Seventeenth Summer

MAUREEN DALY

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1942 by Dodd, Mead & Co., Inc.

Copyright renewed © 1970 by Maureen Daly McGivern

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Book design by Debra Sfetsios

The text for this book is set in Perpetua.

Manufactured in the United States of America

4 6 8 10 9 7 5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Daly, Maureen, 1921-

Seventeenth Summer / Maureen Daly.

p. cm.

Summary: Seventeen-year-old Angie, living with her family in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, finds herself in love for the first time the summer after high school graduation.

[1. Love—Fiction. 2. Fond du Lac (Wis.)—History—20th century—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.D1713 Se 2002   [Fic]—dc21   2002010864

ISBN-13: 978-0-689-85383-8
ISBN-10: 0-689-85383-1
eISBN-13: 978-1-416-99926-3

JUNE

JULY

AUGUST

I DON’T KNOW JUST WHY
I’m telling you all this. Maybe you’ll think I’m being silly. But I’m not, really, because this is
important
. You see, it was different! It wasn’t just because it was Jack and I either—it was something much more than that. It wasn’t as it’s written in magazine stories or as in morning radio serials where the boy’s family always tease him about liking a girl and he gets embarrassed and stutters. And it wasn’t silly, like sometimes, when girls sit in school and write a fellow’s name all over the margin of their papers. I never even wrote Jack’s name at all till I sent him a postcard that weekend I went up to Minaqua. And it wasn’t puppy love or infatuation or love at first sight or anything that people always talk about and laugh. Maybe you don’t know just what I mean. I can’t really explain it—it’s so hard to put in words but—well, it was just something I’d never felt before. Something I’d never even known. People can’t tell you about things like that, you have to find them out for yourself. That’s why it is so important. It was something I’ll always remember because I just couldn’t forget—it’s a thing like that.

It happened this way. At the very beginning of the summer I met Jack—right after graduation. He had gone to the public high school and I went to the Academy just outside of town which is for girls only. I had heard of him often because he played guard on the high school basketball team and he sometimes dated Jane Rady who sat next to me in history class. That night (the night when things first began) I drove down to the post office with my father to mail a letter and because it was rather late Dad pulled up in front of McKnight’s drugstore and said, “I’ll just stop here and keep the motor running while you run in and get a stamp.” McKnight’s is where all the fellows and girls in Fond du Lac get together and I really would rather not have gone in alone—especially on a Friday night when most girls have dates—but I didn’t want to tell my father that.