Fifteenth Summer (5 page)

But he also smiled, and those dimples showed up again.

My stomach fluttered. I hoped he couldn’t tell. Quickly I bent down so I could peer more closely at the books on the cart—and hide my face from him.

One paperback was sunset orange. I pulled it out.

“
Coconut Dreams
by Veronica Gardner,” I said. “That sounds beachy to me. I’ll take it.”

The boy laughed.

“You’re not actually buying that,” he declared.

“I’m
rescuing
it,” I said, hugging the book to my chest. “This book does not deserve to die.”

“Do you even know what it’s about?” he said.

I glanced at the back of the book.

“It’s a dollar ninety-nine on clearance,” I said, eyeing the red sale sticker. “Ooh, and it’s YA! That’s a good start. Let’s see . . .”

I began to read the description on the back cover aloud.

“ ‘Nicole can’t believe her parents have shipped her off to
camp for the summer. Even if the camp is on a tropical island—’ ”

I paused to snort.

“Sounds deep,” the boy said, prompting me to read on.

“ ‘Nicole is
super
-mad about it. What about hanging out at the mall with her friends? What about her job at the frozen yogurt shop? She’ll miss all the parties and all the fun, which is just what Nicole’s parents want! At first Camp Coconut is awful—early wake-up calls, catch-your-own-fish breakfasts, a monsoon—’ ”

“A monsoon!” the boy and I blurted out together.

“Okay, safe to say that’s a stretch,” I said with a giggle.

“ ‘But then,’ ” I read on, “ ‘everything changes. Nicole meets a local boy named Kai. Their summer love blooms like a coconut flower, but like the tide, Nicole knows it can never last.’ ”

This was the part where I was supposed to groan and make a joke about two bad similes in one sentence.

But instead my throat seemed to close up as I realized something—

I was reading to my new crush from a
summer romance novel
. It was about as subtle as my sticky-chin check.

Okay,
I told myself. I tried to take a deep breath without
appearing
to take a deep breath.
Maybe he’s not making the connection. He’s a boy, and lots of boys are clueless. Or maybe he
isn’t
clueless but he just doesn’t associate
me
with a summer romance
at all.

How could I figure out which one it was? And how could I
also
find out his name, his age, and whether he’d been on Team Peeta or Team Gale? (Either one was fine, as long as he’d never been on Team Edward or Team Jacob.)

When you were in a bookstore, those were perfectly legitimate
things to ask, right? So why was I still speechless?

We were just verging on an awkward silence when Stella’s voice rang out from the front of the store.

“Josh, honey? You back there?”

The boy looked up at the ceiling and sighed quietly before calling out, “Yeah?”

I felt that little flutter in my stomach again.

His name is Josh.

Then the boy spoke again. “What is it, Mom?”

This time my eyebrows shot up.

His name is Josh and
his parents
own the bookstore of my dreams.

It seemed so perfect that I couldn’t help but grin. My smile was unguarded, uncomplicated, and delighted. I did not have this sort of smile very often. It felt a lot like the smile that had been on Josh’s face a moment ago.

Luckily, Josh was listening to his mother and not looking at me while I grinned like a big goofball. I only half-heard the question she asked him—something I didn’t understand about a packing slip and a ship date.

Whatever it was, it seemed to bring Josh back to the serious worker-bee place he’d been before we’d started talking.

“It’s in the office file cabinet, third drawer down in the back,” Josh called. Then he added, in a mumble, “Where it was the last time you asked.”

He stared at the X-Acto knife in his hand for a moment. I could tell he wasn’t seeing it, though. His eyes were foggy and distant, and they were definitely not too happy.

Then he seemed to remember I was there and looked at me. He pointed at the book in my hand.

“So, are you buying that or not?” he asked gruffly. He was suddenly impatient to get rid of me so he could get back to his book destruction.

And just as suddenly my rescue of
Coconut Dreams
didn’t seem cute, clever, and boy-impressing. It was silly, a waste of Josh’s apparently very valuable time.

I wondered if I’d been mistaken about his double take. And maybe we
hadn’t
just had an amazingly easy and fun conversation about his cart full of doomed books. Maybe I’d imagined all that, and in fact I was just another annoying customer at Josh’s annoying summer job.

