Conrad sighed. He was still big on doing the right thing then. So he gave me his hand and pulled me up. I got to my feet shakily. He didn’t let go of my hand. “This is how you shag,” he said, shuffling his feet from side to side. “One-two-three, one-two-three, rock step.”
It took me a few tries to get it. It was harder than it looked, and I was nervous. “Get on the beat,” Steven said from the sidelines.
“Don’t look so uptight, Belly. It’s a relaxed kind of dance,” my mother said from the couch.
I tried to ignore them and look only at Conrad. “How did you learn this?” I asked him.
“My mom taught both of us,” Conrad said simply. Then he brought me in close and positioned my arms around his so we stepped together, side by side. “This is called the cuddle.”
The cuddle was my favorite part. It was the closest I had ever been to him. “Let’s do it again,” I said, pretending to be confused.
He showed me again, putting his arm over mine. “See? You’re getting it now.”
He spun me around, and I felt dizzy. With pure, absolute joy.
chapter thirty-one
I spent the whole next day in the ocean with Cam. We packed a picnic. Cam made avocado and sprout sandwiches with Susannah’s homemade mayonnaise and whole wheat bread. They were good, too. We stayed in the ocean for what felt like hours at a time. Every time a wave began to crest, one of us would start to laugh, and then we’d get overtaken by the wave and water. My eyes burned from the salty seawater, and my skin felt raw from scraping against the sand so many times, like I’d scrubbed my whole body with my mother’s St. Ives Apricot Scrub. It was pretty great.
After, we stumbled back to our towels. I loved getting cold and wet in the ocean and then running back to the towels and letting the sun bake the sand off. I could do it all day—ocean, sand, ocean, sand.
I’d packed strawberry Fruit Roll-Ups, and we ate them so quick my teeth hurt. “I love Fruit Roll-Ups,” I said, reaching for the last one.
He snatched it away. “So do I, and you already had three and I only had two,” he said, peeling away the plastic sheet. He grinned and dangled it above my mouth.
“You have three seconds to hand it over,” I warned. “I don’t care if you had two Fruit Roll-Ups and I had twenty. It’s my house.”
Cam laughed and popped the whole thing into his mouth. Chewing loudly, he said, “It’s not your house. It’s Susannah’s house.”
“Shows how much you know. It’s all of our house,” I said, falling back on my towel. I was suddenly really thirsty. Fruit Roll-Ups will do that. Especially when you have three in about three minutes. Squinting up at him, I said, “Will you go back to our house and get some Kool-Aid? Pretty please?”
“I don’t know anyone who consumes more sugar than you do in one day,” Cam said, shaking his head at me sadly. “White sugar is evil.”
“Says the guy who just ate the last Fruit Roll-Up,” I countered.
“Waste not, want not,” he said. He stood up and brushed the sand off his shorts. “I’ll bring you water, not Kool-Aid.”
I stuck my tongue out at him and rolled over. “Just be quick about it,” I said.
He wasn’t. He was gone forty-five minutes before I headed back to the house, loaded up with our towels and sunscreen and trash, breathing hard and sweating like a camel in the desert. He was in the living room, playing video games with the boys. They were all lying around in their swimming trunks. We pretty much stayed suited up all summer.
“Thanks for never coming back with my Kool-Aid,” I said, tossing my beach bag onto the ground.
Cam looked up from his game guiltily. “Whoops! My bad. The guys asked me to play, so …” He trailed off.
“Don’t apologize,” Conrad advised him.
“Yeah, what are you, her slave? Now she’s got you making her Kool-Aid?” Jeremiah said, jamming his thumb into the controller. He turned around and grinned at me to show me he was kidding, but I didn’t grin back to show him it was okay.
Conrad didn’t say anything, and I didn’t even look at him. I could feel him looking at me, though. I wished he’d stop.
Why was it that even when I had my own friend I still felt left out of their club? It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair that Cam was so grateful to be a part of it all. The day had been so good, too.
