Ann Brashares - The Last Summer (of You and Me) (2 page)

She would be there. If she was still Alice, she would be there. If

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Riley was still Riley, she would not be. He had called, so if Alice didn't come, it would mean something. If she did come, it would mean something also. He wished he hadn't called, in a way. The old staging unnerved him, but after all this time he couldn't just sneak up on Alice.

He could imagine that she hadn't checked the messages, but he knew Alice to be heartrendingly on top of the messages. As though she was always waiting for something good and some thing bad.

Now the sweeter, older coast of the island emerged, coughed up by the bay in time for his arrival. He discerned the wide, curling arm of the dock. He saw the figures on it. He knew Riley would be the same. By the letters she wrote him, he could tell she would look and sound the same. But the idea of a twenty-one-year-old Alice scared him.

Would their parents be there? Could he contend with the whole bunch of them on such a narrow tatter of land stuck out here between the ocean and the bay?

Now the shapes of the houses grew and sharpened, and the faces on the dock turned toward the boat expectantly--a bunch of circles without features at first. He unstuck himself from the bench, stretched his legs. He felt the chill sweat of his fingers knit ted around the handles of his duffel bag.

Without quite giving himself the go-ahead, he started scanning the faces. The older ones were most familiar. The tricky doubles player with the comb-over--what was his name? The guy with the crooked shoulders who tended to the fire trucks, the brown

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lady with the dog under her arm. The club pro, Don Rontano, with the starched polo shirt, collar upturned, who got on so well with the lonely ladies. The children were impossible to identify, and the bodies between old and young he feared to scrutinize. Would her hair have gotten as dark as that? Could her shape have changed into that?

No and no, obviously. At this distance, closing in at this speed, you knew a person by her posture, by certain unnameable qualities, and those weren't and couldn't be hers. Maybe she hadn't come. Maybe she wasn't even on the island. But what could make Alice not come?

There was one other figure--a girl, it seemed--half-curled on the bench, one foot tucked under her. But her back was to him, and unlike the others, she didn't turn her face to the boat.

He scanned the small cluster again, resenting the spasmodic activity of his eyeballs. What if she were different now? What if he couldn't keep his old idea of her?

As the ferry pulled around the hook of the dock, the sitting girl stood. Her hair blew around her face, obscuring it. Maybe that was the reason he continued to imagine her a stranger even after he got close enough to see.

For a few moments, both frantic and calm, he watched her care fully, feeling a tingle in the old, blocked-off passageways. He felt the neurons firing in the part of his brain responsible for present perception but also in the part devoted to memory.

Maybe that was why a strange overload took place just then, when he recognized her and didn't recognize her at the same time. Ideas and feelings rushed in that he might have rather kept out.

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u

"Hey," he said to her.

She hugged him, putting her chin on his shoulder and her face toward the lighthouse. It wasn't the kind of thing they did. It wasn't so much intimacy that provoked it, but the need not to look at him any longer.

She couldn't really feel anything of him or focus her eyes exactly. Her body was numb and her eyes confused her. In a moment of lucidity, she feared he could feel her heart pounding and she pulled away.

She put her head down and gestured to his bag. "Is that every thing?" she asked his bag.

"That's it." He sounded almost rueful. She wanted to check his face, but he was looking at her, so she didn't.

What was the matter with her? It was just him! It was the same old Paul. But it also wasn't. He was the strangest of strangers in that he was also her oldest friend.

"Is it heavy?" she found herself saying.

"No. It's fine," he said, and she thought she heard the seed of a laugh in his voice. Was he going to laugh at her? He used to do that. He teased her and laughed at her without relent. But if he did that now, she would die.

She 'd intended to feel cold toward him this time. For leaving for so long and forgetting her. Did you forget me? She was good at being angry with him when he was away, but in his presence she never could.

