The Summertime Girls

by Laura Hankin

  “Hey,” Ally said.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Ally watched the smile slide off Beth’s face and worried that this was going to be even harder than she’d anticipated.

  “What are you doing here?” Beth asked in a stunned voice.

  Ally figured the best strategy was just to get it all out, no matter how much it scared her. “You were right—sometimes I am selfish. I’ve done some bad things, things I feel terrible about, but I feel worst about not being there when you needed me, and saying that you were overpunishing yourself about that boy, because, again, I wasn’t there, so I don’t know what you need to do to get over it. If you want to go back to Haiti, you should go back, and know that I will support you and try to stay in your life as much as possible, if you’ll have me. I could come and visit you there. Maybe I could help you.”

  “No,” Beth said, and Ally’s heart sank.

  “Oh,” she said.

  “No, no, no,” Beth said. “I mean, I’m not going back.”

  “What?”

  “You were right too—I don’t want to go back. I never did. I thought I had to, thought I needed to, but then I listened to your song, and it made me realize that going back there is just another form of running away. And I don’t want to run away from you.”

  Beth reached her hand out to Ally’s, and Ally grabbed it like a life raft.

  “Oh, thank God. I’m so glad,” Ally said. “But how did you hear my song?”

  “Nick brought it over. He said you’d left it in his car.”

  “Ah. Did he tell you what we did?”

  “No, but I sort of figured it out anyway.”

  “Yup. As I’ve said, I’ve done a bunch of things I feel terrible about.”

  Beth squeezed Ally’s hands tighter. Then suddenly, she shook her head. “Wait,” she asked. “How did you get here?”

  “I drove. I rented a car in the city and drove up.”

  Beth paused, incredulous. “You drove? In New York?”

  “I did.”

  “Like through New York? In the actual city?”

  Ally had left her mom at the café and power-walked to the nearest rental car company. Then she’d lurched, in abject panic, the thirty city blocks to the highway, narrowly avoiding at least five accidents. People had honked at her, a lot. She nodded.

  “How was it?”

  “Oh, terrifying. It was absolutely terrifying.” They both laughed, and then Ally stopped laughing. “Somehow, though, it wasn’t as terrifying as not being your friend anymore.”

  Beth started to cry then. Ally hadn’t seen her cry in years. She’d forgotten how the tears welled up in Beth’s eyes slowly and then exploded down her cheeks. “I love you,” Beth said. “Even if sometimes I can’t stand you and you can’t stand me, I hate not having you in my life. And I’m sorry I’ve been punishing you so much.”

  Suddenly, the crowd around them parted for the woman of the hour. “Ally! You came back!” Grandma Stella said, and descended upon her with a tsunami of kisses.

  “Yes, of course,” Ally said, as soon as she caught her breath back again. “I can’t believe I ever left.” Then she noticed the woman next to Grandma Stella, who stood beaming at her side.

  “Hello, Ally,” Penny Joan said. There was that familiar smile, the crooked tooth. The two of them together looked as radiant as they’d looked on the beach that day, in the old photo.

  Ally turned to look at Beth, the question on her lips, but before she could even ask it, Beth nodded, the tears still running down her face. And then Ally burst into tears too.

  “Oh goodness,” Grandma Stella said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” Ally wailed.

  “We’re just so happy!” Beth sobbed, choking the words out.

  “You and Penny Joan are friends again.” Ally let out a tearful hiccup. “And the party is so beautiful.”

  “Yes, it is!” Beth’s voice had reached a higher pitch than Ally had thought possible. She fully expected dogs to start howling at any moment. People were starting to stare. Beth soldiered on. “And we’re really glad we get to be here and support you.”

  “My darlings,” Grandma Stella said, putting an arm around each of them, “I appreciate your dedication. But for crying out loud, get out of here. You’re causing a scene, and I’m supposed to be the center of attention at my party.”

  So they sneaked off into the house, went upstairs, and climbed into their bed together. They curled up toward each other and pulled the covers up to their chins. As the party hummed outside their window, Beth told Ally everything that had happened in Haiti. For half an hour straight, Ally listened. She imagined Beth going through all of that on her own, and her heart ached.

  “Have you told Deirdre and Peter yet that you’re not going back?” she asked.

  “No,” Beth said. “I’m scared.”

  “Why are you scared?”

  “I don’t know—I’m afraid she’ll make me change my mind, maybe. I should just get it over with, though. Stay here with me and be my moral support?”

  “Of course.”

  So Beth put the phone on speaker and dialed. As it rang on the bed between them, Ally wondered if Beth had somehow found a way to pump nerves from one person to another via some empathic pipeline, because all of a sudden she was terrified.

  “Hello?” Deirdre’s voice was brisker than Ally had expected.

  “Deirdre?”

  “Oh, Beth. Hello. What is it? Did you decide on a flight yet?”

  “No. No, I didn’t.” Beth paused and looked at Ally. “I’ve decided not to come back.”

  The ensuing silence on the other end of the phone was so profound, the air seemed almost to buzz with it.

  “Hello?” Beth asked. “You still there?”

