Second Chance Summer (34 page)

“You know,” Elliot said with fake nonchalance, “if we had gone with one of my movies, I’d have no trouble talking about it. We should think about that for the next one.”

“No,” Lucy and I said in unison. She turned to me as Elliot started his shuffle again, muttering about people with no cinematic taste. “You’ll be fine,” she said, giving me an encouraging smile. “And if you’re not, I’ll start doing cartwheels in front of you, okay?”

I couldn’t help laughing at that. “Luce, you’re wearing a skirt.”

She smiled wider. “All the more effective, then, right?”

The cards flew everywhere as Elliot lost control of the deck. Red-faced, he bent to pick them up as Lucy rolled her eyes. I took the opportunity to check out the crowd and possibly throw up or faint, if need be. The sun was huge and low in the sky, having begun the process of setting, reflecting its oranges and reds onto the lake. I looked at the clock and saw that it was getting close to eight thirty, the start time that Fred had scheduled for tonight’s show.

“Taylor!” I turned at the sound of this distraught voice to see my brother, wearing his usual uniform of khakis and a polo shirt, holding a bouquet of flowers with a death grip, and looking like he might be close to fainting himself.

“Hey,” I said. I scanned the towels and blankets—I hadn’t seen my family arrive. “Where are Mom and Dad?”

“There,” Warren pointed, and sure enough, I saw our blanket spread out on the sand. My father had his arm around my mother’s shoulders, and she was laughing. For some reason, there was a beach chair just to the side of our blanket, but it was sitting empty. Next to our blanket, I saw that the Gardner family had set up theirs, with Nora and Gelsey leaning over the space between them, talking. “But listen,” he said, and I turned back to my brother, who looked even more anxious than he had before taking the SATs for the third time, in pursuit of the elusive perfect score (he’d achieved it). “Do I look okay? Or do I look stupid? Gelsey said I looked
fine
. What is that supposed to mean?”

Somehow, in my own panic about public speaking, my brother and his romantic travails had slipped my mind. Which wasn’t good, because this was pretty much my doing, and if things went horribly wrong, I had a feeling I would be blamed in perpetuity. “You look great,” I assured him. “Just… um… breathe. And if you can help it, maybe don’t tell her how anything was invented. Just on the first date.”

“Right,” Warren said, nodding for much longer than people usually nodded. “Okay.” I looked up toward the entrance, where I saw Wendy, her hair out of her normal braids and hanging long over the white sundress she was wearing.

“Your date’s here,” I said, pointing. Wendy saw me and waved, and I waved back. Warren, on the other hand, just stared, his mouth opening and closing a few times.

“Go,” I said, poking him in the back. “Breathe.”

“Right,” Warren said in a voice that indicated he wasn’t doing much of that, but he did start walking toward the entrance. Wanting to give him a little bit of privacy, I scanned the beach again.

It wasn’t like I was looking for Henry specifically. However, he’d come to the last one, and I’d given him the poster, so I knew he knew about this one, so it wouldn’t have been unexpected to see him there or anything. But my eyes moved from blanket to blanket with no sign of him.

I looked back to the snack bar to see Elliot tapping his watch and Lucy giving me a thumbs-up. I knew that the moment had arrived. I signaled to Leland, who gave me a nod, and then walked in front of the screen and took a deep breath. “Good evening,” I started, and must have been loud enough, because most people looked up at me. I could feel how damp my palms were, and I twisted my hands together behind my back, hoping nobody else would pick up on this. “Welcome to Movies Under the Stars, and tonight’s screening of
Casablanca
.” For some reason, this caused some people to burst into applause, which gave me a second to collect myself. What did I normally do with my hands? I had no idea, and I was going to keep them behind my back until I remembered.

