready for awesome summer on a ranch.
This is Not Fair.
Neither is it a state fair.
Miss you already.
Hurry back,
Ariel
Chapter Two
I go home and Grandma Flack isn’t there yet, so I review my mother’s list of what I should pack, like the kind they give you when you go away to summer camp, which is where I should be going, with Dylan.
Camp Far-a-Way. Is he serious?
Shirts: 4
Pants: 3
Shorts: 4
I revised her list. Slightly. She doesn’t seem to realize this road trip is two weeks long, and then we’re going to Grandma and Grandpa Timmons’s house, and even though I can do laundry there, do I really want to wear the same four shirts all summer?
Shirts: 23 (roughly)
Jeans: 7
Shorts: 10
Running shorts: 8
Running shirts: 8
Socks: Lots
Shoes: 16 (That’s eight pairs, so it’s really not as bad as it sounds. I have this sort of obsession with vintage running shoes, so in addition to my new favorites for running, of which I have two pairs, I also have five pairs for not running, and one pair of flip-flops.)
Books: 7
Notebooks: 3
Large bags of Skittles: 5
My suitcase won’t close without major amounts of sitting on it and smashing it.
Mom catches me jumping up and down on my suitcase and wants to know what’s inside that’s making it so hard to fasten and why I have an extra duffel on the side, like an order of French fries.
“It’s all my running stuff,” I say. “I have to bring clothes for every climate.”
“Okay, whatever, Ariel,” she s
ays, looking frazzled. Her graying dirty blond hair is flying out in several directions, as if she’s been caught in a hurricane—that’s what happens to it when she doesn’t use her blow-dryer and product. She and Zena have the same curly, wavy, unruly hair. Me, I have Dad’s hair: dark brown, straight, ruly.
“But you definitely won’t be able to buy anything new on our trip. We simply don’t have room,” she says.
“We don’t? But it’s only the three of us, and we always had room before,” I argue.
“This isn’t before,” she says. “This is after.” She pauses as if she wants to remember those lines for a chapter title for one of her new books. She forces a small smile. “Anyway, the road trip is only two weeks. How much could you possibly need to wear?”
“Maybe I like to change my clothes more often than you do.” I check out her shirt, which looks as rumpled as her hair. “Didn’t you work today?”
“Yes, but only in the morning,” she says. “So, remember: no CDs, no DVDs, no cell phone—”
“Why is that exactly, again?” I ask.
“We’re focusing on us. We’re keeping it realsimple,” my mother says. This is one of her buzzwords. “Realsimple.” As if it’s one word. She and everyone in her family have this thing for inventing words, mashing them together until they fit, the way you do with jigsaw puzzle pieces.
I’m surprised she didn’t give us compound names when we were born.
Instead, it was Dad’s idea to just close his eyes and flip to a page in the baby name book and point. Once a gambler, always a gambler, I guess.
The section they apparently kept landing on was called STRANGE NAMES, or NAMES TO EMBARRASS YOUR DAUGHTERS FOREVER.
Never mind that the movie The Little Mermaid was something everyone had memorized by the time I got to preschool, and I had to explain that no, I didn’t have a tail. I got so many Little Mermaid gifts that for five years my room had an aquarium theme.
The only thing worse than being named after a cartoon character, in my opinion, is not being named after her, or anyone. Just being a random choice that your parents made with their eyes closed.
The Summer of Everything Page 18