Fifteenth Summer

For the rest of the morning our cottage was very quiet. We all drifted apart, each of us deep in thought, each of us saying our own thank-yous to Granly’s ghost.

But eventually I stopped reading Granly’s journals—which were part diary, part very funny short-story collection. I didn’t want to tear through them. I wanted to make them last.

Besides, I was starving.

When I wandered into the kitchen, I found Abbie peering into the fridge.

“I think I’m officially sick of blueberries,” she said, closing the door with a curled lip.

“Better not be,” I said. “The blueberry festival’s next week, you know.”

“Oh, yeah,” Abbie said. “I almost forgot about that crazy festival.”

“You wouldn’t have if you worked on Main Street,” I said. “Every electrical pole is plastered with flyers. Mel’s got three different kinds of blueberry pie on the menu. And at Dog Ear—”

I’d been about to tell Abbie about the cute blueberry-themed window display Stella had made for the bookshop. But I decided to just let that one go.

“Were you and Josh going to go together,” Abbie asked quietly. “To the festival?”

I shrugged.

“We hadn’t talked about it yet,” I said.

But I was sure we would have gone to the festival together. Ever since the DFJ, Josh and I had just known—without having to say it—that we’d share all the summer’s big events. All its little ones too.

Before I could explain that to Abbie, I heard a knock at the front door. A loud, urgent knock.

“Who is that?” I said in alarm.

Abbie and I jumped up and headed to the door. Nobody ever knocked on Granly’s door. Sparrow Road was too remote for salesmen, and anybody who knew us would have just opened the unlocked door and called, “Anybody home?”

Abbie opened the door a crack and peeked outside. Then she turned toward me, flashed me a huge grin, and opened the door wide.

Standing on the screened porch, looking red-cheeked, breathless, and pretty terrified (but also really, really cute) was Josh. His bike lay on its side in the drive behind him, its front wheel still spinning. I watched that wheel twirl around and around and wondered if my eyes were doing the exact same thing.

“Chelsea,” Josh huffed, “can I talk to you?”

I couldn’t quite form words, so I just nodded and stepped outside. The moment Abbie closed the door, Josh spoke in a rush.

“I did it,” he announced. He flopped triumphantly onto the smushy couch. I sat—way more tentatively—next to him.

“You did . . . what?”

“I did what you told me to do,” Josh said, breaking into an elated smile. “I talked to my parents. Both of ’em.”

“Well, what did you say?”

“I asked them to step it up at the bookstore,” he said. “Because it was their choice to buy Dog Ear, not mine. That I was doing all this stuff to keep the store afloat for them, but that it wasn’t making me very happy. In fact, I told them, I’ve given up a lot for Dog Ear. And I was pretty okay with that until . . . well, until I lost you.”

Josh looked so earnest and serious, I had to touch him, just to make sure this was really happening. I reached over and rested my fingertips lightly on the back of his hand.

Josh heaved a shuddering sigh and closed his eyes.

“What did they say?” I asked him.

Josh gave a little laugh.

“You were right,” he said, looking at me shyly. “They had no idea. And they were pretty mad at me for keeping it a secret all this time. Then my mom promised to do more practical stuff, though she might need a little training.”

My smile felt tremulous.

“Does this training,” I broached, “have to happen within, say, the next twenty days?”

Josh leaned in, his face so close to mine that it made me feel dizzy in the best way.

“Not a chance,” he breathed.

I closed my eyes and felt his arms wrap around me, so tightly that I gasped. And then he was kissing me. It was the perfect kiss—full of apology and relief and passion.

In an instant I felt like I’d rewound the past two days and landed right back in that moment when my cell phone had rung and I’d just known how I felt about Josh. I was feeling it all again.

It turned out I wasn’t the only one.

“Chelsea,” Josh murmured when the kiss finally ended. “Can you forgive me for being an idiot?”

“Well, you were being an honorable idiot,” I whispered with a little laugh.

“Is that a yes?” Josh asked, twining a lock of my hair around his finger.

