Second Chance Summer (14 page)

It clicked into place then. I could suddenly see him, at ten, even stockier and shorter, with glasses that weren’t nearly as fashionable, hanging out by the pool snack bar, one of those kids who always had a deck of cards and was constantly trying to get some kind of game going. He’d been primarily Henry’s friend, but sometimes the three of us would hang out, especially when it was raining and there was nothing else to do.

“Taylor,” I said. “Do you…?” I paused, suddenly realizing how pathetic it was to have to ask someone if they remembered you.

“Oh,” Elliot said, eyebrows flying up.
“Taylor.”
He glanced at Lucy, then back to me. Lucy was looking straight ahead, glaring out at the water, as though even the sight of me was too much for her to take. “Sorry I didn’t recognize you. It’s been a while, huh?”

I nodded. “It really has,” I said. Silence fell among us all, and then Elliot cleared his throat.

“Welcome,” he said. “Are you going to be working the snack bar?”

“Kind of,” I said. I looked over at Lucy, catching her eye for a second before she looked pointedly away again. “Also doing something with the movies…” My voice trailed off, and I realized just how little I knew about what this job would entail.

“I guess Fred finally got his fishing employee,” Elliot said. Lucy only shrugged, and Elliot turned to me. “He’s been trying for years. But rumor is that he started dating Jillian in the office, which I guess gave him some kind of pull.”

“Don’t you have a lesson?” Lucy asked, glancing up at the round wall clock hanging crookedly above the microwave.

Elliot looked down at his watch, which I saw now was big and plastic and practically took up his whole wrist. It looked like a diver’s watch, and like it would be capable of withstanding much greater depths than Lake Phoenix. “In ten,” Elliot said with a sigh. “Unfortunately.”

“Lesson?” I asked. In my peripheral vision, I saw Lucy roll her eyes. But since my introduction to this place had been so vague, I was desperate to get what information I could from the one person in the snack bar who seemed willing to talk to me.

“I teach some sailing lessons, plus working snack bar,” Elliot said to me. “We all kind of overlap here. And today is my day for the advanced beginners, who seem to be allergic to retaining any
sort of knowledge.” He started to head out the door, then stopped and turned back to us. “If you see the fly,” he added gravely, “avenge me. Okay?”

Lucy nodded in a distracted way that made me think he said things like that a lot. When Elliot stepped back out and the door slammed behind him, Lucy turned to face me, arms still folded, her face inscrutable. “So,” she said after a long moment. She leaned against the counter and studied me in silence. “You’re back.”

“I am,” I said, my voice sounding a little shaky. I was feeling off-balance, and had realized that no matter what I might look like now, some things were still the same. I still hated confrontation. And Lucy thrived on it. “Just… recently.”

“I heard,” she said. I blinked, and was about to ask from whom, but something in her expression stopped me. I realized that it could have been from any number of sources, Jillian included. Lake Phoenix was small enough that news tended to travel fast. “I just didn’t think I’d see you,” she continued, arching one eyebrow at me, something she’d always been able to do and that I could never get the hang of. It used to make me incredibly envious, since whenever I tried to do it I just looked like I was in pain. “And I certainly didn’t think I’d see you here.”

I stuck my hands in the pockets of my shorts and looked down at the scratched wooden floors. I could feel the restlessness in my legs that was my body’s way of telling me to get out. I glanced to the
door for just a second, considering it. “If it’s going to be a thing,” I said after a moment, “I can leave. See if I can get placed somewhere else.”

I looked up at Lucy and saw a flash of hurt cross her face before her more blasé expression returned. She shrugged and looked down at her nails, which I noticed now were painted a dark purple, and I wondered if she’d matched them to her shirt. The Lucy I’d known certainly would have. “Don’t do it on my account,” she said, her voice bored. “I don’t really care.”

