Sixteenth Summer (20 page)

The Swamp walls were darkly paneled. Every surface that didn’t hold a dart board was covered with artwork made by Arnold Eber Senior, who was the father of Arnold Eber Junior, who owned The Swamp. Mr. Eber Senior was an outsider artist who pretty much made the same thing over and over again—life-sized preachers cut out of old sheet metal and painted with metallic car enamel. The preachers wore candy-colored suits and had black pompadours, as well as voice balloons coming out of their mouths that said
You’ll burn in hell, sinner!
in about fifty different ways.

“Isn’t this a bar?” Will asked, glancing at the neon Pabst Blue Ribbon sign by the door. There were also foamy pitchers on just about every table except ours. “How can anybody take a sip of alcohol with those guys
staring
at them?”

“Well,
you
don’t have to worry about that, sweetheart,” said a
high, scratchy voice above our heads. Our waitress had just tossed a bunch of neon-colored wristbands onto our table. Stamped on each band in blocky letters was the word
UNDERAGE
.

“Hi, Helen,” Sam, Caroline, and I singsonged together.

“Put ’em on, kids,” she said, sounding bored. She fluffed up her white-blond bangs with her frosty pink fingernails. No matter how tan and leathery Helen got in the face, she would always have the hair and nails of a teenager.

“Helen,” Caroline protested, “we know you wouldn’t serve us, any more than we would ask to be served. Don’t make us wear the nerdy bracelets.”

“Don’t make me call your mother, little girl,” Helen said, scowling. “Now put ’em on.”

We put ’em on.

“Back in a minute for your orders,” Helen said, swishing away in her very tight white jeans.

I watched Will take in the other Swamp customers. The Swamp attracted a very specific clientele, which didn’t include people like my parents, my teachers, or any other professional types. This place was for fishermen and oil-rig guys, truckers, off-the-gridders, and curmudgeons.
And
high school kids, because it was the only bar on the island that would let us in—with our blazing wristbands, of course.

It was definitely a slice of the “real” Dune Island.

And once again I was noticing that only because I was looking at it through Will’s eyes. Sam and Caroline were oblivious. They were fixated on the clouds of bugs swarming just outside the screening.

“Look at all those mosquitoes,” Caroline said, pressing her nose to the screen. “They’re as big as birds!”

“Yeah, you know you want it!” Sam called out to the mosquitoes, pressing his bare arm up to the screen. “But you can’t have it, skeeters!”

“Don’t you think you’re tempting fate, teasing them like that?” Will asked with a laugh.

“Whatever, I like to live dangerously,” Sam replied, grabbing Caroline around the waist and giving her a squeeze.

Caroline laughed, but it was a little forced. I reached across the table, plucked the menu out of her hand, and slid it over to Will.

“Ooh, they have boiled peanuts,” Will said when he’d given the short menu a read. “My new favorite food.”

He grinned at me, and I swooped back to us kissing on the wool blanket on the Fourth of July, the salty, briny taste of boiled peanuts still on his lips.

And then I
had
to look away so I didn’t pounce on Will. I glanced at Caroline, whose lip was curled.

“Trust me, you don’t want Swamp boiled peanuts,” she told Will. “They smell like old-man sweat.”

“Caroline!” I said. “Gross.”

“Sorry, but they do. They do, don’t they, Sam?” Caroline said.

“I like ’em,” Sam said with a shrug. “But if they skeeve you out, babe, we’ll skip ’em. And no crawfish.”

“Wow,” I said. “Sam forsaking crawfish?”

Caroline squirmed in her seat, and I started to get what she’d been talking about when we were at the beach. It was sweet of
Sam to be so considerate, but it was also so
different
. He wasn’t acting like the happy-go-lucky, unapologetic crawdad-eater that Caroline had fallen for.

The truth was, I didn’t really want to suck the head of a mudbug in front of Will either, so I didn’t make a bigger issue of it.

Which left us in awkward silence, until Helen stalked over with a bucket of jalapeño-studded hush puppies. She thunked it on the table along with four red plastic tumblers of sweet iced tea.

“Um, I didn’t order any tea?” Will started to say, but Helen wasn’t hearing it. She spun on the heel of her pink Keds sneaker and bustled away.

“Sorry about that,” Sam said to Will. “Like I said, the name don’t lie. I guess we’re just used to, you know, the rudeness.”

