Sixteenth Summer

by Michelle Dalton

  But I couldn’t help it. It was like I forgot I had a body. There was no swiping away the long strands of hair that had blown into my face. I didn’t worry about what to do with my hands. I didn’t cock my hip, scuff my feet in the sand, or make any of my other standard nervous motions.

  There were just my eyes and this boy.

  His hands were stuffed deep into the pockets of well-worn khakis, which were carelessly rolled up to expose his nicely muscled calves.

  His hair—I’m pretty sure it was a chocolaty brown, though it was hard to tell in the shadowy night light—had perfect waves that fluttered in the breeze.

  His skin looked a bit pale; hungry for sun. Obviously, he was a summer guy, though (thank God) he wasn’t wearing shoes on the beach. And he didn’t have that “isn’t this all so quaint?” vibe that some vacationers exuded.

  Instead, he simply looked comfortable in his skin, washed-out though it might have been. He shot a casual glance at the party milling around the bonfire, then looked down at his feet. He did that thing you do when you’re a summer person getting your first delicious taste of the beach. He dug his toes into the sand, kicked a bit at the surf, then crouched down and let the water fizz through his fingers.

  He stared at his glistening hand for a moment, as if he was thinking hard about something. Then he looked up—and straight at me.

  I wish I could say that I smiled at him. Or gave him a look that struck the perfect balance between curious and cool.

  But since I was still floating somewhere outside my body, it’s entirely possible that my mouth dropped open and I just kept on staring at him.

  It’s not that he had the face of a god or anything. At first glance, I didn’t even think of him as beautiful.

  But the squinty softness of his big, dark eyes, the strong angle of his jaw, a nose that stopped just short of being too thin, that swoop of tousled hair, and the bit of melancholy around his mouth—it all made me feel something like déjà vu.

  It was like his was the face I’d always been looking for. It was foreign and familiar, both in the best way.

  Looking at this boy’s face made me feel, not that famous jolt of electricity, but something more like an expansion. Like this oh-so-finite Dune Island beach, which I knew so well, had suddenly turned huge. Endless. Full of possibility.

  “Who’s the shoobee?”

  Caroline’s voice brought me back with a thud. I must have been holding my breath, because it whooshed out of me.

  I closed my eyes, then turned around. When I opened them, I was looking at my friend. But I wasn’t really seeing her. I was feeling the boy’s gaze. It was still on me, I was sure of it.

  “He’s … he’s not wearing shoes,” I pointed out to Caroline. “Which means he’s not a shoobee. Not technically.”

  Caroline shrugged and peered over my shoulder at him. I was dying—dying— to turn around and look too, but I bit my lip and made myself stay put.

  “He’s kind of hot, for a short guy,” Caroline said idly.

  “He’s not short,” I huffed.

  “Hmm, maybe five nine,” Caroline allowed. “Of course, compared to you, everybody’s tall.”

  “And compared to Sam,” I reminded her, “everybody’s short.”

  “Maybe that’s it,” Caroline said with a giggle.

  I gaped. Caroline did not giggle. She cackled. She brayed. Was this what love did to a girl?

  Caroline’s eyes widened slowly. Was she wondering the same thing?

  If so, she didn’t let on. Instead, her focus returned to the mysterious boy down the beach.

  “You should go talk to him,” she said.

  “No!” That’s when my heart actually did leap into my throat. But it wasn’t a love-at-first-sight thing. It was abject terror.

  Which Caroline didn’t notice at all.

  “Look, this is totally low-risk,” she said. “I saw him checking you out, so he’s probably interested. And if he isn’t, or if you screw it up, well, he leaves at the end of the week and you can forget all about him.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I said dryly. “But have you considered the other possibility? That he doesn’t leave until the end of the summer? And I run into him everywhere I go, my humiliation festering like an infected wound?”

  “There is that,” Caroline agreed with a laugh. I was happy to hear that she’d gone back to the bray. “Or … it could go really well.”