So now what was I supposed to do? Put the book back and skulk away? If I did, I’d have to sidle past Josh in the narrow aisle. Twice. It’d be much quicker to just make a dash for the front desk.

So I nodded at Josh.

“I’ll take the book,” I said quietly.

“Fine,” he said, looking stony. “I’ll ring it up for you.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “Your mom can do it.”

Josh shrugged—looking a little sulky—and turned back to his cart.

I headed back up the aisle toward the front desk. Just before I emerged from the stacks, I heard the awful sound—
rrriiiiip
—of another book cover getting slashed.

I couldn’t meet Stella’s eyes as I handed her
Coconut Dreams
.

“Well!” she said brightly. I nodded sympathetically. What else
could
you say to such a pathetic purchase? I could have told her
the book was supposed to have been a joke between me and her son, but now the joke had fizzled and it was just a cheesy book on clearance that I was buying before I made a quick getaway. But that seemed like a
lot
to explain, so I just stayed silent.

Why,
I asked myself mournfully for the hundredth time,
did I take my e-reader into the shower?

“So that’s a dollar ninety-nine,” Stella said. I handed over two of my precious dollar bills, then dug into my pocket for the tax.

“No tax, sweetie,” Stella said. “After all, that book was headed for the shredder. You rescued it!”

“That’s what
I
said,” I said. She grinned at me, and I half-smiled back, feeling a little less mortified.

“Okay,” I sighed. “Well . . .”

I cast a glance back toward the stacks, where Josh was still hidden. Suddenly I felt a rush of tears swell behind my eyes.

How had this gone so wrong? I wanted to linger in Dog Ear. I wanted to slowly browse the stacks, then take a tall bundle of books over to the lounge. I’d flop into that cracked-leather chair, where I’d skim through six different first chapters while nibbling vanilla wafers. Then I’d buy myself a
good
book and take it straight to the beach.

But instead I’d met Josh, and somehow we’d gone from flirting to flame-out in less than five minutes. I was too mortified to stay. I had to slink out of Dog Ear, with a lame book, to boot.

It just wasn’t fair.

I turned back to Stella to thank her for ringing me up, but she was peering with concern into the lounge.

“E.B.,” she said with a warning tone.

The dog lifted one eyebrow at her and whimpered.

“Oh, no,” Stella cried. “E.B., hold on, boy!”

She swooped down to reach for something under the counter. When she came up, she was holding a leash.

Now the dog let out a loud, rumbling groan.

“Noooo, E.B.!” Stella cried. She raced over and grabbed the dog by the collar. She clicked on the leash and hustled E.B. to the door.

“You
know
you shouldn’t eat so many cookies,” she scolded.

I clapped a hand over my mouth to keep from laughing out loud as Stella hustled her rotund black Lab through the door.

But a moment later I felt a presence behind me, and my urge to laugh faded.

It was him. I just
knew
it.

I paused for a moment before turning around. I inhaled sharply.

You know how some people’s looks change once you get to know them? Unattractive people become better-looking when you find out how funny and smart they are. And gorgeous people can turn ugly if you find out they’re evil inside.

Well, now that I’d seen Josh’s surly, sullen side . . . that didn’t happen at all. He was somehow cuter than ever. Which is really annoying in a boy who’s made you feel like an ass (even if he did make me feel pretty amazing first).

“E.B. has a touch of irritable bowel syndrome,” Josh explained.

“Am I supposed to laugh at that?” I asked.

“No,” Josh said simply. “It’s not a joke. It’s really gross, actually.”

That, of course, made me
want
to laugh. So now Josh was making me feel like an
immature
ass.

“Well, I hope he feels better. See ya,” I said. Of course, I
didn’t
plan to see Josh. I was already wondering how I could find out his work schedule—so I could be sure to avoid him.

“Look at this,” Josh said, thrusting a book toward me. It sounded a lot like an order.

“Excuse me?” I said. I raised one eyebrow, which was a skill I’d learned recently. I’d had a lot of time to practice it during the drive from California.

It worked. Josh looked quite squirmy.

