Conrad shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. We’ll always come back.”
Briefly I wondered if he meant just him and Jeremiah, and then he said, “All of us.”
It got quiet again, and then I had an idea. “Let’s make a whirlpool!” I said, clapping my hands together.
“You’re such a kid,” Conrad said, smiling at me and shaking his head. For the first time, it didn’t bother me when he called me a kid. It felt like a compliment.
I floated out to the middle of the pool. “Come on, guys!”
They swam over to me, and we made a circle and started to run as fast as we could. “Faster!” Jeremiah yelled, laughing.
Then we stopped, let our bodies go limp and get caught in the whirlpool we’d just made. I leaned my head back and let the current carry me.
chapter forty-six
When he called, I didn’t recognize his voice, partly because I wasn’t expecting it and partly because I was still half-asleep. He said, “I’m in my car on my way to your house. Can I see you?”
It was twelve thirty in the morning. Boston was five and a half hours away. He had driven all night. He wanted to see me.
I told him to park down the street and I would meet him on the corner, after my mother had gone to bed. He said he’d wait.
I turned the lights off and waited by the window, watching for the taillights. As soon as I saw his car, I wanted to run outside, but I had to wait. I could hear my mother rustling around in her room, and I knew she would read in bed for at least half an hour before she fell asleep. It felt like torture, knowing he was out there waiting for me, not being able to go to him.
In the dark I put on my scarf and hat that Granna knit me for Christmas. Then I shut my bedroom door and tiptoe down the hallway to my mother’s room, pressing my ear against the door. The light is off and I can hear her snoring softly. Steven’s not even home yet, which is lucky for me, because he’s a light sleeper just like our dad.
My mother is finally asleep; the house is still and silent. Our Christmas tree is still up. We keep the lights on all night because it makes it still feel like Christmas, like any minute, Santa could show up with gifts. I don’t bother leaving her a note. I’ll call her in the morning, when she wakes up and wonders where I am.
I creep down the stairs, careful on the creaky step in the middle, but once I’m out of the house, I’m flying down the front steps, across the frosty lawn. It crunches along the bottoms of my sneakers. I forgot to put on my coat. I remembered the scarf and hat, but no coat.
His car is on the corner, right where it’s supposed to be. The car is dark, no lights, and I open the passenger side door like I’ve done it a million times before. But I haven’t. I’ve never even been inside. I haven’t seen him since August.
I poke my head inside, but I don’t go in, not yet. I want to look at him first. I have to. It’s winter, and he’s wearing a gray fleece. His cheeks are pink from the cold, his tan has faded, but he still looks the same. “Hey,” I say, and then I climb inside.
“You’re not wearing a coat,” he says.
“It’s not that cold,” I say, even though it is, even though I’m shivering as I say it.
“Here,” he says, shrugging out of his fleece and handing it to me.
I put it on. It’s warm, and it doesn’t smell like cigarettes. It just smells like him. So Conrad quit smoking after all. The thought makes me smile.
He starts the engine.
I say, “I can’t believe you’re really here.”
He sounds almost shy when he says, “Me neither.” And then he hesitates. “Are you still coming with me?”
I can’t believe he even has to ask. I would go anywhere. “Yes,” I tell him. It feels like nothing else exists outside of that word, this moment. There’s just us. Everything that happened this past summer, and every summer before it, has all led up to this. To now.
acknowledgments
First and always, thank you to the Pippin women: Emily van Beek, Holly McGhee, and Samantha Cosentino. Thank you to my editor extraordinaire Emily Meehan, who supports me like no other, as well as Courtney Bongiolatti, Lucy Ruth Cummins, and everyone at S&S. Many thanks to Jenna and Beverly and the Calhoun School for their continuous support of my writing life. Thanks to my writing group the Longstockings, and one Longstocking in particular, who has sat across from me every Monday and cheered me on—Siobhan, I’m looking at you. And thank you to Aram, who inspired me to write about the forever kind of friendship, the kind that spans over boyfriends and beaches and children and lifetimes.
Contents
chapter one: JULY 2
chapter two
chapter three
chapter four: JEREMIAH
chapter five
chapter six: JULY 3
chapter seven
chapter eight: JEREMIAH
chapter nine
chapter ten
chapter eleven
chapter twelve
chapter thirteen: JEREMIAH
chapter fourteen
chapter fifteen
chapter sixteen
chapter seventeen
chapter eighteen
chapter nineteen: JEREMIAH
chapter twenty: JULY 4
chapter twenty-one
chapter twenty-two
chapter twenty-three
chapter twenty-four
chapter twenty-five
chapter twenty-six: JEREMIAH
chapter twenty-seven
chapter twenty-eight
chapter twenty-nine
chapter thirty
chapter thirty-one
chapter thirty-two: JEREMIAH
chapter thirty-three: JULY 5
chapter thirty-four: JEREMIAH
chapter thirty-five: JEREMIAH
chapter thirty-six
chapter thirty-seven: JEREMIAH
chapter thirty-eight
chapter thirty-nine
chapter forty: JULY 6
chapter forty-one
chapter forty-two
chapter forty-three: JULY 7
a couple of years later
acknowledgments
Things don’t always turn out the way you hoped. Love can fall apart, people can leave and never come back. You can feel so lost it seems like there’s no finding your way out. But in the end, there’s always hope. Always. And you never know, life just might end up better than you ever could have imagined.
