“Oh my God,” Caroline said, rolling her eyes. “I can’t believe I allow myself to be seen with you in public.”
She was joking, of course. But I could hear a thin shard of impatience in her voice.
And in Sam’s there was a touch of wheedling as he said, “You know that’s not me, Caroline. The guy was a complete jerkwad, throwing his weight around. It was just … a bad moment, I guess.”
“Well, remind me never to make you have a bad moment,” Caroline said.
“You could never …,” Sam began, but Caroline had already waved him off. She was peering out at partygoers.
“Looks like skirts were indeed the way to go, Anna,” she said.
She and I were both wearing skirts, if not the A-line uniform of the shoobee girls. Caroline’s was short and sporty. Mine was more flowy, tickling my ankles when the hem fluttered.
Even though we’d ditched our cutoffs for the evening, I knew Caroline and I didn’t look like those girls. And it wasn’t just because they had bleached teeth and manicures and we didn’t. There was a shininess to the shoobees. And a chilly breeziness. In my mind, these qualities created a sort of force field around them that deflected funky odors and ugliness. Not to mention insecurities about vague date requests from strange boys.
I was the one who lived here year-round, yet in this “club,” it felt like they owned the whole island.
“Oh!” Caroline rasped. She grabbed my arm and pointed through the windows to the left side of the pool deck. Thinking she’d spotted Will, I felt my stomach swoop.
“Daiquiris!” Caroline exclaimed. She was pointing, it turned out, at a bar where people were ordering frozen fruity drinks in voluptuous glasses. “I forgot this place serves the best virgin daiquiris.”
“Caroline,” Sam said. “There’s nothing less cool than a virgin daiquiri.”
“Of course there is,” Caroline said, motioning to the entire pool deck.
Sam and Caroline both dissolved into snorts of laughter.
I wanted to swat them on the backs of their heads Three Stooges–style, but then I thought of the alternative: Caroline curling her lip at the shoobee girls, Sam swaggering by the shoobee guys, then everyone jumping down to the beach for a good old-fashioned fistfight.
A little derisive laughter, I decided, was definitely preferable.
“Listen, can you get me a drink too?” I asked Caroline. At that moment I had as little interest in a virgin daiquiri as I did in geometry. But I was pulling out the trick my mom always used on Kat and Benjie when they were acting insufferable—she distracted them with a task.
“I’ll see you out there, okay?” I said, pointing vaguely toward the right side of the pool deck.
Then I headed across the ballroom to the French doors. Just before I reached them, I had an impulse to run to the ladies room, where I could check my teeth for food particles, blot my shiny face, and fruitlessly attempt to pee.
But at that point I was annoying myself with all the nervousness, so I just gritted my teeth and plunged through the double doors. They automatically swung shut behind me, actually making a little squelching sound as they closed. They reminded me of spaceship movies where people get sucked out of the airlock.
What am I doing here? flashed across my mind.
Then I was scanning the crowd dizzily. The people really did all look alike to me. But none of them looked like—
Will.
There he was, leaning against the pool deck railing. He wore a pumpkin-colored T-shirt and faded jeans. With the sand and darkening ocean behind him, he almost seemed to glow. In just four days on the island, he had gotten very tan. Somehow I hadn’t noticed in the fluorescent lighting of The Scoop.
His brown hair had also gotten cutely frazzled by all the salty breezes.
But did Will have one of those shiny force fields around him? That I couldn’t tell yet.
When he saw me, though, he lurched off the railing so hard that an ice cube flew out of the Coke he was holding.
I couldn’t help but laugh.
He laughed too as he hurried around the pool to come meet me. I relaxed a little as I wondered if he was as scared, and exhilarated, by this moment as I was.
If he was really different from the other shoobees.
And if this was going to be a night that I’d always remember.
* * *
“Hi,” Will said as he sort of skidded to a stop in front of me. “Hi,” I said.
Then we both tried, and failed, to stop grinning unrelentingly.
Will smoothed down his flyaway hair with his palm and straightened his slightly wrinkled T-shirt. I marveled at how pleasurable it was just to look at him.