“Where’s my mom and Susannah?” I snapped.
“They went off somewhere,” Jeremiah said vaguely. “Shopping, maybe?”
My mother hated shopping. Susannah must have dragged her.
I stalked off to the kitchen for my Kool-Aid. Conrad got up and followed me. I didn’t have to turn around to know it was him.
I went about my business, pouring myself a tall glass of grape Kool-Aid and pretending he wasn’t standing there watching me. “Are you just going to ignore me?” he finally said.
“No,” I said. “What do you want?”
He sighed and came closer. “Why do you have to be like that?” Then he leaned forward, close, too close. “Can I have some?”
I put the glass on the counter and started to walk away, but he grabbed my wrist. I think I might have gasped. He said, “Come on, Bells.”
His fingers felt cool, the way he always was. Suddenly I felt hot and feverish. I snatched my hand away. “Leave me alone.”
“Why are you mad at me?” He had the nerve to look genuinely confused and also anxious. Because for him, the two things were connected—if he was confused, he was anxious. And he was hardly ever confused, so then he was hardly ever anxious. He’d certainly never been anxious over me. I was inconsequential to him. Always had been.
“Do you honestly care?” I could feel my heart thudding hard in my chest. I felt prickly and strange, waiting for his answer.
“Yes.” Conrad looked surprised, like he couldn’t believe he cared either.
The problem was, I didn’t entirely know. I guessed it was mostly the way he was making me feel all mixed-up inside. Being nice to me one minute and cold the next. He made me remember things I didn’t want to remember. Not now. Things were really going well with Cam, but every time I thought I was sure about him, Conrad would look at me a certain way, or twirl me, or call me Bells, and it all went to crap.
“Oh, why don’t you go smoke a cigarette,” I said.
The muscle in his jaw twitched. “Okay,” he said.
I felt a mixture of guilt and satisfaction that I had finally gotten to him. And then he said, “Why don’t you go look at yourself in the mirror some more?”
It was like he had slapped me. It was mortifying, being caught out and having someone see the bad things about you. Had he caught me looking at myself in the mirror, checking myself out, admiring myself? Did everyone think I was vain and shallow now?
I closed my lips tight and backed away from him, shaking my head slowly.
“Belly—” he started. He was sorry. It was written all over his face.
I walked into the living room and left him standing there. Cam and Jeremiah stared at me like they knew something was up. Had they heard us? Did it even matter?
“I get next game,” I said. I wondered if this was the way old crushes died, with a whimper, slowly, and then, just like that—gone.
chapter thirty-two
Cam came over again, and he stayed till late. Around midnight I asked him if he wanted to go for a walk on the beach. So we did, and we held hands, too. The ocean looked silver and bottomless, like it was a million years old. Which I guessed it was.
“Truth or dare?” he asked me.
I wasn’t in the mood for real truths. An idea came to me, from out of nowhere. The idea was this: I wanted to go skinny-dipping. With Cam. T
hat was what older kids did at the beach, just like hooking up at the drive-in. If we went skinny-dipping, it would be like proof. That I had grown up.
So I said, “Cam, let’s play Would You Rather. Would you rather go skinny-dipping right this second, or …” I was having trouble thinking of an “or.”
“The first one, the first one,” he said, grinning. “Or both, whatever the second one is.”
Suddenly I felt giddy, almost drunk. I ran away from him, toward the water, and threw my sweatshirt into the sand. I had on my bikini underneath my clothes. “Here are the rules,” I called out, unbuttoning my shorts. “No nakedness until we’re fully submerged! And no peeking!”
“Wait,” he said, running up to me, sand flying everywhere. “Are we really doing this?”
“Well, yeah. Don’t you want to?”
“Yeah, but what if your mom sees us?” Cam glanced back toward the house.
“She won’t. You can’t see anything from the house; it’s too dark.”