“The, um, concession stand will be open for the first twenty minutes. So… that’s how long.” I could feel that I was babbling, but at least it was better than the never-ending silences of the last time. I looked up, and my eyes traveled right across to my family’s blanket. My mother was wearing a rather fixed smile, and Gelsey was frowning as if she wasn’t sure what I was doing. But when I met my father’s eye, and saw his steady, encouraging expression, I felt myself let out a long breath. Suddenly, I knew exactly what to say. “
Casablanca
has been called, by some film scholars, a perfect movie, from first frame to last,” I said, seeing an expression of happy surprise come over my dad’s face as I said this. “I hope you agree. Enjoy the show!” There was another smattering of applause as I scurried away from the projector and toward the safety of the snack bar just as the movie started, the old-fashioned Warner Brothers logo, in black and white, taking over the screen.

Twenty minutes later, we closed down the snack bar as quietly as possible. I’d been watching what I could of the movie in between serving up sodas, ice cream, and popcorn, and I thought I’d gotten the general gist of it.

“You staying?” Lucy asked me after we’d locked up the snack bar.

I nodded, looking back to my family’s blanket. “I am. You?”

She shook her head and yawned. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I’ll give it a miss this time.”

“Me too,” Elliot interjected, stepping in between us. “So are you heading home, Luce? Want a ride?”

“No, thanks,” Lucy said. “I biked here.”

“Great,” Elliot enthused. “Want some company biking home?”

“But didn’t you drive?” I asked, feeling that Elliot’s crush was wreaking havoc on his logic.

Elliot’s face fell as he seemed to realize this as well. “Technically, yes,” he murmured. “But… um…”

“You’re a nut,” Lucy said, shoving his arm good-naturedly. “See you tomorrow!” she called as she headed to the parking lot. I watched Elliot literally slump when she passed out of view.

“I think you’re going to have to tell her how you feel,” I told him. “I don’t think she’s getting your signs.”

Elliot blushed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. He also turned to leave, which seemed like a good idea. From what I’d been able to grasp about the movie so far, it seemed to be about a guy pining for a girl, so it was maybe not the best thing for him to see in his current state.

I picked up the Diet Coke I’d poured for myself before we turned off the soda machine and tiptoed across the sand, ducking until I reached our blanket.

“Nicely done,” my father stage-whispered to me. I looked across the blanket and saw that he was giving me small, silent claps.

“Thanks,” I whispered back. “I was just quoting the experts.” I
looked for my brother and saw that, a few rows back, he’d set up his own blanket and was sitting next to Wendy. I noticed that every few seconds he would look away from the screen and glance at her, and I couldn’t help but be glad that I’d chosen a first date for them that would make it impossible for Warren to inundate her with facts if he got really nervous.

I settled in and tried to pay attention to what was happening. I was shocked by how many lines I recognized even though I’d never seen the movie before. They were either things I’d heard my father quote, or lines that seemed to be part of the zeitgeist, references I’d known without even realizing it. I was getting caught up in the movie, the thwarted love story, when I became aware of something to my right. I turned away from Rick and Ilsa and saw Henry sitting next to me.

“Hi,” he whispered.

“Hi,” I whispered back, surprised, and feeling myself start to smile. “What are you doing here?”

He raised an eyebrow at me, a smile playing around the corners of his mouth, which I made myself look away from. “Seeing a movie,” he said, as though this should have been obvious.

I could feel my cheeks get hot, and was glad for the cover of relative darkness. “I got that,” I whispered back to him. “I just thought, when I didn’t see you earlier…”

“Oh, so you were looking for me?” Henry asked, settling himself in next to me and leaning back on his hands. I shook my head,
looking back at the screen for a second, where Humphrey Bogart was lighting what had to be his fortieth cigarette of the movie so far. “I had to help my dad with some of the prep for tomorrow,” he explained after a minute.

I turned my head slightly to look at him, the shadows from the screen flickering across his face. I realized, now that he’d said it, that he smelled sweet—a mixture of cake flour and something like cinnamon. When I realized that I was staring, I looked away fast, back to the screen and the world of Rick’s Café that I had, until just a few moments ago, been utterly absorbed in. I could feel my heart beat fast and was thinking that it would just take a few inches for me to extend my hand and have it touch his. Which was why I made myself keep looking at the screen as I asked, trying to keep my voice light, “So where’s your girlfriend?”

