Fifteenth Summer (15 page)

“What! When? Where?” Abbie and Hannah asked.

“After I got off work,” I said, sticking my chin out. “On Althorp Street.”

“Well, who is this boy?” Hannah said.

“He’s . . .” I drifted off as I gazed out at the river. Josh’s face was floating before my eyes again, with those dimples and those smiling eyes, and those
lips
.

My eyes refocused when I noticed a skimming motion on the river. I put my hand over my eyes to block the sun.

It was a long, skinny boat, sort of like a canoe, but it was as long and sharp as a needle. The person rowing the boat was bending forward and back, his long oars flashing as they skimmed over the surface. His back was to us, but I could see he was tall and skinny.

And he had very short brown hair.

He was . . .

“Josh!” I exclaimed. “That’s him!”

“What?” Hannah said. “
That’s
the guy you kissed. In that boat?”

“Oh my God,” I whispered. “What do I do?”

Abbie cupped her hands around her mouth and hollered, “Josh!”

Josh was so startled, one of his oars missed the water and hit his canoe or whatever with a
thwack
. He peered over at us.

“Abbie!” I whisper-shrieked. “I hate you so much.”

“Chelsea?” Josh called.

“Um, yeah,” I yelled. “Hi.”

Even when you’re yelling across a body of water, it’s possible to sound nervous, I noted with a cringe.

“Hi!” Josh said. He was at least fifty feet away, but I could still see his teeth because he was grinning so hard. Then he waved so energetically, he almost tipped himself off his boat.

“Hi!” I yelled back. I was up on my tiptoes, leaning against the rail, my voice catching because I felt so giddy.

“I don’t have your number!” Josh yelled.

I inhaled sharply and glanced back at my sisters. They raised their eyebrows, impressed.

“I don’t have yours either!” I yelled. Then Josh and I both laughed like idiots. And
then
the current took him so far past the dock that we couldn’t yell to each other anymore.

I turned to my sisters, my giddiness quickly replaced by insecurity.

“I’m such a spaz,” I said. “But that was good, right? I mean, him wanting my number and me wanting his? That’s good?”

“That’s great!” Abbie said. “Most boys are all about the arm’s length. They’ll do anything to
avoid
getting your number. But here yours doesn’t just ask for it; he yells for it from the middle of a river!”

I grabbed Abbie and gave her a squeeze.

“Abbie! I love you so much.”

Then all three of us squealed and jumped up and down.

“Chelsea has a boyfriend, Chelsea has a boyfriend,” my sisters chanted while I covered my mouth with my hand and shrieked.

“Chelsea has a
boyfriend
?”

My dad’s voice brought us down to earth with a thud. He was standing behind us, looking kind of disheveled and pathetic with his grease-stained brown paper bag and a quart of milk.

“Milk, Dad?” Abbie said, eyeing the carton. “What are we, ten?”

Dad got a look on his face that seemed to say,
I very much wish you were.

A year ago I might have agreed with him. I was wearing braces then and had just gotten my first underwire bra. Every time I tried to drink coffee, it gave me the shakes and tasted awful. I was pretty much convinced that growing up meant being physically uncomfortable at all times.

But now my teeth were straight, I liked coffee (albeit with so much cream that you could barely call it beige), and I had (maybe?) a boyfriend!

I still liked milk, though, so I sidled up to my dad, gently took the carton from him, and said, “Milk is perfect for cinnamon sugar donuts. Thanks, Daddy.”

He started to smile at me, but then we heard an ominous sound:
Zzzzzzzz.

Dad glanced at his fishing rod propped against the dock railing, and shouted, “Girls!”

The pole was bending dangerously over the railing, and the
line was zipping into the river so fast, the little handle on the reel thingy was a blur.

“Oops. I guess you got a bite, Dad,” Abbie said.

“You
guess
?” Dad bellowed. He thrust the food into my hands and rushed over to his rod. “You girls were supposed to keep an eye on it!”

“Chelsea had her eye on something much more interesting,” Hannah explained with a glint in her eye.

“Shut up!” I said cheerfully.

“No, you shut up!” she shot back with a grin.

My dad rolled his eyes as he wrestled with his fishing rod and called out, “A little help here? I need my net and my emergency line and a donut, stat!”