  “Yes. Well. I’m disappointed, I must say. And a little confused. You told me you wanted to come back just a few days ago. From my end, this all feels like it’s come a little out of nowhere.”

  “I understand why you might feel blindsided. I’m sorry that you’re disappointed in me.” Beth was scrunching her eyes shut, and Ally watched her, worried.

  “I think you really had the potential to do some excellent work here. I don’t want you to waste your talents.”

  “I know. I don’t want that either.”

  “Are you sure about this?”

  “Yes, I am,” Beth said. “I need to stay here.”

  Ally let out an audible sigh of relief, then clamped her hand over her mouth.

  “I don’t think I’m meant to be a Paul Farmer like you, but I’d like to try to be an Ophelia Dahl. I still want to work with you, and help you if I can. If you’ll have me. You need someone here in the U.S. to talk to donors and organize outreach, reach out to sister organizations, do all of the stuff we’ve been trying and failing to do at the clinic. It would be so much more efficient taking care of all of that from here.”

  “Hmm,” Deirdre said. “Tell me more.”

  “You’ve been trying to raise that money for the water purification system, and it’s taking forever because you have no one really working on it, no one who is able to dedicate herself to actually go talk to people with the money. They just get a letter in the mail from Haiti once every couple of months, and that’s not enough. And I like coordinating things and getting people excited about causes. I could set up an office in Philly or New York, or someplace like that, and be based there but come back to Haiti for a few weeks each year. I’d like to make that water purification system happen. For Michel, and everyone else.”

  “Let me think about it,” Deirdre said.

  “Okay, please do.”

  “I’ll talk to you soon. And Beth?”

  “Yes?”

  “When I said I was disappointed, I meant disappointed you wouldn’t be coming back. I’m not dis
appointed in you.”

  “Thanks,” Beth said. “We’ll talk soon.” She hung up, then let her body go limp on the bed. “Whew.”

  “I’m so proud of you for doing that,” Ally said. “And way to be amazingly badass and competent. Did you just come up with that idea about working on the fund-raising end of things?”

  Beth smiled. “Sort of. I guess I’d thought about it a little bit in the past, but never as a serious option. And then, just now, on the phone, everything sort of clicked.” She sat up, resting her head on her hand, and looked at Ally. “I want things to click for you too. I know you’ve been talking about documentaries and production companies and all of that stuff. But your song—I meant it when I said it was really beautiful. I mean, I liked your stuff before, but this was a whole different level of good.”

  Ally didn’t need Beth’s approval this time to be proud of what she’d done with her music. For one of the first times since she’d been writing songs, she felt confident about what she’d created. She liked the feeling and wanted more of it. She’d want more of it even if some people listened to her music and said Meh. But still, it felt completely lovely to have Beth’s decidedly non-meh response. “Thank you. You sort of ended up being my muse on this one.”

  “Well, thanks. Being a muse suits me beautifully, and I don’t think you should give up on doing music. It just lights you up like nothing else does.”

  “I’m not going to give it up,” Ally said. “But I was thinking about what you said, about me being selfish.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “No, no, it’s okay. So I obviously had a lot of time to think in the car on the way up here. And after I spent an hour worrying that I was going to die in a fiery wreck on the highway, and then another hour worrying that you were going to tell me to go fuck myself, I decided to actually think about what to do with myself that put some good in the world but also made me happy. You know, something besides babysitting that I can do in addition to my music, or alongside my music.”

  “Ally, that’s awesome. So what are you going to do?”

  “Oh,” Ally said. “I have no idea. I reached zero conclusions. But it’s only the first day of thinking about it. I’ll figure something out.”

  And then Beth said, “Tell me about you and Tom. I want to listen.”

  Ally reached inside herself for that box that always overflowed with her heartbreak and longing for him, and found that it wasn’t there anymore. Or rather, it was there, and would always be there, she suspected, marked Tom—First Love. But now, the lid actually fit. She could open the box any time she wanted, she supposed, but she could also close it back up again when she was done. And for the moment, she liked the lid on.

  “You know what? I actually don’t feel like talking about him now. But don’t worry. Someday, you are going to get so many details that you’ll pass out from the overwhelming boredom. More importantly, are you going to tell Owen how much you want his bod, and that you’re maybe a little bit in love with him?”

  “Oh no, I made such a mess of that,” Beth said, pulling the sheet over her face. With her voice muffled by it, she told Ally what she’d done after their fight.

  “Oof. That’s bad,” Ally said. She pulled the sheet from Beth’s head. “But I don’t think the situation is unsalvageable. The question is whether you want to salvage it. Because if you do, you just need a really good plan.”

  “Yeah,” Beth said. Then, suddenly, she sat straight up. “Wait. I think I have one.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Saturday morning came in chilly and drizzly, and Beth shivered in her hoodie. She had been doing so much apologizing lately that she’d hoped by now to be an old pro at it. But still, her shoulders tightened up with nerves as Ally waved her off, calling out “Good luck!” as she left the driveway and headed toward Owen’s house.

  Ally and Grandma Stella had forgiven her, but they also knew her better than Owen did. She and Owen, she had to keep reminding herself, had only really hung out a few times, at least recently. She kept forgetting that, because she’d felt so familiar with him from the start. So her first knock on his door landed weakly, as her hand trembled. She breathed out, shook herself, and tried again. An infinity later, the door opened.