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She forged ahead and he followed. Mrs. McKay was unlocking her wagon, and Connie, their old swim coach, was on the fishing side. If she raised her head, she would see others. They all knew Paul. Would they recognize him with his long, clumpy hair and his bristly face?

All the things she planned to feel, the way she planned to look and seem, the appropriate things she planned to say. None of them came to pass.

"Let's go find Riley," he said from behind her, and her heart thrilled with relief. That was what they could do. That would make sense of it.

She offered him her mother's bike and got on her own. He bal anced his duffel bag over the basket and maneuvered up the skinny boardwalk ahead of her with the grace of a true islander. He used to ride three bikes at once. He could do a wheelie without his hands. He had been her hero of bikes.

They went directly to the ocean beach. He walked out of his shoes and peeled off his socks, barely slowing down. He stood on the stairs at the top of the dune, taking it in, and she lingered a few feet behind, breathless to see what kind of beach it was today.

As children, they had dozens of names for the beach, like Eski mos naming snow, and they were ever finding need for more. A placid, white-sand and sparkly turquoise affair was a Tortola beach after an island in the Caribbean that Paul had been dragged to with his mother. They scorned such a beach. The Riley beach, also known as Fight beach, was when the little grains of sand whipped like glass against your skin and the surf was ragged and punishing. An Alice beach was truly rare, and it involved tide pools.

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Today Alice wanted the kind he used to want, the Paul beach, low-tide crunchy sand, a sharp drop-off to the water, and a close army of rough, green waves. How familiar it felt to want his wants for him. That much had not changed.

Once Paul told her that the beach was like him because it changed every day but it never made any progress. Later she remembered thinking that a normal person might have begun by saying that he was like the beach.

Alice held her hair back, acknowledging that this beach was yet another requiring a name. A Nervous beach. A Gnashing beach. The sand was smooth and gradual, but the surf was wild, the waves coming in at a diagonal pitch. She was making up her mind not to swim as Paul set off down the decrepit steps. She looked east toward the lifeguard chair, with Riley sitting in it and the red "no swimming" flag flying above her.

Paul didn't bend his steps toward Riley but rather headed straight for the water. Alice watched in muffled surprise as he walked into the surf fully clothed. He dove into an olive-colored wall. Alice watched eagerly for his head to pop out of the irritable froth crashing all around. She looked to her sister, who was now standing up in the chair, neck forward in her pose of lifeguard alertness, hands on her hips.

Paul's head did finally appear at least twenty yards out. He was beyond the breaking waves but bobbing and buffeted nonetheless.

Alice could see Riley muttering to another guard, who stood at the foot of the stand. She blew her whistle twice. "Get out of the water!" she bellowed, pointing at the red flag. "Asshole," she muttered.

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From far out, Paul lifted his arm and waved to her.

Alice could tell the moment Riley realized who it was. She whooped loudly enough for Alice to hear. She looked back over her shoulder and saw Alice there.

Riley's pose relaxed. Her whistled dropped. She shrugged and Alice smiled. Riley shouted to be heard over the fresh blast of wind. "I guess Paul is back."

u

"Just leave him out there," Riley said to her backup guard. "He 'll be fine."

She sat back down in her chair and watched Paul's bouncing head. She wasn't going in after him. Let him drown. He would never drown.

Paul had worked through every phase of lifeguard training alongside her, determined to best her every time. Though never to his face, she credited him with making her tough. She didn't just pass the challenges, she had to try to beat Paul. And then the day of the actual test--a formality by that point, their victory lap--Paul didn't show up. When she saw him later by the ferry dock, he'd just shrugged. It was the culmination of her life, and he'd acted like the thing had slipped his mind.

But on her first official day in the chair, when she'd nearly exploded with pride in her official red suit, Paul had turned up again. She didn't realize the dark-haired figure thrashing out beyond the surf was Paul. She'd leapt off the chair with all pos

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sible intensity, blowing her whistle, marshaling her equipment, shouting commands, her blood dashing with purpose.