I grinned and leaned in until my forehead was touching his. I rested my hands on the back of his neck and whispered, “Yes.”

“Good, because you know what?” Josh said.

“What?”

“I’m in love with you, Chelsea. I think I have been since the first time I ever saw you, when you tried to rescue that book from my X-Acto knife.”

Tears sprang to my eyes, but they couldn’t have felt more different from the ones I’d been crying for the past two days.

“What a coincidence,” I said. “That’s when I fell in love with you, too.”

Josh covered my mouth with his. We didn’t say anything else—nothing else needed to be said—for a long, long time.





When you see the boy you love through a crowd, he can look completely familiar and be a complete surprise, all at once.

I thought I knew everything there was to know about Josh’s face. I knew that his left eye got a little more squinty than the right one when he smiled. And that his chin was square, rather than pointed, if you really looked at it. I’d watched the sun turn his hair the color of milky caramel over the course of the summer. It had also gotten long enough to actually look tousled. I knew that the back of Josh’s neck flushed when he got overheated after rowing or, say, rushing over to my house a week earlier to tell me that he loved me.

But when I spotted him in the middle of a throng of people at the Blueberry Dreams Festival, I didn’t recognize him for an instant. Was that him? Was that boy, so tan and tall and gorgeous, Josh? My Josh?

Suddenly he saw me, and I could swear I saw him blink too—before he smiled an incredulous, giddy smile.

We wove our way through the people crowding the Bluepointe town square. Every adult seemed to be sipping a tall, purple cocktail, and every little kid was sweating inside a puffy blueberry costume. Everybody in between, like me, wore face paint, their cheeks dotted with berries. Or they had on funny blueberry beanies, with tufts of green leaves on the crowns instead of propellers.

Josh and I had just seen each other that morning at the beach, but we hugged as if it had been days.

“You look really pretty,” Josh said, putting a hand on my still-damp-from-the-shower hair.

“So do you,” I said. I laughed before kissing him lightly on the lips. “Should we do a walk around?”

The square was lined with tents in which people were hawking blueberry honey, blueberry syrup, blueberry baked goods, and of course, a whole lot of blueberry art.

We ambled along lazily, our hands clasped, checking out the ceramic blueberry bowls and purple paintings. Only when we got to Chloe and Ken’s tent did we have to stop.

They were both sitting in the back of their tent looking miserable. Their space was fronted by two folding tables. One was full of ceramic animals, wobbly bowls, and rough-hewn wood sculptures. The other table was almost empty. That’s where Chloe and Ken had set out their blueberries, eggs, and honey. They had all clearly been snapped up by shoppers.

Josh met my eyes. He cringed, feeling Chloe and Ken’s pain.

Then he pulled out his wallet and reached for something in the center of the table.

It was a small chunk of wood that Ken had carved into a little rowboat. It looked craggy and splintery, but it was also the exact same shape as the shabby little boat that Josh and I had floated into Wex Pond.

“Would you take ten dollars for this, Ken?” Josh asked. “It’s really awesome.”

I’ve never seen a man’s face go from dour to lit-up that fast.

“Absolutely,” Ken said, jumping up to take Josh’s money. “Would you like some blueberry jam to go with that? Gratis!”

“Oh, no,” I said. “We’re good, really. We’re awash in blueberry jam.”

Ken shrugged and turned to give his wife a happy kiss on the cheek. As Josh and I walked away, he handed the little rowboat to me.

“You could put the kissing chickens in it,” he said, “and put them in the bathtub.”

I laughed.

“It’s the most romantic present I ever got,” I said, kissing him on the cheek. “Also the ugliest, but that’s okay!”

“You just don’t appreciate good art,” he said.

“Oh, I think I do,” I said with confidence.

I thought about the poster Josh had shown me the day before, the one he’d finally finished for Allison Katzinger’s book party. It was dreamy and shadowy and layered with one beautiful image after another. It was perfect. And luckily, it wouldn’t be wasted. After Josh’s big talk with his parents, Stella had spent an entire afternoon making calls. She’d managed to round up more than a hundred copies of Leaves of Trees for the party.