“And the dirt,” I said with a grin.

“And the old-man sweat,” Caroline chimed in, giggling.

“And don’t even think about going in the men’s room,” Sam said.

“Will,” I said, “we can just drink our tea and go back to the boardwalk if you want. I guess when you think about it, The Swamp
is
kind of gross.”

“No way,” Will said, folding his hands behind his head and leaning back in his chair. “I love this place!”

But as he said it, he was looking at me, as if he was saying, I love
you
.

It made my heart dance around in my chest, but it also made my neck go prickly and sweaty.

“Music,” I announced. I held out my hand. “Who’s got change?”

“I do,” Will said, standing up to go with me to the jukebox by the front door.

“Great,” I said just a little wanly.

The jukebox was not an antique and it wasn’t charming. It was pure truck-stop-issue tackiness, with rainbow-colored lights skimming up and down the front and a digital CD selecter.

The songs ranged from new country to gospel to old country, along with a whole lot of Elvis. I’d always assumed that was the request of Mr. Eber Senior, who painted Elvis hair on every one of his tin preachers.

“It’s two songs for a dollar,” I told Will, flipping through the titles in the jukebox. “Fast or slow?”

“Slow,” Will said, slipping his arm around my waist. I couldn’t help myself, I leaned into him. Perhaps because I’d been trying to resist Will, pressing up against him seemed to feel twice as good as usual.

Still, I didn’t meet Will’s eyes as I made my choices. Only one of them was slow. The other was a swivelly Elvis number.

Only as we were walking back to the table did I remember that Elvis is famous for being so sexy, he’d made teenage girls scream and faint.

Maybe that
wasn’t
the best choice after all
, I thought, groaning to myself.

When we got back to our table, it was Sam who was hot and bothered—but not in a good way. He was standing up and glaring at Caroline, whose arms were crossed over her chest.

“What
is
it lately, Caroline?” Sam was saying. His face, usually as placid as water, was pale with confusion and anger. “I just
want to have a nice night out with you and you’re not in the mood? I haven’t seen you all week!”

“Well, whose fault is that?” Caroline retorted.

“What, you think I control the weather?!” Sam said. “Well, if tonight isn’t
convenient
for you, maybe you’d be happier if I just left.”

Caroline shook her head and said, “No, I wouldn’t. It’s just …”

She trailed off and shrugged helplessly.

“Well …” Now it was Sam who was searching for words. He spotted me—Will and I had taken a few steps away from the table as if that would give Sam and Caroline some privacy—and gave me a beseeching look.

I gave him a sympathetic grimace, but the last thing I could do was chime in on a fight between my two best friends. Talk about a minefield.

“I need some air,” Sam muttered.

“It’s a screened porch,” Caroline pointed out.

Sam took a deep, frustrated breath, then slammed through the screen door that led to the big deck. Shooting off one corner of the deck was a narrow bridge that led to another, small, circular deck. Sam kept it together while he wove around the crowded tables on the deck, but when he hit the bridge, he broke into a loopy run.

“He’s going to see the gators,” Caroline said, hanging her head. “Well, I guess this wasn’t the dream date either.”

“Caroline,” I said. “Why don’t I go talk to him?”

Caroline shrugged and nodded.

“Do you mind?” I asked Will.

I saw his shoulders deflate just a bit, but he waved me out.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “Go.”

Now I felt torn between all
three
of the people I was with. But I headed outside after Sam. Before I hit the bridge, I stopped at the cart where the waitresses kept the water pitchers and grabbed a handful of dryer sheets out of a box. They were supposed to ward off mosquitoes if you didn’t have any bug spray handy. I tucked one into my jeans pocket and one into a strap on my sandal. I took the other two out to Sam.

He was sitting at the edge of the deck, dangling his legs over the swamp. He dipped his hand into a plastic garbage can filled with fishy smelling pellets and tossed some to the alligators arrayed in the swamp beneath his feet. There were so many, they looked like a very uncomfortable area rug, all prehistoric crags and sleepy, reptilian eyeballs.

“Maybe you should pull your feet up,” I said to Sam. “You don’t want the gators to think they’re a snack, too.”