When she got out to the deep water and saw who it was, she wanted to drown him for real. She called him a motherfucker and started to swim back to shore, her cheeks pounding red with fury. Then she saw the lineup of concerned citizens on the sand and the head guard apoplectic at the idea that she was abandoning the vic tim. And there was Paul out there, keeping up his act. What could she do? She went back and saved his ass. As she dragged him toward the beach, she gave a ferocious pinch on the back of his neck. It was the only time he writhed authentically.

When they were little, she and Paul were the same. She under stood him without having to try. They fought sometimes. In third grade she kicked him to the ground. In fifth grade he shoved her into a doorway and she had to get six stitches in her eyebrow. They didn't fight physically after that, though she did try to pro voke him. It was the scar, she thought, that made him stop. She liked the scar.

After middle school, he started making everything so compli cated. He got quiet and brooding sometimes for no reason she could determine. She always thought he would have ended up hap pier if he'd just taken the lifeguard test. That was her true opinion. Later he joined weird political groups and tried to organize Central American fruit pickers who were too smart to take any of the crap he was trying to sell.

"I arrived with all my political ideas, but the poverty and sad ness around here sort of nullifies them," he'd written to her from a

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farm near Bakersville. "Last night somebody stole my wallet from my pants while I slept. I am finding myself absurd."

She couldn't argue. "You should have been a lifeguard," she wrote back.

And yet, she did love him. In that way, she hated his disappoint ments even if she disagreed with the things he wanted.

"Can you take over the shift?" she asked Adam Pryce. He was her backup guard and her junior by six years.

He agreed, and she jumped down off the chair. With an old feel ing of joy, she walked down to the waves and dove into an ocean that no sane person would swim in. She swam out to Paul with a few tough strokes.

And so they bobbed around together, skirting a riptide, taunting the waves while Alice looked on from the beach.

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You'll Turn Out Ordinary

if You're Not Careful

I n the old days Paul came over in his pajamas to fight for the

good cereal. Alice suspected it was one of the few battles he could win or lose. The point was getting over there early.

His house was enormous and stood between their house and the ocean. The two houses were so close, they could hear each other's parents fighting at night when the ocean was calm. His house had seven bedrooms and a TV, and it was clean and had a shelf full of good cereal. But from Alice's earliest memory, nobody ever went over there to eat the Fruity Pebbles, let alone fight for it. Alice sensed that young children instinctively preferred the life inside a small house to a big one.

Paul did appear that morning, though not in his pajamas. He wore a pair of pants so yellow and stiff that they almost made Alice

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laugh. But she checked herself, wondering if that was the kind of thing they did anymore.

He came the customary way, from the back door of his house to the back door of theirs. If you went the regular way, it was at least a hundred and fifty steps on the boardwalk, more than that if you were Alice, and many fewer if you were Paul and you lied. But the sand passage through the phragmites was thirty steps at the most, and undetectable to the outside world.

"Did you eat yet?" Alice asked casually, caring too much about small things.

"No." He looked mildly chastened. "I'm fine, though. You don't have to feed me."

She pushed the box of Rice Krispies toward him, along with a bowl and spoon. He seemed to forget his own words as he poured his cereal.

"Milk?" she said.

"Thanks."

Her elbow on the table, her chin in her hand, Alice watched him eat. He never minded being watched.

"What's with the hair?" Riley asked, passing though the kitchen on her way to the laundry.

"It grew," he said, crunching away complacently.

"Like that?"

"Yeah, like that."

"Mine doesn't grow like that," Alice pointed out.

"Because you probably wash yours and brush it."

"I do, actually."

"Well."

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"It doesn't look so good," Riley said to Paul, a towel bunched under her arm. She stated it as a simple matter of fact.

"I know," Paul said, feeling one of the clumps between his fin gers. "It's kind of itchy. I think I'll cut it off for the summer." He put down his spoon and looked at Alice. "Do you still have your barber scissors?"