Then we started talking—and things spiraled downward from there.
“So,” Will said as we found a couple of deck chairs to perch on, “it’s pretty cool that this isn’t a members-only club. Anybody can go, right? It’s so different in New York. You can’t even get into most apartment buildings without a birth certificate.”
“Yeah …,” I said. I glanced at the Beach Clubbers as my voice trailed off. My smile went plastic. How could I tell Will—without sounding like I had a big, fat attitude—that the Beach Club felt like the most exclusive place in town? It was about the only place on the island where I didn’t feel absolutely comfortable.
“So … how’d you find out about this party?” I asked. It was a lame conversation starter, but it appeared to be all I had.
“Oh, my brother, Owen,” Will said with a laugh. “He found out about it from someone he met on the beach. Of course. The guy can’t ride the subway without becoming best friends with everybody within five feet of him.”
“Oh,” I said. “That’s not normal?”
In Georgia, when you pass someone on the street, you not only say hello, you ask after her mama and find something—anything—about her outfit to compliment.
“No way,” Will said with a laugh that made me feel like a yokel. “You don’t talk to anybody on the subway. Unless you’re Owen.”
Or, I thought, me.
“So … Owen’s here with you?” I asked.
Yes, my wit was positively sparkling.
“Well, he wanted to come,” Will said. “But I kind of didn’t want him to.”
He gave me a shy smile and I … had no idea how to respond. What did he mean? Had Will ditched his brother because he’d wanted to be alone with me? Or was it just because he and Owen didn’t get along? Was Will trying to tell me that he sometimes felt overshadowed by Owen the Extrovert? I could totally bond with him about that! But how to broach this subject without potentially dissing his brother? What if they were actually really close and I offended him and …
Yes, as you’ve guessed, the silence that ensued while I pondered all these scenarios was long. And awkward.
Will swirled his ice cubes around in his glass—clink, clink, clink— until finally he broke the silence with some more (nervous, I think) chatter.
“Anyway,” he said, “my mom roped him into going to this place for dinner. I think it’s called Caleb’s?”
“Oh yeah,” I said. “Out on Highway 80. It’s, um, nice.”
Once again I was censoring myself. Caleb’s, a restaurant in a semicrumbling, Civil War–era mansion, was more than nice. The food was so decadently Southern, it drawled. But I loved Caleb’s because whenever my family went there for dinner, Sophie and I made up stories about all the ghosts that haunted the old house. As Kat and Benjie gripped their deep-fried drumsticks harder and harder, our stories got more and more grisly. Then one of the kids either cried or freaked out and we had to get our dessert to go.
It was tradition. Even my parents kind of liked it, despite the nightmares the kids usually had afterward.
But telling Will about these goofy family dinners would make me feel about twelve years old. It was out of the question.
“Well, all I know is my mom used to go there when she was a kid,” Will said. “It’s the only place from
that time that’s still around, so she decided she had to go. And Owen never, ever turns down a free meal.”
I grinned, and Will pressed on.
“That’s why we’re here,” he said. “My mom’s on a nostalgia trip. She spent summers here when she was a teenager. We’re even staying in the same cottage her parents rented every year. Of course, the place has been totally redecorated. Mom’s kind of heartbroken that the owners got rid of the orange shag carpeting.”
“My parents always go on about shag carpeting too!” I said, grateful that I finally had something to say, even if it did invoke my parents. I took comfort in the fact that Will had done it first.
“Oh, my mom’s got it bad,” Will said. “She gets all mistyeyed over everything from the good old boardwalk to the smell of the seaweed that washes up on the beach every morning.”
“I ate seaweed once,” I volunteered with a shudder. “In a sushi restaurant in Savannah. It tasted exactly like that stuff on the beach smells.”
The moment the words left my mouth, I regretted them. First of all, gross. Second, could I sound like any more of a hick? New Yorkers probably ate sushi for their after-school snacks.
A waiter walked by with a tray of goat cheese mushroom puffs or some other fussy party food. I glanced at him and realized that the server in the red polyester jacket and too-short black pants was Jeremy Davison, a boy I knew from school.
