Sixteenth Summer (7 page)

Yes, as you’ve guessed, the silence that ensued while I pondered all these scenarios was long. And awkward.

Will swirled his ice cubes around in his glass—
clink, clink, clink—
until finally he broke the silence with some more (nervous, I think) chatter.

“Anyway,” he said, “my mom roped him into going to this place for dinner. I think it’s called Caleb’s?”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “Out on Highway 80. It’s, um, nice.”

Once again I was censoring myself. Caleb’s, a restaurant in a semicrumbling, Civil War–era mansion, was more than nice. The food was so decadently Southern, it drawled. But I loved Caleb’s because whenever my family went there for dinner, Sophie and I made up stories about all the ghosts that haunted the old house. As Kat and Benjie gripped their deep-fried drumsticks harder and harder, our stories got more and more grisly. Then one of the kids either cried or freaked out and we had to get our dessert to go.

It was tradition. Even my parents kind of liked it, despite the nightmares the kids usually had afterward.

But telling Will about these goofy family dinners would make me feel about twelve years old. It was out of the question.

“Well, all I know is my mom used to go there when she was a kid,” Will said. “It’s the only place from that time that’s still around, so she decided she
had
to go. And Owen never,
ever
turns down a free meal.”

I grinned, and Will pressed on.

“That’s why we’re here,” he said. “My mom’s on a nostalgia trip. She spent summers here when she was a teenager. We’re even staying in the same cottage her parents rented every year. Of course, the place has been totally redecorated. Mom’s kind of heartbroken that the owners got rid of the orange shag carpeting.”

“My parents always go on about shag carpeting too!” I said, grateful that I finally had something to say, even if it did invoke my parents. I took comfort in the fact that Will had done it first.

“Oh, my mom’s got it bad,” Will said. “She gets all mistyeyed
over everything from the good old boardwalk to the smell of the seaweed that washes up on the beach every morning.”

“I ate seaweed once,” I volunteered with a shudder. “In a sushi restaurant in Savannah. It tasted exactly like that stuff on the beach smells.”

The moment the words left my mouth, I regretted them. First of all, gross. Second, could I sound like any more of a hick? New Yorkers probably ate sushi for their after-school snacks.

A waiter walked by with a tray of goat cheese mushroom puffs or some other fussy party food. I glanced at him and realized that the server in the red polyester jacket and too-short black pants was Jeremy Davison, a boy I knew from school.

Being spotted by Jeremy just as I’d revealed my sushiphobia made me feel doubly dumb.

At that point I pretty much clammed up—until Will gave a little jump, sending another ice cube flying.

“Oh my God, I just realized,” he said, “you don’t have anything to drink.” He made it sound like this was a
really serious problem
.

“It’s okay,” I assured him. “I’m not thirsty.”

Because you can’t drink anything when your throat has closed up.

“But I invited you here,” Will said, jumping to his feet. “I should have gotten you a Coke. Do you want a Coke?”

“It’s okay,” I said, getting up too. “I don’t like … I mean, I don’t
need
anything to drink.”

“Here’s your daiquiri!”

I closed my eyes for an agonized moment. Of course. That was Caroline, bouncing over—with the drink I’d requested.

The slushie she thrust into my hand was the color of a sunset.

“It’s peach-raspberry,” Caroline said. “
So
good. I got strawberry-lime. Want a taste?”

“No, thanks,” I muttered.

“Um, hi?” Will said. He was clearly confused. He looked from Caroline to me. Then Sam strolled up, swigging a Coke from the bottle.

“This is Sam and Caroline,” I offered lamely. “This is Will.”

“Hey,” Sam said, giving Will a floppy wave.

“Hi, Will,” Caroline said. “How do you like Dune Island?”

“I love it,” Will said, nodding for too long. He gestured politely toward the clubhouse. “This place is great.”

All four of us froze.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Caroline squeeze Sam’s forearm, warning him with a dig of her nails not to make One. Obnoxious. Comment.

I felt, bizarrely, like I might burst into tears.

And Will looked even more confused.

Then Sam shook off Caroline’s claws and blurted, “Dude,
seriously
?”

“What?” Will said. His eyes went wide.

