Well. Carrie’s.
She helps herself to a bag of Fritos before leading me through the sliding glass doors and out onto the patio, where a giant in-ground pool shimmers in the moonlight, the smell of warm grass and chlorine thick in the summer air. She sits down on a lounge chair, nodding with her chin at the one beside her as she cracks her beer and takes a sip.
“So you didn’t actually answer me,” she says once she’s swallowed, holding the bag of Fritos out in my direction. “About what you’re doing here, I mean. Not that I’m not glad you came—trust me, I get tired of seeing the same ugly faces every single weekend—but still.”
I shrug, running my thumb around the edge of my beer can instead of actually opening it. “Just…thought I’d try something new, I guess.”
“You hate new things, though.” Then she frowns and shakes her head, looking annoyed at herself. “Sorry. That was bitchy. Obviously people can change. You’re allowed to have changed.”
I smile. “That’s the thing, though: I haven’t really. I just…started thinking that maybe I’d like to? I don’t know. Anyway, Clayton invited me—”
Carrie looks at me sideways. “Clayton did?”
“Um, yeah,” I say, immediately regretting saying anything. Carrie and Bethany have been best friends since sophomore year. Already I’m imagining Carrie reporting this conversation back to her, the two of them doubled over laughing at how delusional I am. “I don’t actually think it was a real invitation, though. I think he kind of did it by accident.”
Carrie wrinkles her nose. “I doubt it,” she says, digging a handful of Fritos out of the bag. “Clay isn’t really the type to do anything by accident. He’s like you that way, actually.”
Before I can ask what she means, the patio doors slide open—Spencer and James and Trevor all spilling out into the yard, Ethan trailing them with a Bluetooth speaker in one hand. “This where the party is?” James calls, pulling off his T-shirt and sneakers. His back is so skinny I can see each individual knob of his spine.
“You know it,” Carrie says with a roll of her eyes. “We came out here specifically hoping you’d follow us and cause a commotion.”
James ignores her, cannonballing sloppily into the deep end. “You guys getting in?” he calls once he’s surfaced, spitting a long stream of water out like a fountain.
“No thank you,” Carrie says as the rest of them follow suit, shucking their shirts—and, in Trevor’s case, his shorts, revealing a pair of bright blue boxers printed with cartoon robots. It’s the most amount of boy skin I’ve seen in, well, ever, and I glance away, scratching at the back of my neck and trying not to stare. “Somehow the idea of stewing in a bunch of water that’s just been in your mouth is not that appealing to me.”
“Your loss, chica.” James floats on his back for a moment, his pale chest gleaming in the patio lights. “What about you, Rachel?” he asks, raising his eyebrows in my direction. “You coming?”
“Me?” I blink, surprised. It’s funny, I think, that apparently all I needed to remove my invisibility cloak was someone like Carrie sitting next to me. But I don’t have a suit with me, first of all, and even if I did…“I don’t think so.”
Carrie and I sit back in our lounge chairs and watch the boys splash around for a moment, an old Harry Styles song echoing out of the tinny speakers into the quiet night. Carrie takes a long sip of her beer, eyes my untouched can. “Tastes better cold, you know.”
“That is…what I hear.”
Carrie snorts. “You really haven’t changed, have you,” she says, a statement instead of a question. “Menstruation notwithstanding, obviously.”
“I mean, I also learned to drive a car.” I slip my sandals off and tuck my bare feet underneath me, not wanting to talk about myself anymore. “Not that I have one to drive, but. Theoretically.” Tricia and her friends have made their way out onto the patio by now, the whole party splashing around in the pool—that is, except Clayton and Bethany, who still haven’t made an appearance. I can’t help but wonder what exactly they’re doing in there, on the daybed alone where nobody can see. “So what are you up to this summer?” I ask.
Carrie shakes her head. “Nothing terribly exciting, I’m sorry to report. Answering phones at the gallery, biding my time until August. You?”
I shrug. “Swap paintings for pizzas, and pretty much exactly that.”
