Ann Brashares - The Last Summer (of You and Me) (6 page)

Riley led them to the creation of worlds--ancient burial grounds, unseen reefs, valleys, mountains, treasures under the sea, and the things that lurked under the boardwalks too vicious to dis cuss, except when they occasionally turned nice.

Riley made it seem like they were all gods of their world, but Alice knew that Riley was really the god. She just gave them turns sometimes.

So great was Riley's imagination that she did not bother with the distinction between what was real and what wasn't. The older the other kids got, the more they wanted to keep track of that, but Riley never cared.

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Alice remembered the first season Riley pitched the corkball team to victory. They were playing the Ocean Beach team in the tourna ment finals. It was the ninth inning, they were up by one, and Ocean Beach had their best hitter, a strutting character named Brian some thing, on deck. Mr. Peterson, Alex's dad and Riley's coach at the time, took Riley aside and told her to walk the guy--just roll the ball four times in a row and get on to the next batter, he'd said. Riley got a fierce look and struck Brian out in three pitches to end the game. They carried Riley off the field in victory. After that, Ethan took over as coach and led them to many victorious seasons until the team disbanded years later. Ethan never told Riley to walk anybody.

Alice remembered the two trophies Riley got at the awards cer emony that night. When they were going to bed, Riley came into Alice's room with the bigger one, the MVP trophy, and handed it to Alice. "You can have this one," she'd said. Alice was thrilled with it and added it to her shelf, towering as it did over her small cluster of participation trophies. She remembered the feeling of incipient transformation.

But the transformation did not occur, and as the days passed, the gigantic trophy seemed to mock Alice's other meaningless trophies on her shelf. Early the next summer, Alice snuck it back into Riley's room and deposited it in the middle of Riley's groaning shelf. She didn't say anything to Riley about it, and she wasn't sure if Riley noticed that it had been returned. As generous as her sister was, Alice understood that Riley couldn't share the thing that mattered.

As they all grew up, the qualities that defined success changed. Girly-girls had been customarily shunned by the central group,

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but the summer after eighth grade they got their moment. The boys turned their attention to the girls who grew breasts and wore lip gloss.

And as they all got older still, academic prowess started to matter--who was applying to what college, and then who got in. And after that, their old friends started to think and talk most urgently about prestigious jobs and money.

It seemed wrong to Alice that the child-gifts became trivial-- hobbies at the most. It seemed wrong that what made Riley a superstar among them had so little currency anymore and that she was so distant from the things that did matter.

Alice exalted the gifts that her sister possessed. She worshipped Riley, and Riley remained a benevolent and uncorrupted idol, always looking out for Alice, no matter how far down she had to reach. And Paul, in his way, looked out for her, too. In return, Alice put her energy and her meager talents into doing whatever Riley and Paul did, loving what they loved, disavowing what they hated. She tried her best.

Alice felt disloyal to Riley when she began to realize, much later, that her natural talents, her ability to communicate and observe, her caution, her empathy, her love of knitting, suited her better to the grown-up world.

And then there was Paul. He not only had the gifts that equipped him for childhood, he had a natural aptitude for adult hood, too. He was a capable student and a subtle writer. He had a cunning sense of irony and a handsome, masculine way of being. He had lots of money and a prestigious name, though he

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disrespected both of those things. He had talent enough to march victorious from age to age, and yet he didn't seem to fit comfort ably in any part of his life.

Alice didn't like this feeling, but she sat there watching her sister and prodding it like a sore tooth, trying to gauge how sore it was. It was unsettling to feel sad for a person you respected. It was doubly unsettling when you knew that person didn't feel sad for herself. Alice didn't want to see more than Riley saw. She didn't want the alignment to shift.

But Alice had the sense that, like these shallow, pecking life guards, she was moving through her life, and Riley, true to her core, was staying who she was.

u

"The wind is up and nobody's taken out the Hobie," Riley reported from high on the seat of her bike, catching up to Alice on her way back from babysitting at the Cohens'.