  “Hey,” Owen said. She thought of the last time he’d opened his front door for her, how his face had kindled with delight when he saw her standing on his porch. Now he only looked wary.

  “I have something for you,” she said, and handed him a big plastic bag.

  “Um,” he said. “A bag of trash?”

  “Nope. A bag of recycling.”

  He smiled weakly. “Oh. Ha. Thanks.”

  “I have more,” she said. “From the party last night. People drank a lot of beer and used a lot of plastic cups. The car is almost completely filled with bags of recyclables. There’s just enough room for a few more bags, and a passenger. I thought maybe you could come along and show me the best way to get to the recycling center.”

  “It’s right up Route 182,” he said. “Pretty easy to find. I’d give you more detailed directions, but you made it pretty clear last time I saw you that you weren’t a fan of me trying to help you.” He handed the bag of recycling back to her and turned around to go back inside.

  “Owen, please. Wait,” she said.

  He whirled back to face her. “You said that you didn’t realize I knew everything. Well, guess what? I don’t. I don’t know you at all. I thought I did, but after Wednesday night, I’m starting to think that I was wrong.” He turned again, so she spoke desperately, quickly, to his back.

  “You weren’t wrong,” she said. “The me on Wednesday night wasn’t who I really am. I was trying to talk myself into doing something I didn’t want to do. But I can’t do that anymore. You’re right. I don’t want to look at crap. I want to look at you.”

  He faced her again, uncertain. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m not going back to Haiti. So if the offer still stands, I’d really love to go on a nonfriend date with you.”

  He hesitated, his eyes locked on hers, and she felt herself falling into those gray eyes. She wasn’t going to run away this time. She was going to run forward.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Wait—really?”

  “Yes. Okay.”

  A slow smile began to spread on her face, and he smiled back at her. They both stood there, awkwardly frozen, grinning goofily at each other, but she still felt like the wall between them had yet to fall completely. Then she remembered what else she’d brought with her.

  “Oh,” she said, “I almost forgot. I have something else for you too.” She pulled three folded-up sheets of paper out of her back pocket, smoothed them out, and handed them over to him.

  He studied them, uncomprehending, each sheet nearly completely covered in hundreds of different handwritings. “You brought me a . . . list of names?”

  “Yup. A list of the Britton Hills citizens who strongly endorse a recycling program for the town. There are two hundred thirty-seven signatures on there, all gathered in one night.” She smiled. “There were a lot of people at Grandma Stella’s party.”

  He looked up from the paper, dumbfounded. “You did all this?”

  “Well, me and Ally.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Ally’s back?”

  “Yes,” Beth said. “Thank goodness. Anyway, the town council will have to take a recycling proposal seriously now. In fact, if you look at names number forty-three and one hundred twenty-six, you might recognize them.”

  “Stuart Hodgkins and Sarah Bolton.” He laughed. “Town council members.”

  “They just needed a little sweet-talking. And I convinced August Neiderbacher of the program’s merits, and he’s going to write an editorial for the Bugle about it.”

  “Beth, you amaze me,” he said, pulling her into him. He kissed her g
ently, then hard, in his doorway, and the drizzle disappeared.

  Eventually, Owen was the one to pull away. In a husky voice, he said, “Well, should we go take care of this recycling?”

  “We could,” she said, looking at the trash bag very seriously. “Or, we could do that later, and instead, right now, we could go upstairs to your bedroom.”

  “That’s a much better idea,” he said.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Ally woke up at dawn the day they said good-bye to the house. She slipped out of bed and softly made her way to the window seat. There she sat, in a pair of Beth’s pajamas (in her unexpected dash to get back to Britton Hills, she hadn’t brought any of her own with her), and watched the sun come up. One last chance, she thought, to pinpoint that moment the walls changed from pale to sunny yellow. One last chance to watch the trees emerge from the darkness.

  The sky began to lighten, and she savored the way it became something new right in front of her. In the bed, she heard Beth stirring, the little stretching sighs she made as she woke up.

  “Mmm. Morning,” Beth said, her voice muffled in the sheets. “It’s early.”

  “Come and watch,” Ally said, and so Beth joined her on the window seat, leaning up opposite from her, entwining her feet with Ally’s. Ally looked down at the tangle of their toes and legs, and then, by the time she looked back up at the walls, they’d turned sunflower yellow again.

  “I can’t believe this is our last morning here,” Beth said.

  • • •

  LATER that afternoon, Ally wedged a final box into the trunk of Beth’s parents’ car and stood back, surveying the way an entire life could be crammed into a minivan.

  “Thank you, darling,” Grandma Stella said, and gave her a big lipsticky kiss on the cheek. Then she turned around and gave one to Beth too. Ally caught Beth wincing slightly at the pressure on her cheek, and she smiled to herself. Beth had come back from Owen’s the day before, flushed and happy, late in the afternoon. And that morning, she’d woken up with a serious case of stubble burn.

  “Okay,” Beth’s dad said now, slamming the trunk shut. “Looks like we’re good to go.”