  Could it? As Caroline danced back to the fire, I glanced the boy’s way again. He was sitting on the ground now. Clearly, he didn’t care at all if he got those nicely threadbare khakis wet or gritty. His bare heels were dug into the sand. His forearms rested on his bent knees. They looked strong and a little ropey and were completely mesmerizing. To me, at least.

  The boy was gazing out at the ocean. I didn’t get the sense that he was itching to join the bonfire. Or, for that matter, that he was burning to talk to me.

  At least, that’s what I thought until I saw him sneak another glance in my direction.

  Before I could look away, he caught my gaze. And then neither of us could look away.

  Instantly, I felt like I had to know what color his eyes were.

  I wanted to hear what his voice sounded like.

  I needed to know his name.

  Caroline was right. I really had no choice.

  I was going to talk to him.

  Unless I had a heart attack as I walked across the sand, I was going to talk to him.

  One of my feet inched forward as if it were testing to make sure the sand hadn’t magically turned quick, ready to suck me under.

  I took another, slightly bigger, step.

  The boy got to his feet.

  The sadness that had been dragging at the corners of his mouth and eyes was gone. He was starting to smi—

  “Will!”

  The boy turned away. He squinted beyond the fire at a woman on the deck of one of the beach’s smaller cottages. Even from this distance, I could see the weary sag in her shoulders.

  “Will,” she called again, “can you come back in? We’ve got three big suitcases left to unpack and I just can’t face them.”

  The boy—Will—paused for a moment.

  And then, without another glance at me, he began to tromp across the beach to the house. His mom had gone back inside to what sure sounded like a whole summer’s worth of unpacking.

  I stood there watching him go. Now I felt like a speck on this newly big beach, as invisible as one of the ghost crabs that darted around the sand waving their ineffectual little claws.

  But then everything changed again.

  When Will had almost reached the rickety little bridge that connected the beach to his cottage’s deck, I got the second of the summer’s many surprises.

  He turned around and looked right back at me. He shrugged and smiled, a rueful, crooked what’re you gonna do? smile.

  Then he lifted his arm in a loose half wave. His smile widened before he turned and jumped gracefully onto the bridge. He crossed it with long, almost-bouncing strides.

  Maybe that was just the way he always walked, I thought as I watched him bound away.

  Or maybe, just maybe, I was the spring in his step. Maybe he’d seen something in my face that was foreignly familiar too.

  In the coming days, I’d kick myself for just standing there as Will waved at me, too dumbstruck to wave back or even smile.

  I’d play out different running-into-Will scenes in my head. It would happen back on the beach or in the nickel-candy aisle at Angelo’s or under the North Shore pier.

  I’d think of his name, Will, and wonder if it was going to move to the tip of my tongue.

  So what if it wasn’t fireworks the first time I saw Will? Fireworks are all pow and wow and then—nothing. Nothing except black ash dusting the waves.

  But me and Will? I thought we could be something. If I was lucky. If he’d seen the same spark in my eyes that I’d seen in his. If, somehow, this summer
was going to be different from all the others.

  The possibility of that was much better than fireworks.

  “Has anyone seen my wrap?” I’d just stalked into the screened porch that covers the entire front of our house. My parents and sisters, Sophie and Kat, were at the long, beat-up dining table, munching buttered Belgian waffles (leftovers from The Scoop). My five-year-old brother, Benjie, was sitting on the floor feeding his breakfast to his pet tortoise.

  Not one of them even glanced at me.

  Sophie ignored me completely. My mom didn’t seem to hear me. Kat shrugged her shoulders. And my dad’s eyes never left his smart phone as he said, “Nope!”

  “Thanks for the help,” I muttered.

  It was Wednesday, four days after the bonfire (not that I’d been counting or anything), and I was trying to get ready to go to the beach. And yet I didn’t seem to be getting any closer to the front door.

  First, I hadn’t been able to find my swimsuit top. I should have known to look for it in Kat’s room. Lately, Kat, who was seven, had been obsessed with breasts. She kept stealing bras and swimsuit tops from the laundry room and trying them on.

  Sure enough, I found my blue-flowered bandeau crumpled on Kat’s bedroom floor. Only then did I realize that I didn’t have my wrap!