“Okay,” I said quietly. I took a breath and started to say what I probably should have said right away—what I should have said to Henry as soon as I saw him. “Lucy,” I started, “I’m really—”

“Can I help you?” Lucy hopped off the counter, and I turned and saw a customer at the window, a harried-looking mother with a baby on her hip. The top of the kid’s head just cleared the wooden counter, his eyes fixed on the bowl of individually wrapped Star-bursts and Sunkist Fruit Gems.

“Yes,” she said. “I need two waters, an order of fries, and a Sprite with no ice.”

Lucy punched the total into the register and turned back to look at me. I moved uncertainly over toward the cups, my hand hovering near them, but otherwise totally unsure what to do. “Go get Elliot,” Lucy said, shaking her head. “You don’t know what you’re doing.” She turned back to the woman and deftly moved the candy bowl
away just as the kid made a grab for it. “Nine twenty-nine,” she said.

I pushed open the door and closed it fast behind me, stepping into the hallway. The whole interaction had shaken me. For some reason, I felt like I was on the verge of bursting into tears, so I was glad to have a minute to walk it off. I knew Elliot had ten minutes before his lesson, so I didn’t have long to find him. I started by looking for Elliot in the few rooms in the building—but I found only an equipment shed, piled high with life preservers and buoys, and a supply cupboard with plates and cups and syrup bags for the soda machine. Fred’s door had a
GONE FISHIN
’ sign attached to it—no help there. I was beginning to panic, knowing the longer I took, the madder Lucy was getting, when I saw Elliot sitting on the grass near the bike racks, next to a curly-haired guy playing guitar. There were about ten life preservers arranged in a circle, but no kids there yet. Incredibly relieved, I hurried over and started speaking before I’d even reached him. “Lucy needs your help in the kitchen,” I said, as Elliot looked up at me and the guy with the guitar paused mid-chord. “I don’t really know what I’m doing yet.”

Elliot raised his eyebrows. “But she can show you, right?” he asked. “Luce is great at training. She taught me everything I know.”

“Oh,” I said, glancing back to the stand, thinking about how she’d hustled me out, clearly ready to be rid of me. “Well,” I said, “I don’t think that she really… um… wanted to.”

“Right,” Elliot said, nodding. He gave me a sympathetic smile
and pushed himself to his feet. “Well, I guess you can’t blame her, right?” He started to head toward the snack bar before I could formulate a response. “Oh,” he said as he turned back to me for a second, pointing at the curly-haired guy, “Taylor, that’s Leland. Leland, Taylor. She’s new.” With that, he hurried toward the building, and a moment later, I heard the door bang shut.

Leland looked tall, with pale, freckled skin and sun-bleached hair that seemed like it might not have been combed too recently. He strummed another chord and then glanced up, giving me a sleepy smile. “Hey,” he said. “You a lifeguard too?”

“No,” I replied. “Snack bar.”

“Cool,” he said as he strummed a few more chords, lingering over the last two strings. As I watched him play, it seemed a little incongruous that this guy, with his chill, spaced-out vibe, was a lifeguard. It wasn’t what I had expected.

“Speaking of,” Leland said, unfolding his long legs and standing up, “I’d better get to work. I’m sure I’ll see you around.” He shuffled down toward the beach, not seeming like he was in any particular hurry.

I looked back toward the concession stand, then over to my crookedly parked car. There was a piece of me, a big one, that just wanted to get in and drive, not stopping until I was miles and states away from here. But there was something about quitting twenty minutes into your first day that just seemed pathetic. And I knew
that if I left now, it would confirm everything that Lucy already thought about me. So I made myself walk toward the concession stand, suddenly with a lot more sympathy for my sister and what she’d had to face this morning. I took a deep breath before I pulled open the employee door, feeling a little bit like I was going to face a firing squad myself.