Josh and I approached the Dog Ear tent, where lots of books and big piles of blue Dog Ear T-shirts and baseball caps had been transplanted for the day. E.B. was stationed out front, panting smilingly at the passersby.

I put a hand on Josh’s arm.

“Maybe we should go the other way,” I suggested. “You know if you go in there, you’re gonna start working. You won’t be able to help yourself.”

Josh didn’t answer. He just quietly watched what was happening in the tent.

His dad was stationed at the front table, working the cash box. His gray hair was hidden under a Dog Ear baseball cap and he was chatting amiably with one customer after another. He didn’t look like he was talking about philosophy or academia or anything very serious. He also looked like he was having a ball.

Meanwhile, Stella was hand-selling in the back of the tent, chatting up various books. She pointed one teenage girl to Josh’s Allison Katzinger poster. Clearly she was urging her to come to the book party.

“They’re kicking butt in there!” I said.

“I know!” Josh replied, staring in awe. “But how . . .”

“I told you they’d surprise you,” I said. “Parents sometimes do.”

I craned my neck to see if my parents were still where I’d left them a few minutes earlier, talking to some of their friends. They were. In fact, my dad had just told one of his awful jokes. I could tell by the way my mom was rolling her eyes and the way the other couple were shaking their heads as they laughed.

“Aaaand,” I added, “sometimes they don’t.”

“Josh?”

At the sound of a girl’s surprised voice, Josh and I turned. A sweet-faced girl with a blueberry beanie was trotting toward us.

“Hi!” she gushed, giving Josh a quick hug. “How’s your summer been?”

Josh smiled and slipped his arm around my waist.

“Really good,” he said. “Chelsea, this is Aubrey. We go to the same school.”

“Oh my God, you guys are cute together,” Aubrey said.

“Um, thanks,” I said with a shy smile. “Hey, didn’t I see you at the lantern party? You had that pretty lantern with the dog.”

“Yeah!” Aubrey said. “That was me. And this guy has been AWOL ever since!”

She gave Josh a poke in the ribs.

“I guess we have you to blame for that, Chelsea?” she said.

“Well, I—”

“Actually,” Josh said, looking down at me with an easy smile, “I just got an e-mail about a post-festival party at the dock. I was gonna ask you if you wanted to go.”

“Really?” Aubrey and I said at the same time.

Josh held up his hands defensively.

“Hey, I’m not that antisocial,” he said.

Aubrey and I looked at each other with matching one-eyebrow-lifted looks of skepticism, which made us both dissolve into laughter.

“Well, maybe I’m feeling a little more social these days,” Josh said, giving my hair a quick stroke. “For some reason.”

“We’ll be there,” I told Aubrey quietly. Then I shot a quick look at Josh. He seemed a little different, suddenly. More confident, more comfortable in his skin.

Was it all because of . . . me?

“Awesome,” Aubrey said, breaking into my thoughts with her bubbly response. Then she cocked her head like a dog listening for a distant whistle. “Music’s starting. Let’s go!”

She pushed through the crowd toward the gazebo, where a band was indeed setting up. It was a quartet of hipster dudes with lots of facial hair and old-timey instruments—an accordion, banjo, and fiddle.

“Ooh,” I said, fluffing up my purple poodle skirt. “My kind of band!”

A crowd gathered before the gazebo steps. Josh and I made our way toward its center. As soon as the band started up with a twangy rockabilly tune, everyone around us started dancing.

Josh looked at me with a touch of panic in his eyes.

“I’m a terrible dancer,” he admitted.

“Me too,” I said.

Then I started wiggling my hips around and pumping my hands in the air. Josh threw his head back and laughed, then shrugged and joined me.

Did we find each other’s rhythm and start twirling around as a beautiful unit, our love making us effortlessly graceful, perfectly synchronized?