“Girlfriend?” Henry sounded so genuinely confused that I turned to look at him again.

“Yeah,” I said. “The girl who was with you at Jane’s? And I’ve seen her at your house….” My voice trailed off, as Henry shook his head.

“That’s Davy’s babysitter,” he said. “He really doesn’t need one, but my dad gets worried.”

“So you’re not… dating her?” I asked, thinking of the way she’d looked at him at the ice-cream parlor, at how their fingers had brushed.

“No,” Henry said quietly. “There was a moment when maybe that was going to happen, but…” He trailed off, running his hand across the sand for a second, as though smoothing it out, and I held my breath, waiting for whatever would come next. “But I changed my mind,” he finally said, looking back at me.

“Oh,” I murmured.
Oh.
I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I was pretty sure about what I wanted it to mean. It suddenly hit me that Henry, single Henry, was sitting next to me in the darkness, as we watched a movie. And just like that, those butterflies I’d first felt at twelve made a reappearance.

“So what’d I miss?” Henry whispered after a few moments. I glanced over at him, fully aware of how close together we were, how close he’d sat next to me, even though there was ample room on the blanket.

“I thought you’d seen this,” I whispered, looking back fixedly at the screen.

“I have,” he said, and I could hear that there was smile in his voice. “I just wanted a refresher.”

“Well,” I said, turning my head to face him a little. “Rick’s really mad because Ilsa just left, without a real explanation.” As soon as I’d said this, I realized that the statement might apply to more than just the movie. I think Henry realized this as well; when he spoke again his voice was a little more serious.

“She probably had a good reason for that, though, right?” He
wasn’t looking at the screen anymore, but right at me.

“I don’t know,” I said, looking down at the blanket and both our legs extended, just a hand’s width between them. “I think she was just really scared, and ran away when things got hard.” This was no longer about the movie at all, because we’d just learned that Ilsa did have an actual reason for leaving Rick behind in the rain, whereas I had only my own cowardice to blame.

“And then what happens?” he asked. I looked at him and saw that he was still looking at me.

“I don’t know,” I said, feeling my heart start to pound again, certain that we had stopped talking about the movie entirely now. “You tell me.”

He smiled and then glanced back at the screen. “I guess we’ll have to wait and see,” he said.

I looked back at the screen as well. “I guess we will,” I said. I watched the movie, trying my best to pay attention to what was happening—Nazis, French resistance, everyone trying to find some letters of transit—but after a few minutes, I gave up even trying to follow the plot. The movie was unfolding before me, but all I was really aware of was Henry’s presence next to me, how close to me he was sitting, how I noticed every time he moved or turned his head slightly. I was so aware of his presence that by the time the famous last line was uttered—the one about the beginning of a beautiful friendship—our breath was rising and falling in the same rhythm.

chapter twenty-nine

“A
ND THEN WHAT
?” L
UCY DEMANDED, EYES WIDE
.

I took a sip of my soda, and shook my head, smiling at her. “And then nothing,” I said. “Seriously.” Lucy groaned and I looked out to the nearly deserted beach, wondering if at some point we could just admit that nobody was coming to the snack bar and go home early.

I was telling her the truth—nothing had happened at the movie. That is, nothing had happened between me and Henry. We had simply watched the rest of the movie in silence, and when it ended, I’d hustled to the front of the now-blank screen, thanked everyone for coming, and told them that the next movie night would be in a month, and I’d managed to do it without babbling or taking too-long pauses, which seemed to me like some kind of progress. When I’d returned to the blanket, Gelsey and Nora were engaged in some kind of complicated hand-clap game, and my mother was folding up our blanket and talking to the Gardners, who were going on about how the movie had one of cinema’s most perfectly structured screenplays. In the midst of this, my father was struggling up out
of the beach chair. He had moved to sit in it during the movie’s second half, the sight of which had made me lose track of the plot altogether for a while, as I kept glancing back at my dad, looking somehow diminished in the beach chair that he had always sworn he’d never use.