Giggling, we got him everything he needed, and he eventually reeled in his fish. It was huge! Well, big enough that Dad didn’t have to throw it back the way he usually did.

“I am hunter!” Dad said, beating his chest with one hand while he used the other to hold up the poor dead fish. “Hear me roar! And take my picture, somebody!”

“Ohmigod, Dad,” Hannah burst out. “How reactionary can you be?”

Dad faux-scowled at her.

“You know, when we found out you were going to be a girl, everybody congratulated me,” he said. “They said, ‘Oh, daughters and fathers. She’ll think you hung the moon.’ ”

“And I did think you hung the moon,” Hannah shot back, “right up until you killed that fish!”

“Ha-ha!” Dad said. “You’ll thank me at dinnertime.”

I
n the car on the way home, I texted Emma:

You awake?

YEAH, YOU
?

Duh, I’m texting you! And it’s lunchtime out here. How’s the intensive?

INTENSE
!
I
’
M DOING THE PAS DE DEUX FROM DON Q.

I have no idea what you just said. Guess what? Have news.

WHAT KIND OF NEWS
!?!?!?

The boy kind.

?!?!?!?!?!?!

His name is Josh. We kissed! Last night.

DEETS
!!!!!!

He works in a bookstore! He’s so cute.

I stopped typing for a moment. My deets were true, but they only scratched the surface of what I liked about Josh. All the things I
really
thought of him couldn’t possibly fit in a text. Which was, I thought, a very good thing. I had a big, goofy smile on my face as I typed,
How’s Ethan?

GOOD
!!!!
I THINK
 . . .

You think?

NO, NO, HE
’
S GOOD. HE
’
S JUST, WELL, IT
’
S NOT LIKE HE
’
S GOING TO JUST SIT AROUND WAITING FOR ME AFTER MY DAYS AT LAB. HE
’
S GOT A LIFE TOO.

Deets?

HOW
’
RE THINGS GOING WITH YOUR FAMILY
?
IS IT STILL SUPER-SAD
?

I frowned at my phone. Could Emma have been more obvious
with her subject change?
Yeah, a little, but it’s okay. My dad is working through it by killing small animals.

WHAT
???

We just went fishing.

OH. GROSS.

Know what’s not gross anymore? Kissing! You were holding out on me.

ARE YOU KIDDING
?!?
I TOLD YOU EVERYTHING.

Bunhead, I was being sarcastic!

LATE FOR CLASS
!
LUV U.

I snapped my phone shut and frowned again. The conversation wasn’t nearly as satisfying as it would have been by Emma’s backyard pool with ginormous smoothies.

Then again,
I reminded myself,
if I was poolside with Emma right now, I wouldn’t be here in Bluepointe. With Josh.

I smiled through the rest of the drive.

When we got home, Mom was in the vegetable garden. She was decked out in a floppy hat and gloves the color of Pepto-Bismol. She was shoveling with such force that she was out of breath, red-faced, and sweaty.

“What are you doing?” I asked. There was a big pile of dead plants and weeds next to her.

“I just couldn’t stand this mess of a garden anymore,” my mom said. “Something needed to be done!”

“What
are
you going to do with it?” I wondered.

“I don’t know . . .” Mom trailed off, gazing at the big patch of bare earth as if she were seeing for the first time what she’d done. “I hadn’t gotten that far.”

She waved as Abbie and my dad carried our big cooler around the house to the back.

“How was the fishing?” Mom asked as she pulled off her gloves and tossed them to the grass.

“Check it out!” my dad said, flipping open the cooler and pulling out his big fish. It looked dull and stiff and very, very dead.

My mom clapped a hand over her mouth, and her eyes immediately welled up.

“Rachel—” my dad said in a
What did I do?
voice.

My mom shook her head and waved him off.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I was just a little surprised, that’s all.”

“Aren’t you excited to have fresh fish for dinner?” Dad asked a little wanly.

“Of course!” Mom said. Her voice was doing that perky thing, but it was choked up, too. “Listen, I’m tired after all this digging. I’m just going to take a little nap.”

She almost ran to the house, and by the time we followed her in, Granly’s bedroom door was closed.

