Ann Brashares - The Last Summer (of You and Me) (5 page)

� 35 � Ann Brashares

"I'll go first," Rosie had declared.

"Go first at what?" Riley asked. She looked suspicious.

"Isn't it obvious?" Rosie replied, looking to her friends, girls like Becca Fines and Megan Cooley, for backup. She went ahead and spun the bottle. "If you're a girl and it lands on a girl, you spin again," Rosie explained, all business. "If you're a boy and it lands on a boy, same thing."

"What if you're Riley?" Becca said.

Immediately Becca's gang of friends were giggling and making a show of trying to cover it up.

Paul remembered staring straight ahead as the shame and agony unfolded. He wanted to pretend like he hadn't heard it. He wanted to pretend Riley hadn't heard it, either. He couldn't even turn his head to look at her. He remembered the feeling of blood pounding in his temples.

"Shut up, Becca," Alice said through her teeth.

"Go away, Alice," Becca shot back.

Paralyzed, Paul stared straight ahead as the bottle spun slower and settled.

"It's on Paul," Rosie declared, even though it was really closer to Alice. Riley was already on her feet. Rosie stood, too, looking mischievously at him.

"It has to be on the lips," Jessica Loomis shouted.

This broke Paul's paralysis. He remembered Rosie walking toward him straight through the middle of the circle. He stood up and took a step back.

"You have to, Paul. It's the rule," Becca declared, chomping her gum aggressively.

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"He never said he was playing," Riley said in an even voice.

"I'm not playing. It's a stupid game," Paul said. He'd wished he'd had half of Riley's dignity. "Let's go," he said to Riley.

"Chicken," Rosie taunted.

Riley cast a look at the part of the circle where their friends sat, Alex, Michael, Jared, Miranda. Paul expected them to get up and fol low, but none of them moved. The girly-girls had always resented Riley for being the leader, for being the one girl all the boys wanted to play with. Paul expected nothing good from them, but he was sur prised about the other kids. Only Alice tagged along after them.

After that, he remembered, they'd broken into the market and stolen 3 Musketeers bars. They'd skipped stones at the bay, where Riley crushed all previous stone-skipping records. They'd crossed to the ocean side and swum in a sea so wild that Alice had nearly drowned. And even that hadn't been quite enough of a distraction.

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Alice was reading on the beach Sunday afternoon when Riley approached. She dropped down onto Alice's towel and lay beside her on her side, bouncing her toe against Alice's calf. Companion able as it was, Alice knew she wouldn't be there for long. Riley never held still on the beach unless she was sitting in the lifeguard chair. She swam constantly, she surfed under the right conditions, she was a wizard with a boogie board in shallow water. She liked volleyball, and in the old days, she loved building sandcastles. Even now Riley gave no thought to sunbathing, and she never read a book or even a magazine, as far as Alice knew.

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Alice was a reader and Riley was not. Alice remembered long ago sitting in the kitchen at the little table across from her mother in their apartment in the city. Judy was doing a big freelance proof reading job for an educational publisher at the time. Alice remem bered all the proofs piled on the table. It was winter, she recalled. It was already dark in the late afternoon, and Alice wore thick socks around the apartment instead of bare feet.

They'd lived in the same two-bedroom apartment on West 98th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus avenues since Alice was a baby. It was near the school where Ethan taught history and coached wrestling, and where Alice had gone since kindergarten. Riley had gone there, too, until fifth grade. It was a good private school, and Judy and Ethan paid half-price for them, which was partly why they were so slow to switch Riley to a school that spe cialized in teaching kids with learning problems.

It was after Christmas, Alice remembered, because Riley had gotten the dolphin book wrapped up under the tree. Riley had left it on the kitchen counter, and Alice had picked it up and started reading it for her mother. She was showing off, she knew. Her brain did not turn any of the letters the wrong way, and she felt guilty for it in retrospect. In first grade she could already read books meant for fourth- and fifth-graders. She blasted through all the words, hard and easy, until her mother noticed and came around the table to admire her. Alice hadn't realized Riley had come into the room until Riley was moving toward her, her mouth in a contortion.