“Really?” Carrie raises her eyebrows. “You’re working at the restaurant? I would have thought you were headed off somewhere to cure cancer or, like, save the whales.”
“Oh, you’re hilarious.” I make a face.
Carrie grins. “At the very least I’m sure you’ve got work to do on your Fulbright application—”
“Rude!” I chide, throwing a Frito in her direction, though the truth is it’s nice to be teased by her. Ruoxi is wonderful, but she’s also completely, unrelentingly earnest. I forgot what it felt like to get ribbed by a friend. “Where are you going in the fall?”
“Art Institute of Chicago,” she tells me. “I got waitlisted, but they emailed two days ago to say I’m in.”
“Carrie, that’s great!” I pick my still-full beer can up off the concrete, clink it with hers. “Is that what you want to do?” I ask as Trevor executes a particularly painful-sounding belly flop and everyone groans. “Run a gallery like your dads?”
She shrugs, drawing one long leg up and resting her chin on her knee. “I have no idea, honestly.”
“Doesn’t that scare you?”
“I think it would scare me more to have my whole life plotted out, honestly,” she says. “What about you? Still headed for law school?”
“That is the plan,” I tell her.
“Mergers and acquisitions, or whatever?”
I shake my head. “Criminal defense, I think. Maybe death penalty stuff? Or something around mass incarceration, I’m not sure.”
“Seriously?” Carrie’s eyebrows flicker, like possibly I’ve surprised her for the first time all night. “That’s kind of cool.”
She’s starting to say something else when Ethan smacks his wet hands on the pool deck. “Hey!” he yells over to us. “Enough girl talk! Everybody into the pool!”
I shake my head again, but Carrie heaves a loud, theatrical sigh, unfolding her long limbs and getting to her feet before reaching for the button on her denim shorts. “All right, all right,” she tells Ethan. “Don’t get your panties in a twist.” Then, looking at me: “What do you say?”
“Wait, seriously?” I startle, shaking my head on instinct. “What happened to like, not wanting to be contaminated by James’s germs?”
“I’m over it,” Carrie says with a shrug. She shimmies out of her shorts and peels her tank top over her head, revealing a practical-looking black sports bra. “You coming?”
“I’m not getting naked in front of all these people!” I hiss.
“Then wear your clothes in, Princess.” She holds her hand out, an invitation. “Come on,” she presses. “You’re trying new things this summer, right?”
“I mean, sure, but—”
“So prove it.”
I hesitate for a moment, torn between every instinct in my body and the thought of Dr. Paula Prescott sitting on a lounge chair in her power suit, urging me to open myself to new experiences. Just say yes, right? Finally I scrunch my nose and stand up, tugging my fleece over my head. “All right. Let’s do this.”
“There you go!” Carrie says.
“Yeah, Walls!” Ethan yells, drunkenly delighted with himself. Trevor lets out a hoot. Tricia and her friends are eyeing me warily from the hot tub, but when I catch her gaze and smile sheepishly, I’m surprised to see her smiling back.
“On three, okay?” Carrie instructs, dragging me over to the edge of the deep end. “One…two…” And then she tugs my arm and we’re falling in togeth
er, the shock of the chilly water and the thrill of jumping in at all. My scalp tingles, goose bumps springing up all over my body. My jeans weigh about a thousand pounds.
“You didn’t say three!” I sputter as I surface, but I’m laughing. Carrie only grins.
* * *
The house is mostly dark by the time I get home, the porch light winking above the front door as I slip my squelching shoes off. Upstairs I change into dry pajamas and scoop my damp hair into a knot, glancing at the book still sitting on top of my bed. “All right,” I tell Dr. Paula grudgingly. “You win this round, I’ll grant you that.” Things definitely didn’t go quite as I’d hoped tonight—the bedroom door was open when we all finally traipsed back into the basement, Clayton and Bethany nowhere to be found—but on the whole, it wasn’t actually a disaster.
I’m just climbing under the covers when my phone buzzes with a text from Carrie: Glad you came tonight, it says.