I hope you can find your own summer in every winter, spring and fall.
Enjoy!
J + S forever
chapter one
JULY 2
It was a hot summer day in Cousins. I was lying by the pool with a magazine on my face. My mother was playing solitaire on the front porch, Susannah was inside puttering around the kitchen. She’d probably come out soon with a glass of sun tea and a book I should read. Something romantic.
Conrad and Jeremiah and Steven had been surfing all morning. There’d been a storm the night before. Conrad and Jeremiah came back to the house first. I heard them before I saw them. They walked up the steps, cracking up over how Steven had lost his shorts after a particularly ferocious wave. Conrad strode over to me, lifted the sweaty magazine from my face, and grinned. He said, “You have words on your cheeks.”
I squinted up at him. “What do they say?”
He squatted next to me and said, “I can’t tell. Let me see.” And then he peered at my face in his serious Conrad way. He leaned in, and he kissed me, and his lips were cold and s
alty from the ocean.
Then Jeremiah said, “You guys need to get a room,” but I knew he was joking. He winked at me as he came from behind, lifted Conrad up, and launched him into the pool.
Jeremiah jumped in too, and he yelled, “Come on, Belly!”
So of course I jumped too. The water felt fine. Better than fine. Just like always, Cousins was the only place I wanted to be.
“Hello? Did you hear anything I just said?”
I opened my eyes. Taylor was snapping her fingers in my face. “Sorry,” I said. “What were you saying?”
I wasn’t in Cousins. Conrad and I weren’t together, and Susannah was dead. Nothing would ever be the same again. It had been—How many days had it been? How many days exactly?—two months since Susannah had died and I still couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t let myself believe it. When a person you love dies, it doesn’t feel real. It’s like it’s happening to someone else. It’s someone else’s life. I’ve never been good with the abstract. What does it mean when someone is really and truly gone?
Sometimes I closed my eyes and in my head, I said over and over again, It isn’t true, it isn’t true, this isn’t real. This wasn’t my life. But it was my life; it was my life now. After.
I was in Marcy Yoo’s backyard. The boys were messing around in the pool and us girls were lying on beach towels, all lined up in a row. I was friends with Marcy, but the rest, Katie and Evelyn and those girls, they were more Taylor’s friends.
It was eighty-seven degrees already, and it was just after noon. It was going to be a hot one. I was on my stomach, and I could feel sweat pooling in the small of my back. I was starting to feel sun-sick. It was only the second day of July, and already, I was counting the days until summer was over.
“I said, what are you going to wear to Justin’s party?” Taylor repeated. She’d lined our towels up close, so it was like we were on one big towel.
“I don’t know,” I said, turning my head so we were face-to-face.
She had tiny sweat beads on her nose. Taylor always sweated first on her nose. She said, “I’m going to wear that new sundress I bought with my mom at the outlet mall.”
I closed my eyes again. I was wearing sunglasses, so she couldn’t tell if my eyes were open or not anyway. “Which one?”
“You know, the one with the little polka dots that ties around the neck. I showed it to you, like, two days ago.” Taylor let out an impatient little sigh.
“Oh, yeah,” I said, but I still didn’t remember and I knew Taylor could tell.
I started to say something else, something nice about the dress, but suddenly I felt ice-cold aluminum sticking to the back of my neck. I shrieked and there was Cory Wheeler, crouched down next to me with a dripping Coke can in his hand, laughing his head off.
I sat up and glared at him, wiping off my neck. I was so sick of today. I just wanted to go home. “What the crap, Cory!”
He was still laughing, which made me madder.
I said, “God, you’re so immature.”
“But you looked really hot,” he protested. “I was trying to cool you off.”
I didn’t answer him, I just kept my hand on the back of my neck. My jaw felt really tight, and I could feel all the other girls staring at me. And then Cory’s smile sort of slipped away and he said, “Sorry. You want this Coke?”
I shook my head, and he shrugged and retreated back over to the pool. I looked over and saw Katie and Evelyn making what’s-her-problem faces, and I felt embarrassed. Being mean to Cory was like being mean to a German shepherd puppy. There was just no sense in it. Too late, I tried to catch Cory’s eye, but he didn’t look back at me.
In a low voice Taylor said, “It was just a joke, Belly.”
I lay back down on my towel, this time faceup. I took a deep breath and let it out, slowly. The music from Marcy’s iPod deck was giving me a headache. It was too loud. And I actually was thirsty. I should have taken that Coke from Cory.