Being spotted by Jeremy just as I’d revealed my sushiphobia made me feel doubly dumb.
At that point I pretty much clammed up—until Will gave a little jump, sending another ice cube flying.
“Oh my God, I just realized,” he said, “you don’t have anything to drink.” He made it sound like this was a really serious problem.
“It’s okay,” I assured him. “I’m not thirsty.”
Because you can’t drink anything when your throat has closed up.
“But I invited you here,” Will said, jumping to his feet. “I should have gotten you a Coke. Do you want a Coke?”
“It’s okay,” I said, getting up too. “I don’t like … I mean, I don’t need anything to drink.”
“Here’s your daiquiri!”
I closed my eyes for an agonized moment. Of course. That was Caroline, bouncing over—with the drink I’d requested.
The slushie she thrust into my hand was the color of a sunset.
“It’s peach-raspberry,” Caroline said. “So good. I got strawberry-lime. Want a taste?”
“No, thanks,” I muttered.
“Um, hi?” Will said. He was clearly confused. He looked from Caroline to me. Then Sam strolled up, swigging a Coke from the bottle.
“This is Sam and Caroline,” I offered lamely. “This is Will.”
“Hey,” Sam said, giving Will a floppy wave.
“Hi, Will,” Caroline said. “How do you like Dune Island?”
“I love it,” Will said, nodding for too long. He gestured politely toward the clubhouse. “This place is great.”
All four of us froze.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Caroline squeeze Sam’s forearm, warning him with a dig of her nails not to make One. Obnoxious. Comment.
I felt, bizarrely, like I might burst into tears.
And Will looked even more confused.
Then Sam shook off Caroline’s claws and blurted, “Dude, seriously?”
“What?” Will said. His eyes went wide.
“You like the Beach Club?” Sam said. “Nobody likes the Beach Club.”
“Sam …,” I said.
Will gaped at Sam. Then he glanced to the right as another waiter walked by with a tray of smoky-smelling Scotch glasses. To our left, a woman wearing a lot of jangly jewelry came through the French doors, bringing a gust of stale-smelling air-conditioning with her.
“So you guys don’t hang out here,” Will said. It wasn’t a question.
As Will processed this information, I literally saw a crease between his eyebrows melt away.
“You know,” Will said after yet another awkward beat, “a month ago I wiped out playing basketball on an asphalt court. I had this big scrape all down the left side of my calf. And when it scabbed over … it looked just like that wallpaper in there.”
I blinked. Had Will just done what I thought he’d done?
When Caroline started laughing, I knew that he had.
From the moment this awkward date had begun, I’d felt like there was a barrier between me and Will—that invisible wall between the ice cream scooper and the guy paying for the cone.
But with one little joke, Will had batted that barrier away as easily as if he were slapping a mosquito. I laughed, as much from relief as from Will’s quip.
Sam gave Will a friendly wallop on the back.
“So do you want to get out of here?” he proposed. “You heard of The Swamp?”
“I have, actually,” Will said, looking at me. A smile played around the corners of his mouth, but it was only a small one. The rest of his face was not very smiley at all.
Will’s eyes shifted quickly to Sam and Caroline, then back to me. Then they dropped to his glass of ice cubes. Clink, clink, clink.
With a sinking sensation, I realized I’d blown it.
This hadn’t been a group thing.
It had been a date.
And I’d invited not one, but two friends to come along. All because I was worried that a date at the Beach Club had meant a date with a Beach Clubber.
I mean, would that even have been so bad? I thought. Now that I knew Will wasn’t one of them, I was feeling magnanimous about the people at the party. I took a quick survey. A boy with eyelash-skimming bangs pulled a flask out of his pocket and dumped some clear liquid into his Coke. The girl who was flirting with him flip, flip, flipped her long, blond hair. An older couple laughed as they woozed their way toward the bar.
Um, yes, it would have been very bad, I told myself with an inward and, okay, smug giggle.