“You
like
the Beach Club?” Sam said.
“Nobody
likes the Beach Club.”

“Sam …,” I said.

Will gaped at Sam. Then he glanced to the right as another waiter walked by with a tray of smoky-smelling Scotch glasses. To our left, a woman wearing a
lot
of jangly jewelry came
through the French doors, bringing a gust of stale-smelling air-conditioning with her.

“So you guys don’t hang out here,” Will said. It wasn’t a question.

As Will processed this information, I literally saw a crease between his eyebrows melt away.

“You know,” Will said after yet another awkward beat, “a month ago I wiped out playing basketball on an asphalt court. I had this big scrape all down the left side of my calf. And when it scabbed over … it looked
just
like that wallpaper in there.”

I blinked. Had Will just done what I thought he’d done?

When Caroline started laughing, I knew that he had.

From the moment this awkward date had begun, I’d felt like there was a barrier between me and Will—that invisible wall between the ice cream scooper and the guy paying for the cone.

But with one little joke, Will had batted that barrier away as easily as if he were slapping a mosquito. I laughed, as much from relief as from Will’s quip.

Sam gave Will a friendly wallop on the back.

“So do you want to get out of here?” he proposed. “You heard of The Swamp?”

“I have, actually,” Will said, looking at me. A smile played around the corners of his mouth, but it was only a small one. The rest of his face was not very smiley at all.

Will’s eyes shifted quickly to Sam and Caroline, then back to me. Then they dropped to his glass of ice cubes.
Clink, clink, clink
.

With a sinking sensation, I realized I’d blown it.

This hadn’t been a group thing.

It
had
been a date.

And I’d invited not one, but
two
friends to come along. All because I was worried that a date at the Beach Club had meant a date with a Beach Clubber.

I mean, would that even have been so bad?
I thought. Now that I knew Will wasn’t one of
them
, I was feeling magnanimous about the people at the party. I took a quick survey. A boy with eyelash-skimming bangs pulled a flask out of his pocket and dumped some clear liquid into his Coke. The girl who was flirting with him
flip, flip, flipped
her long, blond hair. An older couple laughed as they woozed their way toward the bar.

Um, yes, it would have been
very
bad
, I told myself with an inward and, okay, smug giggle.

When I returned my gaze to Will, though, all self-congratulation ceased. I would have bet that Will wasn’t sizing me up nearly this exactingly. He hadn’t even smirked at my sushi gaffe. All he’d wanted to do when he’d asked me out was
talk
, but I’d been too freaked-out to be even remotely charming—or charmed.

Until now. Was it too late?

I wanted to find out. And I didn’t want to do it with my friends at The Swamp. Pulling Will into my world felt like cheating somehow. No, I wanted to get to know him there, at the Beach Club.

Or maybe
, I brainstormed, breaking out my first confident grin of the evening,
not
quite
at the Beach Club
.

“You know what, guys?” I said. I was talking to Sam and
Caroline but I was looking at Will. “You go on to The Swamp. I think we’re going to do our own thing.”

That “we” felt strange and wonderful to say. Maybe Will caught it too. His thick eyebrows shot up.

I didn’t have to ask Sam and Caroline twice. Caroline gave Will a little wave as she slurped up the dregs of her daiquiri. Sam gave him a fist-bump. But Will seemed to be looking at
me
during the entire exchange.

Ever-watchful Caroline noticed and flashed me a quick grin.

It was official. My friends liked Will. It seemed like something I should be glad about. Everyone knew that was a classic sign of boyfriend worthiness.

But at that moment, I didn’t feel in a position to be testing Will. Quite the opposite. I had some making up to do.

As Caroline and Sam drifted away, I tried to smile lightly at Will. I pointed to the railing at the edge of the pool deck, the one that overlooked the beach.

“Can you go wait for me over there?” I asked. “I’ll be just a minute.”

I was being cryptic, I knew. Will looked skeptical and I couldn’t blame him. He probably thought I was sending him into another ambush—my parents, say, ready to hop out and interview him about his credentials and intentions.

But to Will’s credit, he just shrugged and also tried to smile. Then he headed over to the rail.

I ducked into the crowd of partiers.