Riley had reached out and snatched the book from Alice's hands with such force that Alice just sat there, blinking. "That's

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my book," Riley had said angrily, and strode out of the room. Alice always had an easier time being bad at things than Riley did.

Now Riley leaned into Alice, so their arms and shoulders were pressed together. She leaned over to see the title of Alice's book.

"Middlemarch. Is it good?" Riley asked, as though she may or may not read it herself.

"Amazing."

"George Eliot is a woman, right?"

"Yes," Alice said. It felt nice, Riley's body leaning into hers. Whatever their differences, their physical closeness was never awkward or strained. The body of her sister was not quite like a separate body. Riley's limbs felt to Alice practically like her own, like they were partly bound into her central nervous system and vice versa. Like if she thought hard enough, she could make Riley's knee bend. With an old feeling of tenderness, Alice rested her head on Riley's shoulder. She used to do that when she was smaller.

"Do you want to walk to Ocean Beach?" Riley asked. "They're having the sandcastle contest today."

"Today?"

"I saw the flyer in the market. The judging's at four."

"I'll go," Alice said. It was one of the milestones of early sum mer. Riley jumped up and offered Alice two hands.

Together Riley and Alice had made tremendous sandcastles. They had won the contest the second year they'd entered--not the kiddie contest but the real one. Alice still had the ribbon hanging over the door of her room in the city and a photo of it stuck to her bulletin board.

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Riley had the bold design ideas and the ambition. She was a vig orous builder and a naturally gifted engineer. What Alice offered was the patience of execution. She was focused and good at follow ing orders. "Alice never gets bored," Riley had bragged to one of the judges as Alice skim-smoothed a wall for the thousandth time.

Their winning castle was a cloudlike fantasy, a feat of design. It didn't have the bottom-heavy look that most big sandcastles have. But the greater triumph they built the following year, when Alice was fifteen. The Barnacle Tower was modeled loosely on the Chrys ler Building. It was so tall the girls had to build scaffolding out of sand to construct the top. It had the most gorgeous surface design made out of barnacles, gathered by Riley and painstakingly applied by Alice.

But here they'd built too close to the sun. So magnificent in size, finish, and beauty, it put the others to shame. The irritable and sun burned judge disqualified them on account of not being residents of Ocean Beach. Instead, he gave first prize to the Pody brothers, who'd built a totally conventional medieval-style fortress. Worst of all, Barnacle Tower was mysteriously destroyed before Ethan arrived with his camera. And so it remained an edifice in memory only--growing thereby larger and more skillfully built with time.

"I wonder if the Podys will enter," Alice mused as they headed east, along the edge of the surf.

"They suck," Riley said, galloping lightly along. She would habitually run and circle and weave all around Alice, who tended to walk in a straight line.

"They don't suck."

"Yeah, they do."

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"Well, they beat us."

"Unfairly."

"Jim Brobard sucks."

"That's true."

"He's the one who kicked down Barnacle Tower."

"You don't know it was him."

"Yes, I do."

Alice leaned down and picked up a piece of a horseshoe crab's shell and examined it. "Do you want it?" she asked. It was a vestige from past walks when they used to help each other with their col lections. Riley's collection was always easier. Hers included any and all detritus from sea creatures: shells, claws, egg cases, starfish, an occasional bone or tooth. Once she'd found a piece of a shark's jaw and stunk up the whole house with it. Never sentimental, Riley dumped it all at the end of the summer and began collecting anew at the start of the next season. Whereas Alice collected only one kind of thing: smooth, semitransparent stones of a particular pink- orange shade. She looked for them summer after summer, and never dreamed of throwing any of them away.

"No, thanks." Riley tossed the piece of dark brown shell into the waves.

They saw the bathing suit�clad crowd as they drew close. There were about a half-dozen castles up for consideration, and the sisters examined each of them through expert eyes.

"That thing's more cave than castle," Riley remarked about one of them near the middle of the group.

"That one 's kind of nice. Very classical." Alice pointed to a castle modeled roughly on the Pantheon.