I chew my thumbnail for a moment, dumbly pleased in spite of myself. We exchanged numbers before, but I never expected her to actually text me. Obviously I don’t think this means our friendship is back on, or whatever. But it’s nice to know we can go off to college without some weird, unfinished fug hanging between us.
Yeah, I type finally. I’m glad I did too.
I turn out the light and burrow under the covers. I sleep better than I have in a long time.
“So how was the party?” Miles asks the following morning. He’s washing dishes in the kitchen at the restaurant, loading the rack with a dozen pebbled plastic cups, and his voice is the singsong tease of a person who thinks he knows something. “Was the discussion of grain alcohol chasers absolutely scintillating?”
I blink, a half-assembled ham-and-cheese Gondola clutched in one hand. “How did you even know I was at a party last night?”
“I have my sources,” he says cryptically. Then he shrugs and holds up his phone, the screen of which is completely shattered—an unfortunate mosh pit incident, claims Miles, though I blatantly saw it fall out of his pocket in the parking lot one day last spring. “You were basically all over the internet.”
“Wait, really?” I grab the phone and scroll through his feed—where, sure enough, there’s a somewhat blurry Boomerang of Carrie and me jumping into Spencer’s pool. “Oh,” I say. “Well. Yeah.”
“Whose house is that, Spencer Thomas’s?” Miles strokes an imaginary beard. “Not your usual crowd.”
His tone is totally mild, but still something about the way he says it irks me—how sure he seems, maybe, how certain he knows exactly who I am and what I’m capable of. “And who would my usual crowd be, exactly?”
“I mean, nobody,” Miles deadpans immediately. “That’s what I’m saying.”
I huff a breath, stung. On one hand, it’s just Miles. I don’t care what he thinks of me. Still, it’s not like I’m crazy about the ideas of having no friends or suitors being my defining characteristic. “You know what, Miles,” I snap, “I don’t actually remember asking you for your opinion. And I don’t actually see how it’s any of your business what I do.”
I’m expecting an argument, but Miles holds up two soapy hands. “Sorry, sorry,” he says, conceding the point so easily that for a moment I almost feel bad about sniping at him. “I’m happy for you, if you had fun.” Then his lips twist. “Next time you should consider taking more of your clothes off, though. You know. For the cameras.”
“Ugh.” I shove the half-constructed Gondola in his direction. “You’re foul.”
“And you’re extremely easy to rile up,” he says, drying his hands.
“I’m serious,” I say, emphatically uncharmed. I’ll be honest—sometimes I find it kind of fun, whatever weird back-and-forth thing Miles and I have going on. At the very least, it helps pass the time during lulls at the restaurant. But then other times it’s like he’s totally committed to being the grossest, most annoying version of himself, like he’s actively trying to put me off. “Why do you always have to do that?”
“Do what?” he asks, plastering an innocent face on.
“That,” I say, waving my hand vaguely.
Miles sets the Gondola down on the counter in its paper tray, a beat passing like he’s actually thinking about it. “Deflect?”
“I mean, I was going to say be yourself,” I fire back, surprised by his vocabulary. “But sure, deflect works too.”
He shrugs. “Generalized anxiety and oppositional defiant disorder, I guess,” he tells me. “At least, that’s what my therapist says.”
That is…not what I was expecting him to say. “Wait,” I say again. Since when does Miles go to therapy? “Seriously?”
Miles tilts his head to the side, pressing his lips together for a moment before nudging me gently out of the way so he can finish making the sandwich. “Seriously,” he says.
“Since when?”
He shrugs, reaching for a handful of shredded lettuce instead of looking at me. “A few months, I guess? After the whole almost not graduating thing, it was kind of a condition for my mom not kicking me out of the house.”
I gnaw on my thumbnail for a moment, which is definitely a health and safety violation. “Is it because of…” I trail off. “Like…stuff with your brother?”
Miles smirks down at the counter. “You can say his name, you know. He isn’t Voldemort.”