“I mean, well, I think you might like this book,” he said more quietly. When I didn’t take it from him, he put it on the counter next to me. I glanced at it only long enough to see that the cover was still intact. It had a photo that looked blue and watery.

“Listen,
Coconut Dreams
is not my usual kind of book,” I said. “If this is
anything
like that, I think I’ll pass.”

“It’s not, I swear,” Josh said. “Look, it’s not even on clearance.”

I gave him a look that I hoped was deeply skeptical, and picked up the book.

I loved the look of the cover. It was an undulating underwater photo. In the turquoise water you could just make out a glimmer of fish scales, a shadowy, slender arm, and one swishy coil of red hair.

Beyond the Beneath
, the book was called, and
oh
, did I want to flip through it and find out if the words were as flowy and beautiful as that cover. But I wasn’t about to tell Josh that. He’d already gotten me all confused with his mixed signals and his cuteness. Plus, I only had five bucks left in my pocket, so I couldn’t afford the book anyway. I was going to make my escape while I could.

“I don’t think so,” I said, trying to sound breezy. I tossed the book back onto the counter. “But thanks.”

“Oh, okay,” Josh said. He dug his hands into his pockets and looked away, the way I always did when I was disappointed.

I’m sure that’s not it,
I told myself.
That’s probably just where he keeps his extra X-Acto knife blades
.

Josh seemed to have spotted something behind the counter. I followed his gaze to the receipt paper trailing out of the cash register. It had a bright pink stripe running along it.

“Oh, man,” he muttered. “She never remembers to change the tape.”

He ducked around the end of the counter and started extracting the paper roll from the register, scowling as the thing seemed to evade his grasp.

“Weird,” I said.

Josh stopped fiddling with the receipt tape and looked at me.

“What’s weird?” he demanded.

“I think it would be a dream to work in a bookstore,” I said, “and you don’t seem to like it at all.”

“I like it—” Josh started to say, sounding super-defensive. He stopped himself and frowned in thought. “It’s not that I don’t like it. It’s just that, when people open a bookstore, they think it’s going to be all, you know,
books.
”

“Isn’t it?” I asked.

“Well, yeah,” Josh said, “but it’s also receipt tape. And packing slips and book orders and remembering to pay the air-conditioning bill.”

“But
you
don’t have to worry about that,” I scoffed. “I mean, you’re . . .”

“Fifteen?” Josh said. “Yeah, well, you don’t have to have a
driver’s license to pay the air-conditioning bill. You just have to have a tolerance for really boring chores.”

At that moment he looked a lot older than a boy my age.

Even though, I couldn’t help noting, he
was
a boy my age. Not college age or even my sisters’ age.

I don’t know why that mattered to me, though. Who cared if he was age-appropriate? Yes, he was really, really good-looking. And mature. And for about three minutes it had seemed like he thought I was pretty intriguing too.

But now I didn’t know
what
to think about this boy. How could I have anything in common with someone who found a bookstore—
this
bookstore—as uninspiring as receipt tape?

And how, I wondered as I walked out the door, could I possibly feel worse leaving Dog Ear than I had before entering it?

T
hat night my dad grilled corn and salmon, and my mom tossed an arugula salad with hazelnuts and lemon juice. Abbie and I collaborated on wildly uneven biscuits. Mine looked like shaggy little haystacks, while hers were perfectly round but as flat as pancakes. Hannah made a fruit salad, then muddled raspberries and frothed them into a pitcher of lemonade.

But instead of setting the table like usual, we piled all the food into boxes and baskets and toted them down the two blocks to the lake.

Sparrow Road was narrow and sharply curved. Though the road was paved with used-to-be-black pavement, walking it meant wending your way around various large cracks and potholes. Before
you knew it, you were usually in the middle of the road. Which was fine because there were hardly ever any cars. There was no reason to drive on Sparrow unless you lived in one of the twenty-or-so houses on it.

I always loved our first shadowy walk to the lake. It was so thickly overhung with trees that by August you felt like you were in a tunnel. Of course, by August you also had to spend most of that walk slapping away mosquitoes and horseflies. But even that—after doing it my whole life—felt like a ritual.