My dad heaved a big sigh, then tapped on the bedroom door and went inside.

The three of us wandered into the living room. I peeked into the cabinets in the hutch. The jewelry boxes, board games, and photo albums were right where they’d always been—untouched.

Abbie gave her head a little shake and whispered to us, “Beach?”

“Let me get my stuff,” Hannah whispered. “I’ve got some reading to do.”

“I’ll get some food,” I said.

I went to the kitchen hoping I could find something that
wasn’t
a baked good with a hole in it. As I fished some peaches out of the fruit bowl, I noticed that my mom had left her laptop open on the kitchen table.

I’d barely looked at a computer since we’d arrived. How funny that, other than texting with Emma and a couple other friends, I’d barely wondered what was going on at home. Maybe the long drive out here had made my “real” home feel far away and unreal. Or maybe it was the fact that when you’re in a place like Bluepointe, it’s kind of hard to believe a place like LA even exists.

Or maybe it was because I’d been preoccupied with a certain boy . . . .

It was partly guilt that made me log in to Facebook to see if I’d missed any big news. But there wasn’t anything that caught my eye.

I took a big bite of peach and clicked on my messages. I scrolled quickly through them, until I got to the last e-mail. It had just arrived a few minutes earlier.

When I saw who it was from, I let out a little shriek.

It was from Josh Black, of Bluepointe, Michigan, born February fourth, the same year as me.

The message said:
Kai’s long, shiny locks reminded Nicole of the black keys she’d so loathed during her years of piano lessons. But now she was just itching to touch them.

I clapped my hand over my mouth so my family couldn’t hear me laughing.

I rushed to my room and snatched my copy of
Coconut
Dreams
off my nightstand. Abbie was just snapping the strap of her swimsuit’s halter top into place.

“Aren’t you gonna change?” she said.

“Go on without me,” I said, waving her away. “I’ll meet you down there.”

“O-kay,” she said slowly. “Let me guess—your J-boy?”

I felt a twinge of guilt. I knew what it felt like to be the odd girl out, when everybody else seemed to be in a constant state of swooniness.

“Is that . . . is that okay?” I asked.

“Whatever,” Abbie said, fishing her goggles out of her beach bag. “I’m doing my two miles, so I don’t have time to hang on the beach anyway.”

“Yeah, but . . .”

“Chelsea,” Abbie said. She smiled at me. “It’s
fine
. I mean it. He seems really sweet.”

I smiled, hugged
Coconut Dreams
to my chest, and headed back to the kitchen.

I flipped through the book until I found the perfect passage.

Nicole and Kai danced on the sand, and the gossamer moonbeams danced with them,
I typed.
When Nicole placed her slender fingers upon Kai’s chest, she felt that his heart beat in time with her own; it beat for her.

I bit my lip through a grin and hit send.

The chime of his reply came only a couple minutes later.

So, can I go ahead and get that number from you?

My hands shook a little as I typed my number into the reply box.

It only took a minute or two for the phone in the pocket of my khakis to start buzzing.

I felt happier than I had in a very long time. I was sure Josh would be able to tell through the phone when I answered.

But that was okay. I wanted him to.

I flipped the phone open.

“Hi,” I said. “It’s me.”

T
he funny thing about dating Josh was that it took us a while to go on an actual date.

Our obvious first choice—seeing the fireworks on the Fourth of July—got squelched by a massive thunderstorm.

For days after that we were both scheduled to work. So we did a lot of flitting back and forth between Mel & Mel’s and Dog Ear.

He was the first one to sit in my section, for instance, whenever I started my afternoon shift at the coffee shop.

The third time he showed up at precisely two p.m. and settled himself into my section’s corner booth, I laughed and said, “Oh, you again?”

“Can I help it if I really, really like pie?” Josh asked. “I get peckish at two p.m.”

“You did
not
just use the word ‘peckish,’ ” I said.

“I read it,” Josh said, holding up the book he’d brought with him. “It’s no
Coconut Dreams
, but . . .”

“Oh!” I said. “Allison Katzinger? I
love
her! But . . . wait a minute!
Leaves of Trees?
I’ve never heard of that one, and I’ve read all her books. Or at least I thought I had . . .”