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"I think it's about to fall down."

Alice pointed to an elaborate construction at the outskirts. "The Podys are back, and they've been watching the Lord of the Rings movies again."

Riley laughed. "Where are they? Which was the one who asked you to go skinny-dipping with him?"

Alice rolled her eyes. "The younger one." He'd had the nerve to proposition her after the Tower incident, even with his blue rib bon hanging around his neck.

"Let's keep going." Alice didn't feel like being ogled by the younger Pody. Anyway, the competition still left a slightly bitter taste.

They walked out onto the jetty, Alice picking her way along the slippery stones and Riley bounding around like a goat. They sat at the end with their feet dangling, mist hung like a net over their shoulders, wind and water indistinct.

Later, on the walk home, Riley leaned down and picked up a stone. "Alice, look." She washed it off in the surf and held it up to the sun, her fingers glinting water.

"Oh." Riley put it in her hands and Alice studied it.

"Perfect, right?"

Alice nodded excitedly. "It could be the best one."

It was a see-through stone of the most perfect pale orange-pink color, almost exactly in the shape of a heart. A rare addition to Alice's collection.

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The Talent for Being a Child

A lice's babysitting charges went unexpectedly off-island the

following Tuesday. She should have swept the sand out of the house or mailed the things her mother had left on the desk, but instead she bought a bacon-and-egg sandwich at the market and wandered up to the beach. She finished her sandwich sitting on top of the stairs at the dune, so that Riley wouldn't give her a hard time about eating on the beach. The sister of Riley had to be above reproach.

Sitting there, Alice had a wide and quiet view of things. She saw the squad gathered Baywatch-style in their red bathing suits, listen ing to weather reports and other lifeguard-related briefings. There was always a solemnity to these proceedings, which tickled Alice a little and was probably the reason she hadn't become a lifeguard. That and her inability to do the devilish butterfly kick.

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She finished her greasy sandwich and hunched down to wash her hands and face in the foot wash. The shower would have worked better, but it was broken. It had been broken for so long that it might have been fixed, but Alice wouldn't know because she never tried it anymore.

She didn't walk down to the sand as she had planned but settled again on the top step, her chin in her hand. Maybe it was because Paul was back, but the world had shifted and everything looked as if it were a bit farther away.

Riley was standing in the center of the group, and Alice saw that she was small. Alice knew her sister was small--at least four inches shorter than she--but she didn't usually see it.

Her mother said Riley turned out small in a tall family because of a disease she'd had when she was a toddler. Alice couldn't remember the name of it, but she knew that Riley had nearly died. She also knew that her mother got pregnant with Alice not too long after. Her mother also blamed the disease for Riley's dyslexia. She always called it that: "Riley's dyslexia," as though it belonged to her, like a sweater or a pet. Her mother was oddly protective of her genes, it seemed to Alice. Maybe it was just another way to keep the tally straight between her and Ethan.

Alice always felt proud of her sister because she was tough and nervy. She never showed girly weaknesses like cellulite or crushes. She never laughed if she didn't think something was funny. (Alice did do that.) She wasn't afraid of the water. She never lingered on injustices committed against her.

Alice felt proud of her today also, but from this wide angle, she felt herself slipping toward sad. Riley used to be the youngest

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lifeguard in Fire Island history, and now she was possibly the oldest. Few twenty-four-year-olds could afford to take entire summers at the beach anymore. These other guards were flirting and preening, Alice saw, and Riley was not part of that. These new guards did not appear to be there for the same reasons Riley was there. Did Riley used to fit in better? Or was Alice usually too close to see?

She felt protective of her sister, she realized, and it made for an uncomfortable reversal.

Some people had gifts that made them great at being kids. Riley had those gifts. She was fearless, and she was fair. She was effort lessly expert at skateboarding, sailing, running fast, coaxing a fish off of any line. She was the pitcher on the winning corkball team for seven years in a row. She was the first kid up on a surfboard. She was even good at indoor things, like card tricks and video games. She didn't believe in hierarchies--not even mothers. She was the one kid every other kid wanted to befriend, and she never used her power for ill.