He glanced at me and then back at the house again. “Maybe later,” he said doubtfully.
I stared at him. Wasn’t he the one who was supposed to be convincing me? “Are you serious?” What I really wanted to say was, Are you gay?
“Yeah. It’s not late enough. What if people are still awake?” He picked up my sweatshirt and handed it to me. “Maybe we can come back later.”
I knew he didn’t mean it.
Part of me was mad, and part of me was relieved. It was like craving a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich and then realizing two bites in that you didn’t want it after all.
I snatched my sweatshirt from him and said, “Don’t do me any favors, Cam.” Then I walked away as fast as I could, and sand kicked up behind me. I thought he might follow me, but he didn’t. I didn’t look back to see what he was doing either. He was probably sitting in the sand writing one of his stupid poems by the light of the moon.
As soon as I got back inside, I stormed into the kitchen. There was one light on; Conrad was sitting at the table spooning into a watermelon. “Where’s Cam Cameron?” he asked wryly.
I had to think for a second about whether he was being nice or making fun of me. His expression looked normal and bland, so I took it as a little of both. If he was going to pretend our fight from before hadn’t happened, then so would I.
“Who knows,” I said, rummaging around the fridge and pulling out a yogurt. “Who cares?”
“Lover’s spat?”
The smug look on his face made me want to slap him. “Mind your own business,” I said, sitting down next to him with a spoon and a container of strawberry yogurt. It was Susannah’s fat-free stuff, and the top looked watery and solid. I closed the foil flap on the yogurt and pushed it away.
Conrad pushed the watermelon over to me. “You shouldn’t be so hard on people, Belly.” Then he stood up and said, “And put your shirt on.”
I scooped out a chunk of watermelon and stuck my tongue out at his retreating figure. Why did he make me feel like I was still thirteen? In my head I heard my mother’s voice—“Nobody can make you feel like anything, Belly. Not without your permission. Eleanor Roosevelt said that. I almost named you after her.” Blah, blah, blah. But she was kind of right. I wasn’t giving him permission to make me feel bad, not anymore. I just wished my hair had at least been wet, or I’d had sand in my clothes, so he could have thought we’d been up to something, even if we hadn’t been.
I sat at the table and ate watermelon. I ate it until I had scooped out half of the middle. I was waiting for Cam to come back inside, and when he didn’t, I only felt madder. Part of me was tempted to lock the door on him. He’d probably meet some random homeless guy and become best friends with him, and then he’d tell me the man’s life story the next day. Not that there were any homeless guys on our end of the beach. Not that I’d ever seen a homeless person in Cousins, for that matter. But if there was, Cam would find him.
Only, Cam didn’t come back to the house. He just left. I heard his car start, watched from the downstairs hallway as he backed down the driveway. I wanted to run after his car and yell at him. He was supposed to come back. What if I’d ruined things and he didn’t like me anymore? What if I never saw him again?
That night I lay in bed, thinking about how summer romances really do happen so fast, and then they’re over so fast.
But the next morning, when I went to the deck to eat my toast, I found an empty water bottle on the steps that led down to the beach. Poland Spring, the kind Cam was always drinking. There was a piece of paper inside, a note. A message in a bottle. The ink was a little smeared, but I could still read what it said. It said, “IOU one skinny-dip.”
chapter thirty-three
Jeremiah told me I could come hang by the pool while he lifeguarded. I’d never been inside the country club pool. It was huge and fancy, so I jumped at the chance. The country club seemed like a mysterious place. Conrad hadn’t let us come the summer before; he’d said it would be embarrassing.
Midafternoon, I rode my bike over. Everything there was lush and green; it was surrounded by a golf course. There was a girl at a table with a clipboard, and I went over and told her I was there to see Jeremiah, and she waved me in.
I spotted Jeremiah before he saw me. He was sitting in the lifeguard chair, talking to a dark-haired girl in a white bikini. He was laughing, and so was she. He looked so important in the chair. I’d never seen him at an actual job before.