  And girls on Dune Island never went to the beach without their wraps. Unless they were shoobees, that was.

  The summer people lugged all sorts of unwieldy stuff to the beach: folding chairs, umbrellas, voluminous beach towels, all piled on top of giant, snack-stuffed coolers on wheels.

  Local girls took three things and three things only—big sports bottles of something cold and caffeinated, reading material, and our wraps.

  Wraps were homemade and usually hemless, so their edges were always fraying. They were made of a light, crumply fabric that could stretch to the size of a small tarp or be wadded into your back pocket. We used them for everything. Your wrap was both beach blanket and towel. It was a sarong, a tube top, or even a long-tailed bandanna. When the noon sun got too sizzly, you could drench your wrap in water and tent it over yourself.

  Every April, which was when the sun on Dune Island started to graduate from merely sultry to scorching, we all made new wraps. We wore them until they were shredded, which conveniently happened right around Labor Day.

  I loved the wrap I’d made this spring. It was pumpkin orange with a white tie-dye design in the middle in the shape of a giant eye. I’d been going for a crescent moon, but when I’d gotten an eye, I’d shrugged and kept it. Sophie always dyes and re-dyes her wraps, going for perfect, but that’s just too girlie-girl for me.

  Sophie had always desired the feminine stuff I couldn’t fathom—popularity, a fabulous wardrobe, boys raising their eyebrows when she walked by.

  But me? I didn’t know exactly what I wanted. Sometimes I wanted to dance and laugh with my friends until midnight, and sometimes I wanted to screen all calls and hide away with a tragic novel and a bag of candy. Sometimes I spent an hour trying to pretty myself up, and sometimes I could barely be bothered to comb the knots out of my hair before I left the house.

  Sometimes I wanted to know what it felt like to tell a boy all my secrets. Other times, that seemed as impossible as waking up one morning to find myself fluent in a foreign language.

  Sometimes I felt better alone than I did with people. And sometimes that just felt lonely.

  It didn’t seem normal to be so wishy-washy. That was a term my mom used a lot, and it always made me think of gray laundry water, swishing around and around in circles before it drained away. And as anyone can tell you, gray is the most invisible color there is.

  Orange is better.

  Orange is a color people notice, people like … Will.

  And there I was, thinking about this stranger named Will again. I was picturing that smile, that half wave, and the way he’d looked in his khakis. It made me want get out of the house faster than ever.

  It was irrational—actually, it bordered on crazy—but here’s what I was thinking as I frantically searched my cluttered house for the wrap: I’m late for The Moment.

  That’s right. I was certain that somehow Will and I were supposed to meet—really meet—right then.

  At that very instant, I was supposed to be on my way to the beach and Will was supposed to be somewhere along that way, and I was supposed to bump into him.

  Then I’d actually, finally, get to talk to him and …

  Well, I had no idea what would happen after that. Destiny? Bitter dejection? Or some vague place in between the two? That seemed like the worst fate of all. But at this point, I would’ve welcomed even a lame Will interface—say, in front of my parents or something equally mortifying—if it would just happen already.

  But it wasn’t going to happen, my newly superstitious mind was telling me now. Because while I was searching for my wrap, the magic window of time—in which a boy bumps into a girl at that perfect moment when her teeth are freshly brushed, she’s wearing her favorite bikini, and she has the whole morning to herself—was closing.

  I was late. I was going to miss him.

  Just like I’d probably missed him the night before when I’d somehow gotten a big gob of sunscreen in my hair and had to quickly shampoo it before going out with Sam and Caroline. And the day before that when I’d completely forgotten about a fishing party at the southern pier and had instead spent the afternoon at home doing ice cream experiments.

  Those ice creams, by the way, had all tasted wretched. Probably because the spot in my brain where deliciousness usually dwelled was filled instead with all these made-up missed connections with Will.