The rest of the workday did not exactly go well. Lucy barely spoke to me. She either spoke to me through Elliot, when he was around between lessons, or simply ignored me, leaving several times to make calls on her cell. After the lunch rush, she’d sent me to organize the equipment and supply rooms. It was mind-numbing work—counting and straightening the piles of life jackets, then doing inventory of the supply closet—but at least I was alone, with no uncomfortable pauses or waves of irritation being sent my way. I’d spent my lunch hour sitting on the beach alone, off to the side, in the shade of one of the pine trees. There were groups of kids playing in the water, having the kind of raft-tipping fights that I remembered well. I could see Elliot, out on the lake in a kayak, directing a sailing class around a buoy course, and retrieving one boat when it seemed in danger of floating out toward Delaware. When I returned to the supply room after my break and began counting the cups again, time seemed to crawl, the hours passing with excruciating slowness. When five o’clock finally arrived and I closed up the supply closet,
I was exhausted. I smelled like fryer grease and the mayonnaise I’d accidentally spilled on myself, my feet were killing me, and all I wanted was to crawl into bed and not have to go back to this job ever again.

I met Lucy and Elliot outside, as Lucy pulled a metal gate down over the front of the concession stand and locked it. I saw Leland striding up from the beach, guitar over his shoulder, and was surprised to see that there were still some swimmers in the water, a few lone people still bobbing in their rafts. “So,” I said, as Elliot approached me and Lucy yanked on the lock twice, testing it, “what happens if there’s no lifeguard?”

“A sign goes up,” Elliot said. He nodded at Leland, who was loping over to us. “Lifeguard’s only on duty from nine to five. There’s a sign on the chair the rest of the time that it’s swim at your own risk.”

I nodded as Lucy came over, her phone clutched in her hand. She smiled at Leland, then dropped the friendly expression as soon as she saw me. “So we should figure out schedules,” she said, her voice cold and clipped. “I’ll talk to Fred and then call you. What’s your cell?” I told her, and she punched it into her phone, pressing each button a little harder than necessary. “Okay,” she said, when she’d saved it. She gave me a long look, and as I took in the rest of the three of them standing closer together, I realized that they were probably going to be making plans to hang out. Plans that I, without question, wasn’t a part of.

“Oh,” I said, feeling my face get hot. “Right. Great. So just… call me about the schedule, and I’ll… be here then.” I could hear that I sounded like an idiot, but the words were out before I could stop them. I gave everyone a nod, and power-walked to my car as fast as possible.

As I opened the door, before I got inside, I looked back and saw Lucy watching me. She didn’t look away immediately, like she had all day, and her expression seemed more sad than angry. But then she turned away again, and I was reminded of what Elliot had said. He was right—I couldn’t blame her. Because it was exactly what I deserved.

chapter eleven

five summers earlier

I
STARED ACROSS THE DOCK GLUMLY AT
L
UCY
. “T
HIS STINKS
.” I separated out the purple Skittles from the pile in front of me, and pushed them toward my best friend. Lucy frowned down at her own pile, then selected all the greens and pushed them to me. We divided all our candy this way, our color preferences so ingrained that we never had to ask. When it came to things like Snickers or Milky Ways, we preferred them from the beach snack bar, frozen. We would get one, along with a plastic knife, and Lucy would divide the candy bar with a surgeon’s precision. We shared everything, fifty-fifty.

“I know,” Lucy agreed. “It
sucks
.” I nodded, secretly impressed and a little jealous. My mother yelled at me whenever I said that word, and Lucy’s mother had as well, until recently. But, as Lucy was always pointing out, divorce meant that you could get away with tons of things that used to be off-limits.

Unfortunately, divorce also meant that Lucy wasn’t going to be here for most of the summer, a fact that I was still having trouble getting my head around. Summers in Lake Phoenix meant Lucy,
and I had no idea what I was supposed to do without her. We had even gone before my parents, sitting them down on the screened-in porch one night to make our case: Lucy could just live with us this summer while her parents were in New Jersey, dealing with lawyers and meetings and “mediation,” whatever that was. This way, Lucy would be able to take advantage of the Lake Phoenix fresh air, and not be in her parents’ way. She could share my room—we’d even worked out a system where we’d alternate who would get the real bed, and who would get the trundle bed.