“No,” I say, embarrassed. “Of course he’s not.” Tommy is—was?—three years older than Miles and me. The summer before he was supposed to leave for Quinnipiac he picked up a rare form of meningitis from a water bottle at the camp where he was a counselor and spent the last eleven days of his life in a coma at a hospital on the Upper Peninsula. Miles never talks about him at all.
“Anyway,” he says now, his voice bright and booming like a game show announcer showcasing a brand-new car, “it’s actually still unclear whether I’m a mess because of stuff with my brother or whether I’m a mess because I’m just, like, a mess. But your hypothesis is noted for the record.” He raises his eyebrows then, mischievous. “Girls like a messed-up guy, right? Leather jacket, king of pain?”
“You’re doing it again,” I point out, although the secret truth is I do actually think he’d look sort of cute in a leather jacket. I bump his shoulder with mine without quite planning to do it—wanting him to know I think it’s good that he’s in therapy. Wanting him to know I’m sorry about Tommy, even if I never know how to say it out loud. “Deflecting, I mean.”
Miles makes a face, sticking the Italian-flag toothpicks in both halves of the sandwich and ringing the bell on the counter. “I’m working on it, okay? I have a little sticker chart and everything.”
“Do you really?”
He smiles for real now, his dark eyes catching mine and holding. “No.”
We look at each other for another moment, neither one of us saying anything. I can see his pulse ticking in his neck. It occurs to me that I almost want to tell him about Paula Prescott and my Summer of Yes—to trust him with something, maybe, the way he trusted me with all of this.
“Hey there!” Dad bursts through the back door into the kitchen just then, which is probably for the best. The last thing I need is Miles holding something like that over my head for the rest of the summer, trying to use it as a pretext to convince me we should hold up convenience stores and, like, sleep naked under the stars. “Exactly the two people I was looking for.”
“What’s up, Mr. Walls?” Miles takes a giant step away from me—shoot, I definitely had not realized how close we were standing—and jams his hands into the pockets of his jeans.
“Come on outside with me for a tick, would ya?” Dad gestures to the back door of the kitchen, where all the deliveries come in. “Your mom can cover the line.”
The two of us follow him out the back door and into the service alley, where there’s a small truck parked in DiPasquale
’s designated parking spot. “Are we…moving something?” I ask, squinting a bit in the afternoon sun.
“Not exactly,” Dad says. “Drum roll, please?”
Miles and I exchange a baffled look. “Uh, what?” I ask.
“Oh, fine.” Dad grabs the handle on the moving truck’s door and tugs it upward in one swift motion. “Ta-da!”
Inside the otherwise empty cargo hold is a small cart on wheels with a decent-sized chest cooler attached. The whole thing is shiny sea-foam green, with a loopy red DiPasquale’s logo painted on the broad side.
“What do you think?” Dad asks, looking openly chuffed with himself.
“Um…what is it?” Miles asks, rubbing the back of his neck.
“Well, I’ve been calling it the Cream Cart,” Dad tells him proudly, “but we can change that if you kids can come up with something better.” He’s almost dancing around the thing, motioning us to step into the truck to check it out. “It’s for the summer. A stroke of brilliance if I do say so myself.”
He opens the lid to the cooling chest. It’s brand-new and divided into two halves: one with four circular holes that look like buckets or vats would fit into them, and the other revealing deep shelved compartments. “The Stracciatella, Gianduja, Fior de Latte, and Pistachio di Bronte go here,” Dad explains, pointing to the four round compartments, “and Nonna’s lady fingers go on the other side. And voila! A tasty dessert and beach-friendly spin on DiPasquale’s signature menu item.”
“So…ice cream sandwiches?” I ask.
“Ice cream Gondolas,” Miles corrects, the ghost of a smile playing across his lips. “Gosh, Rachel, get with the program.”
“Yes! That’s exactly right.” Dad is practically doing backflips. “Made with the customer’s choice of up to two of our signature gelato flavors and Nonna’s delicious cookies. Haven’t you noticed her perfecting the recipe?”
Say Yes Summer Page 5