"We should go," Alice said. She was never as good a sailor as Riley, but she did love it. She had ribbons in her bedroom from when Riley let her crew.

"I'll get Paul," Riley said.

"I think he's doing his paper."

Riley looked back and smiled. "Who cares?"

Alice was struggling to pull the boat into the bay when the two of them arrived, white knights on rusty bikes. They took over in their old way, fast-moving and competent with the sails and the knots. They pushed it deftly into the water.

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"Hop on, Alice," Riley called to her. Alice crouched down on the trampoline as the boom swung violently. Paul gave a last push off, and he and Riley jumped on board. The water was rough, and Alice felt glad for her life jacket. Riley would no sooner have worn a life jacket aboard than she'd have worn a hula skirt.

"Wheee," Alice shouted into the wind as they headed to open water and the boat picked up speed. The boat was already heeled over onto one pontoon. Alice clung to the other pontoon, but Riley was darting around the trampoline, setting the sails as though she and gravity had a separate arrangement. Even Paul got out of her way and let her do what she did best.

"Here's a day you wish for a spinnaker," Riley said happily. Only Riley would want to go faster than this.

They flew along on the edge of one pontoon, the other high in the air.

"Alice, you steer," Riley ordered.

"Paul, give us some ballast, would you?"

The wind came in bursts, each threatening to push them over. Paul leaned off the edge as far as he could go without a trapeze sys tem in place, trying to keep them upright.

"Ha!" Riley shouted with glee when the boat heeled so far over that the boom splashed up bay water. She loved to sail on as much wind as she could. She'd push it to the edge and sometimes, Alice knew, she'd go right over.

"Okay, fall off, Alice," Riley yelled at her.

For a moment, Alice forgot which way to fall off and instead came right into the wind. The sail lost wind instantly and the boat came down hard, hurling Paul off the edge.

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Alice screamed, partly from alarm and partly from pure thrill. Riley let the sail luff and held the boom so Paul could get back on. She laughed. In Riley world, it was a boring sail if nobody went overboard. And though Riley never made those kinds of mistakes herself, she didn't get mad at Alice for them.

Not so with Paul. "Alice!" he shouted. "Do you know what `fall off ' means?" She could see how mad he was as he hoisted himself back onto the boat. She saw he was coming after her, so she shrieked and stood up, teetering on the canvas.

"Sorry!" She tried to get away from him, but where could she go? She backed up to the edge of the tarp, trying to find purchase on the pontoon.

"You're going in," he told her, shaking off the water. He never swam in the bay by choice.

"Paul!" she screamed, laughing.

He was laughing, too, as he put a wet hand on either side of her. "Sorry, kid."

"No!" She shrieked again. She hated when she sounded so girly. She felt his hands on her hips, holding them gently and then hard.

"Paul! You better not!" She was laughing so hard she couldn't breathe. "Paulooooo!" she shouted as he pushed her in.

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Riley sat cross-legged in the chair, ten feet up from the sand, and looked over the water. Here was a comfortable seat and an orienta tion to the world that pleased her. At this moment, there were no

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swimmers to watch over. That was often true of her time in the chair, and she didn't mind. She loved the freedom to let her mind rove out and out over the sea, with nothing for it to bump into until maybe the Azores. In the early morning, there were usually just a few veteran ocean swimmers. They typically swam far out and passed through her jurisdiction without incident. Sometimes there were surfers, but she didn't watch them in the same way she watched the regular wave jumpers. She knew the surfers, and they knew her. She surfed with them sometimes, and she knew they respected her abilities and her courage. They'd rather drown than be saved by her.

It was a custom held over from long ago, she guessed, but when she gazed out over the water, some part of her was always looking for dolphins. She'd seen them about ten times in her life from this beach, and each time it was a matter of breathless joy, but also it left her with a strange feeling she hardly knew in any other context. It was a feel ing of incompleteness, of wanting more or different than she had.