My plan took longer than I’d thought. By the time I headed back toward Will, a good ten minutes had gone by and I could
see he was getting annoyed. He tipped his plastic cup to his lips, clearly forgetting that his ice cubes had melted long ago. Then he carefully knelt to put the empty cup on the edge of the pool deck, stretching his orange T-shirt tightly across his shoulder blades. He hadn’t seen me yet, which was a good thing, because looking at his back made me stop and take a deep, wide-eyed, admiring breath.

Looking at Will was so
different
from looking at other boys. When you live on an island, you don’t even think about seeing boys’ bodies. They’re just always … there. I barely noticed when Sam whipped off one of his holey T-shirts to go galloping into the surf. My friends’ tan skin, broad shoulders, and angular shoulder blades all sort of looked alike.

But here was Will, so fully clothed even his
ankles
were covered, and I was practically hyperventilating.

Which was not good, given all the plates, glasses, and foodstuffs I was balancing in my arms.

When Will straightened up and glimpsed me, I could swear he gave his own little gasp. His smile was instant, and natural this time, lighting up his entire face from his crinkling eyes to his slightly scruffy chin.

He simply looked happy to see me, which, given all the confusion of the past half hour, seemed like a feat.

Suddenly I felt like the old independent me—the one who thinks nothing of cutting her friends free and committing acts of petty larceny all over the Dune Island Beach Club.

I found myself beaming right back at Will.

“Come on,” I said, transferring a few of my more awkward items into Will’s hands. I sat on the floor, swung my legs out,
and inched beneath the railing’s lowest bar until I’d landed in the sand below. I kicked off my flip-flops, then started collecting my loot from the edge of the pool deck.

“Am I supposed to come down there too?” Will said, glancing furtively over his shoulder.

“Yeah,” I said. “Make a break for it before they notice all the stuff I took.”

Will grunted as he squished himself through the railing. His T-shirt scrunched up to his rib cage and I tried not to stare. Instead I bent over and sidled under the deck, which was about four feet off the ground. The sand felt cool and slithery under my bare feet. I smoothed a patch of it into a makeshift table, then arranged on it all the dishes and napkin-wrapped bundles I’d collected.

“Has anybody ever told you,” Will said, grunting again as he crab-walked under the deck to join me, “that you’re really small?”

“Watch it, bub,” I muttered with a laugh.

As Will settled in on the other side of my little sand table, I arranged votive candles in a circle around us. We were quiet as I lit them. The party chatter over our heads was muffled by the stone deck, but the crash/sizzle of the waves seemed to echo all around us. The candlelight danced on the blond fuzz on Will’s arms and made my own hands look almost graceful as I pulled a burgundy cloth napkin off a dinner plate. It was piled with hors d’oeuvres.

“What’s this?” Will asked, taking in the crab puffs, hot artichoke dip and crackers, spinach pies, and bacon-wrapped dates.

“A picnic,” I said, using a toothpick to pluck up a crispy date
for him. “A tremendously old-school picnic. I don’t think the Beach Club has updated their menu since before we were born.”

“When
were
you born?” Will asked with a curious smile.

That’s when I realized—we didn’t know anything about each other. I didn’t know Will’s age. I didn’t even know his last name!

I looked down so he wouldn’t see the momentary panic flutter across my face. I busied myself with cracking open a bottle of lemony sparkling water and pouring it into two champagne flutes. I felt a little sheepish about the flutes. When I’d filched them from the bar, I thought they were sophisticated and romantic. Now they seemed way too heart-shaped-hot-tub for comfort.

“I’m sixteen,” I told Will.

“Seventeen,” Will said, tapping his chest with his fingertips. Then he reached for the flute of fizzing water and said, “What’s with these skinny glasses, anyway? I mean, where do you put your nose?”

Confirmed. The glasses had been a cheesy choice. I pointed at the pool deck above us. “So much of
that
just baffles me,” I said. “I mean, a bathroom attendant to hand you your paper towel?
Really?
”

“You’re right,” Will said, popping the date into his mouth. “That’s just dumb.”

I skewered my own date and twirled the toothpick between my thumb and forefinger.

“Is that what it’s like in New York?” I asked. “Poshness everywhere?”