Suddenly I felt shy. I walked over slowly, my flip-flops slapping along the pavement. “Hey,” I said when I was a few feet away.
Jeremiah looked down from his chair and grinned at me. “You came,” he said, squinting at me and shielding his eyes with his hands like a visor.
“Yup.” I swung my canvas bag back and forth, like a pendulum. The bag had my name on it in cursive. It was from L.L.Bean, a gift from Susannah.
“Belly, this is Yolie. She’s my co-lifeguard.”
Yolie reached over and shook my hand. It struck me as a businessy thing to do for someone in a bikini. She had a firm handshake, a nice grip, something my mother would have appreciated. “Hi, Belly,” she said. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“You have?” I looked up at Jeremiah.
He smirked. “Yeah. I told her all about the way you snore so loud that I can hear you down the hall.”
I smacked his foot. “Shut up.” Turning to Yolie, I said, “It’s nice to meet you.”
She smiled at me. She had dimples in both cheeks and a crooked bottom tooth. “You too. Jere, do you want to take your break now?”
“In a little bit,” he said. “Belly, go work on your sun damage.”
I stuck my tongue out at him and spread out my towel on a lounge chair not too far away. The pool was a perfect turquoise, and there were two diving boards, one high and one low. There were a ton of kids splashing around inside, and I figured I’d swim too when I got too hot to stand it. I just lay there with my sunglasses on and my eyes closed, tanning and listening to my music.
Jeremiah came over after a while. He sat on the edge of my chair and drank from my thermos of Kool-Aid. “She’s pretty,” I said.
“Who? Yolie?” He shrugged. “She’s nice. One of my many admirers.”
“Ha!”
“So what about you? Cam Cameron, huh? Cam the vegetarian. Cam the straight edge.”
I tried not to smile. “So what? I like him.”
“He’s kind of a dork.”
“That’s what I like about him. He’s … different.”
He frowned slightly. “Different from who?”
“I don’t know.” But I did know. I knew exactly who he was differen
t from.
“You mean he’s not a dick like Conrad?”
I laughed, and so did he. “Yeah, exactly. He’s nice.”
“Just nice, huh?”
“More than nice.”
“So you’re over him, then? For real?” We both knew the “him” he was talking about.
“Yes,” I told him.
“I don’t believe you,” Jeremiah said, watching me closely—just like when he was trying to figure out what kind of hand I had in Uno.
I took off my sunglasses and looked him in the eye. “It’s true. I’m over him.”
“We’ll see,” Jeremiah said, standing up. “My break’s over. Are you okay over here? Wait around and I’ll drive us home. I can put your bike in the back.”
I nodded, and watched him walk back to the lifeguard chair. Jeremiah was a good friend. He’d always been good to me, watched out for me.
chapter thirty-four
My mother and Susannah sat in beach chairs, and I lay on an old Ralph Lauren teddy bear towel. It was my favorite one because it was extra long, and soft from so many washings.
“What are you up to tonight, bean?” my mother asked me. I loved it when she called me bean. It reminded me of being six years old and falling asleep in her bed.
Proudly I told them, “Me and Cam are going to Putt Putt.”
We used to go all the time as kids. Mr. Fisher would take us, and he was always pitting the boys against one another. “Twenty dollars for the first one to get a hole in one.” “Twenty dollars for the winner.” Steven loved it. I think he wished Mr. Fisher was our dad. He actually could’ve been. Susannah told me my mother had dated him first, but my mother had handed him over to Susannah because she knew they’d be perfect together.
Mr. Fisher included me in the mini golf competitions, but he never expected me to win. Of course I never did. I hated mini golf anyway. I hated the little pencils and the fake turf. It was all so annoyingly perfect. Kind of like Mr. Fisher. Conrad wanted so badly to be like him, and I used to hope he never would. Be like him, I mean.