When I returned my gaze to Will, though, all self-congratulation ceased. I would have bet that Will wasn’t sizing me up nearly this exactingly. He hadn’t even smirked at my sushi gaffe. All he’d wanted to do when he’d asked me out was talk, but I’d been too freaked-out to be even remotely charming—or charmed.
Until now. Was it too late?
I wanted to find out. And I didn’t want to do it with my friends at The Swamp. Pulling Will into my world felt like cheating somehow. No, I wanted to get to know him there, at the Beach Club.
Or maybe, I brainstormed, breaking out my first confident grin of the evening, not quite at the Beach Club.
“You know what, guys?” I said. I was talking to Sam and Caroline but I was looking at Will. “You go on to The Swamp. I think we’re going to do our own thing.”
That “we” felt strange and wonderful to say. Maybe Will caught it too. His thick eyebrows shot up.
I didn’t have to ask Sam and Caroline twice. Caroline gave Will a little wave as she slurped up the dregs of her daiquiri. Sam gave him a fist-bump. But Will seemed to be looking at me during the entire exchange.
Ever-watchful Caroline noticed and flashed me a quick grin.
It was official. My friends liked Will. It seemed like something I should be glad about. Everyone knew that was a classic sign of boyfriend worthiness.
But at that moment, I didn’t feel in a position to be testing Will. Quite the opposite. I had some making up to do.
As Caroline and Sam drifted away, I tried to smile lightly at Will. I pointed to the railing at the edge of the pool deck, the one that overlooked the beach.
“Can you go wait for me over there?” I asked. “I’ll be just a minute.”
I was being cryptic, I knew. Will looked skeptical and I couldn’t blame him. He probably thought I was sending him into another ambush—my parents, say, ready to hop out and interview him about his credentials and intentions.
But to Will’s credit, he just shrugged and also tried to smile. Then he headed over to the rail.
I ducked into the crowd of partiers.
My plan took longer than I’d thought. By the time I headed back toward Will, a good ten minutes had gone by and I could see he was getting annoyed. He tipped his plastic cup to his lips, clearly forgetting that his ice cubes had melted long ago. Then he carefully knelt to put the empty cup on the edge of the pool deck, stretching his orange T-shirt tightly across his shoulder blades. He hadn’t seen me yet, which was a good thing, because looking at his back made me stop and take a deep, wide-eyed, admiring breath.
Looking at Will was so different from looking at other boys. When you live on an island, you don’t even think about seeing boys’ bodies. They’re just always … there. I barely noticed when Sam whipped off one of his holey T-shirts to go galloping into the surf. My friends’ tan skin, broad shoulders, and angular shoulder blades all sort of looked alike.
But here was Will, so fully clothed even his ankles were covered, and I was practically hyperventilating.
Which was not good, given all the plates, glasses, and foodstuffs I was balancing in my arms.
When Will straightened up and glimpsed me, I could swear he gave his own little gasp. His smile was instant, and natural this time, lighting up his entire face from his crinkling eyes to his slightly scruffy chin.
He simply looked happy to see me, which, given all the confusion of the past half hour, seemed like a feat.
Suddenly I felt like the old independent me—the one who thinks nothing of cutting her friends free and committing acts of petty larceny all over the Dune Island Beach Club.
I found myself beaming right back at Will.
“Come on,” I said, transferring a few of my more awkward items into Will’s hands. I sat on the floor, swung my legs out, and inched beneath the railing’s lowest bar until I’d landed in the sand below. I kicked off my flip-flops, then started collecting my loot from the edge of the pool deck.
“Am I supposed to come down there too?” Will said, glancing furtively over his shoulder.
“Yeah,” I said. “Make a break for it before they notice all the stuff I took.”
Will grunted as he squished himself through the railing. His T-shirt scrunched up to his rib cage and I tried not to stare. Instead I bent over and sidled under the deck, which was about four feet off the ground. The sand felt cool and slithery under my bare feet. I smoothed a patch of it into a makeshift table, then arranged on it all the dishes and napkin-wrapped bundles I’d collected.
Sixteenth Summer Page 5