Taylor leaned over and pushed up my sunglasses so she could see my eyes. She peered at me. “Are you mad?”
“No. It’s just too hot out here.” I wiped sweat off my forehead with the back of my arm.
“Don’t be mad. Cory can’t help being an idiot around you. He likes you.”
“Cory doesn’t like me,” I said, looking away from her. But he sort of did like me, and I knew it. I just wished he didn’t.
“Whatever, he’s totally into you. I still think you should give him a chance. It’ll take your mind off of you-know-who.”
I turned my head away from her and she said, “How about I French braid your hair for the party tonight? I can do the front section and pin it to the side like I did last time.”
“Okay.”
“What are you going to wear?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Well, you have to look cute because everybody’s gonna be there,” Taylor said. “I’ll come over early and we can get ready together.”
Justin Ettelbrick had thrown a big blowout birthday party every July first since the eighth grade. By July, I was already at Cousins Beach, and home and school and school friends were a million miles away. I’d never once minded missing out, not even when Taylor told me about the cotton candy machine his parents had rented one year, or the fancy fireworks they shot off over the lake at midnight.
It was the first summer I would be at home for Justin’s party and it was the first summer I wasn’t going back to Cousins. And that, I minded. That, I mourned. I’d thought I’d be in Cousins every summer of my life. The summer house was the only place I wanted to be. It was the only place I ever wanted to be.
“You’re still coming, right?” Taylor asked me.
“Yeah. I told you I was.”
Her nose wrinkled. “I know, but—” Taylor’s voice broke off. “Never mind.”
I knew Taylor was waiting for things to go back to normal again, to be like before. But they could never be like before. I was never going to be like before.
I used to believe. I used to think that if I wanted it bad enough, wished hard enough, everything would work out the way it was supposed to. Destiny, like Susannah said. I wished for Conrad on every birthday, every shooting star, every lost eyelash, every penny in a fountain was dedicated to the one I loved. I thought it would always be that way.
Taylor wanted me to forget about Conrad, to just erase him from my mind and memory. She kept saying things like, “Everybody has to get over a first love, it’s a rite of passage.” But Conrad wasn’t just my first love. He wasn’t some rite of passage. He was so much more than that. He and Jeremiah and Susannah were my family. In my memory, the three of them would always be entwined, forever linked. There couldn’t be one without the others.
If I forgot Conrad, if I evicted him from my heart, pretended like he was never there, it would be like doing those things to Susannah. And that, I couldn’t do.
chapter two
It used to be that the week school let out in June, we’d pack up the car and head straight to Cousins. My mother would go to Costco the day before and buy jugs of apple juice and economy-size boxes of granola bars, sunscreen, and whole grain cereal. When I begged for Lucky Charms or Cap’n Crunch, my mother would say, “Beck will have plenty of cereal that’ll rot your teeth out, don’t you worry.” Of course she’d be right. Susannah—Beck to my mother—loved her kid cereal, just like me. We went through a lot of cereal at the summer house. It never even had a chance to go stale. There was one summer when the boys ate cereal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. My brother, Steven, was Frosted Flakes, Jeremiah was Cap’n Crunch, and Conrad was Corn Pops. Jeremiah and Conrad were Beck’s boys, and they loved their cereal. Me, I ate whatever was left over with sugar on top.
I’d been going to Cousins my whole life. We’d never skipped a summer, not once. Almost seventeen years of me playing catch-up to the boys, of hoping and wishing that one day I wou
ld be old enough to be a part of their crew. The summer boys crew. I finally made it, and now it was too late. In the pool, on the last night of the last summer, we said we’d always come back. It’s scary how easy promises were broken. Just like that.
When I got home last summer, I waited. August turned into September, school started, and still I waited. It wasn’t like Conrad and I had made any declarations. It wasn’t like he was my boyfriend. All we’d done was kiss. He was going to college, where there would be a million other girls. Girls without curfews, girls on his hall, all smarter and prettier than me, all mysterious and brand-new in a way that I could never be.
I thought about him constantly—what it all meant, what we were to each other now. Because we couldn’t go back. I knew I couldn’t. What happened between us—between me and Conrad, between me and Jeremiah—it changed everything. And so when August and September began and still the phone didn’t ring, all I had to do was think back to the way he’d looked at me that last night, and I knew there was still hope. I knew that I hadn’t imagined it all. I couldn’t have.
According to my mother, Conrad was all moved into his dorm room, he had an annoying roommate from New Jersey, and Susannah worried he wasn’t getting enough to eat. My mother told me these things casually, offhandedly, so as not to injure my pride. I never pressed her for more information. The thing is, I knew he’d call. I knew it. All I had to do was wait.
The call came the second week of September, three weeks since the last time I’d seen him. I was eating strawberry ice cream in the living room, and Steven and I were fighting over the remote control. It was a Monday night, nine p.m., prime TV-watching time. The phone rang, and neither Steven nor I made a move to grab it. Whoever got up would lose the battle for the TV.