  All this was why I was pretty darn grouchy when I began searching our cluttered screened porch for my wrap. I barely looked at the plate of fluffy waffles or the sweaty pitcher of minty iced tea on the table. I made eye contact with no one and sighed loudly as I pulled cushions off the couch and rockers, peered behind the porch swing, and even rifled through the magazine rack next to the hammock.

  I could not find my wrap anywhere.

  I almost considered leaving for the beach without it. But the thing was, when you’d low-maintenanced yourself down to a single item, you really needed that item.

  I sighed louder. And finally my mother looked up from the Scoop accounting books. She’d been poring over them with a pained squint. (Not because business was hurting. Numbers just made my mother’s head hurt. It was one of the things, besides shortness, we had in common.)

  “What’re you looking for, honey?” she asked, her eyes a little bleary.

  “My wrap?” I said, trying to keep my voice from sounding shrill. “The wrap I asked you about fifteen minutes ago?”

  Glancing up from her magazine, Sophie snorted.

  “Okay, five,” I allowed.

  “Mmm.” Mom cocked her head, thought for about half a second and said, “Pantry. Next to the bread.”

  Now Sophie laughed, and I heaved one more sigh, this one equal parts irritation and gratitude.

  I had no doubt that the wrap would be exactly where my mother said it was. My mom is famous for random brilliance like that. Which is kind of a surprise because both my parents are—how to put this delicately?—a bit scattered. Their very existence on this island was sort of an accident. They came here from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin when my mom was pregnant with me. And then they just … never left.

  They’d stumbled into the ice cream biz too, when a kitchen fiasco led my mom to invent The Scoop’s most famous bestseller, Maple Bacon Crunch. (Trust me, it’s much better than it sounds.)

  My parents had added onto our house as they’d added more kids to the family, and now it kind of reminded me of Sam—a kid who’d grown too tall, too fast. With all the new nooks and crannies, our place was pretty much chaos. But it was a chaos that my mom had a mysterious mastery over.

  She’d decorated with mismatched vintage wallpaper, funky estate-sale furniture, and painted floors. She’d added a fancy marb
le pastry counter to the kitchen, but kept the creaky, pink sixty-year-old oven. She stored everything from safety pins to sugar in old mason jars, then stashed them on random windowsills or bookshelves.

  And this morning she could remember exactly where she’d spotted my wrap—but it had never occurred to her to move it to a place where I might ever have considered looking for it.

  Like Maple Bacon Crunch ice cream, my mother’s world should have been a mess, but instead it was sort of sublime. You can only imagine how annoying that was.

  I gritted my teeth while I thanked my mother. Then I knotted my wrap around my waist and flew out the door.

  But I’d been right about missing that Magic Moment.

  Even though I took the most roundabout route possible to the North Peninsula, I didn’t see Will anywhere.

  So then I sped through the end of my novel, requiring a trip to the library for reinforcements. But Will wasn’t there, either.

  Finally I committed an act of desperation. I convinced Sam and Caroline to go to the touristy end of the boardwalk for lunch.

  “Ah, Crabby’s Crab Shack,” Sam said sarcastically as we walked into the café. The screened-in dining room was artfully distressed, with deliberately peeling turquoise paint, paper towel rolls on every table, and a big fish tank so crowded with pirate, mermaid, and fisherman figurines, I wondered how there was any room for the fish.

  “My grandparents love this place,” Sam continued. “So ‘authentic.’”

  “Oh, shut up,” I said, looking around with shifty eyes. The tables looked way too shiny and the floorboards had been oddly swept clean of sand. “You know you love their curly fries.”

  “The cheesiest food ever,” Caroline said.

  She snorted so loud that all the sunburned shoobees twisted to stare at her before returning to their fried shrimp baskets. Not one of those flushed faces was Will’s, I noted with a quick but thorough scan of the joint. I was both crestfallen and relieved.

  If Will was at Crabby’s Crab Shack, I wanted it to be ironically. Or because he’d been dragged there by a clueless parent. Or because he was laughing at, not with, the curly fries.

  But I knew it was too much to hope that Will would understand all these requirements just a few days into his summer here. From my experience of shoobees, there was a lot they didn’t understand about us, and vice versa.