Not even close. We were even more awkward dancing together than we were on our own. We were the absolute antithesis of Emma and Ethan.

And I was beyond fine with that.

At the end of the song, we fell into each other’s arms laughing. We pushed our way out of the crowd, and Josh said, “Let’s find the Pop Guy. I’m dying of thirst.”

We were headed to his rainbow umbrella when we were intercepted by Abbie and . . . Hannah! Hannah’s eyes were red-rimmed, and one of the spaghetti straps on her tank top was ripped. She was using her hand to hold her top up.

“What’s going on?” I said. “I thought you were with Liam.”

“She was,” Abbie said fiercely, “but she’s not anymore!”

It didn’t take me long to figure out who was behind Hannah’s torn strap.

“Hannah?” I said, my voice thin and scared. “Are you okay?”

Hannah nodded quickly.

“I am, I promise,” she said. “But I won’t be seeing Liam anymore.”

Abbie whispered into my ear so Josh wouldn’t hear, “He might not be walking for the rest of the day either. He got the big ol’ knee from Hannah!”

My mouth dropped open.

“You didn’t,” I gasped.

“I did,” Hannah said, glancing down at her broken strap. “He deserved it.”

I turned to Josh regretfully.

“I think I need a little sister time,” I said.

Josh nodded quickly.

“No problem,” he said, giving me a quick, sweet kiss. “I’ll see you.”

Hannah seemed a little shaky, so we went to sit on a bench that was hidden behind a cluster of tents.

“I’m getting you some blueberry lemonade,” Abbie declared. “Back in a minute.”

Hannah pulled her knees up to her chin and wrapped her free arm around her shins.

“I’m such an idiot,” she said, shaking her head.

I hated to agree, but . . .

“Why were you hanging out with that guy?” I said.

“I don’t know. It felt nice to get all that attention,” she said. “It’s been kind of a lonely year, you know.”

“But why did you want Liam’s attention,” I asked. “I mean, he’s cute and preppy and all, but he’s not exactly a brilliant conversationalist.”

“Yeah.” Hannah shrugged. “He’s just, you know, kind of normal. Average.”

“Hannah,” I said, “you’ve never made a C in your life. You need above-average.”

Hannah leaned her head back and groaned.

“So I’ve been told for forever,” she said. “I’m kind of over it! Or let’s just say I felt like taking a little break from my pigeonhole. Studious, serious, smart Hannah, you know?

The thing was, I didn’t know.

“I always thought it would be cool to have a place,” I said. “Like, an identity. Abbie’s an athlete, and you’re this pre-premed whiz. You know, you’re defined.”

“But if you’re not, you can do anything!” Hannah pointed out. “You’ve got freedom!”

As she said this, Abbie returned and handed Hannah a plastic cup of purple-tinted lemonade. She sat down on the bench so that Hannah was sandwiched between us.

“Is that what you want?” she asked Hannah. “Freedom? Do you regret choosing such an intense school? Because you could always transfer to UCLA.”

She rested her head on Hannah’s shoulder.

“Please?” she added.

Hannah tipped her head to rest on Abbie’s.

“I’m going to miss you, too,” she said. “But no, U of C is what I want. Liam proved that to me. I mean, besides being way too handsy, the guy was a bore. Have you ever met somebody who’s never heard of the Human Genome Project? I didn’t think that was even possible.”

Abbie and I rolled our eyes at each other.

“Yeah, she’s ready for U of C,” I said.

Hannah shook her head in disbelief.

“It is coming up really soon, though,” she said. “I’m kind of terrified.”

I was too. Unlike Hannah, I’d never known a world without my two sisters in it every day.

So many endings were looming. This summer in Bluepointe. Hannah.

Josh.

But then my eye wandered across the square to the Dog Ear tent. It was still spilling over with people, many of them immobilized because they were so absorbed in their books. I thought about the blank journal Granly had left me.

I’d already filled a few pages. And it had started me thinking—maybe this summer wasn’t just about endings and good-byes. Maybe it was a beginning as well.