According to her father, the first word she said as a baby was "jump," and the second word was "splash." She put them together quickly to describe the dolphins at the Coney Island aquarium. All she wanted to do was visit the dolphins--the prize pair of them, Marny and Turk, came to be spoken of as members of the family. Riley loved to watch them jump and splash. She remembered throwing pennies into the toilet, pretending. Partly she remem bered it, and partly it was what she had always been told. They went to the aquarium every Sunday for years when they weren't at the beach. It was an outdoor aquarium, which was part of what she loved about it. "You were a handful" was the way her mother described her constant demands.

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Her books were about dolphins, the pictures on the walls of her room were dolphins, on her bedsheets there were dolphins. The single thing she liked to watch on TV was a documen tary her father found of dolphins--bottlenose, spinners, Atlantic spotted--swimming fast through open water, jumping, and splashing.

For years she begged to be allowed to take the subway by her self, and the first day she got permission, at the age of eleven, she took it to the end of the line, all the way to Coney Island. She went to the aquarium to watch Marny and Turk. They didn't do the shows or the tricks anymore, so she just watched them swim. And then she went around and admired the sharks and rays and whales and narwhals, too. The furry things, like otters, seals, and walruses, she also enjoyed, but they didn't capture her imagination in the same way. Like her, they were bound to land.

When she'd seen all that she'd liked, thrilled with her freedom, she made her way out to the famous beach, vacationland of old. Along it was the boardwalk, all lonesome honky-tonk. In back of it was a desolate, dilapidated theme park and a number of dodgy neighborhoods, but still it was one of the widest and most beautiful natural beaches in the world.

And to her astonishment and delight, like a gift from nature itself, she looked out with her best eyes, and just beyond the surf, they were there. A school of them, jumping so high in the air you could see the water and sunlight streaming off their backs. Back and forth they swam with speed and agility to make you weep, and suddenly Riley wondered whether they knew about their compa triots just across the water, captive in their tanks. She wondered if

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they could hear each other, maybe at night, when the world was silent and the ocean was calm. What would a free dolphin say to a captive one? How could one possibly understand the circum stances of the other?

And after that it made her sad to think of those dolphins, her old friends, pent up in the aquarium, swimming in their narrow con fines. It pained her to recognize that without the inducement of the shows, the dolphins never jumped or splashed.

After that she only ever wanted to see them in the wild.

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Not Getting Ahead

A lice! Alice?"

"What?"

Riley was grabbing her foot and yanking on it.

"It's an Alice beach."

"It's--?"

"Get out of bed. Come on."

It was depressing how radically your priorities shifted when you were tired. Alice was so deeply in sleep, she might have slept through a fire if she could have died without too much pain.

"Are you sure?" she said groggily. According to her bedside clock it was 2:21 a.m.

"Alice!"

"Okay." Yes, she 'd forget what she loved when she was tired enough, but lucky for her, she had Riley to remind her.

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Alice shoved herself out of bed before Riley could do it for her. She followed Riley, shivering in her T-shirt, boy underwear, and socks. Riley was still in her pajama pants and a T-shirt. When Riley was inspired, Alice learned to get going.

"Oh, my gosh," Alice breathed when she saw the moon reflected in four different places. "When did they come?"

"High tide, earlier tonight," Riley said, face full of wonder. Only one beach was an Alice beach, but all beaches, in a way, were Riley beaches.

"Oh." Alice took off her socks so she could wade into one. It was fine, even sand, not the kind that normally sat under still water.

"I'll get Paul," Riley said, racing back up the beach toward his house before Alice could make any complaint. Riley didn't care when or how Paul saw her. She didn't package herself for him or anyone. When the water looked like this, she didn't care how she looked, how silly and stick-up her hair. She wasn't hiding any part of herself, whereas Alice sometimes felt she wanted to hide all her parts.

She heard Riley banging thoughtlessly on Paul's door. She wondered if Paul thought they had gotten too old for that. What a sad thought that would be.