“Aw, these guys are so domesticated, they don’t even remember that they’re carnivores,” Sam said sadly. He threw another handful of chow at the alligators, who growled and snapped at one another as they lunged for the little tidbits.

I sank down next to Sam and handed him some dryer sheets.

“Thanks,” he said. “I forgot to get these. And Will was right. The mosquitoes are getting their revenge on me.”

He slapped at a few of them as he tucked the dryer sheets into his pockets.

“Okay, so what is it?” he said, looking me in the eye. “How am I screwing things up with Caroline?”

“Why are you so sure you are?” I said.

“Aw, come on, Anna,” Sam said, looking miserable. “I was bound to. I mean, I waited all that time to tell her how I felt because I was scared it would screw everything up. That
I
would screw everything up. Now I guess I went and did it, hard as I’ve tried not to.”

“Sam,” I said, “why
are
you? Trying so hard, I mean.”

Sam looked at me like I was a little challenged.

“Anna! Because she’s
Caroline
. She deserves it.”

“Yeah, and you’re
you
,” I retorted. “Remember? The guy that Caroline fell for? Why do you feel like you have to be different from before, just because you guys are, you know …”

“Makin’ hay?” Sam drawled with a mischievous grin.

“Oh, my God,” I laughed. “You are so
country
.”

Sam laughed too, briefly. But then he sobered up again.

“The thing is, things
are
different now,” he said. “They can’t not be. And if we can’t make it work as a couple, that’s it. Friendship’s over. Maybe it’ll ruin my friendship with you, too.”

“It won’t!” I said fiercely.

“Yeah, well, it’s easy to say that now,” Sam said sadly. He stared down at the rumbling gators. “I never should have told her.”

“No!” I insisted. “You shouldn’t regret going for it, Sam. It was so brave of you. Maybe that’s what you need to be now that you’re together.”

“Brave?” Sam said, looking confused.

“Confident,” I said. “You’re worthy of Caroline. Don’t forget it.”

“Huh,” Sam said, giving me a sheepish glance. This was pretty touchy-feely for us. I guess he was right about everything being different now. And not just with him and Caroline.

“Sounds like you’re saying I just need to get over myself,” Sam said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Like Caroline always says.” Now we grinned at each other. We had shorthand too, me and Sam.

After a thoughtful moment, I cocked my head.

“You know what else might be going on with Caroline?” I said. “I think she’s mad at you because you’ve softened her up.”

“Caroline?” Sam said. “Never.”

“No, you have,” I said. “She’s gaga over you, and I think she doesn’t like to feel that vulnerable.”

“You guys are peas in a pod in that area,” Sam said, flinging another handful of gator chow into the water.

“Um, what?” I said with a barky little laugh.

“Well, you’re doing the same thing Caroline is,” Sam said. “In a way. Anybody can see it, Anna. On the Fourth of July, you didn’t know anybody was at that barbecue except Will. But now there’s, like, this wall between you.”

“Sam,” I said, half outraged, half impressed. “Have you been watching chick flicks or something? You seem to know what you’re talking about.”

“I know
you
,” Sam said. “I know you think too much. I know you like to hold this whole island at arm’s length. And now you’ve found someone you
don’t
want to hold at arm’s length and it scares the hell out of you.”

Whoa. It looked like Caroline wasn’t the only one who could turn that mirror of truth on me.

“Sam,” I said. It came out as something close to a moan. “I have less than seven weeks left with Will.”

“Yeah, and …?” Sam said.

“The harder I fall for him, the harder it’s going to be when he leaves,” I said, hating how needy that made me sound. “And
then
what do I do?”

“You do what you would have done anyway,” Sam said. “You go to school. You make amazing ice cream. You crush Landon Smith’s soul when he asks you to the junior prom and you turn him down. You just … deal.”

“I deal,” I said, rolling my eyes. “You make it sound so easy.”

“It isn’t, but you do it anyway,” Sam stated with a shrug. He slapped at a mosquito on his leg.

“I don’t think these dryer sheets really work,” he said. “It’s one of those urban myths.”

I laughed.

Then we were quiet for another minute or two. We tossed nuggets to the alligators, zoning out to the swishing of their tails until we got to our feet and started back across the bridge. But before we reached the main deck, Sam stopped and turned to me.

“You know,
you’re
brave too, Anna,” he told me. “And strong. You can take it. Will leaving, I mean.”